Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

‘But what about you? What do you believe in? Are you frightened of dying? Will you try and keep your mind together, or will you relax and save your friends? Which will it be?’

  Olam wanted to live. He thought of Wien and of his family. Where were they now? he wondered. Dead, most likely. He tried to picture them, but he couldn’t. He tried to picture Wien, with its towers and its islands. Nothing. All he could see now was his section, Doe Capaldi and his fellow Artemisians. All he could remember was what it was like to march through the streets of Turing City, the feel of the gun in his hands, the feeling of welling joy as he fired, as he saw another robot drop dead before him. Such elation!

  ‘What are you going to be? A bomb, or a dud? What will your final purpose be?’

  No! He wasn’t ready. He didn’t want to die. That wasn’t his purpose!

  ‘Here we go. I will whirl you round three times, and then let you go. Are you going to count with me?’

  No! Not yet. He wasn’t going to die. He deserved to live. He possessed the lifeforce, he knew it. All he had to do was concentrate.

  ‘I can see your troops over there. They look so big, so powerful. All that metal. What a mind I could weave with one of them . . .’

  Concentrate. Don’t let her distract you!

  ‘One . . . two . . . three . . .’

  The words were fainter now, lost in the wind as he spun, and then he had left the sling, he was flying forward. All those stars above. All that expanse of ground below. Soldiers. Artemisian soldiers. Is that what we look like from the air? What about the explosive charge? What would it feel like to die?

  He wouldn’t die. All he had to do was concentrate. Concentr . . .

  Karel

  Metal spheres continued to fall amongst the troops, each exploding in a tangle of blue wire that instantly contracted, snaring anything within range, choking it, cutting it, destroying it. Eleanor and Kavan and the rest ignored them, even when they fell at their feet, and Karel attempted to do the same. Still, he couldn’t help but duck down when one of the shells sailed over his head. It hit the robot behind in the chest, blue wire swarming over his grey body and tightening. Ripping into the panelling, tightening behind the neck, slipping through the joints and into the coil.

  ‘Wolfgang!’ called out Kavan.

  Karel was amazed. Kavan seemed genuinely upset about the robot’s death. This was not what he had expected. Karel watched as Wolfgang slumped forward, and then tumbled down to the ground.

  ‘Hey,’ said Eleanor, standing at his side, ‘it’s just metal. Just like the rest of us.’

  She was taunting Kavan, realized Karel. She was taunting the robot she wanted him to kill. But why me? wondered Karel. He gazed at the dying Wolfgang. The blue wire was still tightening, still squeezing. That had been a powerful bomb, he thought. More so than the others.

  ‘Don’t taunt me,’ said Kavan to Eleanor. ‘Wolfgang was a valuable resource.’

  Karel looked up. Were the pair of them about to start a fight, here and now? What would he do? Kavan didn’t carry a gun, he noticed.

  The front of Kavan’s shell was covered in condensation. They were all similarly covered, noticed Karel, covered in beads of water that ran in hurried little streams down fingers and arms and legs. The heat from the fires across the far side of the bowl was increasing. Red cracks were spreading wider: they now ran red fingers around the base of the skeletal tower.

  ‘Keep up, Karel,’ ordered Eleanor, and he looked up to see that Kavan was now gone ahead, marching on again, following his troops’ thrust into the heart of the Northern Kingdom.

  Karel hefted the rifle, condensation running down his fingers. The wind was lessening noticeably, being pushed aside by the rising heat. The snow had turned to slushy rain.

  There is Kavan, just ahead. Why not raise the rifle and shoot him? I could do it right now. I would be killed straight away, but what does that matter? I’ve nothing left to live for, so what’s stopping me? Is it because I don’t want to be a part of Eleanor’s game? Or is it something else?

  Because I can see it: that we’re both so alike, Kavan and me. Does anyone else realize that? All those people who whispered and hinted about how my mind was twisted, asking me what I was thinking: as if anybody could really tell what their mother had woven into their mind. And yet, I can see something of Kavan in myself.

  He raised the rifle, sighted along its length, took aim at Kavan’s head.

  Pull the trigger. Kill him.

  A shrieking metal noise rang out. The skeletal tower was sagging, its legs twisting, giving way.

  The Artemisian troops sensed victory. They began to stamp their feet as they marched forward.

  Slowly, oh so slowly, the great copper sphere at the top of the tower toppled forward.

  Kavan

  Kavan watched the copper sphere falling; saw the thin, undersized enemy robots running out from its base.

  ‘You’ve done it,’ said Eleanor, marching at his side. ‘You’ve done it again. And now the whole continent is yours.’

  ‘The whole continent belongs to Artemis,’ he corrected her.

  The copper sphere hit the stony ground and crumpled, split along one side.

  ‘You’ve defeated the Wizard,’ said Eleanor, and there was wonder in her voice. As if she had really believed in the Wizard.

  Kavan had halted. He wanted to call Wolfgang, but Wolfgang was now dead.

  ‘Look at the sphere,’ he said to Eleanor. ‘Look at it! What do you see inside?’

  The sphere was collapsing, like a bubble of glass blown too large. It was splitting into two pieces under its own weight.

  Eleanor gazed through the gathering mist.

  ‘It’s empty,’ she said. ‘Hollow. There’s nothing inside.’

  Kavan was becoming quite animated. ‘And look at the fire on the hillside: charcoal, coal, all burning. They’re leaving it all to burn.’ He looked around. ‘They lit the fires when we first attacked. The petrol in the trenches, the trees burning, they ignited their whole kingdom. They are destroying their own kingdom!’ Kavan felt something fierce burning within himself. A fierce joy, a glowing respect.

  ‘Of all the peoples on Shull, only these people truly believe,’ he said. ‘They would rather destroy their kingdom than have it fall to us!’

  ‘But why?’ asked Eleanor.

  ‘I don’t know! Perhaps because they really do believe in the Book of Robots.’

  ‘But look at this place! If the book does exist, it will burn with the rest of them! It will be melted to slag!’

  ‘I know, I know . . .’ Kavan gazed around the bowl again. Something wasn’t right, and he knew it. ‘Where are the slave robots?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Where have they gone? Why aren’t they defending this place any more? They were here when we first attacked . . .’

  The mist billowed around them, threatening to smother them in a pink world of muffled calm. The metal of their shells was growing warmer, and the night was lit by red fire. He scanned the scene, looking through the gaps in the fog for any of the slave robots, searching for robots wearing mining bodies. He saw none.

  ‘We’ve been tricked!’ he announced. ‘Fetch the Scouts!’ he commanded. ‘Get them to fan out into the surrounding countryside. Find the slave robots!’

  ‘What about the infantry?’

  ‘Tell them to keep marching on. We will recover the metal of their bodies from the slag that will eventually run to the centre of this bowl.’

  The order went out.

  Kavan turned and ran back up the train tracks, heading out of the bowl.

  Spoole

  The wind blew cold over Artemis City. The snowflakes danced in the light of the fires of the forges; they danced around the smoke that belched from the chimneys.

  Spoole stood alone on the roof of the Basilica, gazing to the north.

  Even through the howl of the wind, he heard the sound of footsteps behind him. A Scout, judging by the light tread.

  He wondered if this was the t
ime. Was this when his reign as leader would end? Down below, in the Basilica, were they already making ready to welcome back Kavan? He was being paranoid, he told himself. General Sandale and the rest still congratulated him on Artemis’s advance. They recognized Spoole as a brilliant tactician, using his troops to their best advantage. Or was that just what they wanted him to believe?

  ‘Excuse me, Spoole.’

  He turned, and a Scout waited there.

  ‘This message just came through on the radio,’ she said. Her blades were withdrawn, she held out a piece of foil in her hands.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Spoole, taking it.

  He read the words imprinted there.

  The Northern Kingdom had fallen.

  The wind blew, and still he gazed at the words.

  The Northern Kingdom had fallen.

  What now? he wondered.

  Kavan

  The three Scouts had spotted the slave robot making his way along a river, iron shoulders leaving a wake in the dark water. The Scouts had crippled him, cutting electromuscle in his arms and legs, then they had dragged him clear of the water onto the snow-covered bank. The slave had accepted his treatment without complaint.

  The Scouts had been ordered to bring back the whole body, not just the mind, and so they had slowly carried it back northwards, towards the red glow that could be seen for miles around in those bare northern lands.

  Word had been sent to Kavan, and he strode through the night to meet them, accompanied by Eleanor and Karel.

  He made the Scouts prop the body of the slave up against a low rise and then sent them out into the night to keep guard, silver blades flashing as they cut at snowflakes.

  Kavan gazed down at the slave robot. It looked back up at him without emotion.

  ‘What’s your name, robot?’ asked Kavan.

  ‘Banjo Macrodocious.’

  Kavan looked at Karel. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Eleanor says you used to deal with robots like this. Do you know him?’

  ‘That was the name of the robot I met back in Turing City,’ said Karel. He looked down at the crippled slave. ‘But that wasn’t you. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘We are all called Banjo Macrodocious,’ said the slave. ‘Our minds are all twisted in the same manner; therefore we are all the same. Why name us differently?’

  Kavan wasn’t interested. ‘What happened to the Wizard?’ he asked. ‘He never existed, did he? Just another rumour. Another story to frighten people with.’

  ‘There was a wizard a long time ago. But she was a woman. She welcomed slave robots into her tiny kingdom and used us wisely. Her kingdom prospered, and the Book of Robots was kept safe.’

  ‘The Book of Robots? Is it real?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kavan paused, thinking. He had noticed the expression on Eleanor’s face at the slave’s words.

  ‘Then where is it?’ he demanded. ‘You don’t carry it, I see.’

  ‘All slave robots carry it, at least in part.’ replied Banjo Macrodocious. ‘It is woven into our minds.’

  ‘What does the book say?’ asked Eleanor, thrilled.

  ‘It doesn’t say anything,’ said Banjo Macrodocious. ‘The Book of Robots carries the plan for the way a mind should be twisted. It contains the philosophy of a mind: the purpose. My own mind is an imperfect representation of that plan. Other minds carry other parts of that plan.’

  ‘But you’re a slave,’ interrupted Karel, outraged. ‘You don’t mean that the Book of Robots intends us all to be slaves?’

  Banjo Macrodocious focused on him. ‘You are from Turing City,’ it said. ‘You find that disturbing. Your colleagues do not.’

  ‘Nyro’s philosophy,’ commented Kavan, with some satisfaction.

  ‘I did not say that,’ said Banjo Macrodocious.

  ‘NO!’ shouted Karel at the same time. ‘I don’t believe it! You said it yourself, Banjo Macrodocious, that your mind is an imperfect representation of what is written in the book! Nyro cannot be right! A mind is more than just twisted metal!’

  Kavan and Banjo gazed at Karel, waiting for him to finish. Eleanor had turned her back on them, she gazed out at the night.

  ‘Not all minds that carry their part of the Book are slave robot minds,’ said Banjo Macrodocious. ‘Besides which, I cannot comment on what a mind is. You would need to speak to those at the top of the world.’

  Eleanor turned around at that. ‘The robots at the top of the world?’ she said. ‘You’ve met them?’

  ‘No,’ said Banjo Macrodocious. ‘But I’ve visited their places.’

  ‘What places?’ she asked, eagerly.

  ‘There are many places built by the robots at the top of the world. We are not far here from the Northern Road. It joins to the road that runs along the seabed from the top of the world to Shull. They say there are many roads across the seabed and that the whales follow them. They say that there is a glass building that stands somewhere below the surface, so deep that the light of the sun cannot reach it, or illuminate the glass statues of the strange robots that stand within . . .’

  ‘Never mind what they say. What places have you visited?’ demanded Eleanor.

  ‘The road from the top of the world emerges on the northern coast of Shull. There are buildings there, erected by those who came down that road.’

  ‘What’s inside the buildings?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was not ordered to enter.’

  ‘But weren’t you interested?’ shouted Karel in frustration. ‘Didn’t you care? Didn’t you want to know?’

  Banjo Macrodocious turned his head to face him. ‘I wasn’t ordered to be interested,’ he replied.

  ‘Enough of this,’ commanded Kavan. ‘We are at the end of a battle. What happens now to the Northern Kingdom?’

  ‘It will fall,’ said Banjo Macrodocious. ‘We will then walk across the land and we will find a place where we can prosper once more. The Book of Robots will be preserved.’

  Kavan was silent.

  ‘There will be a place for you within Artemis,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘That’s not your decision to make, Eleanor,’ said Kavan.

  And now Eleanor turned to him, wearing that familiar expression of contempt.

  ‘You’ve conquered Shull,’ she said. ‘What’s Spoole going to do about you now? Are you going to let him send you on across the whole of Penrose? Or are you finally going to march on Artemis City?’

  ‘With what troops?’ asked Kavan. He turned to Karel. ‘Turing City is no more. What would you have me do now?’ He jerked a finger at Banjo Macrodocious. ‘You heard what he said; do you still think that Artemis is wrong?’

  ‘Yes! A mind is more than just twisted metal!’

  ‘But why do you think that? Only because that is what your mother wove you to believe. When Nyro’s philosophy is woven into every mind on this planet, then what difference will your feelings make?’

  Karel tried to frame an answer. Kavan turned to Eleanor.

  ‘You ask which way do we march next, Eleanor? I don’t know. But I think that decision cannot be made yet. Because I have crossed the extent of Shull, from the south to the north, and it is only here that I have met robots that truly believed in anything other than just themselves.’

  The wind was dropping. The sky was clearing, just a little. A few stars shone above, glimmering amongst the falling snowflakes.

  ‘We will visit the buildings to the north of here. Just the three of us – you, me and Karel. We will see what we find there. And then we shall decide where we are to march next. North, or south.’

  Maoco O

  Maoco O emerged from a pile of gangue into what had been Turing City, his reflexes immediately dropping him to the ground for cover.

  Everything had gone now. There was nothing left but rock and sky.

  He knew the scenario, he had been trained in Arte-misian tactics for reclaiming a city.

  The buildings that housed the foundries that used to line this road would have been taken a
part brick by brick; their metal frames unbolted and fed into the forges to be melted down and formed into ingots for transportation. The huge acid tanks would have been drained, their contents sprayed on the very dust to make salts out of the scraps of metal that had fallen there, and then the tanks themselves broken apart to make even more ingots, then loaded onto trucks that ran on temporary railway lines laid into this area solely for the purpose of deconstruction. Maoco O could see the faint imprint of the sleepers in the windblown dust that covered the stony ground.

  He felt as if his gyros weren’t spinning properly. Everything looked so wrong. Even the sun seemed too big, a wobbly yellowy-red presence, shimmering in a rusty sky; it gave the land a patina of death, of dissolution into crumbling rust.

  He tried to make sense of this new landscape. There was the rocky outcrop on which the fort had stood, so that must be the slope leading down to where the galleries had once been.

  And over there was the railway station. The station itself was gone, but the railway lines remained. In fact, there were more now than ever: so many lines, they flooded into the valley bottom before spreading out like a river delta. Those lines had penetrated deep into Turing City and had leached all of its metal away, leaving only stone behind. Maoco O could see that even those same railway lines were now being dismantled, loaded up into the trucks that trundled away northwards, taking all that precious remaining metal to Artemis City.

  He heard a sudden noise nearby, just around the other side of the pile of gangue from which he himself had emerged. Cautiously, he edged his way around the heap of dirty white stone. The noise came again, the clink-clank of stone slipping down upon itself.

  He dodged in and out of the bays and coves of the immense pile of gangue, working his way around to the north till his new ears gradually became aware of another sound. The sound of industry: of diesel engines roaring, of heavy machinery moving, the rumble and roar of rock being dug.

  And then he rounded another corner, and the noise was forgotten.

  A round, crab-like machine, not much bigger than his head, was squatting at the base of the gangue pile and feeding fragments of rock into its jaws, grinding it all down. Powdered stone spilt from its crude mouth, covering the ground and staining the metal shell of the machine itself. Such an ugly machine, it was roughly constructed of iron, the top of its shell an uneven mix of leftover metals. This was a cheaply made construct.