Ben stopped in the kitchen door and sighed. “Okay, Dad. Whatever. We’ll think of something. Sigma, Dad.”
He walked out to the narrow staircase, locked the magnetic lock, pulled open the lift cabin’s doors, stepped inside, and punched the button for the underground loopstation.
As the cabin clanged all the way down though, it moved in the other direction, following a maze of tunnels unknown to Ben despite the fact he had lived here with his father since he was six. It was always the loopstation.
This time, the lift cabin stopped next to an underground arch with some stairs hidden in the darkness, leading up. As Ben stepped further, a motion-triggered traffic sign lit up above the passage, scrolling neon characters reading: “OOPS! The station access is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience”. These pop-up holosigns were normally installed by maintenance robots. None of them were in sight, even though the sign seemed pretty fresh, and the staircase was brand-new.
“Seems like something big is going on after all,” Ben muttered as he walked up the immobile stairs, not surprised by the inconvenience itself, but rather by the amount of discomfort the circumstances caused him. He felt like punching that sign, even. This would teach the robots shutting down loopstations a fine lesson.
“PROTECT OUR CITIZENS!” A bullhorn suddenly blared nearby. Ben climbed up the few remaining stairs, so new their material was sticky, and exited through some unfamiliar door out to his own block, which he had hardly visited for the last twenty years.
The street was full of people. Ben never thought such a mass of humans could gather in one place and not explode or die somehow. It was an endless river of people; people who swarmed the streets and alleys, and blocked the store fronts, and pushed things around, some standing still, some scuttling back and forth, each one on their way somewhere. Ben was surrounded by a whirlwind of voices.
“PROTECT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF OUR RELATIVES! OUR LOVED ONES! OUR REVERED ANCESTORS! LET NONE OF THEM FALL VICTIM TO SUPERSTITION!”
“God have mercy on you, on all of you.”
“So they converge like this, you see, they start trouble inside the crowd, and then they go D&D, disperse and dissolve, they get lost in the crowd and pretend to be protesters, you see.”
“Damn robots, I told you they’d get us in trouble.”
“In trouble? They’re killing us, killing our kind out there!”
“No, that’s Faith freaks!”
“I am of Faith, and I say—”
“My aunt is digital, I have to warn you—”
Assorted murmurs filled Ben’s ears and, at first, consumed him entirely. People were squeezing past and prodding his sides with their elbows, and Ben just stood there and listened.
Then he thought about his workshop.
“Oh no,” he muttered. “Gotta move.”
He mind-dialed X-Uber, a cab service handled by robots. To his surprise, the service was disabled for “security reasons”. Then Ben saw a police drone which just flew around the corner, buzzing above the crowd. This changed everything. A huge wave of protest rolled through the mass of people, the levels of robot distrust palpable. Someone tossed a bottle, and it barely missed the drone, then crashed into the crowd and hit somebody. People laughed anyway, everyone saying it was close enough.
“No wonder they won’t send robot taxis here,” Ben muttered. “Not with this crowd.”
“Taxi?” a bearded man asked him, someone wearing an outlandish national headgear. “I have taxi! Five hundred quid? Sir? Sir?”
“Five hun—” Ben started, then looked at the man: “You don’t have any taxi, stop lying.”
“I have better!” the man said. “Look!”
He opened his leather jacket and revealed two grav belts crisscrossed over his potbelly. This was an exotic way to travel, mostly used by people who liked to cause trouble; so Ben shook his head and tried to push forward through the crowd instead.
“Say where, we jump!” The man followed him and nudged him again.
“No thanks!” Ben shouted. “Stop it!”
“WE MUST PROTECT ALL OF OUR CITIZENS,” the bullhorn blared from the top of a food dispensing machine. “THEY SAID THEY’D MAKE US IMMORTAL AND WE SAID YES!”
“Yes!” The crowd roared.
“THEY SAID COME INTO OUR DIGITAL PARADISE AND WE SAID YES!”
“Yes!”
“THEY SAID TASTE OF OUR FORBIDDEN FRUIT OF PLEASURE AND WE SAID YES!”
“Yes!”
“NOW THEY SAY THEY CAN ERASE ONE OF US FROM THEIR PARADISE AT THEIR OWN CHOICE! WILL WE SAY YES?”
“No!”
“WILL WE LET THEM KILL OUR DIGITAL RELATIVES?”
“No!”
“WILL WE TOLERATE THESE DRONES, THESE ROBOTS AROUND?”
“No!”
As far as Ben could see, it was the Faith propaganda, and it was smart — they spoke nothing against DCs because the crowd wouldn’t like it at all. They attacked robots instead. Everyone hated robots. And the local police, not counting Inspector Braggs and Detective Heart, was one hundred percent robotic force, mostly drone quad copters and “trashcans on wheels” carrying a layer of thick armor.
So far, the police only risked launching a single drone — and the results must have been dissatisfactory for them to observe, because it was clear the crowd would lash out at anything robotic. Which allowed the Faith people to roll on unrestrained with their public chants, heating the atmosphere even further.
Ben took another step; then something popped and hissed, and the air was suddenly filled with white smoke tasting like almonds, and everyone around him was coughing, and someone vomited. Then the smoke cleared, and people, as angry as they were, identified the person who had brought this ancient can of gas and popped it open. The captured offender was seated on the curb, his face red, many people talking to him at once. There were still no police.
“So wait,” Ben said to some face in the crowd. “The Church took responsibility for killing the Baron, and the Church revolts against DCs being killed?”
“Oh no,” the face replied. “You don’t understand. It was THEM who said the Church is responsible. The robots. Automatic newscasters. Not a single human ever confirmed it!”
“So it wasn’t Faith?” Ben scratched his head.
“It was some enemy of the Church, definitely,” the man in the crowd said. “They played them pretty well; every organization affiliated with the Church is in trouble now. By tomorrow, Faith will have no allies anymore, mark my words.”
“Well,” Ben said with a wandering smile. “I’m glad things change for once.”
“Oh, this!” Someone else in the crowd said. “This is the main reason. We’re mostly here because of it. Some change.”
“Yes, well noted,” an aproned lady replied. “We need change, and they must answer, and they cannot treat us like that anymore, like blind sheep they feed all their news to.”
There was a kitchen knife in her apron pocket. Ben noticed someone else had brought a hammer. In fact, he thought, I think every second person in here is armed.
Not him though. And this thought was rather chilly. Ben tried to walk forward, but the mass of people resisted him, so the progress he made so far was ridiculous. Loudspeakers kept blaring on and on, except no one was listening to them anymore. The word around was, police trashcans were spotted nearby, a whole column of them, closing in fast. Events were unfolding widly now. The crowd was rippling and bubbling like a cauldron. People were uneasy. They quickly formed chains, trying to face their yet unseen enemy.
Ben didn’t like the mood at all. When a fight was about to begin in the Web, and the atmosphere around you grew tense, it felt thrilling, fun, something to be enjoyed. Self-propelled knight armors with pilots inside ready to charge — knowing their steel wedge was virtually unstoppable, especially with nothing but flesh and bone. Here on the streets, the stakes were somewhat lower — police would sedate the
entire crowd if they had to — and yet the atmosphere wasn’t filled with the thrilling sense of anticipation — the atmosphere was ugly, like all these people were simply here to ambush someone, to break down a robot or two, to raise hell. People were hungry for blood (or silicon, perhaps) but that was it. And someone, presumably Faith, was pulling the strings here, setting folks up against their electronic government.
Ben caught a glimpse of a familiar face in the crowd again. The man with the two grav belts, a potential ride.
“Hey!” Ben called. “Hey, mister! Taxi! Hey! I’ll pay.”
“Gonna be seven hundred quid this time.” The man grinned, with the crooked yellow teeth of a rodent. “I’ll be missing all the action here now.”
“All right.” Ben thrust his hand forward, they shook on the transaction, and the man instantly unlatched one of the belts and gave it to him. Ben clicked the belt shut.
“Which kind of action do you expect?” he asked the man.
“Dunno.” A rodent smile again. “The major kind.”
A ripple of murmur ran through the mass of people, followed by a sudden quiet. Ben looked over the man’s head and saw them: row after row of gleaming domes of pseudoplastic, an entire phalanx of police patrol droids, the R2D2 trashcans, moving in from an alley no-one bothered to block.
“Where to?” the man asked. Ben told him his workshop’s address, and the man punched it into the belt computers, first his own, then Ben’s. He said: “We will hold hands while airborne, just so you won’t make something stupid, mess up your parabola, and smash into a building or something.”
“ATTENTION CITIZENS,” a new voice blared through a bullhorn, this one feminine, concerned, and motherly. A police lady. “PLEASE DISPERSE. GO HOME. NOTHING IS HAPPENING HERE. YOU HAVE BUSINESS ELSEWHERE.”
“Stop telling me what’s happening and what I have to do!” a lonely voice sounded above the crowd.
“Yes! Who is this girl anyway?” another voice responded. “Hey, lady! Are you a robot? What do you robots want from us?”
“NO ELECTRONIC DEVICES OR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES ARE INVOLVED IN THIS OPERATION,” the loudspeaker lady explained. “ALL UNITS YOU SEE IN THE STREETS ARE CONTROLLED BY HUMAN BEINGS. I AM HUMAN.”
“Oh are you?” Another mocking voice from the crowd.
“So wait, lady, who controls these dummies then?”
“Didn’t you hear? It’s Creeps!”
“Dead Creeps control them all; Creeps came here to pacify us now!”
“Burn in hell, you abomination!”
The first rock was tossed from the crowd, and hit one of the white plastic domes. The droid responded by moving a few feet forward and putting the attacker out with a directed sonoray.
“Blindfolds! Blindfolds!” The crowd reacted. “Close your eyes, people! They can’t knock you out if you don’t look!”
This was true. Except it was hard to keep your eyes constantly shut of course. Still, the first blind fanatics rushed forward at the wall of patrol units, more rocks flying, some pipes and wooden planks swinging around.
Then it all disappeared. The city itself became a foggy map, something of a computer motherboard, square grey microchips sticking out here and there. Ben and his guide went airborne.
Now Ben could see the crowd was immense — the dark mass of people was everywhere, the tiny protest signs scattered across the streets like multicolored confetti. The white islands of patrol droids, he could see, were critically small, isolated, and powerless. Then the two of them were falling into the crowd again, the misty ground quickly rushing up to meet them. Then, the dampening systems kicked in, stabilizing their harnesses, making their landing feel like jumping down from a swing.
Ben was worried they would smash into people, but the grav belts were perfect for landing into the crowd: their dampening sprays of air moved the people beneath in the four directions of a compass, clearing a neat square of empty street directly underfoot.
The ground felt like jelly, and Ben suddenly realized how shaken he was by the jump. Once more, he felt lost and disoriented among this whirlwind of voices and faces.
“You know it’s either us or them now, right?”
“I knew it all along! Of course they’re all fake! It’s just robots pretending to be someone’s dead relative. I used to be uncanny-valleyed—”
“So the trick is, you can look, except you must blink about twice every second. Then the sleep effect won’t accumulate—”
“Listen, this is insane, what are we doing, people? Let’s just all go home.”
“Shut up! Hey, here’s a robot lover!”
“Go home, he says!”
“Robot lover!”
“Shut up!”
…And they were airborne again, the voices snatched away, the dark torn clouds jumping up front to envelop Ben and the other man, holding hands.
The air up high was substantially colder. Ben looked up, and instantly found himself choking on wet wind rushing among the high-rise walls, an entire river of wind.
“I — I feel kinda sick,” he shouted to the man.
The man gave him the crooked yellow smile. “Only one jump to go! Then, breathe out!”
They landed into the crowd again. In this part of the city, riots were raging. People swayed together like a giant organism, pressing on everything, pouring into every crevice, smashing windows, slamming into patrol droids and trying to tip them over, going down when a sonoray took them out. Those who went limp were dragged away — their prostrated snoring bodies were scattered along the curbs.
“CITIZENS, PLEASE REMAIN CALM, AND DISPERSE. CITIZENS, PLEASE REMAIN CALM, AND DISPERSE.”
“Damn trash cans!”
“Eyes, don’t open your eyes! Oh no, Lenny! Hey, we’ve got another one!”
“Some of us are still awake, you Creeps! You can’t take us all!”
“CITIZENS, PLEASE STAND BY FOR A CORRECTIONAL TRANSMISSION. ASSUME A COMFORTABLE POSITION ANNNNDDD—”
And they were airborne again. And then, everything went quiet at once, but not because the street noise was left down below. A strange spasm of commotion went through the mass of people, a visible shockwave of something activated at Ben’s two o’clock. No fire, no sound, no flash of light — something invisible rolled through the crowd, and the protesters collapsed in its wake in hundreds, a line after a line of limp bodies going down.
“Did you see that?” Ben muttered, and then realized his companion couldn’t hear him all that well. “What was that? A — a sonowave, this big? Did they have this technology all along?”
The streets below were filled with scuttling beetle-like shapes now. Medical bots, Ben recognized. The things were darting back and forth between the limp bodies, fixing people’s poses, freeing people who were trampled on, and administering shots.
Ben and his companion landed amongst the rows and piles of snoring bodies, Ben’s feet nearly crushing a medical bot. The thing examined him as Ben removed his grav belt, found Ben uninjured, and left. The belt owner gave Ben the final crooked smile, waved goodbye, then blasted off through the drizzle.
People were slowly waking up. As Ben crossed the street to get to his workshop — a long journey across a field of stirring bodies — he saw people stretching and yawning and rubbing their eyes. After the strange wave interfered with them, they seemed well-rested, calm, and reasonable; hardly aware what they were doing in the streets a few moments ago.
Or maybe it was the sedative shots, Ben figured. This way or another, the revolt had died for today. Streets were emptying right as he went, and when Ben opened the workshop’s siding doors and stepped inside, the commotion behind him was almost down to normal.
The bell tinkled. Diego raised his head from the automold chair stretched into its usual deformity.
“What’s going on, man?” he asked. “There was some party going on outside… then I fell asleep, I guess. Is everything okay out there?”
&nb
sp; Ben nodded, not sure if it was appropriate. In any case, it was the only thing he could come up with in response.
Chapter 5: All In
That night, I felt unsafe falling asleep for the first time in my life. By the end of the day, it was a mess. Everyone was chatting online, which is something I don’t enjoy way too much, sort of like opening and reading a hundred fortune cookies mentally, and you also have to bake some in response. Everything in the good old Wakeworld was mixed up now, badly: DCs, robots, police, Faith. Everyone was tired and outraged. The night behind my window was noisy with drunken revolutionary screams and firecrackers going off. Well, it was also Christmas.
Still, as I got into my sleeping nook and the sonolight above my head went on, I was almost thankful for the oblivion.
If only it was oblivion. Fat chance.
Robots spawned me in the military camp, for my convenience — so I woke up with my head inside a wooden bucket full of ice-cold water. I pulled it out, coughed and sneezed, with everyone around laughing. The Moon — yes, there was the Crescent’s banner above our camp. We were deep into their territory, and the Albion commanders thought that if we flashed some local colors and travelled at night, no one would pay us any attention, the desert being what it is.
It was daylight now. The new order was, move out instantly. It seemed like the Citadel was quite nearby, and we had a chance of surprising the Assassins.
Another fat chance.
So we had to march, and being Apprentice Mechanics, both Tranh and I had to pull our carts loaded with hardware, mostly disassembled Knightwalkers we would have to reassemble on the field, rearm, booby-trap all over again, and unleash at the enemy.
This was our major weak spot all along, those clunky things. I had seen some Janissary once, those sand warriors wearing ornate breathing masks. These were ruthless hunters, real Asian cybersportsmen specifically bent on survival; the harsher the environment, the better. I had seen them dispersing a swarm of barbarians. We were supposed to be allies (we still were), so I could watch them up close. Their mobility was amazing. Their bodies were a blur in combat. They didn’t need any armor at all.
Enter the Clockworld Page 10
