Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

  In the end she did as her mother had done, and her mother before her. She tied the fuse.

  Something came to life.

  ‘Hello Karel,’ she murmured. She looked over at the dead body of her husband. ‘Here he is, Kurtz. We did it. Here’s our little boy.’

  Carefully she placed the mind into the tiny body and snicked the skull shut.

  ‘All finished,’ she said to the soldier.

  The soldier looked from her to the child. ‘Did you really do it?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not telling you,’ replied Liza.

  ‘Then I shall say goodbye, Tokvah.’

  He raised his rifle once more, pointing it at her head. Her gyros were wobbling, but she held herself steady.

  ‘Then shoot me,’ she said. ‘But you’ll never know.’

  The robot stared at her, his red eyes glowing. Liza held his gaze, determined not to flinch, even here at the end. She was ready to die.

  And then the robot lowered his gun.

  ‘There is a way to find out . . .’ he said.

  Karel

  Karel’s body wasn’t designed for this sea wind. It got under the thin metal panels that plated his torso, it whistled through the cylindrical sheaths that encased his thighs and shins. The people who worked out here on the coast wore flexible plastic gaiters on their arm and leg joints to keep out the salt water, their body work was thick with weatherproof paint. Now, as he left the marble promenade that ran along the cliff top and strode down the stone steps cut into the cliff face, Karel’s stylish city body felt weak and ineffectual against the elements. The lace-lined waves that crashed and drained from the grey rocks below seemed so much more vital than the pastel paisley pattern his wife had used to decorate his chest plate.

  The Immigration Station was a rusted box built on metal stilts that raised it just above the surge of the waves. A retractable metal walkway led from some steps at the base of the cliffs out across the swirling water to the office itself. As Karel looked down through the gaps in the walkway grille towards the blue waves swirling below, he felt his gyros shudder. Living as he did in the city, he had never seen the need to fully waterproof his interior circuitry. Fall down there and he would probably short himself out.

  But then Karel felt as if he had lived his whole life in fear of falling: falling from the state of grace in which he now found himself in the city, with a wife and a child and a good job: pulled down by the suspicion of his fellow citizens who never quite trusted what was woven into his mind.

  But this was not something to think on today. Buffeted by the wind, he staggered on across the walkway and pulled open the heavy sea door leading to the Immigration Station.

  Gates sat in reception, one of his legs on the desk as he made minor repairs to himself.

  ‘Close the door!’ he called, without looking up. Karel dutifully pushed the heavy metal door into its plastic seal, shutting out the wind. Still the rolling of the waves could be heard, crashing against the metal stilts below, echoing hollowly through the metal building.

  ‘It’s getting rough out there,’ said Karel.

  ‘Rough!’ laughed Gates, still fiddling with his leg. ‘This is just an autumn swell. You want to come here in winter when the storms really get up. The waves go right over the building!’

  Karel knew he wasn’t exaggerating. Immigration was a different job here on the south coast, and Gates and his team were scornful of Karel and the team operating in Turing City, perceiving them to have an easy life.

  They were wrong, of course.

  Karel studied Gates, noting his battered body and chipped paintwork. When a robot started to neglect his appearance, especially in a place like this, it was not a good sign.

  ‘Well, I’m here now,’ said Karel, coolly, ‘and I would appreciate a little courtesy on my arrival. Is this how you greet all your visitors?’ He stared hard at Gates, who paused in the act of adjusting the tension in the calf ligaments of his left leg. Gates held his stare for a moment and then pushed the leg back into place. It locked into position with a click. He stood up and flexed it.

  ‘All sorted, sir,’ he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he felt for his new balance. ‘Would you like to come straight through and see the case in question, sir?’

  ‘Don’t get sarcastic with me, Gates,’ warned Karel.

  ‘I wasn’t being sarcastic.’

  Karel tried a different tack.

  ‘Listen, Gates, let’s not do this. I’ve got enough going on back in the city without having to come down here. I’m sure you’re gritted up with work too. So just tell me, why am I here?’

  Gates held Karel’s gaze for a moment longer, and then he too relaxed.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. Sorry, Karel. Come on through, it would be better if I showed you. We have a client held in isolation that I want you to see. I asked for you specifically because this one is . . . odd. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’

  Gates picked up a heavy iron key and placed it in the lock of the door that led through to the holding area. He banged twice on its metal surface and called out: ‘Hey, Cabeza! I’m coming through with Karel.’

  There was a bang in return and the sound of Cabeza’s muffled reply. Two keys were turned at the same time, and the heavy door swung open.

  ‘After you,’ said Gates, and Karel stepped through into the holding area.

  The isolation area lay at the far side of the station, past the rows of iron-barred holding cells where the immigrants and refugees waited to be processed. Gates led Karel down the central walkway.

  The cells in the main area were nearly full, but that was no surprise to Karel. All throughout Turing City State, the holding cells were filling up fast. Stir the political waters and all sorts of things come to the surface, and the political waters of Shull had been stirred plenty of late by the expansion of Artemis. Turing City State was a kitten compared to the lion of the Artemisian Empire, but it was a kitten with adamantium claws, with Stark electromuscle, and with a mind twisted by Oneill herself. Turing City could defend itself, and every displaced robot on the continent of Shull seemed to be making his or her way here in search of shelter.

  Karel might have expected this many clients, but he was still a little surprised at the startling variety of the station’s occupants. Gates’s team’s normal clientele tended to be the Spontaneous, those robots who had been formed somewhere out in the southern ocean and then walked here along the sea bed. Indeed, Karel could see plenty of examples of these now, sitting or standing or lying about in the various cells. They tended to have heavy iron bodies, simple facial features, their eyes usually recessed behind thick glass. A few of them were humanoid in appearance; most of them were crab-like. They were kept in specially constructed cells, the floors of which were lowered to allow pools filled with salt water. One that Karel spotted was little more than a dark shape in the water: gunmetal grey, biological life clinging to its body – barnacles and limpets – and with green algae staining its underside. Raising its eyes, set below the rim of its shell, it glanced for a moment at Karel and then returned to contemplating the dark patterns below it in the rippling water. Unfused, unsentient, this was just the sort of thing that Karel expected to find here on the south coast.

  Karel resumed his progress along the walkway, still surprised by the number of the Made that had turned up here. Such robots had had their minds twisted by their mothers from wire spooled from their father. But the Made were usually seen on the northern borders of Turing City State, as refugees from Bethe and Wien. How had they made it all the way down here, to the southern coast? And there were so many of them . . .

  He saw elegantly engineered robots from Stark, their shiny smooth casings humming with quiet power as they patrolled the confined space of their holding areas with proud dignity. There were short, unassuming robots from Bethe and Segre, sitting in groups, staring out through the bars. And even the peculiar builds of robots from distant Raman and Born could be seen, with their
magnetized bodies and overlarge feet and hands.

  Most surprisingly, there were the Artemisians. The city state of Artemis was not supposed to recognize any difference between normal metal and the carefully twisted metal of the mind. Robots born into a low rank were held to be expendable in the Artemisian State. Karel guessed that their mothers would have twisted their minds towards thoughts of escape as a more likely means of survival than service at the bottom end of Artemisian society.

  Suddenly the sheer number of people in the large room made Karel feel giddy, as if his gyros were spinning too fast. Metal hands, metal feet; metal floors, metal bars. Grilles and wire and water splashing inside and booming beneath his feet and, meanwhile, all that other motion around him. It seemed as if the entire world was pressing in on Turing City. Newly constructed Artemis railway lines were spreading across the land. They brought metal to the Artemis forges that made new robots daily, even hourly, robots that poured in metal waves across the southern part of the continent of Shull. Could little Turing City’s walls really hold up against that encroaching tide? Who knew? If the rumours were true, even mighty Wien looked to be on its last legs, ready to fall at any time.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  The words jolted Karel from his reverie. The speaker was an Artemisian war robot. A Scout. Her body was made of katana metal, silver grey and hard. Her hands and feet were lean and sharp, mirror-bright blades almost totally retracted, only the very tips emerging to scratch curls of swarf from the metal floor as she advanced. She brought her head right up to the bars, stooped a little so that it was level with Karel’s face. He could see how her eyes were recessed behind their narrow slits, withdrawn beyond the reach of any blade. Now she allowed them to protrude ever so slightly, signalling her contempt.

  ‘How much longer are you going to keep me in here, Tokvah?’ she whispered.

  With a speed that surprised everyone present, Karel slammed a hand into her face, sending her reeling back across the cell, a grinding noise from his arm signifying a stripped gear. All of a sudden everyone else in the holding cells was very, very quiet, all of them staring at Karel, now flexing his hand, flexing his supple, city hand made of light metal, finely engraved with swirling patterns barely seen in the light, then continuing to walk the gangway towards the rear of the vast room. He seemed oblivious to the way the other immigrants drew back in their cells as he walked by.

  Gates followed just behind him. ‘Zuse, Karel,’ he swore. ‘I just don’t understand you, I really don’t.’

  ‘Not in front of the clients,’ muttered Karel, but Gates didn’t seem to hear.

  ‘I just don’t get the way you’re made. Most of the time you act like a classic Turing City robot: behaving as an individual, but still capable of cooperating for the good of all, and then you turn around and pull a stunt like that.’

  ‘I don’t see why hitting that Tokvah stops me being a cooperator,’ said Karel.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. Hey, I’m not judging! But there’s just something about the way you’re made. People talk, you know.’

  ‘Let them,’ said Karel.

  They had stopped at the very rear of the holding pens, just before the door that led to the isolation area where Gates and his team kept the special cases.

  ‘So,’ said Karel. ‘Is there anything I should know about this character you’re holding in here?’

  ‘There’s nothing really to tell,’ said Gates, still eyeing Karel with a thoughtful expression. ‘I’ve never known a robot like this one . . . I think you’d better speak to him yourself.’

  Karel folded his hands together, feeling how the right hand was slightly bent out of true from where he had hit the Artemisian. That could be repaired later. For the moment he felt apprehensive, more so than he would have expected. He wondered what lay behind this door that necessitated him being dragged all the way here, away from his work, away from his wife, Susan. Especially when she had been acting so oddly lately, suddenly so emotional. Karel tried to dismiss the thought. She had been like that the last time they were planning a child, he told himself.

  ‘Very well,’ said Karel. ‘Let me through.’

  Gates opened the door.

  ‘Cell number two,’ he said.

  Susan

  ‘What’s the matter, Susan? You look like Oneill herself has just spoken to you.’

  Deya’s face was filled with concern. Why can’t we make a face that fully masks our emotions? wondered Susan. We can build blank masks or we can build faces. Why can’t we build a buffer between our feelings and our expressions?

  ‘Susan, speak to me,’ Deya insisted. ‘Is it Karel? Are you worried about him? I heard he was out at the coast today.’

  Deya has such a pretty face. I could never build anything so delicate, or so well formed. The curve of the brows over her eyes, the line of her cheek. When she speaks it’s like a breeze blowing on flutes. No matter how I tune my electromuscle, I can never pull a smile like hers . . .

  ‘Susan, stop staring at me like that!’

  ‘Sorry, Deya. I’m okay. Just a little, I don’t know . . . angry I suppose. And shocked.’

  Deya turned this way and that, looking around the metal and glass arches of the railway terminus, trying to determine what had upset her friend.

  ‘Susan, is it this?’ She pointed to the letters, engraved on the sheet of steel at the top of the notice board.

  Susan nodded.

  ‘Oh, Deya, I know I’m being silly. I shouldn’t let it affect me like this.’

  ‘It annoys me too, Susan, but I don’t let it spoil my day.’ She smiled. ‘But then again, I’m not making plans at the moment.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Susan, it’s so obvious. For weeks now you’ve been walking around storing up bits of conversations and mimicking character traits and observing other people’s interactions. You and Karel are going to have another child.’

  ‘We’re thinking of a little girl,’ Susan admitted.

  ‘You’re the chief statistician of this state,’ said Deya. ‘If anyone is going to build a successful child, it’s you.’

  ‘Deya, you’re just like Karel. You make it sound so easy.’

  ‘It is easy, Susan. Robots have been doing it since Oneill showed them how.’

  ‘You don’t really believe in Oneill!’

  ‘No! A figure of speech! But Susan, I believe in you, and you should know better than anyone what makes a successful robot. You have all the necessary figures delivered to you on metal film.’

  ‘I know what makes a successful robot in Turing City,’ conceded Susan. ‘But is that the right way? You can see what it says . . .’

  She read the notice again:

  WOMEN OF TURING CITY

  RAMAN AND BORN. BETHE, SEGRE AND STARK. AND NOW WIEN.

  The Artemisian model has again proven to be the superior philosophy for building robots. Do you want your line to continue? Do you want your children to build children of their own? Then consider Nyro’s design. Nyro’s children are successful. Nyro’s children now populate almost all the southern continent of Shull. By any measure, Nyro has woven the most flourishing pattern of any robot mind currently existing on Penrose.

  Does your husband agree? Or does he still cling to the outdated practices of Turing City? It’s easy for men to talk about the nobility of a certain philosophy. All they do is produce the wire. But, come the night of the making of a mind, it is you that hold in your hands your child’s future well-being. Are you going to throw it away on some arbitrary belief, some vagary of fashion, or are you going to make a mind that really works?

  Think about it, Mother. You owe it to your child.

  ‘I didn’t know they had taken Wien!’ said Susan.

  Deya laughed dismissively. ‘Don’t believe everything you read, dear.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Susan weakly. ‘It makes a good point.’

  A diesel engine revved once, twice, somewhere behind them.

&n
bsp; ‘I can’t believe you’re talking like this,’ said Deya. ‘How many robots are there in Turing City at the moment?’

  ‘In the city itself, or the state as a whole?’

  ‘The city.’

  ‘Thirty-three thousand, one hundred and nine.’

  ‘And how many of them are built according to Artemisian philosophy?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘Twenty-one! Hah! Well there you go.’

  ‘That we know of, anyway. But this time last year there were only four.’

  ‘So what? There’s no choice, Susan. Who is going to sacrifice their child to Artemis in this city? We have so much more going for us. Look!’

  She pointed to the high-vaulted roof of the station, the way that the thin, white-painted metal joined in delicate curves, the way that patterns of sunlight coloured by the glass illuminated the scrollwork of the wrought iron.

  ‘I bet they don’t have that in Artemis,’ said Deya.

  ‘I bet they don’t. But I wonder if they were saying the same in Wien, just before the invasion.’

  ‘I told you, Wien has not been invaded. That notice is lying. Anyway, we’re stronger than Wien.’

  ‘But are we strong enough? It makes me wonder whether it’s worth even making a child any more . . .’

  ‘It’s never been a good time to make a child! But you know you’re going to, Susan. You have the capability. You’re not like Nicolas the Coward.’

  ‘Am I not, Deya? I really don’t know if that’s true any more.’

  Susan stared out through the big empty end of the station, out across the wide valley, with its low railway bridges crisscrossing copper-green rivers, looked out at the deep blue sky that covered Shull, and she felt terrified. Some days she had felt as if the rails that emerged from this station were carrying Turing City’s philosophy out to an entire continent. Today she felt as if they were like an open door inviting in whatever darkness was now waiting beyond its borders.

  Karel

  Everything in the isolation area was painted white: new paint daubed on old, forming uneven patterns and waves on the metal of the floor and walls, white paint gathered on the bolts and rivets holding the building together. The sea could still be heard booming and crashing outside, but now the sound seemed more distant, muffled.