K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

  Footsteps in the kitchen. He scooped together his comics, jumped up at the foot of the bed, pushed them into their hiding place, skinned back under the sheet as the door opened and Mum said, "What's this light doing on? You're meant to be asleep. You have school tomorrow. Don't think you can stay home because you're too sleepy, either." But she gave him a quick kiss, tousled his hair, flicked off the light, shut the door.

  In the darkness, he wished he had a little radio. A crystal set. There was a place in the vacant lot where you could dig down and make a tunnel, and nobody would know it was there, and you could imprison your enemies. You probably needed concrete, because otherwise the tunnel might collapse, but one of the kids said his dad had some in bags, you just had to mix it with water, so that would be easy. When you had your enemies down there, you could try shooting them with your gun.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  August

  Early February afternoon sun was broiling hot, as you'd expect, and I found myself wishing for a straw hat of the sort common in bush paintings of the Heidelberg School. I was quickly sweating under my dark shirt and jeans. Goth black is stylish enough, but not especially adapted to Melbourne summer. I found a shady tree beside the South Lawn greensward that covered the staff parking lot, sat on a handy chunky hewn stone, pulled off my shoes and socks, dumped my feet in the recirculating channel of faintly chlorinated water. The cool ripples soothed me.

  Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, or so an overweight old vet named Mike had told me in Chicago during my year of high school there. But three times, he said, index finger pressed knowingly against the side of his nose, is enemy action.

  Yes.

  "Enough," I said. "Enough already."

  I raised one bare foot, placed it against the hot, rough stone, gripping its pitted surface with my toes and hiding the sigil impressed into the flesh of the sole, propped my right elbow on my knee, my chin on the knuckles of my gloveless hand. Auguste Rodin's Thinker. Enough-ish thought.

  A native bird was making a noise above me, shaking the leaves. I scarcely heard a note, then noticed the fact. I snorted at that reflection; it seemed to me that I'd been doing a lot of that lately: ignoring things, putting aside all the absurdities great and small, the glitches, the changes that snuck past me (dear God, a whole new month, named after me), everything except Lune and me, in bed and out of it, walking the worlds just for the fun of it, in love for the first time, for me, at any rate... shoving it all into the too-hard basket.

  An epithalamium forbidding sadness, Lune had told me one day in a sweetly melancholy mood that somewhat undercut her meaning. I didn't actually take her meaning at the time, having no idea at all what an "epithalamium" might be. Medical studies were rather narrow in my time and place. I looked it up later, of course, yahoogled it off the Net: a rather recondite wordplay on a couple of poems common to my world and one at least of hers. ("A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne and a wedding poem for some chums by any number of old dudes from Sappho and Catullus to Edmund Spenser, if you must know, and I'm damned if I'm going to quote any of them now. Well, maybe a piece or two from Donne. "So let us melt, and make no noise," was sort of our motto during those horny, besotted days, except for the part about making no noise. He had some other wise words that seemed freakily appropriate to our peculiar situation as Players in the Contest of Worlds: "Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears; Men reckon what it did, and meant; But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent." The earth moved all right, and not just under whatever bed of opportunity we found ourselves hot and sweaty and languorous within, atop, beside. Every choice to be made, it seemed to me in my fright, shook an earthquake or tsunami through the very spheres of heaven, innocent or otherwise, that all-but-infinite plenum choking the four Tegmark levels of reality with their seething abundance of life, of suffering, of joy. End of parenthetical aside.) Our epithalamium had just about run its course, it suddenly seemed to me. The verse was broken. The gaps in the logic were showing through. For a ferocious moment, I felt like finding Lune, grabbing her by the shoulders, and giving her a good shaking.

  "Something funny, lad?" A shadow fell on me in the mottled shadows of the tree's leaves. I looked up, still chuckling.

  "Just imagining myself covered in bruises, Coop," I said.

  The machine regarded me without further comment. A human might have asked for elucidation or, embarrassed, changed the subject. James Cooper Fenimore, by profession a disposer of slaughtered machines, or so I'd understood from the little I had seen of his work, stood in the hot sunlight in companionable silence. After a time, he plucked out a stinking old briar, thumbed in a plug of his rank tobacco, snapped a match against his thumbnail, fired up blue smoke. One or two students sunning themselves on the grass a good dozen meters away wrinkled up their noses and stared angrily. Coop was blithe. I choked a little myself, withdrew my hand from my chin and waved uselessly at the polluted air. Just another absurdity, a machine sucking down the poisons and stimulants of a drug designed for organisms. But then, what did I know about the internal workings of a mechanical being like Coop? I'd seen part of the robot guts of a flayed despoiler stretched on an autopsy table in my sister Ruth's mad-scientist laboratory, and the thing seemed a blend of subtle mechanism and flesh, bone, blood: an android, perhaps, as they use the word in TV shows. A K-machine, I had been informed. The foe. Maybe the Red or Black team in the Contest, if we were the White pieces. That's what it was, the dead thing Lune and Maybelline had dumped in my aunt's bathroom for disposal by Coop—a K-machine, or at any rate that's what it was called. My ignorance was all but universal. Here was the chance to remedy at least part of my defective understanding of the many worlds.

  "Coop, what's the K stand for?"

  Instantly, the machine told me, knowing exactly what I meant: "Killer. Killing machines. Foul things."

  "Hmm." It seemed unlikely, somehow. Too easy. Like a children's cartoon. A shiver went through me, despite the sweaty heat. That was pretty much exactly how my own life had been turning out. Deliberately, I turned my thoughts away from that direction. A melodious note rang out overhead. I glanced at the golden sandstone pinnacle of the clock tower above a heavy, granite, Gothic cloister built in, oh, 1930. One o'clock. Hickory dickory dock. The clock struck one, I thought inanely, and down it run. I shivered again, and another little convulsion went through me. There it was again: I was nothing better than a mouse, a blind mouse, on the run, and the farmer's wife was running after me, menacing and terrifying and not at all comical, waving her sharpened knife.

  "So was that Yammer thing one of them? I didn't see any—"

  "No, sar. Wild beast from an ugly world, 'tis all."

  "So someone picked it up and put it down next to me, next to Lune, just to be a nuisance?"

  Acrid smoke billowed about us, trapped by the leaves overhead. Coop regarded me with a friendly eye, fake teeth clenched on the meerschaum pipe's stem, said nothing. All hints and no substance, like some sort of damned programmed learning course in how to fight demons.

  Really, I knew nothing about my foes other than scraps and hints. No killing machine had presented itself to me like some two-handed engine from a special effects movie or the pulp magazines. Something had smashed Tansy's house, the sweet center of a turning world to which I'd returned again and again, growing up, after my parents had died in Thailand. Except that they hadn't. A snare and a delusion. But something had broken that house open and slaughtered Sadie Abbott, an innocent woman I'd once suspected of being just such a foe. Instead, she'd been nothing more than what the theater students call a spear-carrier. A placeholder. A Pawn or less than a Pawn in the Contest of Worlds. Except that, again, she wasn't; she was a human being, with memories, grouchiness, devotion to her silly church, and to my aunt. And someone or something had swatted her like a fly on a kitchen table, no, worse than that, had killed her without noticing, without caring, without pity, without anger as far as I could tell. And yet they t
hought of themselves as exquisitely emotional beings, more so than humans.

  As an afterthought they'd killed my faithful old dog, Dugald O'Brien, dear faithful Do Good, and then I'd—and then I'd—brought him back to life. The least an honorable son could do for his father. And a while later I'd blown a dreadnought crew of the bastards out of the sky. Presumably. I never saw them, just the boiling mist of volatilized metal. In a different sky. A sky of a variant Earth where the Players of the Contest of Worlds, as far as I could tell, went to school under the tutelage of an artificial intelligence called the Good Machine which once had done genocide upon all the humans of its own world, Ember's home page, so to speak. My mind jumped away from the lunacy of it all.

  I glanced up at Coop, standing placidly in the sun. What's a nice machine like you, I thought, doing in a place like this? I remembered Ruthie's derelict factory full of odd robots like lethal toys in what seemed to be a deserted city in a recently deserted world where the wind blew old newspapers and candy wrappers in the dusty streets beyond the grimy windows. And understood in a moment of shocked clarity that the disposer device standing before me was no construction of Ruth's nor the work of any member of my family, despite the fact that the Good Machine was the evolved fruit of my brother Ember's reckless research in manufactured minds. If so—the implication caught me like a blow to the belly. I hunched for a moment, pressed my forearms to the muscled flesh under my ribs, drew in a gasping breath. I wanted to run away, run away.

  "You were one of them," I said. My tone sounded flat in my own ears, not accusatory, not terrified. "You were a K-machine. Whatever the fuck that is. And my family turned you."

  For a moment Coop stood silently. He knocked out his dottle, then, on the lawn beside the cool, flowing water, trod out its coals with his heel, replaced the pipe in his pocket.

  "I don't remember, young fella." He started to walk away from me across the grass, jerked his head in an invitation to me to follow. My feet had dried in the sun; I dragged on my socks, slipped on my boots, followed him down the steps to the library. Maybe he meant to show me some ancient manuscript that would explain it all. Or perhaps he was heading for the lavatory, where he'd find a mirror large enough to walk through without needing someone to lever him. I caught up in the main Ned Kelly lobby, where jaded legal students sat at catalog terminals and a fat librarian in a Simpsons T-shirt scanned bar codes and stamped out unreadable tomes. Coop set himself in front of a monitor, placed one small, strong hand on the keyboard, and did invisible electrical stuff that made the screen forget it was part of a library. Images came and went on the flat screen, vividly colorful geometric shapes like the noise you see if you press your thumb into your eyeball. I watched over his shoulder, forcing patience upon myself.

  I was teetering on the soggy end of a diving platform that seemed to be about one hundred meters above a handkerchief-sized bright-blue swimming pool full of screaming, hooting, riotous children who splashed, dunked each other, dive-bombed from the edge, while one or two adults in rubber hair restraints swam doggedly up and down the center lanes and a bored safety officer in a bright-yellow cap sat in a plastic chair and did nothing to quell the bad behavior. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them again. In actuality, the water was probably no more than five meters below me, but from here it looked like the wet, open mouth of hell. When I turned my head, someone was standing directly behind me.

  "Come on, numb-nuts," a boy's voice rasped. I lowered my eyes automatically to meet his, found myself staring instead at a pouty navel. What the hell? I swayed, sense of perspective completely shot. I raised my eyes to the horizontal and found myself staring at James Davenport, who was about twelve years old. He waved his arms in front of my face in a derisive gesture, and my hands came up automatically fend him off. They were a child's hands. I went stock-still, air cold on my wet body.

  "You've gotta be fuckin' kidding," I said. My voice was eerie, high-pitched, trembling.

  "Hey Miss," Jamie piped, mockery rich in his tone, "August said a bad word. It's all because he wouldn't wear his uniform, don'cha know."

  This isn't happening, I told myself. I'm in the Kelly law library. It's all the fault of that—I couldn't decide whose fault it was. Law library? What was that?

  "Kick the little pussy off," said the kid at the top of the ladder behind James. His voice broke at the end, cracking into a laughable squeak. He flushed. I recognized him: a fourteen year old, in the class a year ahead of us, Bruce something. He was a nasty shit, and sometime soon, it came to me, he was going to chase Davers around the playground because Davers was wearing his sister's tutu and pink pom-poms in a gesture of solidarity with my refusal to wear the school uniform. My head spun. Stupid. Hadn't happened yet. So how could I know about it?

  Davers muttered quietly, "Come on, August, it's no big deal. Just shut your eyes and jump. We don't want that Brucester prick on our tails."

  It came to me as well, then, standing beside the computer monitor, that I love diving, that I spent hours beside the pool in Chicago, and before that in Adelaide, or was it in Melbourne, day after day during school holidays, learning the mass and balance of my growing flesh and bone, the springy bounce of the board, the magic lift into air, body jackknifing, head down, arms like wings or thrust ahead like a plow, flying without wings, eyes open, watching the blue, slicing into water, swallowed up by its womb, pressure in the ears, pressure on the pent lungs, delicious joy, kicking like a frog, bursting upward into air, stale wind gusted out, sweet fresh air drawn in, buoyant in water, stroking effortlessly to the pool's edge with newly strong muscles already starting their growth spurt into adolescence, vaulting up and over, quick, hot-soled, bare steps back to the foot of the concrete and steel diving board installation, waiting my turn with a sort of relaxed eagerness, climbing back into the air, into the sky, into the expectation of joy. It had happened, it was part of me, part of my sinew, part of my very self, it hadn't happened yet, it would happen, I knew precisely what to do. I gave Davers a thumbs-up and a wink, turned to face the water, saw nobody in the water beneath me, bounced in the perfect moment on my toes against the unyielding platform, soared, turned upon my own axis, fell like a bullet, went into the blue. Hardly a splash. Maybe not a perfect ten, but pretty good for a kid having an insane hallucination.

  I came up out of the water into my adult body, shaking imaginary or remembered wetness out of my hair, staring at the darting sigils on the monitor screen. My ears still rang with the slight pressure change. Now I recalled that first astonishing, life-altering dive from the high platform into the municipal pool. It had seemed at the time as if I'd been gifted with some peculiar grace, some awareness of the body and its powers attained without learning, maybe somehow just by watching all the experts do their stuff at the pool and on TV. Certainly our swimming coach was taken aback and wanted me to start training in earnest. Mention was made of Olympic prospects. It excited me a little, but my parents told me, regretfully, it was out of the question. I guess they didn't want me to draw any additional attention to myself. When you're flying through the air like a blend of Superman without a cape and Aquaman without the scales, and photographers are taking happy snaps, it's hard to hide or disguise the silvery hieroglyphs that have always pierced the bottom of your foot. Swimming, even diving, at the local pool were okay; gladiator sports were verboten. It turned me inward a little, I guess, as loneliness will, but then again, I don't suppose the obsessional life of a career athlete is necessarily a barrel of laughs. And with swimmers, it's a career that runs out of puff long before you reach your full maturity. So I'd had to settle for being whatever I was, I thought with a snort. Shapes twined, spun, danced like a Rucker animation of creatures from the fifth dimension. Maybe that was me, too. A Vorpal homunculus, Lune and my siblings had called me. Whatever the fuck that was.

  I still couldn't see what this had to do with the K-machines. I bent down to lean across Coop's shoulder, and a fizzywig of light burst across the center of the screen and too
k me into a dark, dark place.

  Wasn't as dark as I'd thought. The huge movie-ratio flat-screen TV display was showing a sitcom or series drama, and I slouched back in a comfortable leather chair with something cold in my hand. It was a beer, I saw, in a pop-top can. I brought it closer in the dim room, identified it as a Foster's Lite Ale. Not my favorite drink, but good enough for television viewing. There was no laugh track, so this was series drama. I watched for a while. It was The Gilmore Guys, an episode I hadn't seen. Loutish Jack was up to tricks again with the girl next door, Robbie was working feverishly to cement his position as class captain or valedictorian or president of the Young Democrats local, while fat Ed was trying to avoid exercise on the high-tech stationary bike Rose had given him for his birthday. As satire, it was middlebrow but not exactly lame; as drama, it was Leave It to Beaver. I reached around for the remote, sighing, and a man in a beautiful dark suit with the palest-blue shirt and a narrow silk tie bearing unicorns and lions couchant stepped in front of a camera, in the middle of the screen, and said, "August, you're the sorriest excuse for a Godiva ever seen."

  I blinked, as you do when someone addresses you from the TV set, unless you're dreaming, of course, in which case it seems perfectly normal, and glanced down at myself. Fully dressed: T-shirt, cargo pants, track shoes. I blinked again, taking it in on internal replay. Not "Godiva." The man in the TV screen had called me "the sorriest excuse for a god I've ever seen." It made me angry, perhaps unreasonably angry. I took one more swig from the nearly full can, belched, pulled back my right arm with its gloved hand and threw the can as hard as I could at the screen. I winced as it struck, expecting glass everywhere. No, that was old technology. The Fosters can rebounded from a sheet of robust plastic-covered pixels, flew across the room spraying beer and foam, clattered on the floorboards. The shot angled on the man's hard, classical features. He shook his head slightly, disapproving or disappointed. His gaze was radiantly intent. I couldn't look away but I was still furious. I reached around blindly for the remote, found it. My thumb hammered the off-button. At the edge of vision, I saw the remote's red light flick off, on again, off, on again. The man watched my antics as if he could see me from the far side of the screen.