by MacGuffin, WJ; Hanrahan, Gareth; Varney, Allen; Ingber, Greg
Her fantasy always ended with the treasure of treasures, a doped diamond matrix in a boron-nitride case: the bot brain. A jackobot—or perhaps a guardbot with an escort of jackobots, moving with funereal ceremony—enshrined the cartridge in a wall niche. Above the niche, the bot’s name-code was affixed as a gesture of respect—and for convenient retrieval when she finally got there.
Henriette sounded skeptical. “I don’t know why we’d be looking for a Bot Graveyard. This ‘unscheduled side-trip’ was Thaddeus-O’s idea. He’s Armed Forces; why would he know or care about dead bots? Or Roscoe-R either. Did they talk about it?”
“They said they wanted me to lead them to ‘the big find’ in the Underplex.”
“Did they say ‘Graveyard’?”
Sheila thought back. “Not as such. But why else would they recruit me?”
“I don’t know.” Henriette hoisted her multicorder. “But now that you’re here, you can back me up when I finally report Thaddeus-O as a traitor.”
“Wait, I didn’t sign on for that.”
“You haven’t signed on, period. But you still need to support my story, a hundred and ten percent. Believe me, it’s him or us.”
Henriette’s tone unsettled Sheila, a hundred and crazy percent. “Why?”
“This whole side-trip is secret, unauthorized. He’ll try to frame us as traitors just in case we squeal on him. At debriefing he’ll confuse things by raising dumb side issues, probably about me trying to steal experimental equipment. You and I, together, can keep the focus where it belongs.”
“Uh-huh. You have proof?”
Henriette’s pudgy hand thrust into the flashlight beam. It held a pair of red earbuds. Sheila took them, and suddenly she was listening to Thaddeus talking to Roscoe. With a shock she understood this conversation was realtime, happening right now far behind her. Henriette was covertly tracking the two with her multicorder’s long-range mike.
“—doesn’t act much like a soldier.”
“Yeah, man, and this morning, when I woke her up, she was all, ‘I have to comb my hair.’ She has some hair-thing going on, kinda weird.”
“She’s got some connection with the fat one. Didn’t expect that. We’ll have to take them both out afterward.”
“Man, you do that taking-out thing, not me. Harshes my ears.”
Sheila jerked out the earbuds. She heard the men’s conversation continuing as she whispered to Henriette, “You were right! We should get away.”
“Stay on track.” Henriette leaned close. “Yeah, I’ll get away. Let me get away alone with Thaddeus-O for one minute, and I’ll solve the problem.”
“Are you sure—aah!”
From the darkness ahead, a loud clank of metal. In a split-second Sheila thought, It’ll get Henriette first / I can outrun her / run behind Thaddeus / VIOLET laser / he’ll shoot it. At no point did she wonder what “it” was.
Henriette turned her beam to max. They saw, ten meters down the corridor, a wastebin-sized metal canister on halftrack treads. Mop heads, brushes, and soapy nozzles stuck out in all directions. “Just a scrubot.”
Sheila felt faint with relief—then wild with fear as Thaddeus and Roscoe ran up. She flung her arms up and cried, “Don’t!”
They stopped. “Don’t what?”
Accuse me of treason, strand me here, shoot me in cold blood. “Uh—don’t mind me.” She tried to chuckle.
Henriette was examining the cleaning bot. “Damaged. Looks like something hit it, hard.”
They looked around warily. Thaddeus drew his laser, and Sheila tried to move unobtrusively out of his line of sight.
When she saw he wasn’t targeting her, Sheila felt it safe to look at the scrubot. Busted treads, broken sensors, a chassis that looked like something had bitten off half—the bot was a mess.
Automatically her heart went out to it. After a lifetime of conditioning by The Computer’s master propagandists—from the earliest Junior Creche shows with Happy Hilton-B and his lovable sidekick Foodvat, through countless episodes of Hard Tech, Botsense, and Jacko!, to lifestyle ads for everything from new PDCs to surge protectors—Sheila could commit emotionally to almost any mechanism. Her adoration of gadgetry had brought her to Pro Tech, where people could talk ecstatically for two hours about an inkjet print head. Nowadays if she saw a smiley face—just two dots and a curved line—she melted by reflex, even for a toaster.
Henriette said, “Bot, how were you damaged?”
The bot spoke; its damaged speakers fuzzed its voice. “Autocar. Wheelcaps very dirty-dirty. Rude autocar, didn’t want wheelcaps clean.”
Grunting, Thaddeus holstered his pistol. “Idiot bot had me thinking we were about to—” He hauled off and kicked the bot. It sagged and beeped plaintively.
Sheila stepped between them. Objectively she understood some Technical Services coder had programmed Plaintive Bot-Beep #1 just to rouse a human bystander’s sympathy. So what? She still wanted to nurture. “What’s your name, little guy?”
“Human-Interface Designation ‘Alkylbenzenesulfonate’—Alkyl.”
A scrubot named “All-Kill” didn’t fill her with confidence. “I’ll call you Alky, okay?”
Thaddeus stared. “What are you going to do, adopt it?”
Alky the scrubot ignored them both. “Must go-go to assigned destination. Go-go-go.”
Sheila gasped. The bot was following the secret imperative Marcellus-B programmed long ago—heading to the Graveyard. In her excitement she forgot the danger from Thaddeus and Roscoe. “Follow him!”
“Why?”
“He’ll lead us right there.”
“Hey man, do you always call bots ‘him’?”
“Come on, come on!”
Alky was already limping on, or the halftrack equivalent of limping. The four Troubleshooters trailed it (or, as Sheila thought, “him”).
“We may need a few anti-bot weapons,” said Thaddeus. “You think this cache will have some?”
Sheila found the question odd. “I guess it’s possible. Maybe attached to a combot.”
In this dark, quiet corridor, Roscoe was acting almost normal. “Man, I hope this cache-thing has lots of good pills. Something to make me feel like a tunnel all the time. No more brain-burn.”
Thaddeus shook his head. “The only drugs in a weapons cache are bioweapons.”
Sheila repeated, “Weapons?” This she regretted. She wasn’t sure why.
Thaddeus stopped, so they all stopped. He spoke slowly and with suspicion. “We are—talking about—the same—“
Whunk! The scrubot vanished. “Down!” Henriette cried.
As one, the other three fell to the ground. Henriette looked around. “No, I mean Alky is down. He fell through that gap, see?”
Shining their lights down a deep crack in the floor, they saw the scrubot had fallen to another level, some ten meters below. Looking worse than ever, it said, “Not hurt. Not hurt-hurt-hurt. Dirty here, very-very dirty-dirty.” It dragged itself away, beyond the range of their lights.
“You go, little guy—” Sheila shouted, then noticed the bot was moving in a new direction. “He’s doubling back. We have to catch him.” Sheila jumped the gap and ran as fast as she dared down the corridor until she found a staircase. “Here!”
As the others ran to join her, she pried open the rusted door. Her beam showed a stairwell of concrete, stained and marred with a webwork of cracks. The stairs were mostly destroyed, but the steel railings were intact.
Thaddeus pointed at her, then pointed down. Sheila stole a glance at Henriette, who nodded significantly.
Sheila scrabbled and slid down two broken flights, sometimes crawling on twisted handrails across the gaps. Each flight ended in a landing, but the doors were blocked. After a tense climb down a third flight, she arrived at a landing that seemed more or less intact. The other Troubleshooters, still above, were moving more slowly.
Sheila’s flashlight was dying. She felt around in the darkness. As she found an exit door
, she heard from above a muffled gurgle, then a snap, like shattering plastic. One flight up, something, or pieces of something, hit the landing. Silence.
Footsteps. A bobbing beam descended. It drew close to Sheila. A pointing finger thrust into the beam—Thaddeus. “Keep going,” he said calmly.
Roscoe was climbing down to join them. He, too, looked calm.
Sheila waited, but she heard nothing. “Wait, where’s Henriette-O?”
Thaddeus stopped with his face a hand’s-breadth from hers. The light shone up between them. He stared, his expression blank, his eyes dead. “I sent her back,” he said in a flat voice. “Let’s keep going.” He shouldered her aside and opened the door.
Roscoe moved past her. “Nice earbuds,” the mutant said in passing. “Kinda loud.”
Sheila trembled in darkness. Looking back, then up, then crazily in all directions, she tried to think. What could she do? Flee into the Underplex? Suicide. Turn back, try to find the Team Leader? Even if she got Fabian-O to believe her story, it would be her word against an ORANGE Loyalty Officer.
Desolate, she recognized the truth: She was alone.
Poor Henriette.
With hammering heart Sheila followed the others’ footsteps, wondering if—no, when—she’d be next.
—————
They had emerged on the same level as the scrubot. As they followedAlky on its winding route, Sheila tried to keep well away from her teammates. With her attention divided (forward, aft, Alky, and Thaddeus), Sheila lost her bearings. She had no idea where they were in relation to the FunFoods factory.
This part of the Underplex seemed more industrial, or it might have been a warehouse area. The hall was wide, the concrete floor oil-stained but largely intact. Alky wheeled past deserted loading docks and gaping entryways large enough for a truckbot.
After long minutes, the bot rolled into a cavernous hallway where every sound echoed. Overhead, at the limit of their beams, the Troubleshooters saw concrete ceilings laced with cracks. On one wall Thaddeus’s flashlight picked out a sign: TARGETED ENFORCEMENT AREA. Sheila couldn’t tell what had been enforced, but she doubted it still was.
Alky moved directly toward one side of the hall. Following, they smelled—what?—gasoline? cordite? The bot led them to a steel door, dented but still hanging by one hinge. Beside the door they could see a huge loading port, unobstructed; but Alky ignored it and went in the smaller door. The door’s sign read AUTOMATONIC MFG TS.
Sheila’s heart leaped. This Technical Services firm was the location she’d found in the old file. But then her heart stopped leaping—in fact, it just about stopped. Taped below the AutomaTonic logo was another sign:
DANGER! RADIATION! KEEP OUT!
The Troubleshooters paused. “We didn’t bring a radiation counter.” Thaddeus pointed at Roscoe. “Can you see radiation?”
“Not the bad kind, man.”
Sheila said, “I own—well, I borrowed—a good detector. But I had no time to get it when Roscoe pulled me out of my barracks.”
“So we have no way to be sure.” Thaddeus pointed at the sign. “But now I do recall this place. My old sergeant talked about it once in a briefing. AutomaTonic Manufacturing was a big huge bot factory and repair depot. Some traitor ‘liberated’ the bots by taking out the hardware that make them obey orders.”
‘Their asimov circuits,” Sheila said.
“Right. The bots organized, killed everyone or drove them away, took over the place, and hollowed it out as a new—what would you call it?—nursery. Nobody could stop them, because the leaders were warbots and combots.”
Roscoe looked at the ruined doorway. “Man, I think they got stopped.”
“That they did. The Computer finally just pulled the plug. With no power at their recharge stations, the renegade bots eventually went inert, except a few.”
Sheila saw the connection. “So a few extra broken bots wouldn’t be noticed here among the renegades. That explains why Marcellus-B chose this as the Bot Graveyard.”
Thaddeus frowned. “What? What’s a ‘Bot Graveyard’?”
“Uhh—it’s what you brought me along to find.” His blank stare disconcerted her. “The biggest legend in Pro Tech.”
“Pro Tech?” Thaddeus looked ready to explode. “You’re supposed to be PURGE!”
“PURGE?” Sheila was mortified. “Do I look like a homicidal terrorist?”
“No.” He spoke with withering contempt. “You look like a lowdown gadget-scamming sneak thief.”
“Well, all right then.” She felt relieved, if not flattered.
“I thought it was your cover.” He pointed at Roscoe. “You were supposed to bring the soldier who’d find the PURGE weapons cache! I gave you the barracks number.”
Roscoe squinted at his sleeve. He held it out. “Hey man, is that a 1 or a 7?”
Thaddeus slapped the arm away. “I’ll deal with you later. All right, newbie—” He pointed at Sheila. To her eye, his other arm seemed to drift closer to his laser pistol. “—Let’s get back to that stairwell.”
Struggling against panic, Sheila groped for an idea—anything. “Wait—I mean—what about—?” Inspiration struck. “What about Alky? We can reclaim his brain. It’s valuable.”
“Not when it’s radioactive. Let’s go.”
“No, no, nonono. The sign must be a fake. You said yourself, those renegade bots went inert.”
“You know why this factory is a radiation hazard? A few of those bots had nuclear batteries: the warbots and combots. Armed Forces sent in troops to restore order. It was an all-out running battle. It spread nuclear fuel everywhere. That’s why they closed off this whole subsector. That kind of collateral effect is always a risk when you’re fighting the forces that would destroy Alpha Complex.”
Roscoe said, “Like by spreading nuclear fuel across a subsector?”
“Exactly. That’s the enemy—nothing is beneath them.”
Sheila was still stairwell-stalling. “Listen, this place can’t be—it isn’t radioactive. Factories like this are outfitted with, with anti-radiation—system—things.” No, wait, then he’ll follow me inside. “But—but only I know where to find them—how to switch them off. I mean, on!”
“Newbie, it’s lucky you’re not in PURGE after all. They would have killed you the first day. Though that would save time—you’re doomed anyway.” He pointed at her again. “Rule Number 1, little thief: Learn to lie.”
Thaddeus paused; she felt him sizing her up. “Okay, you know what? That’s a good idea. You go in there and fetch that bot brain. We’ll hang back here and wait.”
Sheila felt relief; she’d gotten her wish. Then she felt despair; she’d gotten her wish! He expects I’ll die. “It’s pitch black in there,” she said dully. “My flashlight is dead.”
“Just wait. Soon you’ll start to glow.”
“Here, man. I don’t need mine.”
With leaden fingers she took Roscoe’s flashlight. She thought, Three hours ago—has it been three yet?—I was sleeping in my bunk. She couldn’t see where or how she’d gone wrong, nor how to put it right.
Her mind a blank—feeling already dead—Sheila entered the Bot Graveyard.
—————
AutomaTonic was an abandoned factory—a straight copy of the FunFoods floor with the brightness and contrast turned way down. As in the hallway, the ceiling here was lost in shadow. Anything could be up there. At the thought, Sheila shivered. Then she thought, Better to be killed by a mutant or rogue bot than by skin lesions and coughing up lung tissue. Then again, radiation sickness meant all her hair would fall out and she wouldn’t have to worry about it ever, ever again.
In the giant echoing room she saw, in place of food vats, long lines of machines. She knew them all: gun drills, jig borers, gear cutters, toolroom lathes, recipro saws, and dozens more. This place had been a major installation, once.
Though the air was dry and stale, the factory was spotless—no dust. One clue told Sheila it ha
d been deserted a long time. The floor was marked with lines of tape in many colors—tracking tape.
Tracking tape not only showed clearance boundaries; it guided bots. The bots’ onboard guidance systems read the tape, so no manager need ever fear an errant scrubot might accidentally overturn his desk. Unfortunately (Sheila also knew) traitors tuned tracking tape to transform targets to terrifying troublemakers. By remagnetizing the tape, anyone could encode it with software instructions. A moving bot could be invisibly reprogrammed with illicit commands: “Overturn your manager’s desk.” Nobody made tracking tape any more.
But it looked like today’s bots could still read the tape. Alky the scrubot hadn’t moved far from the entrance, and was making awkward, drunken turns along a winding tape-route. She realized: He’s reprogramming himself.
Sheila needed that brain, altered or not. She ran after the bot. It led her on a winding chase, and soon she was out of sight of the entrance. If she died now, Thaddeus and Roscoe would have no idea what happened.
By the time she caught up with Alky, the bot had started talking to itself. Its voice had changed. “Clean damage—check. Scrub all surfaces—check. Dump irradiated debris—check.”
“Alky, stop. Did you say the radiation is gone?”
“Yes,” said Alky. “Scrubots arrive at Bot Graveyard—get one last assignment. Clean everything. Check. Radiation now, background levels.”
No radiation! With shock and hope, Sheila began to imagine a future free of weeping sores. If she could find an escape route....
“Alky, if there’s another way out of here, lead me to it.”
The scrubot wheeled ahead in a straight line—though, she noted, by coincidence this path still matched the tracking tape. She followed, uncertain. Did he hear me? Is he obeying?
She wasn’t worried, exactly. Whatever the tape was coding into Alky’s brain, it couldn’t revoke the bot’s hardwired asimov circuits. The original AutomaTonic bots that had revolted eight decades ago were destroyed; any new arrivals would have intact circuits. The Graveyard bots wouldn’t harm her—not that scrubots could do more than hit her with a mop.
