Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

  Maoco O

  . . . fell to the ground and rolled awkwardly to a halt. His right side was badly damaged, caught full in the blast of the exploding soldier. He looked back in disbelief at the shattered remains of the silver Scout body. No wonder it had shown such trouble moving! The robot’s entire chest must have been packed with high explosive. He saw the three puffs of dust on the floor in front of him, heard the crack of gunfire a moment later, and he rolled forward, tumbled to the side, his right arm and leg refusing to operate properly. In his peripheral vision he saw the crowd of Turing Citizens that had stood on the gangue pile all watching him. One of them was shouting, pointing to a group of Artemisian robots that had just rounded the corner and was advancing towards him.

  Awkwardly, he raised his gun, and then he felt his reactions adjusting to his new body form. The Fort Mothers had done their jobs well: the mind of a City Guard took feedback from the shape of the body to which it was attached, constantly adjusting itself to new circumstances. He fired, once, twice, three times, an Artemisian falling on each shot. As he made to fire the fourth, he was caught in the hand by a bullet. The electromuscle there shorted.

  His radio crackled to life.

  ‘Maoco O. This is Aorne H. What’s your status?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Maoco O, taking the rifle in his other hand. He fired off three more shots, finishing off the remaining Artemisians.

  ‘Some of the enemy are packed with explosives.’

  ‘I just encountered one of them. I’m twenty per cent damaged.’

  ‘Listen, we’re regrouping before the fort. We can pick off the explosive robots there before they can get close enough to do us any damage. We will use that location to relaunch our counter-offensive. Can you make it there?’

  ‘No problem. I have a group of Turing Citizens with me, though.’

  ‘Get them clear of your current position, and then ditch them. This is more important.’

  ‘They can’t fight for themselves, you know!’

  ‘They’re not supposed to.’

  ‘Okay.’ Maoco O scanned the area, searching for more Artemisians. ‘What’s the situation in terms of casualties, Aorne H?’ he asked.

  ‘Thirty per cent. That’s not a problem. We will prevail.’

  ‘We will prevail.’

  Maoco O scanned the area once more. Everywhere seemed clear for the moment. He turned to the Turing Citizens who stood nervously on the gangue behind him.

  ‘Come on,’ he called. ‘Follow me.’

  The robots began to scramble down towards him. Maoco O shifted his position, adjusting to his newly damaged body. Still, he was calm.

  Karel

  Axel’s look of terror as they entered the apartment was enough to unleash Susan’s emotions in a crackling outburst. She took her child in her arms, her voicebox squeaking and squawking as she comforted him. All Karel could do was lean weakly against the wall. Thank Zuse, he thought. He’s safe. He’s safe.

  Axel was whining as his mother stroked the currents that emanated from his little body, releasing an electronic hum of anguish. Karel’s gyros lurched in sympathy. How long has Axel been gazing at the front door, listening to the explosions in the city, wondering what had happened to us?

  ‘Where have you been? Where have you been?’

  Karel felt guilt and fear in equal measure. And then the child saw the blue paint down his mother’s side was badly scratched, her mouth and ears obviously recently repaired. ‘What’s happened to you, Mummy?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, Axel, I’m fine.’

  ‘Susan, I’m going to extinguish the forge. Anything to avoid attracting attention to this apartment . . .’

  Susan didn’t hear him; she was too busy stroking her child. Karel bent down and began to close the forge vents. He just needed to do something. Besides, the Artemis robots would have heat vision; they could be out there now, scanning the city, looking for pockets of life . . .

  Even so, Karel felt a lurching sensation as he closed the final vent on the fire; it was as if he had just smothered the life of the family.

  ‘I’m going to the outside room,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to see what’s happening.’

  ‘Stay here, Daddy!’

  ‘It’s okay, Axel. I’ll only be next door.’

  He slipped from the forge into the tiny room, closing the door carefully behind him. The window in there offered a view over the seemingly impossible evening. Nothing seemed real. The sky was composed of lines of red and black, the setting sun behind streaks of cloud. The city beneath it was lit by orange fires. The train station was burning, the central district was burning. The foundries burned blue and white and red and golden, as different metals ignited, their incandescent flares dimming the flames beyond them.

  The flames beyond them . . . Karel realized with horror that he was looking at the fort of the City Guard. Even from this distance he could see the flare of the fort’s Tesla towers, brilliant white in the encompassing night.

  The Artemisians had made it all the way up there! What was happening now? Some desperate last stand? But it wasn’t supposed to happen this way! The City Guard were supposed to be invincible.

  And they were, almost.

  He recalled how that City Guard robot had erupted from the gangue and saved them all. It had stood in the middle of the street and calmly shot the approaching Artemisians one by one, like doing no more than testing its gun on a firing range. The minutes had crept by and the robot had just stood there, shooting the enemy down to the diminishing applause of the crowd. Even when that Artemisian robot had exploded right next to it it had gone on fighting, badly damaged as it was. And then it had led them through the streets, avoiding the distant sounds of fighting that echoed panic through the city, and shown them a safe path back here, to the flat. The Guard had paused for a moment, thinking.

  ‘This is far enough,’ it said. ‘I have new orders. Good luck to you all.’ And then it had raised its rifle and headed back towards the fighting.

  The City Guard seemed invincible, and yet the Artemisians were winning. They had made it all the way to the fort itself. How could that have happened?

  But a terrible suspicion was growing within Karel that he already knew the answer. He had known all along that this outcome was inevitable. Turing City was falling not because of the City Guard, but because of everyone else. Karel had walked almost the length of Turing City that afternoon, and the only robots he had seen fighting were the Guards and the Artemisians. Few regular Turing Citizens, if any, had bothered to defend their city. They had just left the job to someone else. How much did they really believe in their freedom? He thought suddenly of Susan. Just how did their mothers twist their minds?

  The windows rippled: an explosion. Clouds suddenly billowed way into the air, and Karel guessed that an acid tank had ruptured. Hydrochloric acid drifted in a grey pall across the burning streets.

  A ghost walked across the scene: Susan’s reflection in the window, outlined in the light of the open door to the forge room.

  ‘Close the door!’ said Karel. ‘They’ll see us!’

  ‘But Axel is worri . . .’

  ‘DO IT!’

  Susan did so; she moved up and gazed out over the city with him.

  ‘What can you see?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing but burning.’ He heard the emptiness in his own voice. ‘Susan, I think this is the end. I think it’s over.’

  ‘It’s never over,’ said Susan, her tone unconvincing. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing to a series of lights moving towards them across the Zernike plain, converging on the burning railway station.

  ‘More trains arriving,’ said Karel. ‘Reinforcements from Artemis.’

  Light filled the room again, now Axel stood in the doorway.

  ‘Mummy, I thought you had left me again!’

  Karel bundled his family back into the forge room, back where they couldn’t be seen by any enemy troops, outlined against the light.


  Karel spoke gently. ‘Susan, take care of Axel. I’m going to go out into the block. See if anyone has some news.’

  The iron corridor outside Karel’s apartment was so quiet, so almost normal. The lights were dimmed: others obviously appreciated the need to avoid drawing attention to their apartment block.

  He walked carefully down the corridor, listening for voices behind the iron doors. Nothing: the building was hollow, a drum seemingly devoid of the beat of life. Everyone was keeping quiet. The silence unnerved Karel as he came to the curled serpent of the brass banister that spiralled up the stairwell. Silence seemed to well up from the floors below, and it took a conscious effort to step forward and to descend into its forbidding depths.

  The faux circuitry patterns in beaten copper that decorated the white walls, the brass banister, the soft tread of his feet on the steps – Karel’s senses seemed enhanced in the silence. Every step, every touch of metal on metal was amplified to become the sound of Artemisian troops entering the building.

  He almost collided with a robot that was creeping the other way, up the stairs.

  ‘Whoah!’ In panic he brought up his arm to strike out at the intruder.

  ‘No, Karel! Stop!’

  Their voices echoed in the stairwell. Karel paused, gazing at the apparition.

  ‘Gustav . . . ?’ he said, relief surging through his circuits. ‘It is you, isn’t it? But what have you done to your body?’

  Karel’s sense of the unreality of this evening deepened as he gazed at the other robot. Gustav used to dress pretty much like any other Turing Citizen; in well-formed lightweight metals, brightly painted and enamelled. The contrast to his current body could not be more marked. He now looked like something from a ghost story, covered as he was from head to toe in some heavy dull-grey alloy, the panels sealed so tightly, their seams rubbed down with thick grease. His head was an elongated, curving tube, the eyes much larger than usual and sealed behind thick glass lenses. His hands and feet were larger too, with foil webbing running up to the first joint of the fingers and toes.

  Gustav’s voice resonated deep and booming, as if welling up from the bottom of a deep pool. ‘We’re getting out,’ he said. ‘The city has fallen, if not now, then certainly by morning. Haven’t you heard? The City Guard are dying. They’ve fallen back to the fort. They’re holding their ground there, but more Artemisians are arriving by the hour, coming in by the railway. The Guards will be overwhelmed by the morning.’

  Gustav’s words kindled the embarrassed anger that glowed dimly within Karel.

  ‘They’re dying, and you talk of running?’ He was almost shouting. He couldn’t help it. ‘They’re giving up their lives for this city!’

  ‘I don’t see you joining them,’ said Gustav.

  ‘I have a wife and child!’

  ‘So do I.’

  Karel lowered his voice, fought to rein in his anger. ‘Listen, if Turing City falls, then the whole southern continent will have been taken. Gustav, there’s nowhere left to run to.’

  Gustav nodded, an odd movement with his newly elongated head. ‘Nowhere left here on Shull,’ he agreed. ‘Karel, we’re heading out to sea. That’s why I’m dressed like this. It’s not too late, Karel. Get up to your forge; get Susan and Axel and yourself adapted for water.’

  Karel looked at Gustav’s streamlined, watertight body.

  ‘But we haven’t the metal. It would take days to build something like that . . .’ A thought occurred to him. ‘How long have you had that body, Gustav?’

  Gustav’s posture radiated embarrassment. ‘Hey, Karel, people have known this was coming for months. I’m not the only one to have considered an escape plan.’

  Current built in Karel’s electromuscles. ‘I hadn’t heard anything . . .’ he said softly.

  ‘Well . . .’ said Gustav, and then he took refuge in frankness. ‘Come on, Karel, maybe that’s not surprising. You know what people say about you.’ He held up one webbed hand in apology. ‘Hey, I’m not saying they’re right, far from it . . .’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ said Karel, icily calm. ‘So tell me, what do they say about me?’

  Gustav shook his head. ‘Karel, I’m not getting into this argument now: I’m doing you a favour. Get upstairs and get your family kitted out. We’re making our way down to the coast tonight. We’ll walk out under the water and start heading south. There’s metal down there on the seabed: placers and exposed ores. Enough to get by on.’

  ‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing! What about fire? How are you going to work metal?’

  ‘You don’t need fire to work metal, Karel. They didn’t in the old days. Robots used to get by just with the strength in their hands. We don’t need these fancy bodies we’ve got used to. I tell you, it will be good to get back to basics. It will be just like starting again!’

  Karel’s voice was filled with contempt. ‘I can’t believe you’re giving up so easily. You should be outside fighting.’

  His words rang out in the echoing shaft of the stairwell.

  ‘Like I said, I don’t see you doing any fighting.’ Gustav was dismissive. ‘Listen, ten o’clock tonight, down in the communal area. We’re setting off then. I’m offering you a lifeline, Karel.’

  ‘Gustav, listen . . .’

  But Gustav turned and resumed his silent progress upstairs. Karel noticed for the first time that Gustav was carrying panels of some kind of alloy. It looked like whale metal, heavy and completely out of place in the white delicacy of the apartment block. Where had he got it from?

  Just what was happening here?

  She sat in the forge room with Axel on her knee. The living metal of the stove still retained some dying warmth. Karel crouched in front of his wife, speaking quietly.

  ‘Susan, it’s like they’ve been planning this for weeks – months, even. It’s like Turing City gave up the will to fight before the battle ever began!’

  Susan was calming Axel, stroking him, letting him feel the warm current from her hands move through his electromuscle.

  ‘Susan, did you know anything about this?’ Karel looked up at his wife suspiciously.

  ‘Karel, I told you! I knew nothing about it!’

  ‘But you worked for Statistics. You were supposed to know everything! Didn’t you notice a build-up of whale metal in the city?’

  ‘Karel, you’re scaring Axel . . .’

  ‘And it’s such a stupid plan! They don’t know anything about what they will find down there! There could be another robot civilization living there already. Or worse . . .’ He brooded. ‘You know, out at the Immigration Centre, the one on the coast, you hear stories. Robots with arms a mile long. They reach out from deep under the water to pluck people from the land and drag them down to the seabed, where they strip the metal from their bodies. Leave only the twisted wire of the mind to slowly untangle in the dark depths.’

  ‘Karel,’ said Susan warningly. ‘Not in front of Axel!’

  ‘Sorry!’ He smiled down at his son. ‘But what if they are real? What if they are waiting down there for Gustav and the rest to walk into their welcoming arms?’

  Susan raised her voice. ‘Karel, stop it!’

  ‘And even if they are safe down there, how long before Artemis comes looking for them? How long before the next wave of expansion sweeps over the seabeds? Gustav and the rest are just delaying the inevitable. I tell you, we should stand and fight here!’

  ‘I told you, that’s enough!’

  Susan had shouted at him. Susan who never shouted. And now Karel saw the fear in her eyes, and he realized just how frightened everyone was. And he realized that it was far too late to make a stand.

  Turing City had already fallen. All they could do was wait . . .

  Spoole

  The land around Artemis City was healthy. The air was filled with the soot of a thousand belching chimneys; the acid rain washed the streets and pitted the copper-lined roofs and killed off all the green organic life. From wher
e he stood on the roof of the city, at the edge of a wide platform built at the top of the basilica, Spoole saw nothing but good, healthy stone and metal. Steel arches and copper domes and riveted iron. Gold chasing and the iridescent patterns of electrolysed titanium. Granite slabs and marble flags and slate roofs and walls. All was ordered, and all was good.

  The city was a living thing: full of the heat of the fires that burned in the forges and blast furnaces, the city shrugged off the chill of the wind that had sprung up from the north.

  The city was healthy, it was strong . . . and yet this morning it shook like a leaf spring with the news that travelled up the railway lines from the south.

  Kavan had entered Turing City.

  What next? wondered Spoole. He didn’t blame Kavan. He had been in that position himself, once. It wasn’t that he had been hungry for power, not exactly. It was just that Spoole had been made to lead. In the making rooms, his mother had knelt at the feet of an Artemisian Storm Trooper and twisted the metal into a mind that would be a suitable leader for Artemis City. And so, as he had grown, it had been obvious to Spoole just how badly things had been run in the city. Spoole knew that he could do a better job, because his mind had been woven that way.

  No, it wasn’t exactly that he had been hungry for power; rather, he realized that he couldn’t let things stay as they were.

  That was the way it was, for Artemis wove its own leaders. Spoole was made to be clever and charismatic. His mother had twisted into his mind the knowledge of how to make himself so very attractive to women. His father had had that knowledge too; he had shown his son how to build a body that was both strong and agile.

  Gearheart knew this. She both loved and hated his body.

  ‘Your mother was a traitor,’ she would say. ‘Attractive men find it too easy to have children twisted. They lose the sense that a mind is a special thing. They cease to take sufficient care in their directions to the mother.’

  ‘I attracted you, didn’t I?’ Spoole would reply.

  ‘I was made to be attracted to you, Spoole. Don’t flatter yourself.’ And at that Gearheart would stand and pirouette, or stretch, or in some other way show off her perfect body. ‘But you have found life too easy, Spoole. You would not make a good father. I will never weave you a mind, since you have no understanding of the balance.’