“You’re an artie,” she said stupidly.
“So are you. What of it?”
“But -” So you can’t help me, you lying s.o.b.
“No time for a teddy bear’s picnic, Josh. They’re getting nasty.”
Another man ducked into the dressing room, human this time. If Josh was the perfect robot, this was her dream sugar daddy. Yes, he’d been through the grinder, but he had a magnetism attractive men lacked. She wibbled her cleavage in his direction. He ignored it.
“Who the flip are you?” she asked.
“It’s a fair question,” the human said. “He’s Josh Foster -”
“- and he’s Alfred,” the artie said. He said it the way a man would say, ‘My wife.’ She felt silly jiggling her boobs. She put them away.
“What brings you fellas here?” she asked.
“You’re in trouble,” Josh said. Alfred added, “We thought you needed our help.”
“I’m a big girl. I can fight my own battles.”
“I don’t think you can,” Josh answered.
Alfred thought he’d overstepped the mark. “We’ll take you somewhere quiet till it simmers down.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
The sentence was barely out when the door flew open. She felt the old strangler’s hold as her handler approached. She’d never seen such pale eyes, human or otherwise.
“Get your bags.” He didn’t notice her visitors.
“But -”
“You and I -” he gripped her shoulder - “are taking a walk.”
She closed her eyes, expecting her punishment to pan out as usual. The unspeakable taste of him, the slippery leather. Suddenly the fingers let go. “Who the fuck are you?” he screamed.
Her eyes bolted open. Buckled shoes waved from a hole she could’ve sworn wasn’t there three seconds ago. The thrashing feet belonged to her handler. His face purpled as he tried to grab something but missed, floppy fair hair in his eyes. Alfred held him by his tie, watched him spin with scientific detachment.
“I don’t give a ding dong damn who you are,” he said. “You’re lucky I haven’t dropped you.” He shifted to give his victim an uninterrupted view. Forty feet down, pitch black and reeking.
Cora’s handler wetted froggy lips. “D’you know who you’re molesting?”
“You wish. Josh?”
Josh produced a wallet and shook it out. “‘Nick Cole, Capricorn Industries,’” he read.
“See?”
Alfred shrugged.
“You must know!”
“Sorry, old man. Anything interesting?”
“Keycards, cashtots ... Oh!”
“Don’t keep us in suspense.”
“Cora’s statement of ownership.”
She craned to look. Call her vain, but she expected something fancier. Embossed letters, gold twiddly bits. Not a scrappy piece of paper.
Alfred had lost interest in tormenting Nick. Absentmindedly he tied him up with the curtains, stringing him up on a hook in the wall. As the finishing touch he picked up a powder puff and shoved it into his mouth. “What do you think?” he asked.
Josh giggled. “He looks like he’s in a butcher’s shop.”
“You’re lucky there’s a lady present, I’d’ve inserted it in you,” he told his victim.
There was no use in Nick struggling. With every move the curtains cut deeper into him. The hook creaked beneath his weight.
“Come on.” Alfred dropped a wrap over Cora’s head as Josh packed her case. “Let’s get you safe.”
They squashed into the dumbwaiter. Soon they were out in the open air, the hot gritty blast making them gasp. Josh ran to the viewing platform. “Oh, how beautiful! You can see the Cog.”
Cora’s eyes filled with oil. “What have I done?”
Alfred arranged the wrap around her shoulders. “You’ve taken a step towards freedom.”
“He’ll find me.”
“Probably.”
“How can you be so calm?”
“I’ve faced worse.”
“Do you really not know who he is?”
“Haven’t the foggiest.”
“Then of course you’re not frightened.”
Alfred patted her hand. It was the first time a human had touched her without sexual or violent intent. Josh rushed over. “Have a look at this!”
A magnificent craft rested on the landing strip, wings unfurled. Bulbous front, rocket launchers, blood red sheen. Cora knew it only too well. The Cora II.
Josh hopped inside. She let out a yell - Nick armed his creations to the teeth - but nothing happened. Alfred handed her up and scrambled into the cockpit. She squeezed between them. “Are we doing what I think we’re doing?”
“Yes,” Josh said. “Does it have his name on it?”
An unfamiliar sensation bubbled inside her. She realised it was laughter. “No, it’s mine!”
Josh confirmed yes, it was called Cora, though it wasn’t that funny. By now he’d mastered the controls. Swinging the craft around, destroying the platform with its tail, they soared into the night.
I’ve left my handler to run off with total strangers. We’ve tied him up and we’re stealing his craft. I should be cacking myself but I’m not. I feel fricking great.
Josh shook her awake. “We’re here.”
The wrapper had been twined round her like a blanket. She hugged it gratefully. Away from the pollution of Astaria, it was murderously cold.
Alfred helped her down. Once her eyes adjusted she made out their home. A fair sized condo, all stripped wood and spotted glass. The austerity continued indoors. A fleecy rug, a cushiony couch. Tulips in every vase. Josh went to make the tea. Alfred stacked a gigantic fire. She offered to help but he wouldn’t hear of it. “You’re our guest,” he said.
Soon the merry yellow flames were leaping. As he stoked the fire, a piece of paper drifted from his pocket. It was only as it crackled she made out ‘Cora Keel belongs to -’
“Alfred, stop!”
A stab with the poker and it was history. “You’re your own woman now.” He gave her a crooked smile. “One of us. An outlaw.”
She laughed. She found everything funny tonight. Perhaps it was the only way to react to the impossible.
Josh came out with ‘a few bits and bobs’- actually the best salad she’d eaten. Slabs of cheese, herb sausages, olives. The tea was sweet, flavourful. They sat on the shaggy rug, talking of this and that. Alfred had the means to set her up with papers and a condo. They could divorce her from Nick and put an order against him.
“Is that common?” Josh asked.
“You get a few cases every year,” Alfred explained. “Normally they’re thrown out. But we’ll have proof coming out of our ears, won’t we, Cora?”
She wished she had his optimism. Conditions must be different in Lila - she had to explain several times to Josh. He didn’t get it.
She yawned. “I’m ready to drop. Where can a sleepy girl lay her head?”
“There’s the spare room -”
“I’ll get your case,” Josh said.
She followed him to the top floor. Though he hastily pushed a door shut, she had enough time to capture the inside: a disorderly master bedroom, sheets turned back on the double bed.
“We hope you’re happy here,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Goodnight -” and he fled.
Cora hadn’t realised how exhausted she was. She slept two days straight, Josh coming in the second evening to ask if she wanted tea. She gaped, unable to place this beautiful man, then memory of the other night came crashing down. She rushed to the window but the craft had gone.
After her old schedule free time was a luxury. She’d never been a reader but her new friends were addicts. They went their separate ways, reading in the hills when it was fine, in a favourite spot when it rained. Hers was a couch beneath the mosquito net. She’d lie and read one of Josh’s trashier books.
She loved the
men who had made her escape possible, Alfred more than Josh. She knew arties, there was no mystery about them. She admired Josh’s looks but only in the way she admired her own reflection. Alfred was the first good human she’d met. She was used to men looking at her and only seeing a face and body. Raping a woman earned a life’s imprisonment; a robot was fair game.
She’d originally suspected him of such motives. After a fortnight she saw his behaviour was nothing but kindness - and love, however weird that sounded. Because it was important to Josh, she guessed. She’d never seen a human-artie relationship like it. They were so tender and intimate, their every look full of meaning. You couldn’t be that synchronised and not be having sex.
Was she jealous? No. She would never want that with Nick - would never want it with anyone. There was her talent and the need to nurture it. It would always mean more to her than any man.
By the third week she danced with impatience. Surely it was safe to come down the mountain? She used her considerable wheedling powers on Alfred, thinking - rightly - he would be more susceptible.
“I know Nick. He’s probably knocking up another artie as we speak.”
Her friends raised eyebrows. Josh knew that if he disappeared, Fisk would leave no stone unturned. Nick seemed cast from the same mould. It wasn’t the robot they prized but control over another creature.
“He can’t have chipped me, he’d be here by now,” she argued. “I haven’t got a certificate or anything to link me to him. I should start a new life. I want to.”
On a day like this you could see the Cog of Clockwork City spinning in the distance. If you strained you caught the hums, clangs and industry of a million robotic lives.
“If you must, but we’re coming too,” Alfred said.
***
Clockwork City should have been paradise. It was a land of pneumatic artifice, of manufactured fantasy. The architect had decided the City of Tomorrow should be pristine and spare no expense. The lawns were ironed every morning, the sunrises and sunsets operated by a technician.
Cora loved it. She snapped up an apartment, persuaded Alfred to take one down the street. This excited comment: he was the first human many of the robots had seen. He had to spend the first few days convincing the securibots he wasn’t a mangled reject.
It was bewildering to traverse a world where ordinary rules didn’t apply. The majority of robots didn’t eat so you had to forage. The weather was a hot dry bubble with choreographed ripples of wind. Robots were sprayed, waxed and repaired in the workshops at the end of every block. The city went into shutdown at eighteen. If you sat on your balcony and watched, you saw it fan across the landscape, from the holographic billboards to the skyways. When Josh became restless he walked the precincts until dawn.
Clockwork City was the spiritual home of all robots. Even the coffee robots at CER were wistful when it was mentioned. Josh had bought into this myth: he’d read the ten volume history, quizzed the functionals on the Mariana. How could he not be tempted?
It was when he had wandered the deserted streets three nights in a row, seeking a natural scent in vain, he realised what was wrong. He missed humans. He missed the chaos they trailed behind them, their moods and spontaneity. Artificials lacked the capacity to surprise or change. You talked to them and they displayed the same expressions, read from the same script. He’d crave a connection but only be met by uncomprehending blue stares. (All Arkan artificials had blue eyes, regardless of ethnicity).
Cora was no help. “Of course you’ll alienate them if you talk about Life and Death with a capital L and D! Get friends! I’ll find you some.”
She befriended other robots effortlessly. Kiki, a dizzy fitness robot she met waiting in line. Finn, who worked in one of the repair shops. Sam and Glen, the public faces of Clockwork City. Josh couldn’t see their appeal. She had a platinum pompadour and the face of a pampered pedigree; he had a roast beef tan and gravity defying quiff. “The perfect couple”, they feuded when the cams stopped rolling. Sam was besotted with her owner while Glen carried a torch for Cora.
Josh tried to mix. Even Alfred encouraged it: “It’ll do you good to meet other bots.” But the more time he spent with other artificials, the more he felt like an outsider. Would he ever belong? He was too robotic for the humans, too human for the robots.
The most unsettling thing about Cora’s group was their promiscuity. Josh was clueless about such matters despite what he’d glimpsed in Timothy’s room. Cora dissected her sexual partners, particularly Nick. “Hung like a peewit, and as much use,” she’d declare, while Kiki giggled and clapped her hands.
One day he met them sitting in the plaza, sharing a jug of Formula 40. (This was the robots’ food substitute. It tasted like a petrol stained glove dipped in cherry juice). They were telling a smutty story, Cora, Sam and Kiki tittering.
“Can I join you?” he asked.
Cora offered him a chair and returned to whatever Sam had been saying. She seemed to mime eating a red hot carrot. Kiki banged her head on the table.
“Sam on the casting couch,” Cora explained. Kiki guffawed, Sam said that wasn’t the only reason she landed the job.
“Sure it is. Enough of this guff, you’ll scare the boy.”
Two pairs of eyes - Kiki’s huge and guileless, Sam’s narrow and shrewd - swivelled. “Josh is a virgin?”
“Maybe he hasn’t met the right girl,” Sam husked, crossing one long bronzed leg over the other.
Whatever she meant, he didn’t like it. He pretended to see Alfred in the distance and left.
The days went by. Sam and Glen’s celebrity status earned them passes to the premiere of Escape from Planet Dinosaur. Cora was invited, along with Kiki and Finn. Josh hadn’t planned to go but Alfred was out on one of his mysterious errands.
They piled into Cora’s Comet. Glen wore a glitzy tux, Finn was ill at ease in a borrowed dinner jacket. There was an awkward moment when Sam’s pompadour didn’t fit inside the vix. They were ordered to shut their eyes while she fixed it.
Josh hadn’t known the film was such an event. He remembered it as a crummy script shoved at him ages ago. Some visionary had pumped five million Q into it, the Blossom’s most respected acting talent -
“And Brad Dion,” Kiki sighed. Her feather boa was moulting, her sea green gown was inside out. She looked what she was, scatty and indefatigably nice.
Brad Dion was said to be the future of acting. He’d been spotted selling ice in the capital. The execs realised they could put their plan into motion. If they slotted Dion into a big budget movie and no one guessed, it could be repeated until all actors were robots.
Sam declared that this was a “very big deal”. Glen muttered, “Should’ve been me.” Kiki drew a smiley cat in the window steam. Finn popped the drinks holder in and out. Josh tried to screen out the noise.
“Shoot!” Cora exclaimed.“Have you ever seen such a whopper?”
Tora Chen, the architect who designed Clockwork City, planned it with utility in mind. Shutdown times were scrupulously implemented, unnecessary functions didn’t exist. She had decreed all roads should be divided into four lanes, two going away, two coming back, and only a set number of vehicles could use them. This system had worked for thirty years.
Chen hadn’t included eagerness to see the first robot idol in her list of factors.
Vixes were decked along the outgoing lanes, nose to rear. Since the city’s roads were cut in lines of geometric straightness, you couldn’t see the end. Because the drivers and passengers were robots, you didn’t get hoots, yells and breaks for freedom, but rows of prisoners accepting their lot.
Josh imagined what Gwyn would have done. “This is creepy,” he said.
“We can play games,” Finn piped up. “There’s this great one we play in the workshop. You see something, everyone’s got to guess – ”
“I Spy, by any chance?” Glen had been in a foul mood all evening.
“You know it?”
Cora punched the c
ontrol panel. “We’ll never get there if this keeps up.”
“What?” Kiki’s voice came out in a wobbly wail. “We’re not gonna see Brad?” She bawled into Josh’s lap.
“Ssh.” He looked to the others for support. “Of course you will. We’ve got the most famous arties in Arkan in here, they’ll give us right of way -”
“Josh, you’re a genius!” Cora exclaimed. “Sam, strut your stuff.”
Sam got up, rescuing her pompadour just in time, and twanged Glen’s strap. “Coming?”
“Must I?”
“You don’t have a choice,” she snarled through a million kilowatt smile.
“Bitch.”
“Fag.”
“Whoretart.”
“That’s not even a word, you moron!”
Glen caressed his quiff and opened the door. He pressed his Adam’s apple, magnified his voice to ten times its usual volume. “Hey, y’all! It’s me, Glen Temple -”
Sam jabbed him in the ribs. “And me, Sam Sawyer!”
Every vix pulled out of their path. A queer clicking sound Josh couldn’t place. It was the robot equivalent of applause. Sam and Glen basked in adoration, industrial grins flashing, until Cora had had enough. “Let’s go before I barf.”
“I was enjoying that!” Glen whined.
“Too bad.”
Kiki stopped practising her wave. Finn chuntered on the theme of how it “made me feel like somebody,” before he petered out in embarrassment.
“I was somebody,” Cora said. “Look where it got me. You’re better off as you are, bucko.”
Finn sighed. Like most service robots he was built for size and strength; he looked like a dim, friendly troll. Greatness would elude him.
The premiere was in the Dome, the one structure large enough to hold the City’s population. Everything was black glass: balconies, lifts, chandeliers. Sam said she must love them and leave them, and gave them each a phony nose rub. Glen was busy chatting up the pretty lift operator.
Love and Robotics Page 31
