You Believe Her

by Richard Roberts

  “Against them?” he asked, scowling again.

  Pulling my broken arm out of my belt, I held it up. “With this.”

  His scowl deepened. The old man pulled his hammer back out of his belt, and gave it a sharp flick. “I’m a cyberneticist. I deal with organic-inorganic interfaces, not pure machines.”

  Retreating to the respectful head bow, I continued offering my arm, broken-off end first. “These do look a lot like Upgrade circuits.”

  He stood there, silent and grouchy, for a couple of seconds. Then he took my damaged arm in both of his, holding it carefully as he carried it over to one of the work benches.

  Guessing that this guy probably did not want me staring over his shoulder, I waited. He kept doing stuff, which I figured meant I hadn’t been rejected.

  After a couple of minutes of peering and prodding, the old man stomped back to me and held out my arm in one hand, and a little white tube in the other. The tiny kind, like industrial superglue or thermal paste comes in.

  “This ointment regenerates synthetic neurons. Apply it to both ends of the broken circuits, and they’ll reattach. That will restore full control and sensation. Everything else you’ll have to find a roboticist for.”

  I took the tube, and delicately tucked it into one of my many pockets. Then I took my arm, and held it all floppy because there wasn’t really any respectful way to carry around a limp arm. He was playing detached and professional, so I tried not to sound gushingly grateful. “Do I owe you anything?”

  His expression changed. His face hardened, maybe literally—the suddenly complex network of Upgrade lines making his whole body look stiff and metallic. With his brows set in a line, for the first time he didn’t look an old man playing ‘get off of my lawn.’ He looked like a supervillain, and the serious kind. “Yes. Tell no one where you got this, or who gave it to you, or that I exist, or about this place, or describe anything about me to anyone else. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank—”

  “DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND?” Criminy, the guy’s eyes were glowing, little burning coals of red in the back of his pupils.

  “Yes, sir!” I barked, at attention.

  He pointed at the doorway. “Now get out.” That didn’t sound quite as harsh and threatening, just like I’d completely used up my welcome.

  Kicking the Machine with my ankle, I goaded it out and back down the tunnel. Awesome. I’d charmed a crazy powerful but secretive old coot, and had the stuff that would fix what a regular robot doctor couldn’t.

  Assuming there was such a thing as a regular robot doctor. But I was on a roll, and felt it. I ought to be utterly exhausted after the day I’d had, but that was the good side of a robot body. Maybe I’d lost my mad science power, but I would exploit this untiring thing to the hilt.

  Laying my arm in my lap, I got out the phone Miss Lutra gave me, and punched up ‘Roboticists near me’ in the search browser.

  And lo and behold, I found a news article. “Eccentric Robot Designer West Lee Revealed As Mystery Santa.”

  ere you go. At least I got my turn before you put me out of a job,” said my taxi driver, marking the sixty-seventh robot joke since I got in the car.

  I flicked him my credit card. “I don’t have any cash, so I hope your gross meaty fingers can handle an electronic transaction.”

  A minute later, after I’d signed, tipped, and as I shut the car door, he said, “Man, I wish my super power was good enough for crime fighting.”

  And then he drove away, leaving me facing the lair of my next conquest, the mysterious man known as West Lee.

  He had to be mysterious. In the middle of a Burbank block full of little businesses related to show business, on a street full of boxy concrete towers housing animation studios, he had an Elizabethan mansion. The house was practically a castle, three stories tall and riddled with turrets. The windows were uniformly dark, like they’d been painted with soot on the inside, revealing only hints of curtains and nothing else. Dark gray pointed roofs and purple-tinged gray wooden walls stood out like a sore thumb. Were those even legal in LA?

  The building looked dusty, cracked, and abandoned, but when I walked up the steps to the porch, that proved to be an illusion propagated by color. This building was in fine shape. At worst, the wood surfacing might be a bit rough.

  West Lee did not make me go through the entrance test gambit. The door opened before I could touch the door knocker.

  Of course, nobody stood on the other side. Embracing drama was at least two thirds the point of being a mad scientist.

  I did check behind the door on the way in. Nope, nobody there. The door swung closed by itself, with an appropriate echoing boom.

  The interior continued the theme of the exterior. A double staircase ran up the back of the entrance hall, and aside from the worn, red carpet leading to it, the floor stretched to the walls in a black and white checkerboard. Together, they made me think of a computer game set. If I inspected the grandfather clock, would I find it missing the hour hand, with a code scratched into the wood hinting at what time I had to set to open a secret door?

  No time for that. I heard voices upstairs.

  Away I went, bounding up the steps and following that siren lure. The upstairs had carpeting, at least, in a faded purple. A mirror hung over a little display table, on which two diminutive wind-up robots held a floral-print vase. As a nice touch, the flowers were all made of metal scrap parts. They might even do something, if you wound them up. Way down at the end of the hall, a doll in a red dress sat on another table. The face of the china head had gone missing, and a metal, robotic skull with bulging eyes peeked out from inside.

  Other than that, closed doors lined the walls, and not much else. Closed doors, and two open doors. One ajar, but dark. When I actually looked at it, I saw a mask peeking at me through the gap. It withdrew into the shadows immediately, and the door snapped shut.

  Light spilled from the other open door, and voices as well.

  “There’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t control every robot in Los Angeles. I barely control any of the ones I built. You can’t even tell me what she looks like,” said a man with a scratchy, high-pitched voice.

  Another man, with a deeper, rolling voice, replied, “We do not know what she looks like. Other than that she is heavily-armed and covered in a fuzzy surfacing, we have no reports. The thief girl does not want to be part of the community.”

  “I hoped you had fitted out one of my babies with a new body, West,” said a soft-voiced woman.

  The higher voiced man said, “I don’t weaponize anything, Raggedy. Is anyone missing who’s human-sized? I don’t—um—Juniper was as big as a child. Have you heard from her? Mr. Pickles is okay?”

  Raggedy! That was the old woman with all the living dolls, who helped Robot Penny. And that made the deeper-voiced man Gothic, her… husband? Partner? Fellow artificial life enthusiast? It made sense that they would be here with a guy who made robots.

  Following those voices to the door, I found a workshop. No surprise there. This one specialized in making skulls, with shelves lined with metal eye sockets, jaws, jars of teeth, masks, and metal shaping equipment on the desk. Plenty of finished robot heads watched us from the shelves as well, with lidless, staring eyes. A lamp shaped like a robot, or possibly a robot with a lamp built into its hands, provided most of the light. A couple of feet tall, with a willowy body made of intertwined wire, it stood on the work bench behind its creator.

  West Lee proved to be a chubby old man in ragged black jeans, a black jacket with a lot of little tools in a lot of little pockets, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of a bipedal robot, missing so many pieces that it couldn’t be identified beyond ‘bipedal’ and ‘robot’, hugging a child in a red cape. Fluffy, snow-white hair sat on his head like an untidy cloud, with a matching Santa Claus beard.

  Raggedy still looked like a little old homeless woman, wrinkled and smiling and dressed in gray… well, rags. Next to her, Gothic stood
in the same stiff posture with the same skull-decorated suit that I’d seen in Chinatown. These two had a Look, and were sticking to it.

  Only West Lee actually faced the door, so he noticed me first. He lifted a hand to his mouth, his face bunching up in concern. That made Raggedy and Gothic turn around. They gasped as soon as they laid eyes on me.

  Raggedy rushed forward, with a high-speed, lunging hobble. She clasped my cheeks in both hands, and asked, “What happened to you, dear?”

  Gothic didn’t move, although he looked just as pained and worried as the other two. “West Lee, this is the Heart of Gold, who stayed with us briefly. She was engaged in what we were told was a pretend public battle with her creator.”

  “No, I’m not her,” I protested.

  “What?” asked Raggedy, even more alarmed.

  Gothic frowned deeply. You could have used his eyebrows as a ruler. “Memory damage from the injury?”

  “No, no. Look. Hold this.” I dumped my broken arm into Raggedy’s grip, which got her to let go of my head. These people loved robots, and this body wasn’t flesh and blood or all that anatomically correct, so it wasn’t too embarrassing to undo a few buttons of my shirt, fiddle with the catch, and open up the doors in the middle of my chest.

  Raggedy and Gothic went cold and still at the sight of my Heart of Steel. “What did you do with the owner of that body?”

  “I didn’t do anything. Some… thing took over my body, stuck me in this one, and—” My hand closed over my belt pouch containing the Heart of Gold. It would be too cruel to show them the battered lump. “I think my good twin can be repaired, but I don’t know when or how. She’s not functional now.”

  That got West Lee’s attention, and he stepped away from his table to give me a look of pained sympathy. “You were forced into a robot body?”

  Raggedy passed Gothic my severed arm. He turned it over a couple of times, scowling. Mind you, various levels of scowl were the only expressions in this room. “The current biological Penelope broke your body and the Heart of Gold both?”

  “And the first step to dealing with her, is to convince Mr. Lee to fix my arm.” I held out my hand to Gothic.

  Raggedy started to say something, but he gave her shoulder a squeeze. She restrained herself, outrage fading to solemn, detached concern.

  As for the Pinstriped Mummy, he not only gave me my arm, but put a card in it. I was learning something today. Supervillains like business cards. “You have come to the right man, Heart of Steel. West Lee will help you. When he has, please come to us. Raggedy and I like to make all new robots feel welcome, and she can fix your costume.”

  “It might come alive if she does,” said West Lee, with the fluttering hesitance of someone who’s not quite sure if their joke will offend anybody.

  Raggedy patted my hair with a wrinkled hand, and said, “We’re always easy to find. We don’t have to hide, because no one wants to rob or arrest us.”

  They walked out.

  West Lee, old Saint Mecha-Nicholas himself, backed up against his desk as if I’d come to kill him. Same wide eyes, stammering voice. “They’re—Raggedy and Gothic are good people, but—they—I’m not the right man. I don’t know how to fix that.”

  Time to fight technology with magic. I applied the most potent incantation I knew. “Please?”

  His mouth opened and shut several times. Gradually, poised to flee, he reached out and accepted my broken arm. Wide-eyed terror became a bewildered frown as he peeked inside. Then he leaned over to look down the gap in my shoulder. “Where did you find this? Who made it? Is this alien? It looks—I’ve seen—it’s a little like the technology Neon Rider used. People said that was extraterrestrial.” Shaking his head hurriedly, he added, “I can’t fix circuits like these.”

  I passed over the tube from the armageddon-obsessed back alley cyberneticist. “Synthetic neural regenerator.”

  Delicately plucking the tube away, he retreated to his table. Metal folding tools didn’t look right for my arm, but he ignored the clamps and presses anyway. Scooping a volt meter and a head-sized lens out of a drawer, he handed the latter to the wiry lamp. Proving it was a robot after all, it extended two more skinny arms, using those to hold the magnifying glass in place. He peered through it. He tapped things inside my detached arm with the volt meter. After a little fiddling with dials, he did that again.

  My detached arm’s fingers twitched, and I was definitely sure a regular volt meter could not do that.

  More fiddling. My arm bent at the elbow, made a fist, did all sorts of things. West Lee got out a soldering iron, then something that looked like a soldering iron, but with a bright spark at the tip. More limb twitching.

  Every eye in the room watched his progress. Not just his own and mine, but all the heads on the shelves, and even the unattached eyes.

  It took awhile, and they had more patience than me. Eventually, my attention wandered. It wouldn’t be fair to say this room was empty. It had the heads, some of which were animal- or monster-like, or had as many as eight glowing red eyes. It also had posters, pinned all over the wall behind the bench. They ranged from old B movies, to exhibits from theme parks, and even a faded poster for—

  “Gerty Goat’s Family Farm!” I shouted.

  West Lee let out a squeal, jumped at least two inches in the air, and dropped his tools on the floor. Hands shaking, he bent down and picked them up, but stopped halfway to standing up straight again. “You know Gerty?”

  “I love Family Farm! Okay, the restaurant is cruddy, but Gerty Goat makes up for it. She’s clumsy and can’t sing, but she’s happy with who she is, and she doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Even if you don’t love her, she loves you. I wish everyone could be like Gerty Goat.”

  He blinked at me, twice, still crouched. His eyes widened, wrinkles forming all around them, and he stood up with a relaxed confidence he hadn’t shown since I showed up. He still stuttered a little, but his voice got more enthusiastic by the moment. “Gerty is mine. I made her. I made all the animatronics at Family Farm. You know, the original Gerty is at the store right here in LA? I still have the biggest share of the company, I think.”

  My head tilted as I processed this. “No wonder she’s so sophisticated. She’s mad science! I, uh… I peeked inside at her workings once. I was bad.”

  That only made him smile. Patting the bench, he said, “Sit up here. I think I can reattach your arm. The goo seems to work, so you’ll probably have control, but it’s going to be fragile. I can’t cleanly reattach enough of the actuator fabric, and my best glues will still leave fracture lines, like scars. You won’t be fighting any battles with this arm. I can reattach, but I can’t heal.”

  A quick push with my good hand hopped me up to sit on the edge of the table. “That’s okay. I know someone who can heal inorganic objects, and she’s a friend.” I should have thought of Mirabelle immediately. Then again, the less she had to fix, the better. Nobody was all-powerful.

  My lips pursed as that thought led to others. “I’ll need to go to Chinatown this weekend to see her. I should do that anyway. Everybody’s super nice to a broken robot, but I need to stop relying on the kindness of strangers, and take my life back, literally.” That would be, let’s see… it was Tuesday, so Saturday was four days away. But they set up on Friday night, right? So three days.

  Nervous again, Lee said, “You can stay with me until then. I have tons of room, and my creations will like the company.” Then very quickly, maybe to change the subject, he said, “This is going to hurt. I suggest you shut yourself off until I’m done.”

  Oops. “I… don’t know how to do that.”

  Quick, Penny, test the obvious! System shutdown!

  …

  Nope, didn’t work.

  Getting his confidence back, Lee leaned around to look at my back. “Oh. Well, the techniques used to make your body are beyond me, but not the design philosophy. Mad scientists tend to think alike. That’s why I’m able to help you at all. You sh
ould have a shut-down switch… here!” I felt his fingers dip under the fabric of my lab coat, feeling around my stiff ‘skin’. When they reached the joint between my shoulders and neck, something gave, then clicked.

  I shrugged, because that was all I could do. No, wait, I couldn’t shrug, either. Criminy, these shoulders! Lifting a hand and dropping it helplessly back in my lap had to do.

  He did his own version of the pursed lip thing. “I could force a shutdown, but with your tech, it would be dangerous.”

  “I’ll deal with the pain.”

  He hesitated for a second, then took me at my word. After a delay no longer than “Where is my doll repair kit? Droopsy, did—oh, here it is,” he got to work.

  Personally, I couldn’t see much of what he did. It included sewing, and gluing, and something that made sparks. Oh, and the neural regenerator, which turned out to be a shiny gold paste he applied with a sponge on the end of a stick. And yes, it hurt. A lot. Gritting my teeth, I sat still and put up with it.

  The last thing he did was fasten a bandage with wire underpinnings around my upper arm, to keep it in place. By then, I already knew the repairs worked. I could feel my fingers again! When Lee gave me enough room, I waggled them, made a fist, then bent my elbow. Perfect.

  “The glue sets fast, but wear the brace until tomorrow morning, just in case,” he said, wiping his hands on his jacket.

  I flexed my arm some more. So nice. Both severed sleeves and my left arm’s teleport bracelets lay on the table next to me. Could I fit them on over the bandage? I might be fit to travel already. “Maybe I shouldn’t wait. I could get started tonight.”

  “When did you get turned into a robot?” Lee asked.

  “This morning,” I answered, not really paying attention.

  At least, I wasn’t until he took hold of my left hand in both of his, and gave me a worried stare, right in my eyes. He looked so much like Santa Claus! “Rest. Please. You think you’re doing well because you’re not used to a body that doesn’t get tired. Take one of my spare bedrooms, please. When your emotions catch up to you, you’ll want to have somewhere quiet to rest.”