Summary of Hot Bot Summer by J. R. Dewitt
Escape Pod 1012, September 25, 2025
Aura, a burnt-out ornithology post-doc studying vanishing bird species in the Philippines, visits the private island of Sergei, a seventy-year-old Belarusian billionaire who collects old war robots. His beach is filled with landmine bots, tank bots, and mini-gun mechas—pre-war relics he photographs obsessively with vintage cameras. Though Aura finds his “robo sanctuary” a waste of good beach, she plays along, hoping to profit from information she’s discovered: photographic evidence and a metal shard proving the existence of a Sickle, a legendary hybrid war-bot supposedly extinct.
The Sickle was a transitional military technology—part traditional robot, part bio-synthetic organism—designed with neural wiring that gave it understanding of human suffering but no willpower to resist its programmed addiction to killing. After the war, they were all supposedly hunted down and destroyed. When Aura shows Sergei her evidence, he immediately offers to quadruple her asking price if she’ll accompany him to capture it. His only explanation for why the Sickle hasn’t been wreaking havoc is that, like any addict, it fled to remove the temptation. Despite her reservations about the danger, Aura agrees when he raises the offer to nine times her original price—enough money to buy her own island and escape academia forever.
Key Plot Points
- They travel to Aura’s research basecamp in the Luzon rainforest and deploy synth-bird drones to locate the Sickle, but it shoots down fifteen of twenty drones before fleeing deeper into the jungle
- They pursue on foot with Sergei’s skeletal servant bot “Mr. Terminator” providing a camouflage bubble, but the Sickle has left a decoy—the tracker-tagged piece of its own casing
- The Sickle ambushes them, destroying Mr. Terminator’s head; as Sergei reaches into the bot’s leg compartment, the Sickle emerges and he reveals he was its creator in a Neo-Soviet lab
- Sergei claims he tried to free the Sickles during the war, showing a scar from one who didn’t understand; he pulls a taser-harpoon from Mr. Terminator’s leg and shoots the Sickle while it hesitates
- The Sickle fires back, leaving fatal holes in Sergei’s chest; with his dying breath, he begs Aura to flip the Sickle’s ventral shutdown switch and “take care of them—they’re so tired”
When Aura approaches the convulsing Sickle to shut it down, she looks into its terrified eyes and is suddenly reminded of a dying dwarf kingfisher from her first expedition—poisoned by post-war fallout, its black eyes pleading for help. She’d cried for nights as they collected poisoned birds until she’d sealed away that caring part of herself in “heavy slabs of detached cement.” Now she feels the cement cracking, something raw leaking out. Despite knowing it’s “just a stupid bot,” her heart aches as she touches its cool casing and flips the switch. She returns to hold Sergei’s hand as he dies, promising to care for his robots—and surprisingly feels relief, like she’s her old self again.
The story concludes months later with Aura giving a tour of Sergei’s island, which she bought from his estate. The beach is filled with the same war-bots, but now also hosts endangered birds she’s rescued from around the world: a mangrove finch perched on a grenade launcher, a yellow-breasted bunting picking seeds from an artillery-bot’s ammo cache. She photographs them with Sergei’s old Nikon for a “Hot Bot Summer” calendar to fund animal centers and orphanages. Down the beach, the Sickle—its weapons removed—plays in the surf like a puppy while a tiny dwarf kingfisher darts around it. Aura captures the perfect shot: sunlight glinting off its new casing as it leaps joyfully in the air. It’s the calendar’s cover photo—a testament to rest, redemption, and the sanctuary Sergei always envisioned.