Running - The Alien in the Mirror

by Lazlo Ferran

  Ishmael wondered how he had survived the RB. He also felt very angry that Reality Breakdowns existed. He remembered who he had been a few moments before and knew that he wasn’t quite the same Citizen now. This made him even angrier.

  “I’m not even sure I am a Citizen anymore!” he told himself. “What am I?”

  The crackling of electricity and two points of light in the distance interrupted his thoughts. He watched and waited. Within a few minutes, a squat machine ran down the tracks from his right and stopped when it encountered the obstruction of Ishmael’s legs.

  ‘A Janitor Robot!’ Ishmael said to himself. ‘I thought they were extinct!’

  Ishmael realised the Bot would need power and so he withdrew his legs to let the Bot pass and lead him to its source. The Bot scanned the tunnel as it went, occasionally stopping to weld closed a crack in a casing or remake a broken connection with two of its four extending arms. From the display on the Bot’s top. Ishmael quickly realised that the Bot headed towards known faults, indicated by tunnel shaft-prop numbers, but that it also fixed any other fault it found.

  They reached an intersection and the Bot stopped. A thick cable extended from its main body and inserted its jack into a socket on the wall. The Bot’s readout indicated; Charging: 10%.

  When the percentage reached 100%, the Bot withdrew the jack and moved on. Ishmael felt nothing short of revulsion as he leaned forward and placed his mouth around the jack. 4000 A/C volts of lovely, raw power surged into his neck. Visions of clones eating raw vegetable matter and meat leaped into his mind. His revulsion at their eating surpassed even that of his own desperate act.

  I wonder how clones can stand it. Such a disgusting imitation of true replenishment.

  The Janitor Bot had almost left his sight before he felt fully replenished. He had to hurry to catch up.

  ***

  The maintenance duct proved drier and more spacious than the sewer and, though Ishmael still had to stoop to walk, he soon felt well enough to consider his next move. As he walked behind the Bot, the awful truth of his situation dawned on him. He had to leave Supercity. But he knew of nowhere else except … Clonecity. The thought appalled him but he had no choice. But how to find it. Clonecity had an almost mythical status in his mind. He had never met anybody who had actually seen it, although everyone had seen pictures of it in books and knew what life must be like there; endless expanses of disgusting grass and prairies containing animals! Really! It made him feel ill to think about it. And now he had to find the clones; only they might be able to help him. He knew he would be terminated if caught in Supercity.

  “But where to go?”

  ***

  Above ground, Government offices went into overdrive, trying to decide what to do about the absent Citizen, Ishmael Bodd, better known to them as C199989. No Citizen had broken the law for nearly 20,000 years. The systems for dealing with such incidents were no longer understood or functioning properly. Even the legal case against C199989 took time to correctly ascertain; for lying to a Policeman, C199989 would have to be reprogrammed and that would include a new Personality chip or P-chip. He would, in effect, no longer exist. This did not explain his continual attempts to evade the authorities, however.

  “Go into the sewers, open up the maintenance tunnels, watch the space port, and the clones!” President Armande One ordered. “But keep it from the Citizens.”

  Recriminations followed and heads of offices were dismissed. The recent increase in incidences of RBs had been known about and, therefore, the incident should have been anticipated. Meanwhile, every Policesuperintendent, or PoliceSupers, armed versions of policemen held in storage for more than a millennium, were reactivated and sent to hunt down C199989 along with a company from Supercity Army.

  ***

  “What is your assignment?” the Janitor Bot suddenly asked.

  “What? You can speak. What did you ask?”

  “I can receive voice input and issue guidance. You asked where you should go,” the Bot replied.

  “Yes. I did. Can you take me to the clones?”

  The Bot remained silent, but an icon on the monitor showed it to be processing information. It replied:

  “Negative. Clones are quarantined.”

  “Oh. Yes. Well, can you take me near to Clonecity?”

  “Affirmative. I will arrive at your requested location in two days. Follow me.”

  “Great! Is it very far then?”

  “Twenty six point two miles.”

  “Can’t we go straight there?”

  “I cannot deviate from my primary function.”

  Ishmael considered tampering with the robot but decided his luck had been too good to try it further.

  “Oh.”

  After more than twenty-four hours of trudging through Supercity’s bowels, Ishmael and the bot reached much larger tunnels and an intersection, whose roof hung three floors above. Long vertical tubes and ducts met horizontal ones and tracks on the floor guide the occasional maintenance vehicle through complex points. Lights blinked everywhere and the Bot seemed disorientated.

  Ishmael looked at the red number fourteen on the Bot’s top and almost felt affection for it:

  “Where next, Number Fourteen?” he asked.

  “Location 42988.12.”

  “Oh.”

  A large vehicle came into view from one of the large tunnels and juddered to a halt. Out leaped six armed figures, holding something in their hands. Ishmael had never seen lasers but he recognised them from pictures. The figures’ suits were black and five had a yellow flash on their shoulders, the sixth, red. Four figures fanned out into the three other large tunnels while two remained, including the one with the red flash.

  “Supercity Army,” Ishmael whispered.

  The two standing figures seemed to spot Ishmael.

  “You must follow me,” the Janitor Bot declared.

  Immediately, it retracted its two mechanical arms until they lay flush with its squat body and it rolled into a pipe, no wider than Ishmael’s shoulders, which ran under the intersection. The pipe looked too narrow for him to crawl through on his own.

  Ishmael had just enough time to grab a bracket on the rear of the Bot before the machine dragged him into the pipe, headfirst.

  The pipe snaked between machinery and when Ishmael estimated that they had crossed the intersection, it began to climb in a series of tight turns. The Bot dragged him over loose rubble and joints in the pipe which abraded Ishmael’s skin.

  They emerged into a tunnel, much like their first one, but it ended in an opening halfway up the intersection walls.

  “Citizen C199989! Do not resist arrest!” a mechanical voice bellowed from below.

  Ishmael stood up and saw the team of armed soldiers converging from the other tunnels and heard the steady clang of two metal feet, climbing up a ladder to his tunnel.

  The Bot had already set off in the opposite direction so Ishmael wasted no time following. But, to his dismay, the Bot extended its arms and commenced a repair in the tunnel.

  “Can’t you detour from your planned route? I need help!” he found himself yelling.

  “My route is planned,” the Bot replied.

  “And I guess the Civic offices will know your route?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Great. So they will be waiting for us at the next intersection, even if we escape the one following. How far to the next intersection?”

  “210 metres.”

  “He’s gaining.”

  In his heightened sense of alertness, Ishmael found his hearing reaching out to detect any sound. His sense of smell and other senses heightened too, and with them, a sense of something else; a conversation in his head:

  “Are you sure you want Number Fourteen to return to base?”

  “That is the orders from the Civic office. Just do it!”

  “I can detect the maintenance network!” Ishmael said. “Perhaps I can detect the soldiers.’” But try as he might, he cou
ld not. He stretched out his thoughts and reached for higher echelons of power. At the limit of his new capability, he detected a voice; the unmistakable one of Armande One, the President:

  “Is C199989 caught yet? Don’t forget; Terminate on Sight! Do you hear? We can’t risk any clone finding out about Project Infinity and attacking Supercity; that is why we built the Army in the first place.”

  “Yes president.”

  ***

  The Bot turned a bend to the left in the tunnel and Ishmael realised he had to take drastic action. He scanned the tunnel for a weapon and picked up a length of discarded pipe. Letting the Bot travel ahead, he forced himself into the recess behind one of the shaft-props; the frames which supported the tunnel.

  When the Bot had moved out of sight, Ishmael heard the steady, steely footfall of the soldier approach and then he saw the end of the laser barrel. He brought the heavy pipe down hard on the soldier’s forearms and swung it up with all the force he could manage to smash the helmeted head upward and back. The soldier let go of the laser and smashed back against the far side of the tunnel before falling forward, onto his face. Ishmael stood over him and drove the pipe into the nape of the soldier’s neck. Electric sparks arced across the damaged area and he withdrew the pipe to avoid a shock.

  “A Bot!” he declared scathingly. Another voice inside his head reprimanded him for committing murder but he ignored it. He picked up the laser and surged after the Janitor Bot.

  “I killed him Fourteen!” he exclaimed.

  The Bot continued welding a broken joint.

  Ishmael pointed the laser at a stanchion and pulled the trigger experimentally but nothing happened.

  “Damn! It’s locked in some way. Stop Fourteen, we have to talk about this. You are taking me to them, not away!”

  The Bot stopped obediently.

  “Which way is it to Clonecity?”

  “I will arrive at your destination in less than twenty-four hours.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. But which way is it. Point to it.”

  The Bot made a brief calculation and extended one of its arms to point to the right and behind them.

  “But we are going in the opposite direction! Listen, my life is in danger. You have to save my life. The First Law of Robotics states that; a robot may not injure a Citizen or, through inaction, allow a Citizen to come to harm.”

  “That is incorrect. The First Law states; a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

  “What? Human being is what the clones call themselves! Just how long ago were you programmed, you piece of junk!”

  “I have just received instructions to report your location to my Operator.”

  “You have harmed Citizens.”

  “Yes, that is true.”

  The Bot seemed to consider this, before asking:

  “Why are you travelling to Clonecity?”

  “I need their help. Wait … ” Ishmael thought fast. “I want to warm them!”

  “I must help you.”

  “Good. Take me by the most direct route to Clonecity.”

  The Bot immediately turned and rolled back down to where they had first entered the tunnel by the pipe. Instead of turning left, into the pipe, it turned right, into another maintenance tunnel, one which terminated in heavy metal doors.

  “What’s this?” Ishmael asked.

  “Elevator 1342. It is damaged.”

  While the Bot analysed data from a diagnostics probe, inserted into a panel on the elevator wall, Ishmael hovered like an expectant father, asking all sorts of questions which slowed down the Bot.

  “Wait,” the Bot said.

  “It’s alright for you to say, you’re not the one they are going to shoot when they get here!”

  The bot pressed a switch in the panel and the doors of the elevator slowly opened. Both stepped into the elevator but the Bot proceeded to remove the control panel cover in the lift, after which it inserted one of its arms into the cavity.

  “They’re coming! I can hear them. Two.”

  The pounding of metal feet grew louder until Ishmael saw two soldiers turn the corner. He pointed the laser menacingly out of the elevator doors and the soldiers retreated, out of view. Moments later, they re-emerged, one falling to his knees, the other to a prone position, before firing. Ishmael threw himself back against the side of the elevator and heard the laser charges taking hot slices out of the back of the elevator. The Bot also got a taste of hot laser on one of its panels but pressed a button and the elevator doors slid closed. An instant later, they were travelling upwards at five feet per second.

  “That was close. Are you damaged?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Sorry.”

  The Bot began to replace the panel carefully.

  “Wait!” Ishmael said.

  ***

  When the elevator stopped, the Bot exited, into a wide tunnel, which headed north.

  Ishmael stuck his hand into the open panel and ripped out some cables.

  “How long will it take to reach Clonecity now?” Ishmael asked, catching up with the Bot.

  “One hundred and nineteen minutes. The soldiers are ahead of you. They know our location and direction.”

  “Then I have to get this laser to fire. Can you hack it?”

  “Insufficient data to respond.”

  “Can you bypass the security code on this weapon?”

  “Insufficient data to respond.”

  “Fine. Let’s try. Stop!”

  The Bot stopped obediently and Ishmael searched for a way to connect the two machines.

  “Your skin is damaged. Do you need assistance?” the Bot asked.

  Ishmael looked down at his hip and saw a great flap of skin hanging off. Below it, he could see ripped flesh and something that shone.

  Strange; I didn’t feel anything.

  He poked his finger into the wound and touched something hard and metallic. Although he hadn’t seen a damaged Citizen since an Ambulance ran over a minor when he himself had been a minor, he knew that there should be bone inside his hip and bone didn’t feel metallic. He sought his memory for other incidents involving his anatomy; visits to the dentist, hospital and doctor. All of them were blanks, with any facts related to him later by his parents. It seemed as if he had somehow blacked-out during all the incidents. He couldn’t remember ever seeing an X-ray image of bones or teeth. But when he cut himself, he bled.

  I don’t want to deal with this right now.

  He returned his attention to the Bot and found a set of cables with sockets, neatly retracted. On the laser’s butt, he found a matching socket and plugged in one of the cables.

  “Good thing, some things don’t change!” he exclaimed. He jammed the laser into a recess on the Bot’s top and said, “Try and activate the laser while we keep moving.”

  The tunnel stretches as far as Ishmael could see so, while they moved along it, he watched the readout on the Bot; numbers flashed across the screen as the Bot tried combinations.

  Ishmael again became aware of voices in his head and loudest of all, he recognised that of Armande One:

  “You have C199989 surrounded? Just a few minutes? Great. Have him brought to me if possible but shoot to Terminate if he, it, whatever it is, resists.”

  Security seems less secure, the higher up you go.

  They passed a cross-tunnel and minutes later, Ishmael heard the familiar metallic sound of boots behind them.

  “Hurry Fourteen! How much longer?”

  The Bot continued to work in silence but then stopped. Ishmael could see a larger intersection ahead and then, into the opening, stepped three soldiers. They aimed their lasers directly at Ishmael’s head.

  “The code,” the Bot suddenly announced, “is … .”

  “Just open it!” Ishmael exclaimed. He looked down and a red light on the barrel of the laser turned green He reached down and wrenched the laser free.

  “Citizen C199989, do not
move,” the soldier with the red flash ordered.

  Ishmael fired and hit the soldier squarely in the head.

  “Too late,” he whispered and stepped neatly to the side of the tunnel, behind a shaft-prop, while the laser charge from the other soldier passed by him and over the Bot. The soldier’s flash immediately turned red.

  “Squad close in!” the soldier ordered.

  Intimidation. He could use the network.

  “Fourteen, tell me the locations of the soldiers.”

  “One; ahead. Four; behind. One; dysfunctional. Sixty two in transit to west-central six.”

  “Damn it! Where is west-central six?”

  “We will arrive there in approximately five minutes if we do not become dysfunctional.”

  “You mean if you don’t.” Ishmael took a deep breath.

  Now or never!

  “Let’s go!” he yelled before leaping out and charging towards the single, oncoming soldier.

  While the soldier had the advantage of specialised programming, outstanding speed and agility and excellent marksmanship, it had the disadvantage that it had been designed to shoot and stun humans, not shoot and kill Citizens, who were made largely of carbon and metal compounds. Ishmael also had the advantage that his premature Termination had become almost inevitable so he had nothing to lose.

  The two adversaries dodged behind the props and other obstructions in the decaying tunnel while closing at tremendous speed. Shot after shot missed Ishmael by millimetres while he could not seem to land many shots on the dancing soldier. Moreover, the soldier’s armour changed colour to match its background, making the grunt appear almost transparent at times. When Ishmael did land a shot, it deflected like a drop of rain.

  They had closed to just over ten metres when a shot from the soldier passed straight through Ishmael’s upper laser arm, forcing him to the drop the weapon and dive to retrieve it. The grunt didn’t anticipate this and, intending only to disable the Citizen, fired a long, careless burst at the sprawling figure’s legs. The shot missed and instead, sliced a long slit through a steel rail. Because of this long shot, and because Ishmael had not been able to get the soldier within his sights very often, the grunt’s laser ran down to zero charge first.