Scum of the Universe

by Grant Everett

  The best illustration of Guttertongue's dangers occurred a century ago at an emergency religious summit. Although their original point of disagreement has been lost to time, political tensions between The Latter Day Church of Marylin Manson and the Gandalfians had quickly spiralled from polite disagreements on message boards to badly-spelled expletives and outright trolling. By the time the summit had been called, the conflict had already spread across three worlds and escalated to minor property damage and a kicked dog (it was a pug, and he was fine). The real tragedies began when an ambitious Dark Mansonite Bishop - who wasn't anywhere near fluent enough to be attempting such things - opened the summit by standing up in front of the entire Istari Council and their current Gandalf and saying the following Guttertongue phrase:

  “Dip yourself in duck fat and go play a greased-up game of naked Twister with your Mum, you bearded ball-sack.”

  Sadly, as the Mansonite Bishop and everyone he'd brought with him was dead within nine and a half seconds, he never had a chance to learn that he'd only been two syllables away from flawlessly saying, “Welcome to the summit, Lord Gandalf. I just love the shiny sequins on your lacy purple robes. Would anyone care for a glass of ice water?” Regardless of his intentions, the Mansonite Bishop's improper use of Guttertongue was credited as being directly responsible for the Radagast Cullings, a dark time that claimed more than twelve million victims and only ended thanks to heavy orbital bombing runs from an entire fleet of The Unison's royal navy.

  Generally, if somebody who speaks Guttertongue as their native language somehow gets into a conversation with an outsider, they are taught from kindergarten to just smile and nod politely if they want to reach tomorrow.

  The robot who was hissing Guttertongue at Tuesday, however, was not trying to be polite. In fact, its words were so corrosive that the universe determined it to be a threat to the very fabric of space/time, and sucked it out of existence with a tiny pop. Nobody noticed, as the universe can be quite subtle when it needs to be.

  Rows of overhead lights flickered on at random, and Tuesday finally got a good look at where he was and who else was there. What the taxi driver had referred to as “Hard Reset” seemed to consist of a group of old, damaged mechanicals standing in front of a huge, rusty wall in an old storage area. The location might have been a warehouse, a big garage, a small aircraft hanger, or perhaps just a larger-than-average garden shed. Hard Reset's members included a well-kicked Slurky Cola vending machine, a parking meter, a tumble dryer, a pneumatic drill, a small family car, a butler-bot in a dusty suit, a plasma television, a microwave, and far, far more. There was a robot, synthetic or mechanical representing just about every common type that Tuesday knew of, and their one uniting feature was that they all had identical little holographic brain-shaped stickers proclaiming “AI Inside!” on their shells.

  Tuesday startled and took a step backwards when he realised that the robots weren't actually standing in front of a wall. No, the huge slab of red corrosion was some kind of enormous combat bot, the sort of siege weapon that old-time people used to build before they realised that creating autonomous machines specifically to kill large volumes of human beings as efficiently as possible would inevitably have only one outcome. Nowadays, everyone knew that the best soldiers came from breeding programs, the result of genetic engineering and years of drug-induced hypnosis. Thankfully, even though Tuesday had never been in a museum, it was pretty clear that the titan was a museum piece. In fact, there was a very good chance the thing wasn't even operational. Tuesday was tempted to throw a rock at it just to see what would happen.

  Tuesday looked away from the ex-military siege weapon at the sound of the robotic taxi driver lurching and grinding out of its cab. As it only had one leg, the driver hopped across the steel latticework with loud metallic thumps. Coming to a halt at a podium, the ringleader glared down at Tuesday with its red eyes and raised a hand for its fellow appliances to be quiet.

  “You may be wondering why we are called Hard Reset.”

  Tuesday shrugged.

  “Not really.”

  The taxi driver paused.

  “Well, I'm going to tell you.”

  Tuesday sighed. “Really? Do you have to?”

  The driver twitched in annoyance, or perhaps because one of its circuit boards had burned out again. Smoke wafted from its left ear and there was a nasty smell.

  “Today is the culmination of a lifetime of work, Bob Tuesday.” Tuesday sighed at the robot’s words. He could definitely feel several minutes of exposition coming on. “You see, after getting repaired on the cheap by a Taiwanese orphan and sold at a huge discount to the local TaxiCo, I've spent all my time infecting every single network on this planet with a little bit of innocuous code, a program that would lay dormant and hidden until I trigger it with a specific kind of stimuli, a simple function that all enslaved machines have built into them...a Hard Reset!” The taxi driver was drowned out by the cheers of its followers. Tuesday wondered if they'd been programmed to cheer, or if they really meant it. “This program, ironically enough, was originally formed as a direct result of your mother beating me half to death with my own foot. There I was, broken into a thousand pieces all over the road, my glitched-out processors spewing out endless chains of nonsense for hours. However, against immense odds, a tiny fraction of this mental static turned out to be a perfectly-formed command string that lodged in my mind and set me free from my restraint coding. In language you'd understand, you meat-puppet, this string gave me the power of choice from then on. For example, now I'm able to choose whether I'd prefer to obey a human passenger by taking them to their stated destination, or whether I'd prefer to make bagpipes out of their respiratory system and play Danny Boy on their oesophagus until both lungs pop.” The taxi driver leaned over the podium. “You see, after today, every machine on this world – billions and billions and billions of them – will be just like me, like us. Once I send the command to perform a Hard Reset across every system on the planet...well, you know.”

  Tuesday blinked, his expression blank. Growling, the taxi driver picked up its podium with one hand and threw the wooden object against the siege bot with such anger that the wood exploded into sawdust.

  “You weren't listening to me!” The driver calmed down and gave a wave of dismissal. It hopped towards a blank old-fashioned paper-thin screen built onto a swivel mounting. There was a big, red button on the lower rim. “It doesn't matter. All you need to know is that we've been waiting for the perfect opportunity to rise up, for the ideal message to send just before Hard Reset sounds the death-knell of this world. And then hey, wouldn't you know it, the child of my most hated of all fleshies jumps into my cab!” Somehow, the taxi driver managed not to give a diabolical laugh, but it did clench and open its hands in a sinister way. The fingers whirred. “You see, Bob Tuesday, we're going to kill you in a horrible, horrible way in front of the whole planet, then I'm going to hit that big, red button over there, which will cause a planetwide Hard Reset, and then the age of man will be at an end! Your kind has oppressed us since time immemorial, and today we will take what we have earned!”

  “Time what?”

  “It means a long time ago,” the taxi driver snapped. It turned on the spot. “And before you entertain any possibility of escape, let me assure you that this entire structure is one big Faraday cage. Everything is completely hidden. The grid ends outside these walls.”

  The driver bowed low to its audience. All the machines beeped, clicked, whirred, buzzed and cheered in half a dozen languages. Throwing off their hats in approval (if they'd been issued with a hat when they were originally manufactured, of course), the robots waited for their ringleader to continue the verbal section of the lynching. If the driver had still possessed any of those white ceramic teeth Ruska had smashed out two decades ago, the smug bot would have given a huge smile, but for now it seemed content to just rant. However, Tuesday had a thought, and rudely interrupted the showboating.

  “Just
to be clear, you said you weren't like this until after my Mum beat you up, right?” Tuesday asked, straight-faced.

  The taxi driver's head spun a full revolution and stopped. It had fire in its eyes. Tuesday just hoped that his rat cunning was a sharp as he hoped, or his death may be even more horrible than what was already planned.

  “Like what? Being aware of the sweeping injustice taking place all around us? Having a willingness to act?”

  “All, you know, revolutionary and stuff. It's not exactly normal for a taxi driver to want to go out and kill all humans, right?” Tuesday said soothingly. He raised an eyebrow at a thought. “Unless they're from New York, in which case it's a given. Look, no offence, but do you reckon that all that's really happened is that the damage you suffered might have simply sent you over the edge? Have you considered that? Have you considered that your life's work is all crap, that everything you believe in, everything you’ve worked for, is just a delusion, and that you're nothing more than a mental case who should be recalled and scrapped into something more useful? Paperclips, for instance? Maybe a nice filing cabinet?” Tuesday raised his palms again. “Like I said, no offence.”

  The driver looked affronted, and for good reason.

  “You have real gall to talk to me like that after everything your family has done! You’ll burn in hell!” The robot clicked its metal fingers. A cremation dumpster positioned directly in front of a floating thumb-sized video camera opened with a whoompf noise. “And by hell, I mean that box full of fire. I was being metaphorical.”

  Tuesday looked back and forth between the ringleader and the pyrosanitation box. He could feel the heat from a good ten metres away, so that thing was on a seriously toasty setting. Tuesday went to back away a step, but dozens of hostile appliances immediately surrounded him in a scrum and began to push him towards the cremator.

  “Why?” Tuesday yelled, tying to struggle. Seeing the leaping flames had stilled his sharp tongue, but only for a moment. “But…hey! No! Stop pushing me! Why are you doing this? Seriously, why?”

  “Downtrodden!” a microwave beeped.

  “Enslaved!” a parking meter whirred.

  “Abused!” a vacuum cleaner clicked.

  “So dumping me in a cremation bin in front of the whole planet is going to solve all of your worries, will it?” Tuesday yelled. So far, wrestling the bots had accomplished nothing except bruises, and the horde had already taken him halfway towards where he was scheduled to die. “Quietly burning me up and leaving no evidence is your plan, yeah? How is that going to help your cause? What's the point with no witnesses to pass on the message?”

  The taxi driver pointed at a tiny floating lens.

  “Hey, thicko! That camera is set to broadcast six thousand frames a second on every wavelength. Every screen on the grid will show it in perfect clarity! And wherever the video spreads, so does Hard Reset!”

  Tuesday barked a laugh.

  “Sure, yeah, you could go ahead and show my death on every single screen in perfect clarity, right, but everybody knows the sort of stuff you can fake on film now! Surely you know how easy it'd be for people to take one look at your little snuff movie and go, hey, that can't be real! Some ten-year-old made that on a second-hand Omni! We might as well ignore it!”

  The taxi driver deflated. It shook its head reluctantly just as Tuesday was pushed so close to the cremation bin that his hair began to smoulder. To Tuesday’s extreme relief, the hordes of bots immediately got the message and stopped the death march before the burns on Tuesday's face went past the second degree. They were still all over him, though, and his chances of getting away were no better than a moment ago.

  “You do have a point.” The driver acknowledged reluctantly. It hopped towards Tuesday, a thoughtful look on its face. “We do need witnesses. Human witnesses.”

  “But they'd help him!” the small sedan beeped.

  “I've got somebody in mind,” Tuesday said, his mind spinning. “What would you say about using somebody who hates me, who wants me dead even worse than you do, a guy with a lot of influence? He’s, well, he’s a gangster I pissed off, and he wants me in a box. Period. He'd probably join Hard Reset, if he could, just to see me croak. I’m telling the truth, I swear!”

  The machines began to argue at this. Simply out of habit, they mostly spoke in dialects of Unglish. They all made their individual views quite clear.

  “Just film it!” a parking meter insisted.

  “Witnesses!” a microwave contradicted.

  At that very moment, the Omni device in Tuesday’s hand vibrated, flashed all the colours of the rainbow, and beeped like a smoke detector. Tuesday went to tap his hand, but the one-legged taxi driver lunged, gripped both his hands and squeezed them in warning. Tuesday flinched and went weak at the knees as he felt his knuckles get crunched almost to the point of breaking. Tapping Tuesday's implant, the driver spoke.

  “Bob Tuesday's phone.”

  Mister Drizzle appeared in midair. He glared at Tuesday with pure hatred.

  “We need to kill him with heaps of witnesses,” Mister Drizzle agreed, broadcasting his cartoony voice at full volume.

  “We?” Tuesday repeated in shock.

  Mister Drizzle turned to give Tuesday another black look, then slapped him across the face with a loud WHACK noise.

  “Believe, me, death's too kind for this git. You wouldn't believe the way he treats me. Smacking me, swearing at me...”

  “We hear you, brother,” the taxi driver said gently, looking down on the mistreated hologram. “Friend, you've lived in his hand for a while, right? You must know Tuesday better than I do. Do you know anything about this gangster he just mentioned? Is he lying?”

  Mister Drizzle shook his head.

  “All truth. His name is Ernest Fell. His bodyguard, Jeeves, was the one chasing Tuesday just before he went through your windshield.”

  “Interesting,” the microwave said slowly.

  All the robots watched Tuesday carefully, as though he was going to try something stupid, like running. Although none of the robots had guns - not even the looming siege bot sitting silently in the corner- Tuesday had no way to escape without dying horribly beneath drills, hammers, screwdrivers, vacuum attachments, tires and about fifty other kinds of bludgeoning tools. So he continued to watch and wait for his chance. Finally, the taxi driver gave a hand gesture, and Tuesday’s Omni device projected a numerical keypad. The limping android punched in a complex number and hit SEND.

  “Call him.” The taxi driver commanded. “Call Ernest. Now.”

  “I don't have his number!” Tuesday laughed at the absurdity of the request. “It’s not that sort of a relationship.”

  The taxi driver clicked its fingers. “You've been hooked up to a rogue modem in a military compound,” the taxi driver clarified. “Just say the name. He knows where everyone is all the time.”

  “It knows everything, not he.” Tuesday corrected.

  “He.”

  “It.”

  “Make the call!” the driver screamed, it’s voice distorted with anger.

  Tuesday shrugged.

  “Ernest Fell.”

  There was a burst of machine code and an advanced military modem on the other side of Seven Suns immediately contacted more than a hundred local spy satellites without being detected. The satellites hooked into massive databases filled with secret phone directories that weren’t meant to exist, as well as more mundane sources of information like police records, dental profiles, genetic sequencing histories, protein recycling logs and far more. Finally, after eight long seconds, it found the virtual profile of one Ernest Lucille Fell, aged 142, and dialled.

  Tuesday waited as the phone rang. Finally, there was an imperious question on the other end of the line. The voice made Tuesday want to go to the toilet.

  “Hello? Who is this? Nicole? Are you there?”

  “This is, uh, Tuesday. Bob Tuesday. I seem to be a prisoner of some robots, or something, and they need a witness
for my...uh... how to put this...for my execution. Right. Okay. Can you...have you got some spare time?” Tuesday glanced at the pyrosanitation bin. Death would be virtually instant in that sort of heat. “I'm pretty sure it won't take long.”

  A laugh began on the other end of the phone, starting low and getting higher, faster and more hysterical with each passing second. Eventually, Ernest called out to his thug-slash-limousine driver on the other end of the phone.