Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

  ‘Nothing. This conversation is at an end.’

  The anger that had lain long dormant inside him was surging forth, and it was all the stronger for its slumber.

  ‘Then what was all this for? You’ve brought us across the continent. You’ve destroyed my city, my life, you killed my child, and for what?’

  Kavan stared at him, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘For what?’ asked Kavan. ‘For Artemis of course.’

  Karel kicked at the half-frozen ground. A small stone skittered across the rock.

  ‘Fight me,’ he said.

  ‘Karel,’ warned Eleanor. ‘Don’t be silly . . .’

  ‘Isn’t this what you wanted? For me to kill Kavan for you?’

  ‘To kill me, Eleanor?’ said Kavan. ‘Don’t you think you can do it yourself?’

  ‘You know I can’t.’

  Karel didn’t care about any of this. ‘Fight me,’ he repeated. ‘Come on. Turing City versus Artemis. We both wear the same bodies, we both believe we’re right. This is about nothing more than our philosophy. This is where we find out which is the stronger.’

  Kavan was gazing at Eleanor still. She spoke first. ‘Karel, you’re being ridiculous.’ She drew back further, her gun aimed at the ground. ‘Kavan has worn that body for years. He’s a soldier. You won’t stand a chance.’

  ‘I don’t care. He killed my son.’

  Kavan was growing impatient. ‘This has gone on long enough, Eleanor. Kill him. Or, if you think you can do it, kill me. I’m unarmed. Or if you still consider yourself an Artemisian, follow me.’

  At that, Kavan turned and began to walk away southwards.

  Eleanor raised her rifle, pointing it first at Kavan, and then at Karel.

  ‘You coward!’ shouted Karel at the retreating robot’s back. ‘Why won’t you fight me?’ His voice was thick with static.

  ‘Apologize to him,’ said Eleanor, desperately.

  ‘Apologize?’ said Karel. ‘For what?’

  Kavan had stopped. He turned, impatient.

  ‘Why do you still waste time? Kill him.’

  Eleanor looked down at the rifle she held in her hands like it was the first time she had really noticed it. Dark metal, shining with oil. She had carried it for so long. Now it was as if she was really thinking about what it was for.

  ‘I . . . I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t kill him.’

  ‘Then give me the rifle and let me do it,’ said Kavan.

  The rifle moved ever so slightly in his direction.

  ‘I can’t do that either, Kavan. He’s my brother. It is woven into my mind to protect him.’

  Kavan looked from her to Karel.

  ‘Well, that explains something. I wondered why she insisted you accompany her here.’ He looked impatient now. ‘Time presses on. We shall leave him here. Will your mind allow you to do that?’

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘Come on, then.’

  He turned and resumed his walk south. After a moment’s hesitation, Eleanor followed him.

  Karel watched them go. And then the anger arose in his mind for the last time.

  He charged after Kavan, feet pounding on the half-frozen ground, spraying flashing jewels of shining snowmelt. Kavan still had his back to him. He let out an electronic roar of hate and flung himself forward. The other robot turned, grabbed his hand, and, seemingly without effort, pulled so that Karel tumbled forward, head over heels, landing on the stony ground with a crash that rattled through his body.

  Karel pushed himself up, his right leg bent out of shape. There was the sound of gunshot, and he turned to see Kavan had kicked at the barrel of Eleanor’s rifle, bending it.

  ‘Are you with me or against me, Eleanor?’ called Kavan.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Eleanor looked down at the broken rifle in her hands. She ran a hand along it, feeling the twist in the metal. ‘I’m lost, Kavan.’

  ‘Then find yourself,’ said Kavan, and at that he turned and lashed out at Karel.

  Karel jumped back, found himself crouching, steadying himself, raising his hands at the ready. Kavan’s expression was cold, empty of heat. The Artemisian feinted with his left hand and then he kicked out, landing a blow right on Karel’s damaged knee. It gave way, and his body fell forward into the path of Kavan’s follow-up punch, aimed right at the back of the neck, right at the spot where the coil was attached to the body. Karel’s hand lashed back, smashing into Kavan’s wrist, Karel kicked back at Kavan’s knee. Kavan rolled forward, body crashing on the stony ground in harsh percussion.

  Karel drew back, the current surging through his electromuscle. He was astonished at what he had just done.

  Kavan rose up, gazing at him with new respect.

  ‘So fast, Turing City. If only the rest of your state had shown such spirit. Or was it your state? Who are you really, Kavan? What is there woven into your mind?’

  Karel looked at Eleanor. Eleanor who had flourished in Artemis. Eleanor who wasn’t helping him, but who wasn’t helping Kavan either. Eleanor, the woman who had killed his child. Eleanor, his sister.

  Just what was woven into his own mind? Certainly he never realized he could move so fast. Maybe the potential had always been there, it just needed the right circumstances to unlock it.

  ‘Turing City is gone, Karel,’ said Kavan. ‘I don’t think you were ever part of it. Look at Eleanor. She’s so much an Artemisian that she can’t kill me. Is that the answer, Karel? Did your mother make you an Artemisian after all?’

  ‘I’m not what you are, Kavan.’

  ‘Are you sure of that? Stop the fight now. Turn around and walk away. I wish to rejoin my army as quickly as possible. We march on Artemis itself. For the moment, I have no quarrel with you.’

  ‘Fight me!’

  ‘You’re not fighting me, Karel. You’re fighting yourself. You’re trying to prove to yourself that you are different to me. But it’s not true, is it? Look at your sister.’

  Why is he talking to me? The thought came to Karel at the same time as Kavan thrust forward a hand, and Karel’s body surged with the shriek of feedback that screeched through his body. He couldn’t feel anything below his waist, just a wall of agony, a break in the circuit. He was dimly aware of Eleanor shouting, somewhere in the distance.

  ‘No, Kavan, pull it out of him!’

  Kavan had stabbed him with a knife. Shorted out a circuit. Where? Karel didn’t know this new body. He had hardly had any time to repair it since Eleanor had plugged his mind into it, let alone to examine it in detail. And yet Kavan had worn bodies such as this nearly all his life. He knew all their vulnerabilities. The fizzing charge of electricity was rising within his body now. He needed to pull out the blade, and yet he couldn’t. He had felt the crack as Kavan had bent the knife, breaking off the handle, leaving the knife-edge lodged in his body.

  Feebly he tugged at the stomach panelling on his body, trying to pull it free, trying to get at the knife lodged in his body. Where was Kavan? Why hadn’t he attacked yet?

  To the side, he was dimly aware of Eleanor struggling with Kavan, keeping him away, preventing him from striking the final blow.

  Finally, the stomach panelling came loose. Karel tossed it to clatter across the rock. Moving his arms now felt as if he was thrusting them into the crackling current. Fighting through the pain, he fumbled at the broken knife blade.

  He heard a clatter, a fall. Eleanor lay slumped on the ground, the metal at the back of her neck torn open. And Kavan was running towards him again.

  Karel pulled the blade clear. Instantly the pain ceased, but something was wrong. He could no longer feel anything below his waist. Kavan had shorted out his legs completely.

  He scrambled with his hands on the rock, seeking escape, realized it was pointless, turned to face Kavan, saw the foot lash out. Karel caught it, twisted it, hurled Kavan to the ground.

  How did I do that? Where is that coming from?

  Kavan rose to his feet. He gazed at Karel thoughtfully.
<
br />   ‘So fast, Karel. We could fight all day.’ Karel began to pull himself forward, his legs dragging uselessly behind him. ‘But what would the point in that be?’

  And at that he turned and began to walk away.

  ‘Hey,’ called Karel. ‘Come back. This isn’t over!’

  Kavan said nothing, just continued walking, heading south, back to his army. What was left of it anyway.

  Karel watched him go, watched his grey body disappear over the crest of dark hill, dark rocks soaked in melting snow. He didn’t care. Kavan really didn’t care. He really did regard Karel as nothing more than metal.

  He heard a faint cry nearby. Eleanor.

  Painfully, he dragged himself across the rock towards her.

  Her grey body lay slumped on the ground. He examined the back of the neck, saw how Kavan had crushed the coil there. Crippled her. And there was something else. The black shape of an awl, thrust deep into her mind.

  Carefully, he turned her head towards him. There was still light in her eyes.

  ‘Karel,’ she said, static lacing her words.

  ‘How badly are you hurt?’ he asked.

  ‘Can’t feel anything really. I can see and hear and speak. But things are fading. The circuits are discharging too fast. I’m dying.’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘He’ll send someone back to reclaim our metal. He knows you can’t get far like that.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m dying, Karel. Current leaking away.’ Her voice-box let out a low buzzing noise. It resolved into a voice again.

  ‘Karel, take my legs.’

  Karel looked down at her body. It was in better shape than his own.

  ‘Good idea. I’ll take your mind, too. I can carry it with me.’

  ‘No point. I told you. Lifeforce draining away.’ She let out an electronic burble. Karel was already at work on Eleanor’s legs, disassembling the hip joint.

  ‘Eleanor,’ he began, ‘He was right, wasn’t he? We’re Artemisians, aren’t we? That was how Liza made us.’

  Eleanor let out a bubbling laugh.

  ‘You know that’s not true, Karel. Not Artemisians.’

  Karel felt a wave of relief.

  ‘But not Turing Citizens either. Liza had a gun held to her head. She was made to choose how our minds would be woven, Artemis or Turing City. Imagine what passed through her own mind then. Hate, rage, despair. What was the right choice to make?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Nor did she, Karel. And there was so little wire for her left to twist . . . What could she put into our minds with that wire? What choice could she make? She put in anger, Karel. Anger at the world.’

  ‘Anger?’

  ‘Anger. More so in you than in me, Karel. All that anger she felt for that robot who was raping her, all that anger was woven into your mind. Because she knew that anger can be so powerful, it means you don’t accept the world as it is, you try and change it. What you have in your mind is something so unusual. Something that few other robots have. You have the ability to choose. You can look at the way the world is and then choose which philosophy you follow.’

  And at that point, Karel knew it was true. He wasn’t just the mind that his mother had made him. He could choose his own mind . . .

  ‘You’re special, Karel. Many people know it . . .’

  ‘If I’m special, then you must be too, Eleanor.’

  ‘I was,’ she replied.

  And at that the light faded from her eyes.

  ‘Eleanor?’ he said. He gazed at the black awl, lodged in her head, unsure at what he thought. This was the woman who had killed his child. This was his sister.

  He stared at her for some time, trying to figure out what he felt.

  Eventually, Karel got to his feet. He turned his back on Eleanor and looked out to the north, to the brightening day, looked at the white foam that decorated the iron-grey waves like badly applied solder.

  He felt angry, confused, dizzy. His gyros were spinning way too fast, and he sought to slow them. Turing City, Axel’s death, the loss of Susan, his mind placed in a train, and now this . . .

  It was the sudden change. You built up a picture of the world, you slotted everything into place, made sense of everything that you knew, built up a view that fitted all the facts, and then something came along that destroyed it all.

  Karel had carried an idea of himself around all of his life, an idea of who he was that had been inviolate, untouched, unseen by anyone else. And then Eleanor had come along and had shattered it.

  What should he do now?

  His whole body shook. He felt as if it were disintegrating as he stood there, as if it were turning to rust and just flaking away.

  Does anybody else feel this? he wondered. Do we all feel like this? Do we all walk through a world building pictures of what is normal, not realizing that at any minute the foundations of our world might be revealed to be false, that they will crumble away, and everything will collapse around us?

  Or are some people lucky enough never to see it? Is the obvious falsehood so big that they never notice it, hanging there right in front of their face?

  He looked up into the sky; the clouds were clearing. He could just see the night moon, setting for the day. A great orb, perfectly spherical: 7 x 1022 tons of metal, orbiting the world of Penrose. Such a natural sight.

  At least there were no surprises to be had there.

  What was he to do now?

  The answer, when it came, was so simple that he almost laughed. He grasped at it gratefully, the only certainty in this shifting world.

  He had come to the uttermost north of Shull. All of his past lay to the south. Everyone he knew was to the south. Susan, if she still lived, was somewhere to the south.

  For the moment, at least, there was only one way to go.

  The light of the sun reflected off Zuse’s polished surface as he turned his back on the sea and began to walk.

  Epilogue: Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah

  The turboprop of Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah’s craft spun so quickly it sent ultrafrequency vibrations humming through his frame. The twisted metal of his mind vibrated, his thoughts seeming to come from a little farther away. The pinging that now echoed inside his skull was irritating. It took him a while to realize that it came from the radio.

  He clicked the send button. ‘Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah.’

  ‘Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah! Turn immediately on heading oh four oh two.’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  The wide blue sea tilted as Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah banked the plane, eyes fixed on the navigation device before him. The radio controller had sounded excited, and Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah wondered why, but manners and discipline prevented him from asking.

  He clicked the send button again. ‘Assumed the heading. Awaiting orders.’

  ‘Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah, we want you to check if the radar is malfunctioning. It indicates something approaching you from behind.’

  I can’t see it if it’s behind me, thought Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah.

  ‘It’s travelling at four times the speed of sound,’ added the controller. ‘It should be passing you anytime now.’

  Four times the speed of sound? But breaking the sound barrier was supposed to be impossible! Any craft attempting to do so would shake itself apart in the attempt! Obviously the radar was malfunctioning. Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah composed himself, meditated on iron and water.

  And then his craft was shaken by a huge boom. A shadow passed over him, moving at such speed, and then he saw it . . .

  ‘Control!’ he called, ‘I see it. An . . . aircraft!’

  And what an aircraft. Clad in a silver skin, it was much, much larger than Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah’s craft. Several hundred yards long at least, and painted with such odd symbols.

  ‘Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah, report! What can you see?’

  ‘I don’t know! It looks like a . . . ship! A ship of the ocean, but flying through the sky! It’s so high up, but it’s descending. Where has i
t come from?’

  There came no reply. The silver ship was rapidly receding into the distance. Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah gazed at it with enhanced eyes. Was it decelerating? he wondered.

  ‘It seems to be changing course. Control, I ask again: where has it come from?’

  The carrier wave of the radio clicked on. Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah could just hear the controller engaged in muffled conversation with someone else. Then the voice came to the fore.

  ‘We . . . we don’t know for sure. We think, we don’t know, but we think, we think it has come from above the atmosphere. From out in space!’

  Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah opened the throttle of his own craft and he heard the rising note of the turboprop as he sought to chase the rapidly diminishing silver speck. It was flying in the direction of Shull, he thought. Was it one of their own craft? No, it couldn’t be! Shull was a backward continent. They had little knowledge of flying craft; they could not build something like this. Was it true then that it had come from space?

  The distant speck was changing direction. It seemed to be curving around, back towards Yukawa.

  Control came back on the radio. ‘Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah, the craft is changing direction.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah,’ the controller’s voice was low and hollow with emotion, ‘the craft has spoken to us, using the radio. It is coming to Yukawa. It is coming to us, Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah!’

  ‘Controller, control yourself!’

  ‘They say they have come from the stars! You are to escort them to Huru base!’

  The silver speck was growing.

  ‘Controller, they are so big! They could knock me from the sky!’

  ‘They say that they can see you, small though you are. They say they can see all of our aircraft with their ship’s senses!’

  ‘Controller, what are they?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  The ship was getting large enough for Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah to make out its shape, to see its smooth lines. It seemed to be built entirely of metal. He looked for its propulsion system, but saw nothing. There were no propellers, nothing to indicate how it moved.

  Closer and closer the ship came, and then suddenly it swung around in a wide loop.

  ‘Cha-Lo-Ell-Curriah, did we not ask you to set a course for Huru base?’