Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

‘Saddleworth,’ she declared.

  Saddleworth was a short, stocky robot standing up on the fourth terrace. He spoke in self-important tones.

  ‘Now hold on,’ he began. ‘I think we’re all missing the point here. We’ve been told that Artemis now basically controls the continent. We’ve also been told that we should have nothing to do with them, that we should shut out the outside world. Well, I operate a foundry, as you all know, and a foundry needs coal. Now, answer me this. Where is the coal going to come from if we have closed our borders?’

  There was a murmur of assent from around the arena.

  ‘I never said we should close the borders,’ insisted Kobuk. ‘Besides, where is your coal to come from now that Wien is captured?’

  ‘I dare say the Artemisians will still trade with us,’ said Saddleworth stubbornly.

  ‘Dad, I don’t understand. Aren’t they frightened?’

  Karel looked into the yellow glow of his son’s eyes.

  ‘I think they are. That’s why they are pretending that nothing is happening.’

  ‘Dad, what’s the matter with Mum?’

  Karel looked down to where Susan stood. She seemed dazed, as if she had seen something that shocked her. He followed her gaze, but he saw nothing unusual in the terraces over there. Nothing apart from a City Guard robot who stood at the top of the terraces, obviously just arrived. A City Guard robot attending parliament was unusual, it was true, but surely not enough to induce this reaction in his wife.

  Saddleworth was still speaking. Now he had the floor, he obviously didn’t want to give it up.

  ‘So what I want to know is whether the City Guard is up to the task of defending us? Can anyone answer me that?’

  Susan was still staring at the City Guard robot. She looked totally stunned. When she finally spoke her voice sounded strange.

  ‘Thank you, Saddleworth,’ she said. ‘You’ve had your turn. Maoco O.’

  The crowd looked up towards Maoco O. He was a tall robot, his body so beautifully engineered it held the eye, begging to be looked at. So smooth, so seamless. The way the metal curved in at his hips, flared at his shoulders, the dull glow with which it shone, even in the blazing sun. When he spoke, his voice was so clear, so finely modulated.

  ‘Citizens,’ he said. ‘I bow before Kobuk.’ At this he turned and bent in an ostentatious fashion towards the ex-City Guard who still stood on the parliament floor. He straightened up and addressed the crowd once more. ‘The City Guard has served us well in the past, and I pledge to continue that tradition. Turing City has stood here many years, during which our mines have produced the best gold and nickel. With these metals we have wound the finest minds. Here, at least, all robots may stand equal. I say to you, citizens, the City Guard will stand strong.’

  The assembled robots stamped their feet again in applause. Karel paid little heed to the robot’s words. He was still gazing at Susan, rapt in concentration as she stared at Maoco O. What was the matter with her? The Speaker was trying to gain her attention, trying to find out who would be the next to contribute to the debate. Finally she noticed him; she seemed to take a moment to regain her balance and consult with her team. At last she spoke.

  ‘Leavore,’ she said.

  And the crowd began to murmur again. Leavore? That was an Artemisian name!

  Karel saw ripples in the silver pool of light reflected by the assembled robots. Heads were turning to the stranger in their midst. And there she stood: an Artemisian war robot. A Scout dressed in a silver skin of katana metal, the blades at her hands and feet barely sheathed. She reminded Karel of the robot he had seen so recently at the Immigration Centre. Maybe it was even the same one, now released and given citizenship. She would have the right to attend parliament, so why should she not be here? For a moment his thoughts travelled back to Banjo Macrodocious, the strange robot that had denied its own intelligence. What had happened to him?

  Leavore spoke. ‘I wish to question Maoco O. I am a new citizen of Turing City. I thought we were all equal here. And yet Maoco O claims that your minds are wound of better metal. Is this true? Are we not all equal?’

  There was silence. The point had struck home.

  ‘Dad?’ said Axel, but Karel was trying to think. He had never thought of that before. Turing City minds were wound with equality in them, and yet the war robot had a point. They did believe their minds were better than others’.

  ‘Don’t listen to her. It’s an Artemisian trick!’

  ‘She’s a spy!’

  ‘Even if she’s not, she’s a traitor to her own state!’

  The Speaker raised his hands. ‘The parliament will come to order!’

  In the ensuing confusion, and much to his own surprise, Karel found he had raised his own hand. As the noise died away he saw Susan, down below, staring at him. He held his hand higher. Susan seemed to consult with her team. Then she spoke.

  ‘Karel,’ she called out.

  This brought silence to the crowd. Now all those many heads turned towards Karel. So many eyes, yellow and green and red, their glow dimmed by the bright sunlight.

  ‘You know me,’ said Karel, ‘and that I’m an immigration officer. If this woman has been deemed fit to be a citizen, then we should listen to her. We may disagree with what she says, but we cannot dismiss it. I will try to answer her question for her. Leavore, what makes us better isn’t our minds or our gold or our nickel. It’s our philosophy, our . . .’

  The Speaker interrupted. ‘I am sorry, Karel, but this is not pertinent to the debate. Do you have anything to add that is relevant to the motion?’

  Karel felt his electromuscles tense in anger. Slowly, he allowed them to discharge. Across the stone bowl of parliament, he saw Leavore, the war robot, gazing back at him with something like contempt.

  ‘Dad, what’s going on?’

  Karel looked again at Axel, and the last of his anger ebbed. He looked back into the arena.

  ‘Yes,’ he called, ‘I do have something to say. Noatak, assuming that Artemis does not attack soon, what will you be advising us in three years’ time? Will you still counsel patience?’

  ‘If it is the correct thing to do.’ Noatak chuckled. ‘Karel, your mind seems already made up. I wonder when that happened?’

  There was a ripple of laughter around the terraces, and Karel felt himself gripped with cold fury.

  ‘Why are they laughing, Dad? Are they laughing at you?’

  ‘It’s okay, Axel.’ Karel could barely speak. His electromuscles were sparking within him, overloaded with angry current. The Speaker was shouting for order again.

  ‘Noatak will withdraw that remark!’

  ‘Of course I withdraw,’ said Noatak, bowing in Karel’s direction, and Karel felt himself seething. Axel still didn’t quite understand. But he got the gist of it.

  ‘Dad, are you okay?’

  Karel said nothing.

  Susan

  Susan spent the remainder of the debate gazing up at her husband. She could feel his anger, even from here.

  It was hot down on the parliament floor, standing on sun-heated stone, hearing the constant plink of hot metal. Her team worked well, but Susan felt removed from them. She was ready to weave another child, her mind sparking with ideas, and yet she was frightened of the future. Her husband was a mystery to her, at least part of him was, and, somewhere behind her, she could feel the gaze of the mysterious Maoco O focused on her back. What did he want with her?

  Time passed as the sun descended, and longer shadows cut across the far wall of the parliament bowl. The debate was coming to an end, and Susan was surprised at the turnaround. At the beginning, sixty-one per cent of robots had been all for declaring war immediately, but now she guessed that the motion would be opposed. Noatak had spoken well. Surprisingly well. She had come across as sympathetic, understanding, brilliantly undermining Kobuk’s position as an ex-soldier, portraying him as behind the times and unnecessarily cautious. Her offer to have a permanent cohort of no less
than one-fifth of the City Guard constantly on duty at the railway station, in case of a surprise attack, had both defused many of Kobuk’s arguments and made it obvious to all that she was not totally ignoring a possible threat. Of course, she had been helped out by a number of robots in the crowd who had supported her, Susan realized. Robots who did not usually attend parliament. Noatak had been lucky today.

  Kobuk and Noatak began their summing-up speeches, and suddenly Susan felt very tired, her mind only half on the job. She looked up again and saw that Karel had gone, she didn’t know when. Axel would have been tired too, she guessed, so he must have taken him home. That was probably just as well. Karel would not have reacted well to a vote opposing the motion. He could get so angry sometimes . . .

  And now the summing-up had finished, and the Speaker was calling for the vote. Myriad arms were raised, and Susan and her team scanned the crowd and conferred.

  They were all agreed. Susan was surprised at how shaken she was by the final vote.

  She relayed it to the Speaker, who announced it as the sun set over the bowl.

  ‘Citizens, the motion for combat is opposed.’

  Grey shadow filled the bowl. Susan felt empty.

  ‘Citizens, it is time to return to our homes. Turing City will remain open. We will welcome Artemis!’

  Susan’s gyroscopes lurched. She looked up, and there was Maoco O, staring down at her. There was something so desolate about the City Guard’s stare. And then he recovered himself, turned away and slid from the arena.

  Olam

  A thin wind whined southwards: barely there, but sharp like an awl. It hissed through the gravel on the Zernike battleground, scratched at the rock and prised at the cracks. It was the last remnant of the winds that had torn over the icy plains of the North, whipping up the snow into blizzards before rushing on to tear the foam from the iron-grey waters of the Moonshadow sea. It was a scout wind, searching out the land, preparing for the invasion of winter.

  The wind hissed between the chinks and joints of Olam’s new metal body, cooling the electromuscle inside, making him feel numb and sluggish. He needed to get up and move around, but he wasn’t allowed to. He had been ordered to lie down on the bare rock and wait, and so that’s what he did.

  It wasn’t that great a distance from Wien to the Zernike plain, but Olam felt as if he had come a very long way.

  After the trials of the stadium, he had been marched with the other recruits to a training camp. There he had been drilled in Artemisian philosophy and engineering by one of those seemingly identical grey-painted robots. The lectures had gone on, day and night, while in the distance they could see Wien being quickly and efficiently disassembled. But there had been little time to watch, his attention constantly called back to what they were being taught: how to be Artemisians.

  And then the lessons were over. He had been marched with the rest to a forge; his panelling stripped away and sent off to be melted down. Artemisian soldiers had probed his body, detached his electromuscles, showed him the standard design for Artemisian infantry and then patiently watched over him as he rebuilt himself as an Artemisian citizen, all the time correcting him and offering advice. They had been kind and helpful, much to Olam’s surprise.

  Now he was a little shorter and squatter, even a little weaker. His eyesight had improved, his hearing was a little more acute, but aside from that he couldn’t help thinking that he would have made a better soldier as he had been before.

  Doe Capaldi, the tall aristocrat, lay nearby. Except he wasn’t the tall robot any more, just another interchangeable infantryrobot exactly like Olam. To Olam’s surprise, Doe Capaldi had altered himself with little complaint, stripping away whale metal and replacing it with the iron and copper the Artemisians gave him, thus making himself Olam’s equal.

  Except he wasn’t, of course. He never would be. Doe Capaldi’s mind had been woven for leadership, just as Olam’s own had been woven for servitude.

  The wind blew, and the electromuscle in his abdomen ached. They had lain there unmoving on the plain for hours. They had seen the sun set in the west, red fire over distant Wien, his broken home. Zuse had risen, its silver light reflecting off the railway lines that ran across the plain.

  He listened to the wind. He listened with his new ears to the voices carried through the night. He recognized the voice of Eleanor, the robot who had conscripted them. She was speaking in tones of disbelief.

  ‘Madness! We are not ready to attack Turing City! Our numbers are too depleted. We should return to Artemis and re-equip!’

  ‘That is not the will of Artemis,’ replied another voice. ‘The city is closed to us. Spoole has sent a message, that we are not to cross the marshalling yards. We are not to enter the city!’

  ‘Spoole is frightened of you. He will have heard about what you did to General Fallan.’

  ‘Possibly. Nonetheless, we attack Turing City.’

  The robot that spoke to Eleanor sounded male. His voice was low and colourless, and yet he was clearly in charge. Olam hadn’t seen the leader of his group, nor had he been told what they would be doing. He had merely been assigned a place on a train, and then shipped out here to this plain in the middle of the continent. Maybe Doe Capaldi was right after all when he had said Artemis needed cannon fodder to launch an attack on Turing City.

  ‘We’ll be wiped out,’ Olam muttered. ‘Doe Capaldi, you were right. We’re just cannon fodder!’

  The other robot didn’t reply, so Olam lay in the dark, wondering whether it would have been better to have just remained in Wien.

  The cold wind sang through his elbows and knees. All he could hear now was the same whistling sound from the bodies of the other robots that lay around him, and he began to wonder if he had imagined those voices in the night.

  Thin ribbons of dark cloud were approaching from the north, oily bands that slicked across the moon’s surface. They drew patterns across the sky so that the stars seemed to gather in bright pools amidst the darkness.

  And then there was a stirring of bodies. The whine of muscle, the scraping of metal. The rails were singing.

  A train was coming.

  Eleanor

  The train was four and a half miles long, weighed over nine thousand tons, and was moving at one hundred miles an hour. Eleanor had been given the job of stopping it.

  ‘It’s just passed me by,’ crackled the voice on the radio.

  Eleanor held the radio away from her skull. The signal made her mind sing.

  ‘Did the driver see you, Paxan?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure she did. I don’t know if she took any notice of me, though.’

  ‘Okay.’ Eleanor thought for a moment. She clicked the send button on the radio and spoke to the next soldier in the long line that she had arranged along the track, ready to meet the oncoming train. ‘Crewe, aim your rifle at the driver. That should send a message.’

  ‘Okay, Eleanor.’

  She looked into the distance. The dark plain was cut by two perfect lines of silver, and she could see the lights of the train there in the distance, seemingly unmoving. And yet the train was rushing to meet her with incredible momentum. How long would it take to stop the behemoth, she wondered.

  The radio crackled. Crewe spoke again.

  ‘I aimed the rifle. I don’t think it worked, though. That train is still going by, and it doesn’t look to me like it’s slowing.’

  ‘Thank you, Crewe,’ said Eleanor. She looked back across the plain, coming to a decision. She clicked the radio back on. ‘Seth,’ she called. ‘Shoot out the windshield.’

  The headlights of the train were noticeably larger now. A high-pitched hum insinuated its way through the night, and Eleanor realized she was hearing the reaction motor. The radio crackled to life.

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘Well done, Seth.’

  ‘I think that got her attention!’

  Eleanor heard the hum of the reaction motor change in pitch. The train was slowing down.r />
  Olam

  Olam rose at the command and ran forward across the dark plain towards the longest train he had ever seen in his life. It was like a green metal wall, seemingly stretching into infinity. No, that couldn’t be right. He dialled up the focus on his new, more powerful eyes and there, in the far distance, he spotted the locomotive, a swollen but still streamlined shape. There was a small group of infantry around the cab.

  ‘Other way! We take the rear!’

  That was Doe Capaldi, already in charge of a section. Just as Olam had suspected, the former aristocrat was rising rapidly through the Artemisian ranks. The other grey robot was just ahead of him, and Olam’s hands tightened on his rifle. One squeeze on the trigger and Doe Capaldi would be dead.

  Not now, though, not with all these witnesses around.

  Olam ran on, tripping and stumbling on the loose rocks that strewed the plain. He dialled his new eyes back down to close focus. On and on they all went, approaching the seemingly endless green wall of the train. It seemed to curve slightly, and then, as the ribbons of cloud peeled away from the moon, they followed around the curve and finally Olam could see the end of the green wall.

  There were coaches here at the rear of the train. They had been opened up and the passengers forcibly disembarked and separated into two groups. One group, the Artemisians, were already beginning the long walk back along the tracks towards Artemis City. The remaining passengers were being efficiently herded together and shot.

  Olam wasn’t thinking clearly that night; it took a while for his brain to process all the information: the train was heading for Turing City; and those people being shot were Turing Citizens.

  Turing Citizens?

  And then he had it.

  They were doing it. They were really doing it. They were really going to war on Turing City State.

  The thin wind carried the crack of rifles through the darkness, the night moon shone down on the green wall of the train, and Olam and the rest of the infantry ran even faster across the plain.