Robot Wrecker

by Paul Tomlinson

  Now there was a team of chefs, several of them Jampur family members, the ingredients were delivered by a wholesaler, and Kareem's contribution was of a supervisory nature. He had an easy familiarity when welcoming his guests, treating newcomers like long-lost friends, and there were never any complaints about the quality of the service.

  At the bar, Kareem had a blank-faced white and chrome waiter, a machine which always reminded me of the old Woody Allen movie. Maybe the next time it broke down I'd tweak its voice-box and make it a neurotic Jewish-American. There was also an ancient Korean clone of an even more ancient Russian automaton – to call it a robot would be over-generous – which had been the subject of half-a-dozen visits I'd made to The Oasis in the past couple of months. The machine was actually beyond repair, but I regarded it as a professional challenge to keep it functioning. And each visit to fix it was an excuse to order food without having to worry about the bill. I slid into a booth and tapped out my order on the table screen without needing to look at the menu. A quick 'thank you' flashed up, and then the image was replaced with a national news feed with subtitles. I watched the latest footage from one of the African war zones, where human rebels were still managing to stalemate a whole army of soldier robots. And then I saw Milo Bryce reporting from what looked like a murder scene. Bryce was a freelance whose tongue-in-cheek reports often got picked up by the networks. A murder seemed an odd choice of subject for him, so I turned up the sound to see what his angle was.

  "... unconfirmed reports suggest that Zeta was disembowelled and her insides spread around her body in a manner which one source has described as 'ritualistic'. The police will not confirm the rumour that her brain had also been removed, but nor are they denying it. This is the third such attack in as many days, and many are now asking whether the city has its very own 'serial killer.' We'll bring you updates on the 'Jack the Wrecker' story as they come in. This is Milo Bryce for the Independent News Network."

  It always amazed me that Bryce could deliver his reports in such a deadpan manner. Zeta, of course, was a robot – one of the old Rotron domestic series. I'd carried out repairs on a couple of them in the last few months: they were simple and reliable, which is why people still used them for daily chores. Now it seemed that there was one less in the world. Whoever had carried out the attack on Zeta had chosen a violent, yet creative way of taking out his frustrations on the robot.

  Kareem appeared then with a pot of strong, sweet coffee and two glasses, and sat down opposite me. My food arrived as he filled our glasses.

  "What have you done to that robot this time?" I asked. "Where is it?"

  Kareem pointed towards a shadowy corner.

  "And its head?"

  He pointed to another corner. He had a habit of kicking the robot whenever it keeled over. Unfortunately its head was loose. I shook my head, and Kareem pretended to be sorry: it was part of the ritual.

  "You can fix him, I am sure, you always do," he said.

  "I'm going to have to take it away with me this time and completely overhaul it," I said. "And hopefully fix its head on properly."

  "But how am I to manage without it? How will my floor be cleaned?"

  "You see that thing by the door," I said, "long stick with a sort of bristly thing on one end? You take hold of the stick bit and put the bristles on the ground and push it along in front of you as you walk up and down."

  "You are very funny, and should have been a comedian," Kareem muttered.

  "Alright, I'll tell you what I'll do for you..."

  "This is what unscrupulous traders say in this country when they are about to rip off the unwary punter, is it not?" There was definitely a hint of Bradford in his accent.

  "Do you think that I would I ever cheat you?" I tried to look pained and honest in equal measure.

  "For the sake of our friendship, and to avoid offending, I will not answer. What is this special, once in a lifetime, never to be repeated, you're giving them away at this price offer you were about to make?" He asked.

  "Do I detect a note of cynicism in your voice?"

  "The offer?"

  "I have in the truck my own personal robot, which I am willing to loan to you until I have this one fixed; but only because you are my friend."

  "You, a former robot-hater and neo-Luddite, have a robot of your own? Now I am most suspicious."

  "It's either that, or you get to push the broom yourself."

  Kareem looked over at the sweeping brush in the corner.

  "Very well. I do not trust your motives, of course, but a robot is a robot."

  As it turned out, he was wrong. He also ended up pushing the broom himself. Life can be like that.

  Chapter Twelve

  Nathan must have really stirred up the Insurgents' nest and got them all excited, because within two days I received a mysterious message. Instructions to be at a specific point on a certain street at a precise time, nothing more. The message was handwritten, and delivered to me at The Oasis by a freelance messenger. The Insurgency symbol had been stamped in one corner in pale green ink, so I'd know who the unsigned note had come from. All very cloak and dagger.

  I stood in the shadow of a doorway at the appointed hour. The appointed place was on one of the main streets through the city, just before it curved round towards the railway station. From what I could see, I was standing in a blind spot, where the sweeps of two security cameras didn't quite cross. One of only a handful of such dead zones in the city. I was expecting a vehicle to pull up, and was ready to scramble in quickly, so that the cameras would never register the fact that the car has stopped. But it wasn't a car that came down the hill towards me.

  I heard them before I saw them. And when I looked, it was the placards and banners I saw first. An anti-robot march – I could tell that from the symbols on the cards, even before I could read the slogans. The marchers were mostly women and school-aged children. A couple of uniformed police officers in fluorescent yellow vests walked in front, and others were marching along both sides, keeping a watchful eye in case the toddlers turned violent. A couple of cruisers hovered overhead. There were no cops in exo-suits – they'd have looked too much like robots for the protestors to accept their presence, I suppose.

  As they got nearer and the sound of their chanting and chattering washed over me, I wondered if the Insurgents had made a mistake – that they hadn't know that the march would be taking place. Then as the crowd was passing, someone seized my arm and pulled, and I was swept into the tide. Other hands took my elbow, guiding me toward the middle of the marchers.

  "It's good to see you again." The woman smiled at my confusion. She was dressed in a conservative, almost severe dark blue jacket and matching skirt, and a silk blouse with a kind of peacock feather paisley pattern. Her make-up was intended to make her look older, more conservative. It was Janine, who I'd last seen when she and her friends were blowing up a factory.

  "Good to see you again," I said.

  "Keep where you can see me, but keep out of sight of the cameras," she said. "We'll be ducking out of here in half-an-hour. There will be a car waiting. I have to go off and talk to the press first." She smiled again, and put on a pair of frameless glasses. "Thirty minutes," she said. She handed me a placard: Remember Frankenstein? I guess she thought it would make me feel less conspicuous. "If you see a camera, put it in front of your face," Janine said over her shoulder, and disappeared. Of course the police would be using face recognition systems on the crowd. And anyone else who wanted to could use them on the broadcast footage. No one was ever just another face in the crowd.

  Other placards around me had slogans like Is My Child Safe? And People Have Souls! Many of the adults around me were wearing t-shirts or sweatshirts that simply said MOTHER. I got close enough to read the small print on the back of one woman's t-shirt: Moms Opposed To Humanoid Educational Robots.

  "You have children?" A man at the side of me asked. He had a little boy on his shoulders, about four years old I guessed.
>
  I shook my head. "Here with a friend."

  "That's good," he said. "We need as much support as possible. My husband couldn't get time off to be here."

  "You're a MOTHER?" I asked.

  "Absolutely!" He grinned. "I wasn't mad about them having mechanical robots in our son's school. But replacing teachers with androids – what were they thinking?"

  "Androids don't take sick days," I said.

  "That's it, isn't it? All they think about is cost – never about value."

  "I just hate the fact it's getting harder and harder to tell robots from people," a woman at the side of me said. "I'm Brenda."

  "Steven," I said.

  "I'm Zac, and the little guy is Billy."

  "Hi Billy!" Brenda waved up at him enthusiastically. Billy ignored her: he was more interested in wiping white chocolate off his fingers into his dad's hair.

  "Where's Janine?" Brenda asked.

  "Talking to the press," I said.

  "Good," Zac said. "She's good at it – sticks to the point and doesn't let them run her round in circles."

  "Where's Bobby?" Brenda asked.

  "Back there somewhere with his friends," I said, hoping this was the right answer.

  "Bobby, Dylan and Karen, can't separate the Three Musketeers," Brenda said.

  I saw Janine moving through the crowd towards me.

  "We'd better go back and make sure the Three Musketeers aren't duelling with the police," I said.

  "Catch you later," Zac said.

  "How'd the interview go?" I asked, as we moved against the tide of people.

  "About what you'd expect. Me and a suit from MinoTech standing in front of one of their androids. More free publicity for them."

  Janine obviously knew another security camera dead zone: she hustled me down an alley between two buildings. The path of well-worn stones led down towards a narrow cobbled street. Janine checked her watch, paused, and then stepped out of the shadows.

  The narrow street ran parallel to a main shopping street: there were a few shops and restaurants here, and offices for solicitors and doctors, all with shiny black doors, brass plaques and painted iron railings. It was quiet and exclusive, away from the bustle of the main street. A vehicle moved silently along the narrow street, a Jaguar coupé: I could almost smell the leather trim a hundred yards away. There was something sinister about its noiseless bulk, something about the gleaming dark green paintwork and tinted windows. I ducked back into a restaurant doorway. The coupe came to a halt in front of me, and the driver pushed open the driver side door and climbed out. He ducked into the alley without a word, leaving us with the car.

  "Can you fly one of these things?" Janine asked.

  "Probably. Can't you?"

  "Yeah, but I'll be too busy shooting at anyone who tries to follow us." She scooted across to the passenger seat.

  "Shooting? Oh, good." I climbed in. The seats and dashboard were covered in leather that made my shoes jealous, and there was everything from air conditioning to a 100 watt hi-fi – it was better equipped than my apartment.

  "We've got about three minutes to get back onto the main street," Janine said.

  "I'm sure there's a very good reason for all of this," I said.

  "Drive!"

  I pushed forward on the leather-covered joystick and the coupe floated silently down the street.

  "Keep it at street level for now. Straight ahead, take the third street on the left, then left at the end of there: we're back on the main street then."

  I did as asked. As we pulled on to the main street I glanced in the mirror and saw blue lights flashing: there seemed to be some kind of commotion back along the main street.

  "A little distraction," Janine said. "I have a friend back there who has crashed a pizza delivery wagon into a traffic monitor, and unfortunately her faulty microwave oven is blanking out the security monitors for about two blocks. As far as the cameras know, now that they've picked this car up again, I slowed for the accident, but never actually turned off this street."

  "I'm sure all this secret agent stuff is necessary," I said. "I'm just not sure why."

  "This car will save us a lot of problems: its owner has flight clearance and a house in the country, so no one will worry when we leave the city limits. Unfortunately, in the meantime, it tends to attract a lot of security attention: they fall over themselves to keep an eye on us and make sure we're safe."

  "This will all begin to make sense later, of course," I said.

  "Your movements are being tracked by two security men from Minos Technologies: we have to lose them before we go any further – we don't want to lead them straight to The Insurgents' secret hideout, do we?"

  She had a point. I hadn't even realised that I was being followed, but it wasn't exactly a surprise.

  "Turn into the multi-storey car park at the end of the street: we'll take off from the roof," Janine said. Security ID's on the car's number plate raised the barriers and got us into the car park, and as soon as we hit roof level I took the car into a near vertical climb, exactly the way the owner's manual tells you not to.

  "What're you doing?" Janine asked, smeared back in her seat.

  "The unexpected: don't want to make it too easy for them to follow us."

  Janine wasn't about to lead whoever was behind us straight to the unsuspecting Insurgents. We would take the scenic route, one which would allow the Insurgents to see us approach, and prepare their defences before we got there. And which would also allow her to find out if anyone was tailing us. We followed the line of the old Motorway One, heading north to a high point which had once overlooked a mining community, back in the days when they used to burn stuff to make electricity. There was a telecommunications tower on the top of the hill. Janine told me to set the Jaguar down next to it and kill the engines.

  "What now?" I asked.

  "I'm being cautious," Janine said.

  Being so close to the beacon would make us virtually invisible to the enemy's scanners: if they were behind us, they'd come in close trying to relocate us, and so reveal their presence. In theory.

  "Turn on the TV," Janine said.

  I touched the symbol on the dashboard, and a large part of its flat surface blinked and became a media screen. I selected the news channel.

  "Looks like you're on," I said.

  "Wonderful, let's see how they edited and twisted it," she said.

  I slid my finger on the smooth surface to turn up the volume.

  Janine looked just like a middle-class corporate employee. Obviously this was deliberate: she wanted to be taken seriously, not dismissed as some left-wing feminist student with no grip on reality. It was subtle, I couldn't see exactly how they'd done it, but the network had managed to frame and edit the piece so that she appeared to be the token opposition, not quite a half-wit technophobe afraid of change, afraid of the future, but close.

  "We're not saying that we want to see all robots removed from our schools," Janine said. "What we want is for the robots to look like robots, so that our children know that they are robots. Why introduce robots that look exactly like human beings, how will that benefit my child's education? Why does the robot teacher need to have natural-looking skin and hair? Our argument is that people have the right to know whether they are dealing with a human being or an android."

  "Doctor Matthias?" The interviewer turned to the Minos Technologies representative who was standing on the opposite side of the motionless android.

  "To suggest that anyone, even a child, is going to encounter one of our new machines in an everyday situation and not know if they are speaking to a human or an android is ridiculous.

  "Such robots will be far more reliable than the all-mechanical robots in use today, and that can only mean an improvement in the educational system as a whole: even Miss Hampton must agree that any improvement in education should be welcomed."

  "Miss Hampton, you wouldn't object to something that will improve the quality of your child's educati
on, surely?" The interviewer asked.

  "Of course not," she replied, icily. "What I object to is the kind of example Doctor Matthias and his company set for our children: profit first, people second."

  "How can you say that when Doctor Matthias has just said that these robots are being introduced with the sole purpose of benefiting the education system?"

  "They are being introduced into our schools at a bargain price to provide an opportunity for Minos Technologies to cash in on the publicity their act of 'generosity' will generate," Adrienne said.

  Doctor Matthias attempted a jovial laugh. "Well, there are always going to be those who doubt our motives, however well-intentioned our actions." The image cut to a head-shot of the good doctor, who trundled out his best benevolent uncle shtick.

  "Minos Technologies have been producing robots for almost forty years, and in that time we have had no evidence of a robot conspiracy: they are not going to take over the world," Doctor Matthias said. "Robots are simply tools designed to improve our lives, and the better the tools become, the greater the resulting improvement. I think that is quite clearly stated in the Minos Technologies motto: Progress for the Good of the People."

  "Doctor Matthias, Miss Hampton, thank you very much."

  "Damn!" Janine stabbed at the console and the TV faded away. I could almost imagine the car raising an eyebrow, like a supercilious English butler. "They filmed the last part after I'd gone and then cut it in."

  "You need to get yourself a new agent," I said, then shrank back under her glare. I looked out of the window and tactfully changed the subject. "Have we been cautious enough yet?" I asked.

  "From now on, we keep to the road," Janine said. "It will make it more difficult for them to track us. Turn off the transponder."

  I tapped an icon on the dashboard, and typed a couple of commands using the illuminated keyboard. When the screen asked me for a password, I paused and looked at Janine. I guessed the password on the second attempt.