Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

Eleanor

  Eleanor climbed into the cabin of the reaction engine and looked around its cream-painted interior with interest. So many dials, so many levers. She had never seen anything so technically advanced. It made her proud to be an Artemisian.

  ‘Who are you? By what right do you stop this train?’ The driver of the train came forward in order to block Eleanor moving further into the cabin. She was a well-built woman, she obviously had some skill with metal. She wore little panelling, as was the current fashion amongst the intelligentsia of Artemis City. A band of metal around her chest, a band from her waist to her thighs. All the rest was bare machinery and electromuscle. The mechanism of her fine body was shown off to all: the elegantly knitted muscle that ran smoothly over her metal bones. Eleanor was left in no doubt; this robot was a thing of craft and beauty.

  ‘Who am I? My name is Eleanor, infantryrobot. Who are you?’

  ‘Dorore.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Eleanor, ‘now I understand. A goldenmind. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Dorore, with obvious pride. ‘My mind was twisted from gold taken from Bethe, just after the invasion. Those in the making rooms say my mind is patterned on those of the thinkers of Bethe and Segre and Stark.’

  ‘And your mind has earned you a place on the reaction project. As a train driver, no less.’ Eleanor was impressed, despite herself. Once more she looked around the controls of the cabin. The needles on the dials before her were all neatly centred; the reaction chamber was humming at the correct frequency, the generated current smooth and powerful: she could feel it.

  Dorore was craning to peer past Eleanor, trying to look out of the open door.

  ‘What’s going on out there?’ she demanded. Like Eleanor, she could hear the sound of the troops outside in the night, moving moving back and forth, swinging open the access hatches as they boarded the train. Eleanor moved to one side to let the driver past. Dorore dropped down the ladder into the night beyond. Eleanor heard her shouting out orders into the dark.

  ‘Hey! Stop that! Get off of there!’

  Nobody answered.

  ‘Hey! I’m talking to you! What are you doing with my train?’

  A quiet voice carried through the night. ‘Not your train. Not your train at all.’

  Eleanor recognized Kavan’s voice, and she felt a spark of annoyance. Why was he here? Didn’t he trust her? Did he think she was not capable of handling this situation? She quickly climbed down from the cab to find Kavan speaking to Dorore in soft, compassionless tones.

  ‘Why should my troops not do this?’ he was asking. ‘They are doing what is necessary for the coming battle. Do you think that you know better? Do you think that having a golden mind makes you special? No, I don’t think so. Only Artemis is special.’

  To Eleanor’s surprise, Dorore found the courage to answer Kavan.

  ‘I’m not saying that. But why have you stopped me? Let me go on my way! I too work for Artemis!’

  The grey soldier spoke contemptuously.

  ‘Doing what? Driving an engine back and forth? There is gold on your wrists, there is a gold band around your waist. You have gold in your mind, and you choose to advertise the fact, golden-mind. Is that why they picked you to drive this engine?’

  Dorore hesitated.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, eventually. ‘And why not? It’s not easy to control. I bake the control rods myself. I maintain the primary coolant loop, I keep the temperature constant . . .’

  ‘What would happen if you didn’t?’

  She had missed the meaning in his words, Eleanor knew, eager as she was to impress upon him the importance of her job.

  ‘The train would run slow!’ said Dorore. ‘But when I get it right . . . Look at the length of this train! Four and a half miles of Artemisian beauty. It takes a reaction engine to pull this much mass. This train is an expression of Artemis power!’

  She now had the first inkling that she was saying the wrong thing. Her words, carried by the cold wind, seemed to chill the mood of the half-seen robot.

  ‘Artemis has no need to express its power. Artemis merely is.’

  ‘I know that,’ she hurriedly replied, ‘that’s not what I meant. I meant to say this train better serves Artemis . . .’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Four or eight or sixteen diesel trains would carry the load just as well, and at far less cost to time and resources.’

  ‘That’s not true . . .’

  ‘This is just an expensive toy. A way for goldenminds to amuse themselves and justify their existence. There is too much of this sort of thing in Artemis of late. The state is losing its purpose.’

  ‘No!’

  The grey robot was silent. Despite the constant activity around them, it was strangely calm on the plain. The night stars billowed above them, like the highlights on a foil sail cracking in the wind. Eleanor could see the silhouettes of robots as they climbed into the interior of the engine. She imagined them running their coarse hands over the marvels of the pressurized water reactor.

  ‘What are they doing?’ asked Dorore in alarm.

  ‘They are rigging it to explode.’

  Dorore laughed. Rather, forced herself to laugh. It was a gesture of defiance. If anything, it seemed to impress the grey robot.

  ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ she said. ‘That’s a PWR, you can’t make it explode! It’s all to do with the negative temperature coefficient of reactivity. As the reactor gets too hot, the water becomes less dense and the chain reaction slows down. You can’t have a runaway explosion like you got on the old reactors. Besides which, I baked the control rods myself. They don’t contain enough fissile uranium to sustain a critical chain reaction!’

  ‘They will do, goldenmind.’

  And at that Kavan turned and made his way to the engine to direct operations, leaving Eleanor and Dorore standing together in the empty night, on the empty plain, the cold breeze whistling through their bodies.

  Dorore turned to Eleanor, desperate for her to understand.

  ‘Tell him,’ she said. ‘Tell him this train is needed back in Artemis City. My crew will be waiting for me. Pinza, Alycidon and Tulyar . . .’

  Eleanor said nothing. Behind Dorore, the grey robots were withdrawing from the innards of the reaction train. The panels and hatches were being carefully locked back into place.

  Kavan returned. ‘Okay, goldenmind, it’s ready. You can get back on board.’

  It took a moment for Dorore to register what he meant.

  ‘Back on board the engine? But it’s rigged to explode!’

  ‘Yes. And we need someone to drive it to its destination.’

  ‘What? But you can’t mean . . . It will explode! I’ll be killed!’

  ‘Yes. But this way you will best serve Artemis.’

  ‘Set one of your own troops to drive it!’

  ‘They would not know how. There is the pressure to keep constant, the primary coolant loop to maintain . . .’

  Dorore paused, registering his tone. ‘You’re being sarcastic.’

  ‘No. Besides which, my troops are too valuable to waste. Their training and experience offers Artemis much. What can you offer?’

  ‘I am a goldenmind!’

  And at that there was another of those cold silences. And then . . .

  ‘No. There is no goldenmind, there is no golden body. The wire is not special, only the pattern that is twisted there. There is too much of this thinking back in Artemis City. Some day I may turn my attention there.’

  Despite her original annoyance at his intervention, Eleanor felt a thrill at Kavan’s words.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Dorore, who didn’t understand.

  ‘I mean that the last state that Artemis will conquer may well be Artemis itself.’ He seemed to come back to the present. ‘But now, for you, it is time to get on the train.’

  And at that Dorore lost her temper. She had nothing else to lose.

  ‘You! I know your sort! You are like Nicolas the Coward!
You turn away from anything new. You fear it. You fear my mind!’

  Kavan didn’t seem to care. ‘You will set off in five minutes.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  ‘You will give my troops sufficient time to climb upon the back of the train. Four and a half miles should be sufficient to keep us all clear of the blast.’

  And at that he turned and began to walk back along the length of the train.

  Dorore turned and looked at Eleanor, pleadingly. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked.

  ‘Do what he says,’ said Eleanor, turning to glare at Kavan’s retreating back. ‘That’s what we’re all doing.’

  Susan

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Karel looked up at her from where he knelt, feeding coal into the forge.

  ‘I’m going to the railway station,’ said Susan, pained by the suspicion in his voice.

  ‘The station? Why?’

  The look he gave her was so hard and unforgiving that she felt as if she were rusting from the inside. She couldn’t even meet his eyes.

  ‘I need to think. I need ideas to make our child, Karel. There are concepts collected there from all across the continent. Oh, Karel, please don’t be like this. I’m sorry.’

  And, just like that, the spell was broken. He rose to his feet and crossed the room and was holding her hands, his body close so she could feel the currents running through his electromuscle, the edge of his lifeforce.

  ‘I’m sorry too, Susan.’

  They held on to each other, tight.

  ‘You’re a good man, Karel, I never doubted it.’

  ‘I know, Susan. Come on . . . Oh!’ He stared at her body and laughed guiltily. He had smudged ash from his dirty hands all down her powder-blue panelling.

  Susan saw it and started to laugh too. She reached for a clump of twisted metal and gently wiped herself clean.

  ‘Let me come to the station with you,’ said Karel.

  ‘No, it’s okay, you don’t have to.’

  ‘I want to.’

  ‘What about Axel?’

  ‘He’ll sleep for another one hundred and twenty-seven minutes. He’s fine. I want to come.’

  ‘I’d like that. Thank you.’

  Karel gently wiped her hands clean with his. She could feel the current in the electromuscle of his fingers as he did so.

  The marble flagstones of the residential area were covered in a fine dust, carried by the cold wind that blew from the north. Oily black clouds were spreading across the sky like a slick over water; the sun seemed to shine a muddy brown that day. Susan rejected this image instantly; she didn’t want her child to grow up thinking of this.

  ‘I want to hear the ocean,’ she announced.

  ‘The wind’s the wrong way,’ said Karel. ‘Do you want to catch a train to the coast?’

  ‘No, Axel will wake before then.’

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  Susan was staring at the white walls of the fort of the City Guard, clearly visible in the distance above the glass-and-iron roofs of the railway station.

  ‘The fort,’ she said.

  Karel said nothing, just squeezed her hand, made her electromuscles pulse in time with his own.

  The railway station was set at the head of a wide, shallow valley that cut through the hills at the northern edge of Turing City State. The valley had been excavated centuries ago by porphyry worms, copper animals that had ground away at the fissured rock of the land, sifting through the residue for the frills of copper that had been left behind when acidic magma had bubbled up from deep beneath the world.

  Susan had never seen the worms herself, but their memory was woven into the wire of her mind: a memory she intended to pass on to her child.

  The worms had been small to begin with, but long years of dining on the thin veins and frills of copper had allowed them to grow fat and huge. By the time the first robots had walked south into southern Shull, the worms stood taller than a robot and were as long as a whale. They had eaten the rock away down to a depth of a hundred metres. Those robots who had first viewed the land that would become Turing City State found a valley filled with porphyry worms, their beaten-copper bodies dull in the sunlight. They watched in wonder as the worms reared up high to nibble at the rocks of the valley walls. Susan now had that image in her mind. It was strange and gorgeous and filled her with a ravenous feeling.

  Those first robots had felt the same. A base greed had come upon them, and they had lost control of themselves, falling on the defenceless worms without restraint. Robots had melted their way into the bodies of the worms and had gazed in lust at the brass and copper and tin of their interiors. They had walked through the ringing tubes of their bodies to their minds woven of electrum wire, and a frenzy of greed had overtaken them. They ripped those minds apart, spooling out the electrum wire into the daylight. They had mounted the carcasses with sharp knives and shears and cut the worms’ bodies open lengthways and then peeled them apart, laid them flat and plated the valley floor with copper, the remaining worms looking on, uncomprehending. They had taken those worms and built themselves castles with copper walls. They had unwound the electrum wire of the porphyry worms’ minds, and with it they wove children with golden minds.

  They did all this without restraint, without guilt, and in doing so they rendered the porphyry worms extinct.

  Only then did they look out at the once beautiful valley and see what they had done . . .

  And this memory I will weave into you, my child, Susan thought to herself, for this was Turing City’s darkest moment, and it was as a reaction to the horror of this that we became what we became. This was where we learned to respect the mind as something more than just metal.

  ‘Are you okay, Susan?’ Karel was looking at her with such concern. ‘Are you thinking of the child?’

  ‘I was.’

  They looked down at the valley now. Its rocky walls had long since been mined away, leaving a series of terraces. Bridges from one level led to the roofs of houses on the next level down. A maze of metal walkways and steps led them down to the railway station below. Many silver rails set in white concrete sleepers led north from the station, heading out over the Zernike plain beyond. A wide river, green with copper, ran southwards between brick embankments, twisting slowly underneath the pattern of the railway lines.

  And then there was the railway station itself. Seen from above, it resembled an iron-and-glass sphere, cut into segments and then pressed flat on the ground. Arched glass canopies ran in all directions: they covered platforms serving railway lines that ran to all the former countries of southern Shull. Over to one side there were platforms for Bethe and Segre and Stark, the three of them crowded together, made of good steel and pale green glass. And over there was the wide arch of the Wien terminal, the long thin platform that jointly served Raman and Born, twisting like a snake in a north-westerly direction. And last, but by no means least, there was the Artemis terminal. Plain and functional in clear glass and dull iron it may have been, but it was by far the most impressive. Its utilitarian shape dominated the head of the valley, a visible proof of the power of the two states that it joined. Robots streamed into it, and a constant array of goods rolled in and out. Plain, functional machinery from Artemis exchanged for the delicate and quirky metalwork of Turing City.

  ‘Look,’ said Karel. ‘Look at all the City Guards down there! I’ve never seen so many of them!’

  ‘It’s what Noatak promised at parliament, remember? That the station would be guarded.’

  Susan and Karel descended by the maze of metal walkways that led over the roofs of the buildings on the lower terraces, heading down to the wide marble square that lay before the station itself. Behind them, the shops and galleries of the retail district rose in riotous colour. Before them, the iron and glass of the station stood in measured solemnity.

  ‘What’s the matter, Susan?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Susan wanted to ask him what was the noise th
at she could hear, but she felt too disoriented, like her gyros were spinning too quickly. She could hear the rumble of trains on the rails – that was normal, here outside the station – but there was something else too. A high-pitched whining noise that seemed to resonate with the wire of her mind.

  ‘Is it that noise?’ asked Karel, tilting his head. Susan nodded.

  ‘It is a little odd, isn’t it?’ He listened some more. ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a train approaching. A reaction engine, I think.’

  Susan pulled at his hand.

  ‘Karel, let’s go.’

  ‘But we only just got here!’

  The noise of the reaction engine filled her mind; it seemed to resonate with the wire of her brain, shrilling terror straight through her body to her electromuscles.

  ‘Karel, let’s get out of here. Please.’

  ‘Susan, you’re being silly. Look – look at all the guards. We shall be safe here.’ He pointed to a nearby guard, looming tall and silver in the sunlight.

  Susan jerked at his arm. ‘Run, Karel. Please, let’s run . . .’

  She pulled Karel along a few steps. The other robots in the marble square were looking at them curiously, but Susan didn’t care.

  ‘It’s all going to go wrong,’ she said with utter finality.

  Karel started to walk with her back towards the steps that led up the residential district.

  ‘No, not up there,’ insisted Susan. ‘No, it’s the wrong way. We need to run. Back into the city, to the shops.’ It struck her then with a feeling like a cold awl plunged into her mind. ‘Oh, Zuse, what about Axel?’

  Karel was staring at her, humouring her.

  ‘Why don’t we go back and see him?’ he asked carefully. ‘We could check he’s all right.’

  ‘No! We have to run!’

  A Guard had seen them and came walking in their direction.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so . . .’ said Karel.

  The high-pitched whine was louder now, accompanied by a rumble that was filling her body. Susan wrenched herself free of Karel, began to run. The rumble was filling her entire world. She ran. Stopped. Turned to see where Karel was.