Dot Robot

by Jason Bradbury

  ‘A game of cat and mouse, Mr Farley.’ Lear sounded intrigued. ‘The only question is, which one are you?’

  ‘Neither, as it happens!’ said Jackson. ‘You ready, Brooke?’

  ‘I guess so, cap’n.’

  Jackson reached the apex of his climb and, with the nose of his MeX1 kissing the rafters, let the robotic aircraft stall and fall on to its back, gravity and the full-throttle-ducted turbofan driving it downwards.

  ‘OK, bring up your menu. There’s something special in there.’ Jackson wasn’t sure if the Kojimas could hear, so he was keeping things cryptic.

  ‘Say what?’ Brooke pondered for a couple of seconds. ‘Oh sure, I see what you’re about, you sly ol’ dawg.’ She had opened the SPEC tab in her menu, guessing it was an abbreviation for ‘Special’ and was now staring at Jackson’s plan.

  As his remobot pulled out of the dive, Jackson’s forward view trembled while the craft’s advanced thermoplastic airframe struggled to cope with the extreme velocity. Straight and level now, his MeX1 screamed towards the pile of wooden pallets before streaking straight over the top of Brooke’s stranded machine. Jackson looped upwards to see the Kojimas pulling out of their dive. As the twins passed just millimetres above Brooke’s saucer, there was an almighty explosion. All three machines and most of the pallets were lost in a furious fireball.

  When the smoke cleared, a blackened halo on the barn floor marked the spot where the three remobots had met their fiery fate. Fragments of wood and part of the workbench were still smouldering, but there was no visible trace of anything robotic.

  ‘Hot-diggity-damn!’ yelped Brooke. ‘Now that’s what I call barnstormin’!’

  ‘Of course, the idea of keeping the incendiary device under SPECIALS and not ARM is to avoid an accidental discharge. But I’m guessing that was no accident?’ It was clear Devlin Lear was impressed with the pair’s unconventional use of the MeX1’s self-destruct feature.

  Jackson felt a flush of pride.

  ‘You betcha, daddio,’ said a jubilant Brooke. ‘Well, if you’re having a barbecue – it’s rude not to share.’

  ‘I commend you both on a prudent win. But I’m not sure what your Japanese fellow-fighters will have to say about it.’

  ‘Isseki ni chou.’ It was the voice of Master Kojima. At least Jackson thought it was, as the duo not only looked the same, they sounded very similar.

  ‘It mean … one stone, two birds. It is old Japanese saying. My brother paying compliment. We look forward to flying with you – not at you.’

  Jackson was about to repay the compliment when a third voice cut in.

  ‘I’m sick of little cretins like you taking the Michael. Order a full English breakfast or sling yer hook.’ It wasn’t a Japanese saying and it definitely wasn’t a compliment. The cafe girl’s face loomed large in Jackson’s virtual display.

  CHAPTER 12

  Theoretically, Jackson’s iPod could hold a maximum of five thousand songs. In reality, it held six hundred and twenty-three songs, forty-one podcasts and thirteen Dr Who audio books rented and then ripped from the town library. What’s more, Jackson could recall the precise numerical position of each of them. He had no choice as, thanks to Tyler Hughes, the screen of his pulverized player no longer worked – it was completely blank. If, for example, he wanted to find a particular song, it was a matter of moving his finger around the player’s click-wheel in a precise sequence. The first ‘click!’ sound always meant he was in the MUSIC menu; a further three clicks of the dial would bring him to the SONGS folder. It was then a case of remembering the position of a tune – say, the two hundred and twenty-third song – U2’s ‘Vertigo’. So the number code Jackson needed to remember for his favourite U2 track was 13223.

  He could find anything on his machine by recalling its combination, then counting out the clicks as he turned the wheel like a rotary lock on a safe. Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’, his mum’s favourite, was 13564. Dr Who’s ‘Agents of Algore’ equalled 1512 and the folder containing his much-favoured NASA podcasts was 17, and then whatever number podcast he was after from 1 to 41.

  Of course, he was missing out on album art or the chance to watch music videos and TV shows on his device like some of the other kids, but Jackson’s music number system had some added benefits. It meant that for most of the last term he had been able to covertly access his music library during class without the need to pull his iPod out of his pocket. He’d even stripped a headphone so it was barely noticeable when secreted in one ear.

  Today, however, it wasn’t a hotwired headphone kept in place with a bit of tape and skin-coloured modelling clay that was stuck in Jackson’s ear, but the undetectable and considerably more comfortable MeX grommet.

  After the training match Lear had spoken briefly about their first mission. He said he would review the footage from their machines afterwards and debrief them, but that from now on he would not be there during missions to assist them. From now on the team members were on their own.

  To help them prepare Lear had given the four conscripts access to the Experimental Mechanicals network. All they were required to do was call a mobile phone number, wait for a dead tone and hang up. They’d then receive a call back and a vocal-identity check. This gave them entry to MeXnet with its blisteringly quick Internet access and to MeX’s own internal network on which Lear had left them some files, which he referred to as ‘a little homework’.

  They had not been told when their services would be needed, but simply instructed to keep their MeX gear with them at all times and wait to be contacted. It was all rather mysterious. In fact, just what Jackson had signed up for – intrigue and adventure, as Lear had put it.

  There was nothing ‘little’ about Lear’s homework. The MeX manual was a three-hundred-page guide that detailed everything the MeX operator needed to know about the dot.robots and their sophisticated support network.

  In addition there was a large collection of mission documents and photographs, which described a group of guerrilla fighters called The Faces. The group were responsible for a series of bombings in and around the Siem Reap province of Cambodia. They were said to live a nomadic existence, setting up temporary camps, living among the jungle ruins of the county’s ancient Khmer civilization, performing hit-and-run bombing raids that, so far, the authorities had been unable to prevent. They got their name from the tattoos that adorned their faces: cryptic Khmer symbols and images of animals cut into their skin with knives and ink.

  These fierce-looking fighters were at the heart of the new recruits’ first mission for MeX. Excitement – and fear – had kept Jackson awake most nights since they’d first been briefed about it. Even now he struggled to divide his attention between the mission material he could see floating in front of him and Mr Willard, his history teacher.

  The teacher was busy writing three sentences on the whiteboard: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a cow!

  But Willard was actually Jackson’s favourite teacher and for that reason he tried to focus on the lesson the teacher was about to deliver. The connection with Willard had been kick-started after discovering a shared passion for codes and code-breaking. It had been in a lesson on Second World War cryptography. ‘The cracking of codes won us the war,’ Willard had said. Jackson loved the idea that V2 rockets and Spitfires were bit players while the real secret weapons of the Second World War were the code-cracking mathematicians. Willard, who gave all his lessons a headline or catchphrase, had started that one by writing ‘Even geeks can be superheroes’ on the whiteboard. Jackson had liked that idea even more. After class, Jackson had told his teacher about a musty linen-bound book in a box of his mum’s things. The book had belonged to her father, his granddad, and was called The Bletchley Bombe. The antiquarian hardback told the story of a fantastic calculating machine designed by English mathematician Alan Turing to smash the heavily encrypted radio transmissions of the Nazis.

  Willard had used their mutual admiration of Alan Turing to try an
d persuade Jackson to join his chess team.

  ‘Alan Mathison Turing was a mathematical super-hero. He’s also the father of modern computer science – but I’m getting sidetracked – the point is that he wrote what many believe was the first ever computer chess program. Except of course there wasn’t a computer powerful enough to run it …’ For a moment Willard looked to have confused himself. ‘What I’m trying to say, Farley, is that Turing was a genius mathematician just like you. But he was ghastly at chess! If you could learn to win at chess – the game of kings, Farley – you’d be better than Turing.’

  It wasn’t the argument that Jackson found persuasive, but the passion of the teacher who always wore the same bad clothes and never failed to make him laugh. In truth, Jackson’s first year in the school chess team was marked by a litany of embarrassing failures, one to a six-year-old girl which Jackson unsuccessfully campaigned to have annulled on grounds that she wasn’t even of school age. But Jackson had risen to the challenge, absorbing the thousands of ‘plays’ of the grand-masters that had been transcribed online by loyal chess fans. Within a year of picking up his first pawn, it was one of Jackson’s games that won his school the County Cup.

  Willard turned round from the board at the front of the classroom and held up a textbook with a picture of a very sick-looking cow.

  ‘This bovine has the plague,’ he said. ‘What possible use could a sick cow have in a siege situation?’

  Jackson saw that no one had their hand up.

  ‘Violet. You’re good at French. What’s this?’

  Willard sketched a childlike drawing of a device that looked like some kind of medieval see-saw: a triangle with a couple of wheels on the bottom and a big stick balancing on top, hastily sketched speed-lines suggesting motion.

  ‘It’s a trebuchet, Sir,’ said Violet Poole confidently. Willard now added a rather sorry-looking stick-figure cow being hurled from the medieval machine, even taking the time to add a daisy to its mouth which met with a ripple of laughter. He then wrote ‘Biological Warfare’ in red marker.

  Jackson focused back on the MeX mission documents. The phantom pages could be shunted around the room by minuscule movements of Jackson’s eyeball.

  He pulled up a photograph of one of the jungle fighters, the pages revolving like the numbers on a ghostly roulette wheel, until a translucent tattooed face hung in front of Willard’s whiteboard. The image of the man’s face made him jump. He had a set of extra eyes drawn on his forehead. Jackson thought they looked incredibly realistic as they stared back at him. There was no less detail in the fists that were etched into each cheek and the flames that threatened to consume his nose.

  Jackson didn’t like the way the photo made him feel. There was something disturbing in the act of marking your own face, something that made the man inhuman. He remembered how he’d felt when Lear had shown the four of them the newspaper headlines and given them the ‘justice and fair play’ speech. Jackson had been hooked by the notion that he might get to do some good. Perhaps even more, that what he would do, would make people sit up and take notice. That was something Jackson hadn’t really ever experienced before. But the sinister man’s face reminded him that this was a serious business. He looked across the classroom and found Tyler Hughes. Compared to the man in the photograph, he didn’t look that scary at all.

  Jackson brought a document into view with the words ‘Intelligence Report – MeX Eyes Only’ stamped above it.

  According to the report, The Faces were planning to plant IEDs or Improvised Explosive Devices. Their intention was to disrupt national holiday celebrations by detonating three bombs. This, they hoped, would get headlines for their cause, which was described on the report as ‘Freedom for the indigenous Khmer peoples’.

  It went on to explain that the group had done this kind of operation before and would give warnings ahead of time so people could be evacuated. This time they had said they were planning to hit a village and a temple and, while the Cambodian authorities were confident they could get the villagers out, the monks were proving more stubborn. Bombs or no bombs, the head of the Buddhist monks had decreed that his holy men would be staying in their wats, or temples, tending to their crops and observing their daily rituals.

  The Faces were refusing to back down. And so was the Cambodian government.

  It wasn’t clear who had called in MeX, but the purpose of their mission was:

  • Rendezvous at the Landing Zone (LZ)

  • Proceed to the pre-programmed endpoint

  • Find the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and trigger them without incurring casualties

  • Remain undetected at all times

  Jackson swung his way through more of MeXnet’s classified documents, perusing maps and aerial photographs of jungle camps and temples that were straight out of Tomb Raider.

  ‘And what are your thoughts, Farley?’ Willard was glaring at him. ‘Or are you too busy talking to yourself to talk to us?’

  Jackson had been so immersed in what he was doing that he’d forgotten to disguise the commands he was using to work his way through the MeX research material.

  ‘It’s his imaginary friend!’ Tyler Hughes rarely missed an opportunity to have a go.

  ‘Sorry, Sir,’ said Jackson, annoyed with himself for not being more vigilant. ‘What was the question?

  ‘I was asking for a description of a motte and bailey castle.’

  Taking care to casually cover his mouth with a hand, Jackson silently enunciated SEARCH and was presented with MeXnet’s own search-engine page. He then mouthed the words ‘motte’ and ‘bailey’. The grommet instantly translated the nanoscale pressure shifts inside his ear, cross-checking them against an internal database of hundreds of thousands of words. A list of websites appeared over the faces of his classmates. In a process that lasted all of a second, Jackson flexed the extra-ocular muscles of his right eye and opened the third link down belonging to a history Wiki.

  ‘Motte is derived from the Norman-French word meaning “clod”, “clump” or “hillock”,’ Jackson said, trying to sound casual and not give away the fact he was reading. ‘The motte of a castle is a large mound, built using excavated earth, with a defensive ditch around its base. The bailey is the castle wall on top of the motte which contains the courtyard and surrounds the keep, the strongest part of the castle.’

  ‘Yes … well … nice to have you back with us,’ said Willard, surprised.

  Relieved, Jackson tried not to grin. Being part of MeX was turning out to be one of the best things that had ever happened to him.

  ‘Now we’ve heard from Jackson –’ Willard turned his attention elsewhere – ‘Mr Hughes, can you tell us what changes the Plantagenets brought to castle design?’

  When Tyler couldn’t answer, he threw Jackson a look as black as coal.

  CHAPTER 13

  ‘Good work today,’ said Willard as Jackson followed the rest of the class down the corridor. ‘See you at chess club – Monday night. We’re gonna give this newfangled Bullet Chess a try!’ he shouted, as he backed into the staffroom behind a leaning tower of textbooks.

  Bullet Chess, thought Jackson as he walked towards the canteen. A whole game in just one minute. It was something he’d always wanted to try.

  He was doubled over before he saw the duffel bag coming.

  When he looked up, Jackson saw that he was surrounded. The group parted only to let their master in before closing back round him and Jackson like a hyena pack.

  Tyler’s face shared many of the features of a potato. His ginger hair was cropped so short as to be invisible, large ruddy blotches blighted his skin and one or two of his spots were as big and white as the sproutlings you get on spuds that are past their sell-by date. And this close up, he even smelled like something pulled from the dirt.

  ‘It’s the first sign, you know,’ said Tyler, each word borne on a globule of spit.

  ‘I’m … not sure I … follow you?’ Jackson replied, trying to keep hi
s voice from trembling.

  ‘Talking to yourself – it’s the first sign of madness.’ The underlings dissolved into laughter.

  ‘Yes, well … I guess I must be mad.’ Jackson saw Tyler’s face instantly darken. The last thing he wanted to do was rub this oaf up the wrong way. But it was too late.

  ‘You tryin’ a be clever?’ said Tyler, tightening his grip on the school tie that already threatened to garrotte Jackson.

  There was no mistaking it, Jackson was clever. It wasn’t like he flaunted it, but he was. Brilliant even. He was following a completely different arithmetic syllabus to the rest of the school and was expected to bypass sixth-form and go straight to university. He wasn’t one of those little kids who wear bow ties and play the piano on chat shows when they’re four, but, for a twelve-year-old, Jackson Farley was just plain, off-the-chart clever.

  Jackson decided that the clever thing to do here was, unfortunately, to agree with everything his tormentor said – to apologize for whatever petty insecurity he’d triggered.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, OK. Please let me go?’

  ‘Please let me go,’ said Tyler in his best baby voice. ‘Ah diddums – is Teacher’s Pet scared?’

  Jackson sighed. That plan obviously wasn’t working. He was going to have to try something else. As Tyler turned to his minions to amuse them with his baby impersonation, Jackson mumbled his way into the school’s computer. The home page flashed up over Tyler’s guffawing face, then the STAFF AREA and the USERNAME and PASSWORD fields. Jackson mouthed ‘Richard Willard’, followed by ‘Kasparov1985’.

  He had known his history teacher’s password for a while. When dealing with an amateur, and in terms of all things ‘computer’ that’s what Mr Willard most certainly was, it was simply a case of finding out which of the world’s most popular types of password applied to them. ‘Password’ consistently appeared as number 1 in a series of Top 100-style charts on the Web. The equally inane ‘123456’ was a regular contender for the top spot, followed by a series of predictable inventions based around users’ first names, pets, children and favourite sports teams. The combination of the godfather of chess and the year in which he became the youngest-ever world champion occurred to Jackson when he thought about how many times Willard had mentioned how he’d flown to Moscow with his uncle in 1985 to watch the ‘most famous chess match in history’.