Robot Wrecker

by Paul Tomlinson

  "Nice place," I said.

  "Come on through to the back, hopefully the sun's on the conservatory and it'll be less morgue-like." She led me down a dark, wood-panelled hallway, through a traditionally furnished parlour, and through French windows into a bright, foliage-filled conservatory. The conservatory looked out onto a long, overgrown lawn: inside, it smelt of damp earth.

  "I'm sorry you got caught in the middle of this business with me and Nathan," I said.

  "We were both in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  "I still feel responsible somehow."

  "It wasn't you that blew up my squad car."

  "I know. But I feel like the detective in that old Robert De Niro movie – the one where he played the Devil: the Devil hired this private detective to find this guy who owed the Devil his soul – "

  "In the end, the detective discovers that he was the one who owed the devil, and along the way, a lot of people got killed," Beth said. "I've seen that one."

  "Bad things keep happening, and I always seem to be in the middle of them," I said. "People get hurt or killed, just because they're near me. I don't know why."

  "Sounds like a Robert Johnson song," Beth said. "Crap happens, you're not to blame. Bones and flesh heal: they reckon I might be able to dance in a couple of months or so."

  "Could you dance before?"

  "No."

  "I don't think medical science can help you then," I said.

  Beth laughed, and I guess from her expression she wished she hadn't. "I'm going to sit down for a while. Feel free to explore the old homestead. Be careful on the top floor though, the floors are rotten where the roof leaks."

  "I'll unload the food and stuff from the car," I said.

  "We'll probably want to light a fire before dark," she said. "This place is a bit damp."

  I looked towards the hearth. "Where's the switch to turn it on?" I asked.

  Beth rolled her eyes and muttered something about 'suburban sissy boys', so I asked her whether matches were too high-tech and did I have to rub two sticks together.

  "After dinner, I'll show you something that'll help you defeat Nathan Rhodes when it comes to the High Noon showdown." Beth leaned back and closed her eyes.

  It was a real old country kitchen with a terra-cotta tiled floor, copper utensils and bunches of herbs hung everywhere, and a big wood-fuelled range. We'd brought food that could be easily warmed up in the oven, though I wasn't sure how many lumps of wood I needed to get it fired up to 140o F.

  "How'd you end up being a cop?" I asked over dinner. "You were a StormRider, a member of a street gang – well, sky gang – it's a bit of a leap, isn't it?"

  "It was an accident, really," Beth said. "Literally. I was cruising around in a stolen CG-Suit, and I saw this big corporate limousine which was flying pretty low, under fifty feet, hit almost head-on by joy riders. Those kids always cloak themselves against radar detection, and at two hundred miles an hour, there wasn't time to avoid a mid-air collision. Both cars went down.

  "The front seat passenger in the joy riders' car was killed, the driver and another boy bailed out and legged it. The passenger in the limo was killed too: he hadn't been wearing a seat-belt, and went over the front passenger seat and out through the windscreen.

  "The driver was trapped in the wreckage, and I went down to help him. I used the exo-suit to tear the wreckage apart, and got him out. I stayed with him until the paramedics and the cops arrived, holding on to the gash in his leg to stop him bleeding to death.

  "The police were going to arrest me for possession of the stolen suit, but the driver used his influence and got me a suspended sentence. His company sponsored me and I got a place in a security training school: they were impressed with my suit skills.

  "After I graduated, I went out on the beat, which is what I was doing when I first ran into you. And Nathan. After you two wrecked my suit, I was assigned to a patrol car with a couple of other guys – they were killed in the explosion. I think it was some kind of grenade: killed the two in the front; the screen protected me and Nathan in the back."

  I cleared away the dinner plates and brought the sherry trifle back to the table. I hadn't seen a trifle since my grandmother passed away. Hearing the slurp of the first spoonful coming out of the bowl took me straight back to her dining table, and I had to blink myself back into the present.

  "We should probably give the brandy a miss," Beth said. "We need to keep our heads clear. We'll need to make a start on the training early tomorrow: we might not have much time."

  "Training?" I asked.

  "Hmm. I'm going to teach you how to fly."

  "You mean fly as in...?"

  "Uh-huh. Fly as in CG-Suit. Nathan won't be expecting you to meet him in an armoured sky suit: it might give you the edge you need to beat him."

  "Fly?" I said, stupidly.

  Beth grinned. "You'll love it!"

  After the food had settled and we'd drained another pot of coffee, Beth raised herself to her feet. "Come on out to the garage, I'll show you the suit."

  The suit looked like a make-believe piece of mecha from an old Japanese cartoon: man-shaped, but all the proportions wrong; too chunky, arms too long, chest too broad. Part suit of armour, part flying machine, hunchbacked with its two CG units, power cells and cooling fins. The arms had fixing brackets for various armaments, but they were all, thankfully, empty.

  It was made of some kind of carbon fibre, polished to the same kind of gloss as an antique automobile. This was no dull military or security agency suit, it was done up like a sports car, dressed in the colours of some long-forgotten gang of StormRiders. In short, this was an illegal suit.

  Powered armour was originally developed in the USA for the military – who else could afford the development costs? – and it was used in the Middle East. Most corporate security agencies now had Flight Suit divisions. A man in a suit could walk into a blazing room and pass through to the other side without breaking into a sweat: the environmental controls in the suits were without equal. The fire services use them all the time. Divers use them to swim to previously unreachable depths, and because of the CG field inside the suit, there are no decompression problems.

  A bomb could go off at the side of a suit-wearer, and he'd be unharmed. Have you ever seen film of those guys striding across a mine field on a mine clearance exercise? Providing that the fabric of the suit remains unruptured, the CG field inside protects the wearer, he feels almost nothing. Floating inside the suit.

  The British Army made the mistake of featuring powered armour in their recruiting ads once: they showed some of what the suit was capable of – the way its surface colour could be altered, chameleon-like, for camouflage; the way they could accelerate from nought to sixty in a fraction of a second, without smearing the wearer over the inside of the suit, and come to a dead stop in the same amount of time; and they showed a man standing at the heart of an explosion and the ensuing fire.

  In other words, they made the suit look pretty exciting. That made a lot of young people want to try one out: not just potential squaddies, but also the kind of guys that like to steal BMW's finest for an evening's joy riding. Young thrill-seekers who wanted to free-fall without a parachute and stop within only an inch of the ground, without needing to decelerate. Military and security agencies lost eighteen suits within a month of the commercial first being shown, and the Army had pulled the ad after only three nights. Most of the suits were never recovered; others have disappeared since then. Somewhere out there is a whole illegal sub-culture based around powered suits of armour. Beth Civardi had been part of it for a while, before she'd been recruited by the police. This had been her suit.

  "The power cells were replaced a couple of weeks ago, and it worked fine when I fired it up then: it's been carefully maintained, so you shouldn't have any problems with it," Beth said. "Want to try it on for size?"

  Not really, but she wasn't actually giving me a choice.She touched a stud on the arm panel of the s
uit, and there was a hiss of hydraulics. The helmet snapped back, and the suit split open down the front like an insect about to shed its shell for a larger size.

  "You have to back into it, get your legs in place, and then slide your arms in like you're putting on an overcoat. There should be enough room for the splint too, the suit will adjust around it."

  I eased myself back into the suit, trying not to think of it as a hi-tech sarcophagus. Or worse, an iron maiden.

  "How's the fit?" Beth asked.

  "Not bad. Do you have it in a thirty-two regular?"

  "You'll be okay when I close it up and switch on the interior CG.

  I was willing to bet that she was wrong. Beth touched another stud on the suit's arm, and it hissed once more, sealing me inside. As the helmet lowered itself into place, I fought a rising tide of panic.

  "How's that?" Beth asked. I could hear her perfectly through the suit's external pick-ups.

  "Now I know how baked beans feel."

  "You may feel a little claustrophobic for a while: it'll wear off as you begin to get used to the suit. Don't try and move yet."

  I was more than a little claustrophobic: I'd always hated really confined spaces. I tried to relax.

  "I'm going to turn on the CG, it'll feel weird, but not unpleasant."

  My stomach flip-flopped as she thumbed the switch: I felt my feet lose contact with the soles of the suit's boots, I was floating. All around me, the suit was keeping me a few millimetres away from its inner surface, as though someone had filled it with flotation tank juice. It was weird, but not unpleasant.

  "I'm going to get you to raise your arm in a moment, but I'm going to tell you how first."

  She was kidding, wasn't she?

  "Now, logic tells you that you're wearing heavy armour, so you'll need to use extra force to raise your arm: you don't. You've got to try and move normally, as if you're wearing nothing more than t-shirt and jeans, okay?

  "Inside the suit are pressure sensors: as they detect your arm moving, they'll move the suit arm correspondingly. It won't feel as if you're lifting anything except your arm.

  "Okay, gently raise your right forearm, bending at the elbow. Slowly... Excellent. See what I mean?"

  It was an odd feeling. My brain told me I was lifting several kilos of metal and plastics, my arm told me I wasn't.

  "Know what this is?" Beth asked. She took a small flat metal object out of her pocket and held it between finger and thumb.

  "An old coin," I said.

  "A fifty-pence piece," Beth said. "Hold your fingers up like this."

  I held up my finger and thumb, and Beth placed the coin between them, so that the edges were against my gloved finger-tips, and I could see the old Queen's image on the coin's face.

  "Squeeze it," Beth said.

  I did. The coin seemed to collapse in on itself, folding in half.

  "Is it a trick?" I asked.

  "Nope. It's a genuine coin. Should give you some idea of the strength increase the suit gives you. The harder you squeeze, the harder the suit squeezes: there's a logarithmic progression. If you keep squeezing harder, the suit assumes you want more and more force, so it keeps on squeezing more and more."

  I looked from Beth to the coin.

  "Crushing stuff like that is easy," she said. "More difficult is fine control. Picking up an egg is a real test of skill, takes hours of practice. And dozens of eggs." She grinned. "Let's try walking now, but take it easy. If you fall over, there's no way I can pick you up: we'd have to 'phone for the fire brigade to come and get you out of the suit."

  The walking was okay. I thought about the Strider Nathan and I had hijacked, the principles in getting it to walk, and applied them to the suit.

  I walked up and down the garden for a while, practised picking up objects. I picked up a piece of stone the size of an armchair without effort. Picking up a pea-sized pebble took several attempts.

  "Try picking a rose," Beth suggested.

  I was as gentle as I could be: Beth looked down at the mangled petals in my armoured hand and shook her head. "Needs work, Houston."

  The next day, I had my first flying lesson.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  "Up, up and away!" Or, how I became a superhero in six easy lessons. Like many superheroes, my special powers were given to me by a Mysterious Stranger: I had been chosen for my courage, my honesty, and the fact that my legs looked okay in tights. I was given tremendous strength, I was invulnerable to attack, and I had the ability to fly. I would use my powers for the benefit of mankind. Faster than a speeding train! Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound! Is it a bird? Is it a 'plane? No, it's Suited Man. Pretty soon I'd be trying to thwart the evil plot of Mister Nastyman, but for now I had to learn how to use my powers safely and wisely.

  The principle behind the counter gravity device is one of those things they try to explain to you at school. It's all to do with something called Shaw's Gravitational Anomaly, after the man who discovered it: I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand it now. I think it has something to do with Newton being slightly wrong about one thing, and Einstein being not entirely right about another. Or was that cold fusion? Can't remember. The demonstration of the Anomaly involved dropping a lead ball and an aluminium ball from the top of a mile high tower in wind-free conditions and measuring the difference in time it took them to reach the ground. Probably. I didn't take notes.

  The thing about CG is that the harder you push against a CG device, the harder it pushes back. Or pulls, to be strictly accurate, which I'm not being. Anyway, get the push (or pull) calculations right, and you can effectively float in the same place above the ground, anything between three feet and a mile up, if you're in something with a big enough D-Drive and enough power cells. There are even larger, industrial scale, units with virtually unlimited push (pull?) that can take you up into orbit. The kid who discovered how to use the principle of Shaw's Anomaly to create a useable counter-gravity device originally called it the Dean Drive when he sold it to the companies. But then someone explained the joke to them. Now they call it the D-Drive. Or the Daleth Drive. For a while the kid was the richest person on the planet.

  CG has been used for all kinds of things – tables without legs; elevators without cables; sculptures without purpose. But today, we're interested in its use in powered armour suits: if you create a field within a suit, it keeps the wearer protected from any form of impact: the impact pushes against the CG field, the field pushes back equally hard, and the wearer feels nothing. No g-forces when you accelerate from nought to a hundred and sixty in two seconds, no tug of inertia. Within the field, you are effectively not moving. It's the thing science fiction writers have always pretended was possible. Add a second CG device to the back of the suit, and your invulnerable knight in shining armour can fly around like the Man of Steel. Theoretically.

  I was once more enclosed in the CG-Suit, and Beth and I were both jacked into the net, so that she could stand over my shoulder and demonstrate the suit's control software.

  "You've used telepresence systems before, so many of the suit's controls will be familiar to you. Collision avoidance is automatic, both long-range and short-range: short-range will also give you an 'awareness' of objects all around you; you'll sense the presence of objects to the side and behind you, even though you can't see them. The suit will also monitor cross-winds, pressure and temperature changes, and automatically compensate for them," Beth said.

  The suit offered various forms of visual and non-visual scan, including radar, infra-red and motion detection. It also had a link to the satellite navigation network: it could display a three-dimensional map of the surrounding area on the inside of the suit's helmet, in anything from simple geometric shapes to full photographic images. A route could be programmed, and the suit would then follow it without need for intervention from the wearer.

  "The only two things you'll really have to get to grips with are control of speed and orientation: this three-d
imensional icon," she indicated a little man-shape enclosed in a wire-frame globe. "Shows you which way up you are, and in which direction you are moving.

  "You've no keyboard or pointer to operate, the whole system works on visualisation: you have to think clearly about the direction you want to go, and how quickly you want to get there. If you've never used a mind-link before, it'll take a little practice. The software is pretty good at figuring out what you're trying to tell it, and it'll soon get used to your way of thinking."

  I had used so-called 'mind-link' control software before – I didn't like it: some primitive, irrational part of my brain feared the idea of a machine reading my mind, even if I was controlling the thoughts I was letting it pick up. Such mind reading was only the first step, my irrational mind said. How long before there's a machine that actually controls your thoughts?

  There already is, it's called television.

  But, when you're going to be flying around at anything up to (a theoretical) two hundred and fifty miles an hour, the idea of controlling your suit at the speed of thought is quite attractive.

  "Movement is almost instantaneous: no acceleration when you start to move, no deceleration when you decide to stop. There are no rocket thrusters suddenly kicking in, no inertial effects to overcome.

  "Normally you wouldn't feel anything in the suit, but built into the interface software are simulated acceleration, deceleration and direction-change sensations. You'll feel a fake sense of movement, is what I'm saying. It helps overcome travel sickness: if your body can see that its moving, but can't feel it, or vice versa, you're likely to want to puke."

  Even without the fake sense of movement, I was likely to want to puke.

  "The software has been tweaked," Beth said. "It's designed for non-military, illegal use by StormRiders: it'll allow you to take more risks than usual, and when you pick a route, it'll chose one with a smaller safety margin: more near-misses. Basically, it's more fun."