Running - The Alien in the Mirror

by Lazlo Ferran

  Rather than take the fraction of a second required to swap cartridges, the corporal opted to discharge its own power directly into the butt of the laser, giving him just one more shot.

  Ishmael got lucky. He had spun after picking up the laser, purely acting on something most people would call instinct. He came out of the turn on his back, pointing his laser barrel at the neck of the grunt, who had begun to recharge his laser. This took half a second and in that time, Ishmael forced himself to focus and fire one, steady beam into the vulnerable neck of the grunt, just below his helmet.

  The heat from the long shot bore into the grunt’s neck. He had been programmed not to suffer from pain but his sensors told him the intensity of the shot would almost certainly disable him. He growled, as he had been taught as a novice grunt to do when cornered by an enemy, and raised his recharged laser for a shot. But the barrel never lined up with its target. In an instant, some of the android soldier’s major circuits burned through and he lost primary control of his laser arm. An instant later, his C-chip shorted and his useless body slumped across the rails. Somewhere behind Ishmael, another grunt’s flash turned red and he took command.

  “Come on!” Ishmael yelled, pulling aside the grunt’s body to let Number Fourteen past. He sprinted to the intersection, checked to both sides and ran across to the continuation of their tunnel, opposite. “I presume it’s this way?” he yelled back.

  “Affirmative,” Number Fourteen responded, trundling across the complex points in the rails at the intersection.

  “How far now to Clonecity?”

  “Six hundred metres.”

  “Good, and how far to the nearest soldiers?”

  “Two hundred and fifty metres.”

  “Ahead of us?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Can you just say, “Yes,” instead of affirmative? It takes too long.”

  “Yes.”

  “I need charge,” Ishmael announced. “But there’s no time. I will use reserve. How do I charge the laser?”

  “Place the base of the butt in Socket 18,” the bot replied.

  “Good. Now is there another way? I don’t want to meet more soldiers.”

  “Yes. Turn left in ten metres.”

  Some steps interrupted the alleyway after just twenty metres. The Bot used its set of three wheels around each axle-end to negotiate the steps and trundled on to a wall at the end.

  “Where now?”

  “Up.”

  Ishmael looked at his limp arm and up at a long ladder, dubiously. But the Bot inserted a key into a tiny slot in a panel and an electrical whirring could be heard. Moments later, a Janitor Bot-sized platform descended on four cables and stopped in front of them. Number Fourteen rolled onto the platform and Ishmael clung to the side. The Bot withdrew the key and the platform rose at great speed.

  As they rose, they passed outlets which blasted hot air into Ishmael’s face. The platform stopped and the Bot rolled onto a bridge over a circular opening, about fifty metres across. Thin rubber strips, between the flanges on the Bot’s wheels, three around the end of each of its two axles, had expanded to form rubber tyres. Ishmael followed but the blast of hot air from below almost made him lose his balance. He had to crawl behind the Bot, on the narrow bridge.

  On the other side, the Bot rolled into a narrow pipe and Ishmael had to grab hold of the grab rail and let himself be again dragged along.

  “I will have no skin left soon!” he yelled, as parts of him were ripped off by sharp edges in the pipe.

  Suddenly, there were huge gaps in the floor of the pipe and Ishmael’s leg caught in the jagged biometal, or biomet of the broken pipe. He pulled it loose so that the Bot could continue and then saw, far below him, a mass of soldiers deploying. He tried to focus his mind and thought he could hear a lot of network chatter but couldn’t pick anything out in particular. The Bot stopped.

  “We have to go down,” it announced.

  Ishmael stood and climbed aboard another platform, which took them down two levels. The Bot moved off, northward but stopped at an intersection soon after.

  “Clonecity is straight ahead. I can take you no closer because it is not safe for Janitors.”

  “Alright. Straight ahead?”

  Ishmael picked up the laser and saw the green light. He walked over the intersecting tunnel and red alert lights began to flash in the tunnel in front of him.

  “Warning. Danger of clone attacks!” blared from loudspeakers.

  He turned to the Bot:

  “Hey. Thanks for the laser and thanks for the help, Number Fourteen. I hope they don’t Terminate you. Good bye!”

  “Good bye.”

  ***

  Way Out

  Ishmael walked into the tunnel, now completely bathed in red light from the alerts. The speakers continued to warm him of clones as he reached an obstruction in the tunnel.

  Yellow tape had been wrapped around rusty scaffolding, which stretched to the roof. A sign, painted in red, told him that; Only Military Access Permitted.

  He bent under the tape and clambered through gaps in the scaffolding. He had to scramble for quite a distance before the scaffolding ended and he could walk on the tunnel floor again. The tunnel turned sharply to the right and converged with three more from the south. They merged to form one, long tunnel with steps. Ishmael began to climb. Several times, he heard steps echoing in the tunnel behind him and had to quicken his pace. After almost thirty minutes, the tunnel terminated in a hatch, set into a bulkhead. He shot off the simple lock and climbed through the hatch, into a round, sloping tunnel with smooth sides. Air roared past him and the tunnel seemed to narrow ahead but he had to keep moving.

  Every ten or so metres, a security cam swung to follow Ishmael’s progress. Soon the pipe became so steep that he had to crawl and then he saw a set of vanes at the end. He dragged himself to the circular frame around the vanes and peered between them. A few feet further on, he could make out a large fan, which turned so fast that, like an aircraft propeller, it allowed him to see right through to more scaffolding.

  His spirit sunk.

  “This can’t be the way!” he yelled in frustration.

  “Hey you! Can you hear me!” he heard from the scaffolding beyond. Ishmael activated his speech to reply:

  “Yes. I hear you! Are you a clone?”

  “Can you stop the fan?”

  The voice sounded desperate so Ishmael looked for any kind of control. He found one, a lever, sticking out of a black box with the label; Emergency Stop.

  “Stop!” announced a mechanical voice behind him. “Citizen C199989, we know you are in there. Come out with your hands empty and no harm will come to you. We only want to talk to you.”

  Ishmael briefly wondered who lied, the soldier or the President, or perhaps neither, but he reached up, pulled down the lever and crawled through the vanes.

  The razor sharp fan blades slowed until he could count them; five. There would be enough space to crawl between when they were stopped. He didn’t want to risk his remaining skin by crawling too fast. With his nose a few centimetres from the blade path, he waited until they stopped. The tension almost made something inside his head snap. He found himself thinking in overdrive about what might happen to him in the next few seconds.

  “It’s stopped. Shoot out the hub with your laser,” the voice said.

  Ishmael saw a young, dark-haired clone balanced on scaffolding.

  “Why?” he replied.

  “Don’t argue! No time. Just do it!”

  Ishmael, pointed the laser at the fan’s axle-housing and let go a short burst. Part of housing melted and drops of hot metal fell to the tunnel floor.

  “Now!” shouted the voice though the blades. “Jump now!”

  Ishmael got to his knees and dived through the blades, just as a laser beam sliced through the air above his head. He landed awkwardly because the pipe widened suddenly on the other side, creating as steep slope, down which he fell, on his back. He hu
ng on to the laser and noticed that the fan blades had been badly chipped by something on the clone-side. He also saw a makeshift armoured construction, which covered the hub of the fan.

  He slid to a halt and saw a face, upside down, peering down at him. He turned over and his hand touched something soft; the sleeve of a clone corpse. Beyond it, another lay, half-decayed. Their smell and appearance horrified Ishmael and he pulled away.

  “Move. Get up here!” the face of a clone girl yelled.

  Ishmael twisted round and leaped for the lower girder of the scaffolding.

  “I can’t believe you made it!” yelled the girl, after helping Ishmael behind the cover of a thick biomet sheet. “The laserguns should have taken you out!”

  “What guns?”

  “Does the laser work?”

  “Yes.”

  The girl grabbed it. “Watch this.” She poked her head round the side of the biomet sheet, which seemed to have been placed there as armoured protection, and aimed at the fan. She fired a burst of less than a second before quickly pulling her arm back. From two armoured cupolas, placed a few metres above the fan duct, a hail of white hot laser automatic fire rained down on the biomet sheet and girders of the scaffolding around them. It stopped after a few seconds, followed by more accurate fire from the first soldiers to poke their heads out of the fan duct.

  “Don’t worry,” said the girl. “It’s only designed to stun. Androids, or Citizens as you call them, don’t like to hurt us. But you’ll be out for an hour!”

  “But the bodies down there?”

  “Yeah. Technically, they don’t hurt us but some fall off when they get stunned. We better get out of here.”

  Ishmael followed, thinking:

  I couldn’t agree more!

  ***

  After creeping some way back on a maze of duckboards within the scaffolding, each step of the way protected by assorted sheets of biomet, the girl handed Ishmael back his laser and stood up.

  “We’re safe now. My name is Serendipity, Serendipity Frankis. But everyone calls me Chancy or Chance. You can call me Chance. You’re an android, aren’t you?”

  “I am a Citizen.”

  “Whatever … . You need help, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I can’t go back.”

  “Cool. It’s cool man but I am so in trouble with my pop.”

  “Pop?”

  “My dad. He’s the leader and he ain’t gonna like this!”

  “Why are you speaking? I thought clones could telepath like we can.”

  “Some of us still can but we have to make eye contact first, to share codes. But Supercity Intelligence can read the traffic so it’s not safe.”

  “Oh.”

  “We don’t think they can read thoughts but who knows?”

  Ishmael noticed the scaffolding opening out and more light filtering in; a pale light unlike that in Supercity. Chance stopped at a railing and Ishmael caught up with her. He saw a view, which astonished him. They were somewhere near the top of a virtual city of scaffolding. Ahead of him lay a vast cavern, stretching perhaps twenty miles northwards, three wide and a mile high. Small, fenced off areas could be seen, which contained some livestock. A few dwellings were dotted about but it mostly looked desolate; no colour or vegetation. It looked nothing like the pictures and recordings of lush green forest and plush dwellings that Ishmael’s clone recordings contained. The roof, consisting of huge, transparent panels, hung about three quarters of a mile above them. Through it, Ishmael could just make out a bright patch of light to the west in a red sky. He noted with satisfaction that the clones all had similar features to him, except for much smaller hands and feet; just as the history books portrayed.

  ***

  “Are we underground?” Ishmael asked.

  “Sure. Just like Supercity,” Chance replied.

  “No. That is on the surface. But this is … ” Ishmael searched for the right word but couldn’t find it. “Disappointing,” he added.

  “Yeah. You could call it that. Come on, I have to take you to my dad. Be nice to him. Otherwise you might be disassembled!”

  Chance led Ishmael down a long series of ladders. It quickly became clear to Ishmael that the ‘scaffolding,’ as he had thought it, actually consisted of a conglomeration of building parts and that, for some reason, the clones must have taken apart their dwellings and used them to build the bizarre construction. As they descended, crowds of onlookers began go gawp or follow them.

  Finally, proper flights of steps replaced the ladders and the two could walk at leisure down to ground level. Even so, Ishmael’s reserve’s had almost failed by then.

  “I need charge. Do you have any charge bars or anything like that?”

  “You mean; you need recharging?”

  “Well, that sounds very mechanical when you put it like that!”

  “You certainly are strange for an Android. I never met one but I have been told they are very emotionless. You seem anything but! I will ask my dad. Here he is.”

  “Chance!” a tall man, dressed in silver and with a tight mop of black hair, like his daughter, exclaimed. “How many times have I told you not to go to the fan alone!” Ishmael noted that the man had sideburns, rare because very few clones still had any body hair.

  ‘Vanity,’ thought Ishmael. ‘I have heard of it.’

  “But dad, you said time is running out, now the lights are on! And he jammed the fan!”

  “You could have died! Did you say he jammed the fan? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Shot it out. They won’t start it again for at least a few days!”

  “Hm. That’s interesting.” But the tall man’s eyes were fixed on Ishmael. “What have you brought me? Somebody take the laser.” A man, heavily armoured himself, and carrying a crude weapon with the barrel, took away Ishmael’s laser and handed it to the tall man.

  “Dad, this is … . Oh, I didn’t ask your name?”

  “Ishmael,” Ishmael replied.

  “Ishmael,” Chance continued. “This is my dad, Jonr. Dad, this is Ishmael!”

  “An android! But a battered one and I am wondering why.”

  “Dad. The droid needs power. He’s almost out.”

  “Hm. That will be tricky. We haven’t had a visitor from the City for nearly a thousand years.”

  “I remember it on the news,” Ishmael exclaimed. “The food delivery machinery failed and teams of Medics had to bring it in by hand. The clones Terminated one.”

  “Yes. That is pretty much as our records show,” Jonr replied. “Then you must be a C-type?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Ishmael replied. “I am a Citizen.”

  “Come on, let’s find my chief mechanic. He might have something.”

  An oily-faced man with red hair and a livid scar on his cheek clambered out from underneath a broken generator, once Jonr had led Ishmael into a ramshackle workshop.

  “Kris, guess what we have?”

  “I can see it but I don’t believe it!” Kris cried. “A … Citizen!”

  “Yeah! And a friendly one too. He’s escaped.”

  Kris’s eyes turned to the laser and his eyes bulged:

  “The very latest laser?” he half-asked Ishmael.

  “Yes. I think so; Supercity Army’s.”

  “How the hell did you get that?” Kris asked.

  “Hell? Oh, I see; religion. We don’t have religion. I just killed him and took it.”

  “Ha!” Jonr chuckled. “I like you already. Kris, the … Citizen needs charging.”

  “Okay. 4000 volts? I have an old adaptor somewhere.”

  Kris led Ishmael through a series of dimly lit streets, really just spaces between ramshackle lean-tos, until they came to another shed, built against the stone wall of Supercity itself. Kris turned a key in an old-fashioned padlock and opened the door. He pointed to a red outlet plug and said:

  “There you go.”

  “I … this is very crude. I don’t want anybody to watch.”

&n
bsp; “Okay,” Jonr said. “How long will it take?”

  “Just ten minutes will do.”

  “We’ll wait outside.”

  The door closed and Ishmael placed his mouth gingerly over the red socket adaptor. Instantly, he felt the hot surge of 4000 volts. The charge made him feel good but he also felt ashamed at his position. He hoped nobody would open the door. After ten minutes, he re-emerged.

  “What did Chance mean,” Ishmael began, “when he said; Time is running out, now the lights are on? I have been thinking about it.”

  “You will find out soon enough,” Jonr replied. “But right now, we have to act fast. If the fan is jammed, as Chance tells me, we may only have a few hours. I will call together all the leaders as soon as possible. Ishmael, stay with Chance and don’t go far. I will need you. Do you mind if I keep the laser for now?”

  “No. I don’t like weapons.”

  “Hm. There really is something different about you; more like a human than an Andro-… I mean, Citizen.”

  “Humans are a mythical race from Earth. They never existed!” Ishmael declared.

  The others laughed.

  “You will find out the truth of that too, soon,” Jonr added. “Once we take you to the Tri-mex building.”

  ***

  “Why do you call us clones?” Chance asked, as soon as they were away from the adults. “We are real humans and we built the robots!”

  “But that is nonsense. It’s just something that your forefathers wrote down in a book; the Third Testament. It is … not really true. Although, I do value religion. Clones need it for survival and they best understand the flora and fauna of Earth. We believe in Conservation!”

  “Oh yeah? Look how we live? It’s an existence but no chance to evolve. That’s not Conservation!”

  “Where are your crops and livestock?”

  “That was on Earth, millions of years go. Earth is a long way from here!”

  “You mean Earthone. Yes, it is a long way. But our books show you with crops and livestock, vegetation; trees … .”

  “No trees here and very little vegetation. Somebody lied to you!”

  “Nobody in Supercity lies. Citizen’s cannot lie.”