Zero Bomb

by M. T Hill

  Overtired from her late night, or perhaps flagging from emotional fatigue, Miranda kept this vigil until she fell asleep with her head in a growth of emerald moss, and slept there through the day’s warmest hours. She only found herself waking as the wet sound of her father’s floatercar filtered through the trees. Beyond their hamlet, there were no other habitations for miles around, and it was unlikely to be the postman, or the doctor, or the man who tried to sell them televiddy cartridges. In any event, she recognised the timbre of its motors.

  Her father moored his craft by the outhouse as suspected, but he did not step out, or turn it off. He sat for the longest time at the controls with his shoulders rolled forward. The fans whined as they cooled. The stabiliser jets hissed and squirted as they kept the craft inches from the ground.

  Miranda had a knot in her throat. She pushed herself out from beneath the bushes, swabbed down her dress, and went to the driver’s port. Her father did not see her – he was staring into the distance, though there was nothing but the outhouse wall before him. His eyes were red and his mouth hung slack. She tapped on the window; he startled and his expression shifted, grew a shade darker. He barked something at the window in such a way that minute flecks of spittle patterned the glass. Miranda stepped back. The craft drew itself down. He stepped out, set down his briefcase and folded his arms. He smelled of whisky.

  ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’ he asked. And with that he turned and marched towards the house, leaving Miranda bereft, adrift on a million-mile ocean.

  * * *

  Their dinner was a turgid and bleak affair, with each of them pushing cooling food around their plate as though waiting for the world to end. The first utterance came, in the end, from her father, who sighed solemnly and began to speak without intonation.

  ‘Four years ago my research position at the meteorological institute was defunded,’ he announced. ‘I was rendered to work for the government’s extraordinary projects bureau, where my role ever since has been to oversee the development of an N-class orbital weather platform, whose auxiliary functions afforded the capture of highly classifiable intelligence, and, at a later time, the creation of micro-pressure systems fully controlled from stations on the surface.’ He stopped briefly to look at the viddyscreen on the wall, which was flashing an ill green colour – offline. Miranda, in that moment, did not recognise her father.

  ‘At around twelve hundred hours this morning, the computers that oversee the weather platform’s navigation overheated. Skybound instrumentation began to receive conflicting messages, and the whole system suffered an embolism, so to speak. Shortly thereafter, critical heat levels caused the computers to shut down indefinitely, leading to the fatal loss of our asset, as you have doubtless seen on the news. Ordinarily this might incur a rap across the knuckles, an expensive lesson learned. Unfortunately, however, my appointment at the bureau coincided with the parallel trial of an experimental machine that, well… it transpires that my employers engaged a machine to mirror my entire bloody job. Unbeknownst to me, I have been pitted against an artificial thinking machine whose sole purpose is to manage a second, identical weather platform, operated from a partitioned network. This infernal thing was programmed to do much as I did – including keeping an eye on cooling. So when this morning the air conditioning went awry across both partitions, the machine was able to immediately activate several fail-safes, including those I would have operated myself given fair warning. The machine’s weather platform is still operational at high altitude, unlike mine. And so the machine has, over time, been proven the superior task manager. I have been bested.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Miranda’s mother said. ‘Kip, that’s unthinkable—’

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘It is the future.’ He looked to Miranda, who was weeping quietly. She could not respond; saw now her part in this.

  ‘In around fifteen minutes,’ her father went on, ‘men from my bureau will be arriving here to perform what they call a deep cleansing of the library and my study. From tomorrow I will be a civilian. I will have no research to my name. I will have no state transport. My life’s work will be in their custody.’ He settled his cutlery, with which he had been gesticulating, and stood up from the table. ‘Please excuse me,’ he said.

  Miranda watched him walk to the fireplace, where he took down from the wall a large iron poker. For a moment she thought he might strike her with it. Instead, he went calmly to the green-glowing televiddy and, with a single, almost graceful swing, transformed its screen into a shoal of diamond fish.

  Chapter 13

  New London, Earth. 2029.

  New London was burning. Behind Kip Mornington and his personal guard, all mounted on ironclad horses, the mob ran as a river to the fringes of Hyde Park, where thousands from all the counties of automatic England had gathered. With the mob came household appliances for the unlit pyre, by now a hundred-foot-tall pyramid at the heart of the green. These offerings were held aloft, a great torrent of metals and plastics, and Kip appeared delighted by the spectacle. This was more than a movement: it was an army. His army. And the first act of war was unfolding.

  Behind Kip’s mounted guard, the first daughter Miranda’s motorcade crawled through the throng. She herself stood in the bed of an old farming vehicle and, like her father, was hemmed in by men and women sworn to protect her. Their greatswords, looted from the museums of the city, caught the light from smaller fires taking hold in terrace windows and shopfronts. The air was thick and burnt, and she held a damp cotton rag to her mouth. She watched as ash fell across the city, white flurries catching the sunlight. It gave the proceedings an air of grim celebration.

  Miranda was not necessarily proud of her father’s actions. She resented the pain that had preceded this day, much as she admired the acuity of her father’s prescience, the single-minded drive and desire to fight that had ultimately cost him his marriage, his estrangement from June and Marcus, and arguably caused the death of Miranda’s mother. Beyond this, Miranda was also in awe of her father’s figure as it bobbed rhythmically before her, and overwhelmed too by the nature of his leadership. She had been strangely moved by the pure will mustered by these people around her, drawn here together by the idea that marching on Hyde Park might allow them to intercept, and so head off, a darker dawn.

  Did Miranda believe in the cause? Did she really believe that domestic and industrial machines were set to replace and diminish workers on a scale far grander than that seen in the Victorian era? Was it really the case that they must reject them in all their forms? She turned to regard the seething mass of people in pursuit of her father, and realised that even to consider the question was irrelevant. The tide had shifted, and the mood had already swung. The labour force was now the armed force, and in turn it was the unstoppable force; and in any case, the incumbent government had demonstrated its withering regard for her father’s ideas of a new cooperation, a form of social welfare whose central tenets put the new machines to work in ways that benefitted all. Contrary to predictions, the reins of industry had not been handed down, only consolidated and concentrated at the uppermost levels. A promise of fairness – the end of scarcity, rations and mass dismissals – lay smashed. Now the city was burning, it was much too late to go back. And Miranda’s father was leading the torchbearers.

  Presently, the pyre came fully into view: a colossal structure that dwarfed the ancient trees around it. Miranda turned to one of her bodyguards and asked when they would light it. The man, who had garbed himself in several pieces from a looted suit of armour, pushed back his helmet visor and grinned at her. He was one of her father’s most trusted counsels – the same man who had replaced him at the research institute all those years ago, and whom he had nicknamed Merlin.

  ‘When it’s good and ready,’ said Merlin.

  ‘And there will be fighting?’ said Miranda, aware that coaches loaded with forces sympathetic to the state and its sweeping laws of automata had been halted on the hyperway to London from the north.


  ‘If there is, we’ll bloody well choke them into the soil,’ said the bodyguard. ‘Their numbers won’t stand.’

  Miranda sighed and touched her face. She felt her worried expression in the lines around her eyes and brow, and bowed her head.

  ‘The city will recover,’ added Merlin, by way of reassurance. ‘It has seen much, much worse.’

  Miranda understood this rationally. Yet the rhetoric of civil war had been on her father’s lips for a long time now. Even last night, in the public house, she had heard the blind hatred in the jeers of her father’s supporters. As he made his speech, she had seen their focus and belief. They mob had come to believe in something, calcified around it, and that something was her father.

  ‘Halt!’ came a cry from the front. The motorcade did so promptly.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ asked Miranda. A state of hyperarousal seized her, eyes flitting madly from guard to guard.

  One the bodyguards began to laugh. The other soon joined him.

  ‘A thing of beauty!’ one of them cried.

  ‘A day to remember!’ came another.

  Moving across the crowd, as though skating on its surface, was a vast fibreglass dinosaur. Miranda blinked. It was a museum piece, in all likelihood. In coursing here, the mob had looted and ransacked the city and brought many of its icons with it.

  ‘No,’ said Merlin, tugging on Miranda’s arm to turn her away from the spectacle. ‘Not that old thing. See, look – over there.’

  Miranda leaned on the cab of the vehicle and pitched herself up. There was no problem after all; or if it counted as a problem, it was a good problem to have. It seemed the crowd was so densely assembled around the pyre that further progress was impossible. Now only her father’s horse moved through the crowd ahead, the mob parting and surging into his wake, his horse’s tail bouncing. Miranda could see it all from there – the pyre and the faceless crowd of thousands – and the air itself was electrified. The sun above the city was deepest red.

  At the base of the pyre, her father pulled up and rotated his horse, giving it a moment to adjust to the spectacle of his London at arms. The guards fanned around him. For the first time today Miranda saw his face, and for the second time in her life she did not recognise him. She was Miranda the young girl again, seated at her parents’ dinner table in her childhood home. She was listening to him admit defeat to the machine that, in hindsight, had proven to be the catalyst for his change.

  Except her father was not defeated. He was stubborn. And Miranda was sure the pyre was about to be lit.

  ‘Hullo…’ It was her father’s voice, reverberating. He was wearing a microphone, which surprised her – at home he insisted on voice and paper, as he could be surveilled through electronic equipment. Again he was cast as a stranger.

  The crowd roared, and Miranda’s skin prickled.

  ‘All this way here,’ Kip Mornington told them, his voice tremulous, ‘I was afraid to look behind me. Though I heard you, I would not allow myself to believe.’

  The crowd roared.

  ‘Please,’ he said, and even at such a distance Miranda imagined he was trying not to smile in wonderment. ‘Please. I only want us to consider what we have done in standing together. In solidarity we form the greatest of unions – and yet each of you is still worthy of more than being a figure in a crowd. I – I am no leader.’

  At this, someone handed Kip a burning stake, wreathing him in dark smoke. Miranda’s stomach tightened. It was happening. She felt sure, then, suddenly and sickeningly, that this could be wrong, a mistake, and that some inexorable slide into madness would follow. No matter his protestations, it struck her that her father stood as a revolutionary in the eyes of the mob; in her memories her mother had used ‘terrorist’. Yet she could not decide which of these she believed herself. The bonds between Miranda and her father were so tight as to make the distinctions soluble. Miranda was proud, and frightened, and restless. Her father stood out there as all the things he was said to be.

  ‘Today, tomorrow, and always,’ said Kip, ‘we will work.’ As he lowered the stake’s burning end to the pyre, the crowd returned these words.

  ‘Today! Tomorrow! Always!’

  The fire took quickly. The flames tore up the pyre. Even as far away as Miranda and her transport, there came a tangible wave of heat, as though an aperture into the very bowels of the earth had been opened and quickly shut. Instantly the sky darkened, and the mob’s various weapons and armours took on an orange aura. The pyre’s smell was noxious.

  ‘We are the workers!’ called Kip. ‘We are the breakers!’

  ‘We are the workers! The breakers!’

  And it was then that the tumult began. A gasp: Miranda’s focus pulled to a mass of shifting bodies to one side of her father, men and women toppling like skittles and the awful silencing of chants. Soon it was screams that were audible, and the reason visible: an armoured government unit was loose in the crowd, with motorised foot-tanks rushing her father’s position.

  The guard fell about him as the tanks closed in. She saw their operators – men strapped inside steel cages – and understood that their target was set.

  ‘Get her inside,’ uttered one of her bodyguards, meaning Miranda, perhaps reading the situation similarly. Merlin took her arm. She shook him free and continued to watch. ‘Inside!’ hissed Merlin. But the tank unit was carving out its route to her father.

  Just as quickly, the mob realised their strength. No longer rooted, they began to resist. As the chaos spread, Miranda saw two tanks go down, and the mob pile in to suffocate their operators. Surely enough, metal offcuts and panels and wiring looms came flying.

  ‘They’ll tear us to pieces,’ said Merlin. ‘We have to go.’

  Miranda wasn’t listening. Misplaced pride was now hot fear. Her father had seen what was coming, and had ordered his guard about him.

  ‘I’m going,’ said Miranda.

  She vaulted the transport cabin and slid down its bonnet. Her bodyguards were screaming, but she was quickly into the crowd. She jostled and fought to stay upright; there were concussive blasts and fresh waves of heat. The foot-tanks were incinerating people. Closer she went, loosened of regard for politeness or polity, and tripped upon the smouldering body of a young boy, thirteen at most, and saw in his poor pale face, the only part of him untouched, the madness that had descended: the thing she had feared most come to life. She went on, towards her father, and understood it was both pathological and futile, and went on regardless; to be with him, as if to reason with him, so that he was not alone.

  Too late. It was all much too late. The single remaining foot-tank made short work of Kip’s guard. There was a heavy stench of horseflesh, and a single shot rang out from the tank’s shoulder. She watched her father’s own horse stumble then topple, Kip still on top, and the two of them as one being swallowed by the crowd.

  The mob became a formless rage. As they tore into the foot-tank’s armour panelling with bare hands, Miranda saw the operator’s last expression – a rictus of surprise and loss, this being a young conscript no doubt, no true hatred in him yet – and then a mist of dark fluid on his window port, and the celebratory jeers, primal, of her father’s avengers as they dismantled the tank and the operator with it. Eventually she reached the horse, whose enormous bulk the nearest men had shifted. Her father lay with eyes closed, at peace, chest rising but a bloody foam at the mouth. Crush injuries. It was not the shot but the fall; it was the weight of his charge. He lay shattered, held intact only by the clothes he wore.

  ‘Daddy,’ she said, falling across him, and only some of the gathered heard her and noticed. ‘Oh, Daddy…’

  ‘He’s gone, little one.’

  This was Merlin, there with her now, and the speed of her grief was dazing: it rushed out and over her body as a coastal wind in harshest winter. Her father was just there, speaking in a manner she never imagined he could, and now this. She lay shivering on the paving beside him, and thought of what he
r mother would say if she were there to see. Or if she was there regardless, looking down on them as her father insisted she did.

  ‘What’s her name?’ somebody asked Merlin. They had linked the crude uniform of Kip’s guard to the overalls she wore, and were right in their summation: the cloth and patches were identical.

  ‘She is Miranda,’ said Merlin. ‘His second daughter.’

  Hands quickly enveloped hers and pulled her to standing. Miranda swayed, and they steadied her, and their eyes studied her.

  ‘What is your name?’ one asked.

  ‘Miranda,’ she said quietly. ‘Mornington.’

  ‘Mornington! Oh, lamb!’

  Miranda did not answer. She could not answer.

  ‘She’s one of his daughters!’ cried another. ‘He just said!’

  ‘Whose daughter?’

  ‘His daughter!’

  Without waiting, the group held her aloft.

  ‘His daughter!’ – this time in unison. ‘Mornington!’ they shouted. ‘His daughter! Mornington’s daughter! Mornington!’

  And rapidly their chant spread, and spread, and spread, until it seemed the whole crowd was chanting her family name. But Mornington being long and harder to say, the chant evolved, and presently the word was shortened, and now they sang together and louder, more fluidly, and she surveyed them all – this great heaving mass of men and women and children – and heard how all of them were chanting a word that could have filled the heavens.

  ‘Morn! Morn! Morn!’

  Epilogue

  Southampton, Earth. 2070.

  Fallow was down in the leaded cell, unwilling to test his luck. He had been down there since his mother set out from the city in her farmour unit; he had been unwilling to say goodbye to her also. It was doubtless selfish in the eyes of some, of course, yet Fallow did not want his final image of her to involve her frailness inside that skulking beast, skins flapping from its mass as she crossed the flatlands towards the ocean, with the filthy homing pigeon fluttering in her shoulder-cage. Fallow wished instead for a partition of silence: no news of his mother at all, no update on her progress overnight, and so no confirmation of her inevitable demise. Last dice rolls aside, his mother was stubborn and obstructive, and Fallow was unable, even as her son, to persuade her that the plan was suicidal. The moment it would be relayed to him was a moment he wished to postpone for as long as possible.