The Extraordinary Colors of Auden Dare

by Zillah Bethell

  “How did you know Paragon’s name?” Vivi asked.

  “Eh?” Treble, slightly annoyed to be distracted, turned to look at her. “How did I know its name? Oh, because I named it.”

  “You named him?”

  “Inadvertently, I suppose. Bloom was looking for a name for his next project. He never told me what it was, exactly—said it was going to be something that was going to change the world. Something perfect. So I suggested Paragon. A paragon is something that is considered to be perfect, you see.” He went back to his inspection. “And this is it. Bloom’s paragon. My, my.”

  “Him. He,” I said.

  “Hmm?” Treble half ignored me.

  “Paragon is a ‘him.’ Not an ‘it.’”

  “It’s a humanoid robot,” Treble corrected me. “It’s not actually human. Just human shaped. It doesn’t have internal organs. It’s not capable of independent thought. It’s an ‘it.’”

  “Ahem.” Paragon coughed. “Should you all be discussing me like I’m not here? Seems like bad manners if you ask me.”

  I laughed. Vivi laughed. Treble frowned.

  “So you were good friends with Dr. Bloom,” Vivi said.

  “Well … er…” Treble hesitated. “Once upon a time.” He poked at something near Paragon’s ear.

  “Ouch!” Paragon jumped. “Do you mind?”

  Treble frowned again.

  “What does ‘once upon a time’ mean?” I asked.

  “It means what it says. It means we were once friends but then we weren’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Treble sighed. “It’s all very dull, I’m afraid. You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “Go on. Try me.”

  “Stretch out your leg,” Treble ordered Paragon, who duly obliged. “Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.”

  “Dr. Treble.”

  Treble sighed again. “We had a professional argument. Over an academic prize. The Geneva Prize for Scientific Advancement, if you must know.”

  Geneva? So that was why Paragon was triggered to reveal Treble’s name and address. It wasn’t the phrase “Geneva Convention.” Just the word Geneva. I looked at Vivi and she looked at me.

  “Anyway,” Treble continued, “we argued over who was likely to first win the Geneva Prize. Silly, I know. But then scientists can be silly over things like that. Vain. We both set ourselves the challenge of being the first to win it, and we went our separate academic ways.” He suddenly sounded sad. “I didn’t speak to him at all for the last year of his life.”

  I peered around the laboratory. “So what are you working on now?”

  “A number of things. None of them very successful, I’m afraid.” He patted Paragon on the back. “Nothing like this.” Treble looked back at us. “What’s its cognitive function like?”

  “Cognitive what?”

  “How he thinks.” Vivi put me straight.

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I said. “He’s rather fond of poetry.”

  “Poetry?”

  “Especially Emily Dickinson,” Vivi added.

  Treble looked confused.

  “I can quote you some now, Dr. Treble. If you’d like.” Paragon cleared his throat and was about to launch into something or other.

  “Er, no,” Treble cut him short. “No. Don’t.”

  Paragon appeared deflated.

  “What about its mobility?”

  “He’s very fast,” said Vivi. “He’s very good at playing hide-and-seek.”

  Treble raised his eyebrows.

  “There is something, though, Dr. Treble,” Paragon quietly remarked. “This light here…” He pointed. “It’s not working. And I don’t know what it’s for or how to get it started. I was wondering if you might be able to help me.”

  Treble tapped the dead light. “Might it not just have blown?”

  “No,” Paragon answered. “It’s fully functioning. But for some reason it’s not reacting to any of my diagnostics.”

  Treble thought and as he did so he stroked the beard around his chin.

  “Okay.” He walked away from Paragon toward a computer situated near the back of the laboratory. He clicked a button and a wobbly line suddenly materialized on the screen. “Does it have a coaxial digital data jack?” He aimed the question at Vivi and me.

  Paragon answered by walking up to the computer and flipping back yet another of his fingertips. He proffered the finger to Treble, who grinned and attached a lead to it.

  “Bloom really did think of everything. Amazing.”

  Treble plugged the other end of the lead into the computer and began to tap at the old-fashioned keyboard.

  “Right … Let’s see what the problem is.…”

  A series of shapes started to flit across the monitor. Three-dimensional shapes. Wiry-looking cubes and cuboids. Spheres and cones. Triangular prisms. Twisting all over the screen. And then more complicated things—shapes for which there are probably no names. After that came a number of two-dimensional tessellations, scrolling from left to right, then top to bottom. I had no idea what any of it meant, but Treble clearly did.

  “Dr. Treble?” I ventured as the man’s eyes glared at the screen. “I think my uncle was working on a machine to help me see color.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Something he called a ‘rainbow machine.’ We found it at his house but it’s missing its battery. I wondered if you knew anything about it? Did my uncle tell you anything about it?”

  “Erm…” He was still focusing on the images in front of him. “No. Sorry. Don’t know anything about that.” My heart dropped like a stone again.

  “Did you try passing the secondary load over the central auxillary system?” Treble asked Paragon.

  “Of course.” Paragon sounded a bit put out. “It was one of the first things I tried. I’ve attempted all the possible permutations of power-to-resistance ratio, but nothing seems to work.”

  “Inverted the amplitude substructures?”

  “Yep. Many times.”

  “Hmm.” Treble looked stumped. “Are you sure the bulb hasn’t just blown?”

  Paragon gave a sigh. “I’m sure.”

  Treble tapped at the keyboard a bit more and the whole screen went ziggy-zaggy.

  “What about … what about undermining the whole motor system and backtracking the primary load within the pseudoparameters? Momentarily, of course.”

  Paragon tilted his head at a curious angle. “Why would I try that? I wouldn’t want to risk losing all motor function, now, would I?”

  The whole conversation flew over my and Vivi’s heads like a Scoot drone. “No, but … if you do it for less than a billionth of a second, there should be no serious comeback. Everything should just work as normal.” He hovered a finger over one of the keys on the keyboard. “I can do it for you if you’d like.”

  “Er, no. I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, after all—”

  “Too late.” Treble hit the button with a loud tap.

  “No!… Oh.” Paragon looked at his arms and his hands. “Oh. It’s okay. I still have mobility. Ha!”

  A second or two passed before—

  “Look!” Vivi pointed. The light on Paragon’s chest had started flashing. Constantly. About once a second.

  “Oh! Thank you, Dr. Treble.” Paragon rushed up to Treble and held out his hand. “Thank you so much.”

  Treble looked at Paragon’s hand like it was something alien before slowly—and perhaps slightly reluctantly—taking it and shaking it.

  “That’s … okay … Paragon.”

  “So,” I said, the disappointment still showing in my voice, “now that you’ve got it going, what does it do?”

  Paragon stood perfectly still like he was giving the matter some serious thought.

  “I … don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I have no idea what it is.”

  “Hold on,” I huffed. “You’ve been worried about the light not working. And now that you’
ve got it working, you don’t know what it does?”

  Paragon thought again. “Nope. No idea.”

  “Unbelievable!”

  Treble was still staring at the monitor. “Wait a minute. There are still some other functions that have lain dormant since your initial power-up. I can see something here.”

  “What do you mean?” Vivi asked.

  Paragon had a puzzled look. “Other functions? That can’t be. Everything in my database is now accounted for. There is nothing else.”

  “Not according to this, it isn’t.” Treble jabbed his finger at the screen.

  “But I don’t understand.”

  “Let me see if I can get it to…” The sentence faded away to nothing as Treble focused back on the images flashing over the monitor, his fingers dancing over the keyboard.

  “There must be a mistake,” Paragon argued. “I’ve fully exhausted every possible operation of my being. There is nothing more that I can do.”

  “Yes, there is.” Treble didn’t even look up. “Hold out your arms.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said hold out your arms. Straight in front of you.”

  Vivi and I watched, perplexed, as Paragon leveled his arms so that they were horizontal.

  “Now. Watch.” Treble slapped another key.

  As he did so, something moved on the back of each of Paragon’s forearms. Two rectangular plates of metal lifted away from each arm by about a centimeter or two, then curled around both sides of the forearms.

  “What’s going on?” I thought out loud.

  Then, slowly, a long, thin, dark metal pipe raised itself up from inside until it was looking like it was sitting along the length of each arm. There was a click as the two pipes locked into position.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  Treble swiveled in his chair. “Machine guns.”

  *   *   *

  “There were rumors. About Jonah Bloom. You see, the scientific world is actually a rather small, close-knit one. Everyone has a fair idea of what everyone else is doing. So even though he and I hadn’t talked for a year, through colleagues and other members of scientific establishments, I was still vaguely aware of what he was up to. Sandwich?”

  Treble dug some sandwiches from out of his plastic lunchbox and handed them around. They were made with real bread. That told me Treble was clearly well paid.

  “And the first rumor was that he was doing some work for the Water Allocation Board. No one knew what, precisely, but something. Something big. The second rumor said that he had fallen out with them and was refusing to complete the project. On ethical grounds. Quite soon after that second rumor bounced around the scientific establishment, Bloom was found dead.”

  “Yes,” I said quickly. “I think he was murdered.”

  Treble’s eyebrows arched.

  I told him about the way Unicorn Cottage and Uncle Jonah’s rooms had been trashed. I told him about the threatening letter we’d found in a file. The clues that both Vivi and I had been left in order to find Paragon. All the tiny little pieces of evidence to suggest that Jonah Bloom had not died a natural death.

  Treble put his own sandwich down on the desk. “It’s exactly what I’ve been thinking ever since he was found. Of course, I couldn’t prove anything. I doubt anyone can—not even you, Auden. But it seems rather more than a coincidence that Bloom dies soon after walking out on a top-secret scientific project.”

  “What about the police?” Vivi leaned across the desk. “Didn’t you tell them that you thought Dr. Bloom was murdered? Wouldn’t they find out the truth?”

  Treble gave an awkward shrug. “The police investigation found nothing untoward. What could I do? Anyway, the police and Water Allocation Board are too closely interlinked to be completely fair and unbiased. They are basically in each other’s pockets. They’re the same thing.”

  We sat in silence for a while as we digested the information.

  Was the Water Allocation Board responsible for killing my uncle?

  “Soon after Bloom was found dead,” Treble eventually continued, “the WAB paid me a visit. The first of several, actually. Questioned me—well, interrogated me, to be more accurate. Asked me if I knew anything about Bloom’s current work. Had I had any contact with him recently? That sort of thing.” He picked up another small sandwich and shoved it whole into his mouth. After he had swallowed it, he went on. “They also asked if the word Paragon meant anything to me. Obviously I feigned complete ignorance. I think they bought it. And to be honest, apart from giving him his name, I knew nothing whatsoever about Paragon. Until now, that is.”

  We all looked over to Paragon. He was sitting some distance away from us, on a stool, bent over and staring at the floor. Since the guns had been revealed, he had been in a kind of depressed stupor.

  I got up and went over to him.

  “Paragon?”

  “Hey, Audendare.” He looked up at me but the glow in his eyes seemed a little dimmer than usual.

  I knelt beside him and put my hand on his shoulder. He’d been there for me when I needed him, when I found out my dad wasn’t a soldier but a prisoner. He’d supported me and comforted me and told me everything was going to be okay.

  Now I was going to do the same for him.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Oh. Not so good.”

  I put my arms around him and held him tight.

  “You know, I don’t understand,” he said, his hand patting my arm. “All this knowledge I have. All the poetry and language and art and nature. Why do I have it? Why have I been given it? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He gave a bitter laugh. “Weird, isn’t it? All these weeks, you and Vivi have been wondering what exactly my role is. We’ve exhausted most things. Doctor. Teacher. Farmer.” He shook his head. “And then it turns out I’m nothing more than a killing machine.”

  He squeezed my arm, his hand soft and careful. Gentle. It was not the touch of a killing machine.

  “I see how you felt now. Finding out about your father,” he said. “Coming across a truth that hurts. Everything dropping beneath you. The whole world just falling away. Like a big hole that you hadn’t even noticed was there. A pain you just weren’t expecting.”

  “What does any of it matter?” I said, trying to sound cheery, but with tears in my eyes. “It doesn’t make any difference. I mean, my dad’s still my dad. And you’re still you. Just because you were designed in a particular way, doesn’t mean you have to be that way. You’re better than that. You’ve risen above it. You’re Paragon. You’re my Paragon. And I love you.”

  PART SIX

  YELLOW

  CHAPTER 19

  THE WATER ALLOCATION BOARD

  The loud bang awoke me. Without thinking I threw the covers off my bed and stood up. What was that?

  Voices. Growly voices. And footsteps. Heavy boots pounding up the stairs.

  Something wasn’t right.

  I pushed the window open and leaned out of it. Suddenly, my bedroom door flew open so I leaped out, grabbing hold of the tree branch and dropping down onto the trampoline before bouncing hard onto the ground, my bare feet scratching on the dry earth.

  “He’s got out of the window!”

  “He’s in the garden!”

  Loud, angry voices from above me.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I sprinted toward the hole in the hedge. If I could get through the hole and across the field I might be able to hide away and assess what was going on.

  Mum!

  I couldn’t just leave her in the house. Whatever was going on, I couldn’t just desert her. I had to go back.

  That was when one of them tackled me to the ground. They thumped roughly into my shoulders and dragged me down.

  “I’ve got him!” he called to the others. “I’ve got the boy.”

  My face was buried in the dirt and I couldn’t see. The man pulled my arms behind my back and tied
something around my wrists so I couldn’t move them. Then he picked me up by my pajamas, stood me on my feet, and turned me around.

  The man had tough features and cold eyes. His chin was covered in a thin, scratchy layer of stubble. And he wore the dark uniform and protective helmet of the Water Allocation Board. Over his chest, crossing from top right to bottom left, was a belt of bullets, and on his hip, strapped away within a leather case, was a revolver.

  “Come on. Move!”

  He gave me a harsh shove and forced me back toward the house.

  *   *   *

  The house was full of them. Dozens of them. They were kicking things over and pulling pictures from the walls. I could hear a loud ripping noise coming from the sitting room as one of the soldiers sliced a big hole in the sofa.

  The man who had tackled me kept jabbing me in the back as we made our way past the men, through the house to the kitchen.

  “Keep moving.”

  “Here he is!” It was a smooth, educated, well-spoken voice that greeted me as the soldier gave a final shove and closed the kitchen door behind me.

  My mother was sitting at the table, a nervous, confused look on her face. Next to the back door, another of the soldiers was standing at attention, his watchful eyes pinning both me and Mum down. He looked familiar somehow.

  But it wasn’t him I was interested in.

  In front of the sink—the window behind him—was a man dressed in the uniform of a Water Allocation Board officer. He was older than the other soldiers. More lined around the eyes. His slick hair looked grayish and a substantial grayish mustache dominated his top lip.

  “Good of you to join us, Auden. Please”—he indicated a chair—“sit.”

  I sat on the chair next to my mother and felt her arms pulling me nearer.

  “Now.” He turned to the sink. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m feeling rather thirsty.” He took a glass and turned on the tap, filling it to the very top. He spun back to face us and took a long sip from the tumbler. I noticed that he’d left the tap running behind him.

  “That’s better.”

  “Who are you?” I said. “What do you want?”