The Forbidden City

by John McNally

  Suddenly Finn felt another shift. Hundreds of bots, perhaps thousands, yellow in colour, seemed to wake from their torpor and started to move towards the quantum core and the growing central cluster.

  As they gathered speed, these yellow bots began to fire their rail guns. With a staccato crackling white-hot bolts of carbon issued from their bellies and – WHHHHHAPHAPHAPHAPHAPHAP! – detonated fireballs of exploding bots across the surface of the core cluster, which began to fracture and burn, like a planet hit by an asteroid storm.

  Finn watched in awe. It was a spectacle he couldn’t hope to understand, like a bizarre grand opera seen from the furthest, highest seat.

  EVE.>>ALLBOTS>>EVASIVE DISPERSAL>>DESTROY ALL ENEMY XE.CUTE BOTS >> OBEY EVE.

  The whole bot storm started up again with a rapid jolt – as if time, unfrozen, were trying to catch itself up.

  Finn braced himself in his cell. Through cracks he could see a blur of violent aerial combat as the many turned against the few. Yellow bots were attacked en masse by the others, rounded on, blasted, torn to pieces by tentacled mobs – exploding and taking out many of their attackers in the process.

  They didn’t stand a chance. Within moments the maelstrom calmed again. The flashes stopped.

  Finn felt the bonds that held his cell relax.

  Through the smoke he saw the central cluster start to reform above the quantum core. Bots flew straight in or orbited, waiting their turn, like particles drawing together at the birth of a star. As the cluster grew, it regained energy and began to revolve and glow.

  “Kid!” he heard Kelly cry. Distant.

  He looked round and, as he did, his cell began to give way. The bots unhooking and drifting apart. Trance-like. Uninterested. Their purpose forgotten. Finn began to slip and found himself clinging on to a tentacle, to prevent a long, long drop to the concrete floor.

  “Kid! Down here!”

  Finn looked. Kelly was floating free with his gun and pack on, clinging to Stubbs with one arm, while holding on to the last remnants of his cell cluster with the other. Just three bots. They weren’t powerful enough to keep the two soldiers aloft and were rapidly losing height.

  “Break one off and hold on! Drift down!” Kelly yelled.

  Would a single bot possess enough lift and thrust to take his weight? There was only one way to find out. Finn was clinging to a purple bot. He reached up and yanked its tentacles free from the bots it was still attached to –

  Suddenly Finn felt himself drop like a stone. He cried out in terror, but then the bot registered it was losing altitude and kicked power through its thrusters, slowing his descent. He drifted and held it to his chest. The bot was about the size a dog, docile and compliant. A comfort even.

  “Get over here!” Kelly yelled. He was floating down like a snowflake a dozen nano-metres beneath, straining as he held on to Stubbs and their trio of bots.

  Finn slipped down the body of the purple bot until he dangled from one of its tentacles, like a kid holding a balloon, then swung himself over towards Kelly. He shot out a hand and managed to grab Stubbs’s shirt. Reunited, they drifted down one of the hyper-server canyons as one, speeding up as the bot thrusters started losing power …

  “Brace yourselves!” yelled Kelly as the canyon floor rushed towards them.

  “We’re going too fast!” Finn panicked.

  “Oh glory …” said Stubbs.

  “Bend your knees!” Kelly just had time to yell.

  DAY FOUR 14:24 (Local GMT+1). Roof of the World, Shanghai.

  Al watched the bots in the observation tank, fascinated.

  The wreckage of the yellow bot that the other bots had turned on lay smoking on the floor. Above it the conquering bots circled to celebrate the kill, like ecstatic primates. Then those bots that had fired their rail guns attached themselves to the light at the top of the tank, clustering around the source of power.

  “What are they doing?” asked Delta.

  “Charging up?” wondered Al.

  “Does this represent a shift in behaviour?” asked Bo Zhang.

  “If it does, why? How?” Al asked back. “If it’s global, how are they talking to each other? Or maybe it’s just some local disagreement like in Lord of the Flies.” Al was smiling, mesmerised. “I mean, if they’re all capable of independent action then—”

  The Chinese President looked at Commander King, who duly interrupted.

  “Allenby. We can’t keep a hundred thousand people in a traffic jam all night. We need a plan.”

  Al withdrew his hands from the tank.

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but the bots will always need power,” Al speculated to the assembled world. “We should cut the power for another couple of miles around the Forbidden City, but leave the back-up generators running in the manufacturing plants. Which plant has the biggest generator? Do we know?”

  A technician rattled at a keyboard. “The Shen Yu – it can run for eleven hours before it needs refuelling.”

  “Perfect! They have to stick close to power, which gives us time to figure out how far they’re spread and …”

  “As the generators run out of gas one by one, they’ll concentrate …” added King, thinking aloud.

  “Until they’re left with a single source of power. A single target,” concluded Bo Zhang.

  “And then we hit them hard!” said General Jackman. “Good job.”

  Military leaders on screens all over the world nodded in agreement.

  “Not until we’ve found the guys!” Delta snarled from the Skimmer.

  “Right – we take things one step at a time,” Al agreed, adding to Delta, “and trust me, Stubbs and Kelly will survive anything. No one has ever been able to get rid of them.”

  Bo interrupted, receiving incoming intelligence.

  “Flight Lieutenant, is this your sister?” He clicked on a screen and brought up a loop of street CCTV from the West Nanjing Road. It was just the tiniest, poor quality, second-long clip of someone being helped into a beaten up cab.

  “The shopping mall in the background suffered a cyber-attack and lost all surveillance – just like the hospital in Hong Kong.”

  Delta squinted. Was it Carla? Whoever it was already looked unconscious.

  “Do you think it’s her?” asked Al.

  “I can’t tell …” Delta looked uncharacteristically scared.

  Bo reassured her. “We will keep looking. We will find her.”

  “Sir, they’re changing again!” a technician called to Al from the observation tank.

  Al ran back to the flea circus.

  The bots were now clustered against the same area of glass, stuck, trying to push themselves through it in the same direction.

  South. Towards the Forbidden City.

  Across the Forbidden City and beyond the bots did the same.

  All the bots.

  Crawling out of their hosts’ hair in the quarantined zones. Exploding when scratched, setting scalps alight, provoking panic.

  Many more began the process of tunnelling, chewing, blasting and burning their way out of packaging, out of the machines and consoles and containers they had been stationed in ready for distribution around the world.

  Returning to the source.

  Obeying EVE.

  DAY FOUR 15:07 (Local GMT+8). Song Island, Taiwan (disputed).

  On one screen of the domed array in the chamber, the K-SAT feed showed the Forbidden City changing colour once again.

  The poison that had been spreading from the centre was now in reverse. The red specks were streaming back from the furthest reaches, flying in long orbital arcs, in clusters and in convoys, spiralling in towards the centre, obeying the call of a new master.

  Grandma had been summoned out of her bath to come and watch the ‘Great Moment of Victory’ but instead found herself watching Kaparis.

  “TREACHERY!” Kaparis roared. “PERFIDY! INCOMPETENCE!”

  She had seen small children having tantrums – and she had c
ertainly seen adults get angry. But she had never seen a grown man, trapped in an iron lung, gurgle and froth at the mouth.

  Heywood, the butler, discreetly prepared a pipette full of tranquilliser to prevent full hysteria. His orders were clear. The engineering that encased Kaparis and forced air in and out of his lungs was brutal, and if it had to work harder because he was agitated, it became more brutal still. In the early days of his confinement it would break his ribs.

  The drops fell from the pipette. Kaparis groaned and hissed.

  Poor man, Grandma thought, despite herself.

  But not for long.

  Li Jun was hauled into the chamber by a dead-eyed goon who towered over her. Her young head hung limp from her body, as if she had already been beaten. The goon took out a pistol.

  “Lift her head up!” barked Kaparis.

  The goon pulled it up. Her fearful eyes regarded Kaparis on the dais. They also, briefly, caught Grandma’s.

  “I FIND THAT SMASHING A POT HELPS!” Grandma interrupted, much too loudly.

  “WHAT?” Kaparis spat.

  Just talk, thought Grandma – witter – delay …

  “I smash a pot to let off steam – I get through a dozen a week around Christmas. I have to buy in a job lot from a factory outlet outside Woking. Or I beat a pillow. That helps too. ‘Everybody needs a strategy’ – they tell you that in family therapy. Have you ever had family therapy? I think you’d benefit.”

  “Family … therapy …?” Kaparis gurgled, building towards another eruption, which Grandma punctured by suggesting –

  “I could smash one for you, if you’d like?”

  At this Kaparis became suddenly still. His eye revolved and then settled on her.

  Is he still breathing? wondered Grandma.

  “All … right … my dear. Perhaps you could help me? As you may have noticed, I’m indisposed,” he said in a spooky sarcastic tone.

  “Why, of course,” Grandma replied, and trotted up to the dais past Li Jun and the goon, Li Jun looking up at her in terror.

  “What about that pot? The one by the window?” said Kaparis, flashing the pot in question up on his screen array – an oriental, antique vase.

  Grandma walked over and picked it up.

  “SMASH IT!” barked Kaparis.

  SMASH! – Grandma threw it against the floor and it shattered. What a waste, she thought.

  Kaparis gurgled. “Now, the one next to it! Go on!”

  SMASH! went some blue Roman glassware. Again Kaparis gurgled.

  Grandma dared to think it might be working. “Aren’t we making progress? Now all we need is someone to love and something to believe in …”

  “Now the painting!” he commanded.

  Grandma hurried, to show willing, and pulled a Picasso from its fixing, cracking the frame hard against the floor, the canvas folding and crumpling within.

  “Now the gun …” said Kaparis. Dead calm.

  Grandma froze.

  “The gun?”

  “Help her, Hans.”

  Hans the goon moved towards Grandma, grabbed her hand and began to force his pistol into it.

  “Stop that at once!” Grandma protested.

  Li Jun looked at Grandma with renewed terror.

  “Let me show you my family therapy,” said Kaparis.

  Grandma fought to wriggle free, but Hans gripped her hand harder, forcing her finger across the trigger.

  Grandma – who had never had a moment’s serious trouble at Broadmoor – felt a flash of fear such as she had never felt before as Hans angled the gun towards Li Jun. Grandma filled her lungs –

  “STOP!” she yelled.

  And for a moment everything did. Hans froze. Kaparis stopped gurgling. Even the fish, illuminated in the sea beyond the windows, seemed to freeze. It wasn’t for long, barely half a moment, but it was long enough for Li Jun to fill her lungs and yell in turn –

  “Strategy! I have a strategy, Master!”

  Kaparis paused.

  Six minutes later, after Li Jun had outlined her desperate plan, Kaparis rescinded one order and gave another. Not because he had been persuaded by a superior intelligence, but because he was Kaparis and he could change his mind.

  “Get her back to work,” he ordered Hans. “And get me Baptiste. Now.”

  DAY FOUR 20:28 (Local GMT+8). The Forbidden City, Shanghai.

  Night fell and as it did the vast circuit-board metropolis seemed to reveal its soul in tiny points of light. Up and up the sides of the hyper-servers, sixty thousand light-emitting diodes twinkled, of every colour, on every inch of circuit board, constant and reassuring, or blinking to demand attention – receiving none from the restless bots that tacked about them, illuminated themselves like tiny orange lanterns. And at the centre of it all, the moon: or at least the mother cluster – the glow of it, blue and orange across the tops of the towers.

  Finn stared up at it all and had delicious memories of a long drive with his mum and Al, being taken up a narrow staircase to bear witness to an extraordinary model railway – his mum holding him up to see a dozen locomotives puffing this way and that, little houses, tiny happy people. And then the real magic, when artificial night fell and lights within the busy trains and houses came on. One house even had a tiny television set in it. It had glowed, just like Finn had inside.

  The feeling made his thoughts break to Carla. To hope. Surely she must have made it out? Maybe she was with Delta and Al right now, with Grandma even, all safe and together and—

  “What the hell are you mooning over? Get over here!” Kelly yelled, breaking his reverie.

  Finn grabbed the burnt-out husk of a nano-bot and carried it across the polished concrete floor to where they’d established their ‘camp’ under one of the server towers. It consisted of Stubbs, a knee injury from their fall crudely braced, warming himself beneath the downdraft of a cooler unit and surrounded by battered and blown bot carcasses, dragged to him by Finn and Kelly.

  “OK, old man, what’s going on?” Kelly asked.

  “Some kind of malfunction. Impossible to know what, but it won’t last long. If Kaparis can create all this –” Stubbs motioned in awe to the millions of bots – “he can do anything.”

  Kelly checked his pack, which had stayed on his back through everything, and broke the mission into bite-size chunks, defining their objectives like a true SAS grunt. “We have a single canteen of water, some meds, some ration packs, my smashed nPhone, an M249 with maybe fifty rounds of ammunition, half a pack of C4 and a six-shot sidearm. We need to: Survive. Get out. Make contact.”

  “Wrong,” said Stubbs. “First, I’m afraid these beautiful creatures must die, every last one. That is our priority.”

  “How the hell are we supposed to do that?” asked Kelly, gesturing at the bot clouds.

  “Chinese whispers,” said Stubbs. “They’ve only got room for small brains and they keep in constant physical contact – have you noticed? – by touching antennae. They must network to form some kind of collective memory. Some kind of super-organismfn1.”

  “Like Kaparis’s idea …” said Finn.

  “Exactly. Should never get fixed on one idea, like I did with Wendyfn2…” mused Stubbs. “So if we can construct our own bot and infect it with an auto-destruct code, it should pass it on and we can infect the whole lot.”

  “A software virus to kill a hardware virus,” said Finn.

  “Just so.”

  Over the next couple of hours Finn and Kelly managed to drag together twenty-four dead bot carcasses. Using extracted tentacles from some of the worker bots as tools, Stubbs stripped an antennae down to its wires and worked out how it transferred data and power. From a bunch of other bots he managed to detach thruster units, charging coils and various other common components.

  “Where are we at?” Kelly asked, panting as he and Finn brought in yet another dead bot.

  “Very clever and very simple,” said Stubbs, surrounded by parts. “They’re entirely modular in construct
ion. These things are optical units,” he pointed at one pile and then the one next to it, “these are simple transmitters, these simple radars – they all plug into a universal carcass. The memory and processor come as a single unit too – this brain box here,” he said, indicating a grey lump the size of a shoe box. “They’re much bigger in the yellow bots. I think they were the officer class, and what we witnessed earlier was some kind of revolution.”

  “Like Stalin and the Red Army purges. We just did it in History,” said Finn.

  “Stalin. Great,” muttered Kelly, glancing up at the bots. “Any upside?”

  “Well,” said Stubbs. He crossed some wires on the side of one of the thruster units and, like magic, it jolted to life, hovering a nano-foot in the air between them, completely stable.

  “Wow,” Finn said. “How do they stay in one place?”

  “See these tiny vibrating buds?” Stubbs bent down and pointed to three sets of miniscule wings set into the unit. “These are in every smartphone. Simple gyroscopic halters; crystals that want to keep vibrating on the same plain no matter what, otherwise they complain and the processor alters the angle of thrust.”

  “Awesome …” said Finn, prodding the unit to test this.

  Kelly rolled his eyes. He was in danger of losing Stubbs to the wonders of engineering – again – and if he wasn’t careful Stubbs would take Finn with him.

  “Never mind the magic, Dr Frankenstein. Do you think you can build one that will fool the others?” asked Kelly.

  “Yes, I can build it,” Stubbs stated.

  “Great, let’s go …”

  “But I’ll need an interface – some means of accessing the brain, of reading and inputting. We can use an nPhone keypad, but we still need a computer screen. The glass box over the far end of the hall must be the nerve centre. We could blast a hole through the glass.”

  “It’s miles away and hundreds of metres up a concrete cliff face!” said Kelly, slightly dreading what was coming next.

  “Ah,” said Stubbs, “but we can fly.”

  Carla was shaken awake.

  Her mind was still groggy from the sedation she’d been given at the mall, but the Tyro with the staring eyes and the shovel jaw standing over her with a knife brought back every detail. She flinched as he raised the blade and cut the ties on her wrists.