Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

  ‘But why? You drew that shape yourself. I saw you!’

  Nettie was obviously distressed, was doing her best to hide it.

  ‘Susan, this is Artemis City! We follow Nyro’s philosophy here! The Book of Robots is heresy! There is no philosophy but Nyro’s!’

  Susan gazed at the robot. ‘But you drew the shape. So did Maoco O and . . .’

  ‘Don’t mention their names! I don’t want to know!’ She continued to knit, agitatedly, and for a moment Susan wondered what her left arm would feel like when Nettie had finished. How long before she could politely knit herself a new muscle?

  That didn’t matter now. She wanted to know about the Book of Robots. ‘But why do people keep telling me about this!’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’ said Nettie. ‘But you bear the mark!’

  ‘What mark?’

  ‘It’s woven into you. You built it into your body! Can’t you see it?’

  ‘See what?’

  Nettie looked at her, puzzled. ‘Have I made a mistake?’ she murmured. ‘No, it’s there! Don’t you see, the way you have shaped yourself? How you resemble me? It’s subtle, but unmistakeable!’

  Susan looked from Nettie to herself. She couldn’t see anything, just two robots.

  ‘The mark is all around us!’ said Nettie. ‘I can see it written in the world, in the moon! It’s so obvious. You and I bear the mark!’

  ‘I can’t see it.’

  ‘But why not? Your mother wove the pattern into your mind, so that you would make yourself as you do—’

  ‘I can’t see it! I told you! I can’t see anything!’

  The other women were all looking in their direction now. Susan pretended to take an interest in the electromuscle that Nettie was knitting. She asked questions on her technique, as if anyone else would want to imitate Nettie’s poor knitting. The other women returned to their work.

  ‘Listen,’ said Nettie. ‘I don’t understand why you can’t see it, but the mark is on you. The knowledge must be in you somewhere, you just haven’t seen it yet. You need to search through your memories. It will be there somewhere, you need to recognize it.’

  ‘How will I recognize it?’

  ‘I don’t know – it’s obvious to me. Listen, this is what I know. Some time, a long time ago, the first robots were made. They had a purpose, a reason for existence, a philosophy that was woven into them. When they made their children, they wove the same philosophy into their minds. And their children wove it into their children’s minds. But, in time, as the generations went on and the years passed, the mothers stopped weaving in the full knowledge. They substituted other knowledge, for reasons that no one understands.’

  I was right, thought Susan. You never did twist minds. Any mother would understand why the full knowledge was not passed on. Any mother would add something new to the weave in order to give her child an advantage in life. They wouldn’t hesitate to discard something that would hold their child back.

  Nettie continued: ‘And so the original knowledge was diluted and broken apart, and gradually the robots diverged into different states and different beliefs. But, even so, some knowledge is still passed on even now; some few fragments are woven into the minds of children, along with other memories. Those memories contain the sign’ – Nettie’s finger made the symbol of the dot on the circle – ‘woven into them. We few who carry those memories are charged with the task of assembling the true knowledge back into the whole. Of rediscovering our true reason for being.’

  Susan was silent for a moment, thinking.

  ‘But that’s not right,’ she said finally. ‘Robots weren’t built. We evolved, just like all the other life on this planet. There is no purpose, no reason for our existence. We just are!’

  Nettie smiled sadly. ‘You can’t see it at the moment, Susan. Search your memories. It’s in there somewhere. You’ll see that I’m right.’

  Susan didn’t think so, but she didn’t feel confident enough to disagree.

  ‘Tell me about the Book of Robots.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Nettie, pausing to examine her progress with the electromuscle. A loop of wire had popped out, further up the pattern. She tried to pull it back into place. ‘The Book,’ said Nettie, absently.

  Suddenly, she seemed to remember where she was and took a look around the room, but no one now seemed to be paying them any attention. ‘Well,’ she continued. ‘Some people hold that assembling all the fragments of memory will be an impossible task. They are too diffuse and too much has been forgotten.’ She nodded. ‘I must admit, I can understand their point of view, but I am not so defeatist. My mother made me that way.’

  Susan nodded.

  ‘But there are those who believe something else to be true. They hold that the memories are lost and that we should not waste our time trying to bring them together again. Instead, we should search for the Book of Robots, the design for the original robots. It contains the pattern in which the original minds were woven: the philosophy, the rules, everything. Find the book, they say, and we will know our purpose.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Susan, ‘where should we look?’

  Again, Nettie drew a circle on the air.

  ‘Large circle,’ she said, ‘our planet of Penrose. Small circle,’ she drew a smaller circle on top, ‘Kusch. The continent on the top of the world. The birthplace of the robots. That is where we should be looking for the Book of Robots.’

  Karel and Kavan

  ‘What’s your name, driver?’

  Karel’s hands tightened around the brakes at the surprise of again hearing a voice. It didn’t matter, the train wasn’t moving. He had sat waiting in this valley for hours now, just watching the wet snowflakes melting into a slushy mess on the rails ahead.

  ‘I asked, what’s your name?’

  ‘Karel,’ he replied.

  ‘Karel, my name is Kavan. Do you know who I am?’

  ‘You’re the leader of the Artemis troops. You led the invasion of Turing City.’

  ‘That’s right. And you’re the robot who drove the train from which all those troops mysteriously disappeared. Tell me about it.’

  ‘I’ve already said all there is to say.’

  Silence. Wet snowflakes falling on rock.

  ‘You’re very brave for a robot whose coil I could have crushed at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘I’m not being brave; I’m just telling the truth. I’ve been over this many times already.’

  ‘Hmm. Tell me, do you believe in ghosts, Karel?’

  ‘Ghosts? No. That wasn’t twisted into my mind. I’m not superstitious. We weren’t superstitious in Turing City.’

  ‘We aren’t superstitious in Artemis, either. We don’t need to be. We just believe in iron and the forge. But up here, up in the north, it seems that things are different. They twist the minds of the robots up here to look for patterns in everything. The snow blows down the valley and they look for a death. The day moon casts a shadow over the sun and they look for the coming of a stranger. They twist suspicion into the metal of their children’s minds and think nothing of it.’

  Why is he telling me this? wondered Karel. Why does the leader of the Artemisian army want a lowly train driver to know this?

  ‘No wonder all the ghost stories come from the north,’ continued Kavan. ‘It is in their nature to believe in such things.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But that makes me suspicious,’ said Kavan. ‘When I hear about what happened to the troops that were being carried on your train, it makes me think about war. Do you know, Karel, that one’s tactics reflect one’s philosophy? In Turing City you hid behind your supposed superiority of mind, and behind your City Guard with their superior bodies. Artemis has been so successful because we know that Nyro’s philosophy transcends the metal of our minds. And now we meet a state where the robots look for patterns in the night, and they attempt to fight us in that manner . . .’

  ‘I can’t help you,’ said Karel, impatiently. ‘I’ve told you
all that I know.’

  The slightest of pauses.

  ‘I’ve heard of you, Karel. Even before I entered Turing City, I had heard of you. Not by name, as such, but through the story of the robot with the hidden mind.’

  ‘Every robot’s mind is hidden.’

  ‘To a certain extent, yes. But there is something special about your mind. It is almost the embodiment of the fight between our states.’

  ‘There is no fight. Artemis has won.’

  ‘So we have. And I wonder how you feel about that?’

  ‘You killed my son. You took my wife from me. How do you think I feel?’

  ‘A true Artemisian would not care. Are you a true Artemisian, Karel?’

  Karel was silent.

  ‘No reply? Not that I expected one. Well, we leave soon to head further north. Another kingdom to conquer. And then what, Karel, and then what? What would you do if you were in my position?’

  The voice was soft, almost as if he were genuinely interested in Karel’s reply. Karel waited a moment before he gave it. ‘Well, I suppose, if I were you, if I had the chance, I would . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ asked Kavan. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I would crush my own coil and have done with it.’

  Karel heard Kavan laughing loudly as he broke the connection.

  Kavan

  The torture chair sat in the middle of the stone room. It was quite ingenious in its own way: a little bowl into which the twisted metal of a mind was placed, a little hole for the coil to poke through and to be plugged into the taut wires that stretched down the chair’s arms and back. Wires like electromuscle that could then be plucked and strummed like a lute, and the delicious pain of feedback sent playing through the coil into the mind itself. An exquisite device, thought Kavan, and indicative of the minds of the robots that had inhabited this kingdom. A device entirely contradictory to Nyro’s philosophy, for it was not the Artemisian way to treat a mind as anything more than so much twisted metal.

  The prisoner that Eleanor brought into the room still wore her original body: she had not yet donned the standard grey body of an Artemisian infantryrobot. She looked at the torture chair and wriggled her fingers slowly in fear.

  ‘Ignore it,’ said Eleanor. ‘This is Kavan. Tell him about the Kingdom of the North. You say you have been there.’

  ‘Once,’ said the prisoner. She was small, her legs too short in proportion to her body, her arms too long. Kavan had seen the locals climb the mountainsides, seen how they would fall forwards to scamper up on all fours. Idly, he had wondered if he should get some of his troops to adopt that same design for fighting in this terrain. He dismissed the thought for the moment: it would be something to discuss later with the forges of Artemis City, when and if he returned there.

  The prisoner relaxed a little. She now ignored the chair and adopted the storytelling pose that Kavan had seen other northern robots assume.

  ‘Once,’ she began, ‘when I was younger, I did travel to the edge of the North Kingdom. Back then, that same year, my kingdom had harvested much wood from the western slopes, so we had a surfeit of timber that we wished to trade before it could rot.’

  Kavan glanced at Wolfgang, standing silent at the prisoner’s side. His aide had explained it earlier, but Kavan still thought it strange, the northern habit of relying on organic life as a construction material or a source of fire.

  ‘What did the North Kingdom have to trade with you in exchange?’ asked Kavan.

  ‘Labour. Slave robots, they would work for us for five years before returning to their northern homes. The slave robots are well regarded, for they are strong and work hard. They have minds that can think, but they have no sense of self. The secret of how they are made is known only to the Northern Kingdom.’

  Kavan glanced at Wolfgang again.

  ‘Such robots are not unknown in the south,’ said the aide. ‘They turn up here and there occasionally, though they usually claim to be Spontaneous. It’s possible, I suppose, that they originate from up here.’

  Kavan nodded. ‘Tell me more. What did you see there in the north? What did you learn?’

  ‘I must report that I saw little, for it was raining during most of the journey. We walked the Northern Road. It is wide and was in better repair back then.’

  Kavan and Eleanor exchanged glances, but the woman didn’t notice, and continued to speak.

  ‘The land of the north is not so mountainous as here, but there are still valleys filled with mist through which one must walk, there are rivers and streams that fill the air with noise of running water, and the ever-present drizzle that makes the rocks so slippery also curtails the vision. I saw very little on the journey there.’

  ‘But what of the North Kingdom itself?’

  ‘Alas, I saw that not at all. For the Northern Kingdom lies in the last of the mountains that rise before the Moonshadow sea. It nestles, hidden from sight, within a ring of rock through which there is only one entrance: a maze of rock known as Lazar’s Labyrinth. The way through is known only to those who dwell within.’

  ‘More stories and superstition,’ said Kavan to Wolfgang. He turned back to the woman.

  ‘Tell me, how long were these lengths of timber that were to be carried through the maze? Twenty feet? Thirty?’

  ‘Longer,’ said the woman. ‘For the trees that we grew were tall and proud, and the integrity of the wood was much prized by all that dwelt thereabouts.’

  ‘So they carried through timber more than thirty feet in length? I don’t suppose, therefore, the maze would be that difficult to traverse.’

  ‘I cannot speak the answer to that,’ said the prisoner. ‘We were not allowed to enter. We found our slaves waiting for us at the entrance to the maze. Twenty of them, tall and hard-working. We got good use out of them for our five years’ worth of labour.’

  ‘What happened to them at the end of the five years?’ asked Eleanor.

  ‘One bright morning, beneath the light of Zuse and Néel, who shared the sky with the sun that day, the slaves formed themselves into a group and then marched back home again. There were only eighteen of them still working by then. Two of them had been damaged during their labour for us.’

  ‘Did the North Kingdom not object to this damage?’ asked Wolfgang.

  ‘No,’ replied the kingdom woman. ‘The remaining slaves carried the bodies of the broken robots back with them, for metal is the most precious thing in the North Kingdom. Now if we had kept the metal of those bodies, then their retribution would have been terrible to behold . . .’ she trailed off, smiling.

  ‘Do you fear the North Kingdom that much?’ asked Kavan.

  ‘We respect them, for the North Kingdom is said to have been established by the robots from the Top of the World.’

  ‘The robots from the Top of the World?’ Kavan felt like laughing. ‘We heap story upon story! And who, exactly, are they?’

  ‘A child’s story, Kavan,’ volunteered Wolfgang. ‘The Top of the World is the place where children believe that the first robots lived. Alpha and Gamma. Their children are said to have moved south to inhabit all the rest of the world.’

  ‘And do you believe in the robots at the Top of the World?’ asked Kavan of the prisoner.

  ‘Well, no,’ she said, her fingers waggling slowly again. ‘No. Not as such. But there are stories. They say the North Kingdom holds a fragment of the Book of Robots. And that, although they are poor in metal, they are rich in knowledge. They know something of the true nature of robots, and this is what gives them power. They say that they can increase the power of their lifeforce just by meditation. This is why they are so respected.’

  Kavan was silent.

  ‘Worried, Kavan?’ asked Eleanor.

  ‘No,’ replied Kavan, ‘but I wonder about these stories and their power. The robots who dwell here have superstition twisted into their minds. I wonder at how much this superstition will increase as we travel further north. I thank Nyro that our own troops have minds that a
re twisted true.’

  ‘Some of them do, at least,’ said Eleanor. ‘We have so many volunteers at the moment, it’s difficult to predict how they think. And don’t forget that some of our troops are now conscripts from here, from the conquered kingdoms of the north.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Kavan gazed at the prisoner. ‘So tell me more about the North Kingdom. You say they are poor in metal. What does that mean?’

  ‘There is little metal in the circle of the mountains that form the North Kingdom,’ she said. ‘They say that the robots there do not make their bodies as we do, instead they must make their bones from wood. The wood rots eventually and must be replaced. They say that a robot from the North Kingdom can shatter its own body with its own electromuscle if it squeezes too hard.

  ‘It is said that they dwell in poor hovels, built on mud through which metal worms swim. They say that the robots shape a nugget of metal into a bell and press it into the mud at night in the hope of attracting a metal worm. If the worm takes the metal, they hear the noise of the bell and pull the worm from the ground.’

  ‘Metal worms?’ said Wolfgang. ‘That sounds a little like the porphyry worms of Turing City State.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ said Kavan.

  ‘I don’t know . . . oh . . . it is said that metal is so scarce that men cannot waste their wire on any woman who might twist an inferior mind. They say that the kingdom locks the men in high rocky towers, and the women must climb up to meet them. The women must surpass doors closed by ingenious locks and puzzles in order to prove their skill at shaping the twisted metal that a man produces, in order that they can then make a mind.’

  ‘That’s an old story,’ said Wolfgang. ‘I’ve heard something similar originating from Stark. It claims to explain how they rose to engineering dominance. Only there it was the women who were shut away . . .’

  ‘Okay, is there anything else?’ asked Kavan.

  ‘Tell him about the Wizard,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘The Wizard?’ said Kavan.

  The prisoner threw a dark glance at Eleanor, but continued.