Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  ‘That would be good,’ said the Director. ‘That would be,’ uncertainly, ‘cool.’

  ‘OK,’ said the Cameraman. ‘Good, good, yeah.’ The Director glanced nervously about, as if the coming combat were aimed directly at him.

  The desert was custard-powder, milled infinitely fine by eons, smoothed by wind and gravity. The sky was so darkly-blue bright, the sun intently bright and unyielding. It is impossible to imagine the night that could ever rust the enamel of this light. An ideal landscape, like a stage set, yellow boards, blue backdrop, before the props and actors are moved into position. And so hot! Its heat was a dry, parching heat. Somewhere over that horizon, to the west, was Tyre, and west of that is the sea - less blue than the sky, though still cobalt and juice-ish. You’re about to correct me, and quite right: to the west was what’s left of Tyre, and that’s not much. The UN Army is a mill, and it has ground Tyre very fine, almost as floury as the desert around it. Concrete has been turned to talcum, brick shattered and granulated, glass made molten and splattered. To wander the streets of the ancient city of Tyre was to walk amongst heaps of well-ground dust, and the occasional sheared-off concrete pillar with cords of steel sprouting from its fracture like weeds. Remember what General Heighton said? We have grown tired of Tyre. Soldiers have gotten it in their hair, and have breathed it into their lungs.

  A convoy of tanks hurtled across the distance, churning thunderheads of dust in their wake.

  Here are three marines - just sitting about. Just hanging.

  ‘Tell us about the Godbombs,’ said the Director to the three marines. ‘Talk to camera, and just speak what’s on your mind.’

  They looked at him, and he felt the need to elaborate.

  ‘Just be natural.’

  The three men were wearing helmets and khaki flak jackets that left their arms bare. One was sitting on an upturned bucket; the other two standing. Each of them was wearing different coloured sunglasses: black; green; blue.

  ‘Taste of lavender,’ said one.

  ‘Something bloomish, yeah,’ concurred the second, shifting his rifle from one hand to the other and back again, as if it were a pool cue. ‘Springtime, or - what. You don’t eat it, but it’s a real distinctive flavour - in your nose, and throat. And then the sky gets loved-up and pretty.’

  ‘The sky?’

  ‘Everything, pretty much,’ said the second. ‘The sky, the land, the—’ he gestured at the horizon.

  ‘It’s like a veil of joy,’ said the first, with sudden eloquence. He pondered, and went on: ‘My home church, we speak in tongues a month, once a month, and then when, and when that come round, there’s—’ The sun fireworks dazzle from the lenses of his shades as he looks right, and then back. ‘Excitement,’ he concludes, shortly. ‘It’s like that.’

  ‘Like Christmas,’ agreed the second.

  The third spoke up: ‘No Christmas for Musclemen,’ he noted. ‘They bottled no Christmas feeling when they concocted this stuff.’

  ‘No shit?’ said the second.

  ‘Musclemen don’t celebrate Christmas - you knew that.’

  ‘No shit?’

  ‘You knew that.’

  The director wanted the talk brought back to topic. ‘And the Godbombs themselves? What do you know about, what do you?’

  ‘I heard it was the French invented.’

  ‘The Mullahs done it!’

  ‘Was it,’ the second guy put in, ‘ours? I heard it was one of ours.’

  ‘The Mullahs thought it would bring the Marine Corps to its knees,’ said the first soldier, vehemently. ‘That’s why they invented them. But they were wrong.’ At this the three started whooping. Marine Corps! Marine Corps!

  The Director tried to keep them on track. ‘But what does it feel like? Doesn’t it make, I mean does it really make you think the enemy are gods?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Soldier 1, lazily. ‘They get them an aura. They look real fine.’

  ‘Like Christ himself,’ said 2.

  ‘Greek gods,’ said the third. ‘Come down from Olympus.’

  ‘And,’ said the Director. He was thinking back to the interview with the neuropollutants expert guy, who had been saying that the new strain locked into the religious centres of the brain so solidly that none of the neuropurgatives could dislodge it. He tried to think how to put that to them without just, you know: pissing them off. You’re stuck with this forever, you know? You know you’ll never be free of it? He couldn’t say that. ‘So you want, so it makes you want, so when you see the enemy, so you want to worship them?’ He tried again. ‘It brings on the desire to worship?’

  ‘What else you do with a god,’ said Soldier 1, ‘but worship?’

  ‘And masks?’ he meant gas-masks. The soldiers weren’t following. ‘The stuff gets in through the skin, I know. But - even in whole body suits?’

  ‘They’re no good,’ said Soldier 1, crossly, without expatiating further upon their inadequacy.

  ~ * ~

  2

  ‘You know; you know,’ said Captain Haldeman. He keeps peppering his speeches with ‘you know’. They’ll have to be edited out. ‘You know I’ll tell you what it is. Muslims consider God entirely beyond the world - there’s no harm we can inflict upon Allah. And they consider Mohammed as meriting very great respect.’ There’s a slightly patrician edge of drawl to his voice; ivy-league tones. ‘Really, it’s almost a definition of a Muslim to say that he respects Mohammed. That’s kind of the first thing a Muslim’s got to do: respect Mohammed, submit to God, that’s what. But a Christian . . .’

  ‘Sure,’ said the Director. It wouldn’t be true to say he was listening, really. It isn’t the case that the Captain has his full attention. Where’s the damn cameraman? Off taking filler footage, probably. They need to nail this down and get away, never mind the filler. Ink-blue sky. What’s to say? But the Captain was still pontificating.

  ‘You know what a Christian is?’ he was saying. ‘A Christian is somebody who knows deep-down he murdered his God. You got to own that fact, you got to acknowledge that and and, you got to love that fact to be a Christian. And. I mean, hardly respectful! Murdering somebody is, I’m sure we can agree, the, the, the,’ a chuckle in the words, ‘the opposite of respect. But.’ But when the Captain tried for serious he just made himself look chumpish. ‘But I guess there’s a cosmic truth there, you know? It is that by murdering God we let God transcend. It is, you know’ and he rolled his hand, an intellectual turned into a theologian by exposure to godbombing, ‘you know, it is by killing God that God can be victorious.’

  The Director was less happy with this. All too discursive. This was not news. News is adrenalin and the tightening of the scrotal skin. He needs action. ‘What’s it like in action?’ he prompted.

  ‘Well, when the Godbombs hit Musclemen units they tend . . . you know, to throw down their weapons and come out weeping, shouting out Islam! Islam!’

  ‘They’re none too muscly, neither, most of them,’ put in Sergeant Easterbrook, ramming his huge ugly face in frame once again and favouring the lens with a lopsided grin. You never saw such a huge nose. ‘Beefsteaks! That’s what you need. Add re-eal muscle.’ He backed up, and tried to model his biceps for the camera, but Haldeman shoved him out.

  ‘The point,’ he went on, when he had his breath again, ‘the point - really.’ As if he actually were about to come to the point. ‘You know . . . the point is that for a true Christian - like the members of this Christian Marine Unit - that when the Godbombs blow over us . . .’

  ‘That’s some fancy neuroscience!’ cawed Easterbrook, off-screen. He was giddy as a goat, that sergeant. ‘There’s some fancy neuroscience in those Godbombs!’

  But there’s no more time. The siren sounds, and the attack is already under way.

  Whatever the Director was, and however often he attended his Episcopalian church, he reflected afterwards that he was no Christian - no true Christian - because when he scrambled up
a bank of rubble, Cameraman beside him, and peered over - when the neurotabs flared in his nostril, and splashsoaked in the pores of his skin, and rushed up the chemical staircase to the centre of his brainstem, where the numinous and religious sensations of wonder are processed - he felt only awe. He looked, and the tank rumbling towards him struck him as sheerly awesome. He felt the almost overwhelming urge to go forward and prostrate himself before it: the Metal Hippopotamus God, so mighty yet merciful. Predicating mercy on might - it was so moving. It was a beautiful idea. And, running up behind it, darting and crouching and aiming their rifles, troops of the United Islamic Army struck the Director’s neurologically tampered-with brain as angels - as angels from a higher realm. He was filled with love, and wonder. There were sparks woven into the tissue of their skin. There was wonder and desert infinity and purple heavens with innumerable grains of distant suns captured in their eyes. It was overwhelming. He was crying and crying, sobbing. He threw his arms upwards.

  He had to assume the Marines had the same feelings. There they were, rushing forward all about him, singing hymns. They ran, and their guns sparked with light and their weapons shouted at the landscape, hah! hah! They were dashing forward in a religious ecstasy to kill their God, to murder him again - tank, angels, everything, to kill it all - in the most profound religious communion of Christendom.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Thrownness

  Mysterious Oval Embedded in Club Room Floor. Staff at Fordham Sports and Social Club are at a loss to explain a mysterious oval of ceramic discovered embedded in a newly laid parquet floor yesterday afternoon. ‘It’s the most baffling thing,’ said Society Treasurer, Jeremy Fagles. ‘The plan to relay the floor had been brought forward to this week, thanks to generous member donations. The old floor’s tiles were taken out, and the new parquet laid by Monday lunchtime. That afternoon, somebody must have crept into the room during a lull, cut out and removed an oval of parquet and replaced it with an oval of the old tiling. The latter is literally embedded in the former! We don’t know how the trick was done; but most of all we don’t know why! Local police say they are unable to comment at this time on whether a crime has been committed.

  ~ * ~

  1

  The first time it happened I suppose I assumed the world had become insane. I say suppose.

  Well.

  We find ourselves chucked into this life, don’t we? That’s the nature of the thing. I was simply going about my business when suddenly I was surrounded by a flicker swirl of methylated-spirit-coloured light, and then the light died away, and afterwards nobody knew me at all.

  At the beginning I suspected a conspiracy: that people were being coordinated to pretend I was a stranger - in some elaborate prank, or perhaps for more sinister reasons. Then I suspected a kind of collective amnesia. How was it that nobody knew me? Soon enough I considered a second possibility: that I had become insane. Or that I had had a stroke. I believed I was a man with a name, a flat, a job, friends, a girlfriend, the whole package. But this belief no longer corresponded to reality, for strangers were living in my flat, my workplace threatened to call security, my friends blanked me and my girlfriend pulled a can of Mace from her handbag when I persisted with her. She nearly got the lid off, too.

  No, I’m not going to tell you my name.

  So, naturally I considered the possibility that what I thought had been my life was all a sort of crazy hallucination. The odd thing was that I inclined towards this belief even though I had about my person physical evidence that it was not so. For example, my keys still let me in through the front door, even if none of my stuff was inside and a big, pale-faced amber-haired man came burlyingly out from the kitchen booming ‘Hey! hey! Who are you?’ Oh, I ran. Another example: my swipe card still let me into Twyford House, but my workstation was occupied by a cross-looking dark-haired woman. The desk was cluttered with photographs, and none of this was me in any way, neither the photographs nor the clutter. My life has always been punctuated by furious bouts of cleanliness. That’s just the sort of person I am. So, and yes, this is the point: if my past life was all a hallucination, then how did the keys and the swipe card get into my pockets? And yet, despite this, and despite various other pieces of concrete evidence, I still tended to doubt my own sanity rather than the sanity of the world around me. I daresay that says a lot about my personality. Or maybe it’s normal. Maybe anybody, finding themselves in my situation, would do what I did.

  I tend to believe so.

  Anyway, I don’t need to draw it out. The person staying in my flat - Roderick, I later discovered - startled me with his booming, and I backed out with my hands up. It was only subsequently that I became conscious of the depth of my resentment at being yelled out of my own flat. I became angry at his possession of what was rightfully mine. Outside again I noticed that my motorbike had been stolen (oh! man!). Which is to say: at first I thought it had been stolen, because I still had its keys on my fob. Later on I realised that it hadn’t been stolen at all, of course. So I walked across town to Susan’s house, but she wasn’t there. Of course not: she was at work. But how could I know that she was at work, or where she lived, or what her name was if it was all a hallucination in my brain? How could I know that she had a tiny sun and moon tattooed just below the panty-line? Or maybe the woman called Susan, whose name I somehow knew, didn’t have that tattoo. Maybe that was just my imagination. I tried calling her, but my phone was not recognised by the network. So I sat in a pub, and nursed a pint, and ate chips and mayonnaise, and waited for the world to come back to normality. The world did not oblige me.

  Eventually I went back to Susan’s house, because it was late in the afternoon and I knew she would be coming back from work. I loitered until she appeared at the corner of her street. I called her name. Her face, first of all, was open. She smiled, and for just the briefest moment the idiotic frustration and insanity of it all fell away from my heart. Just for a fraction it felt as if everything was going to be alright again. But then her eyes did that thing (What is that thing eyes do? It’s so subtle as barely to be noticeable, and yet at the same time it’s quite unmistakeable.) that conveyed that she did not recognise me. ‘Susan!’ I cried. ‘Susan!’ And her smile went away, and she shoved past me to get to her front door. ‘It’s me!’ I wept, like a lunatic. She opened the door a sliver and squeezed inside and then held it in front of her like a shield, peering round the rim of it.

  ‘What do you want? Go away. What do you want?’

  I’m afraid I fell back on my anger. It was the one thing that was not failing me in this weird new world. I’m afraid I said things like, ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Susan?’ And she shut the door on me. This infuriated me, I freely confess. Also, of course, I had a key; so I opened the door and barged through into her hallway and she shouted from the sitting room that she was calling the police, shouted that she was calling the police right now. That she had the phone in her hand and was really dialling. So I allowed my anger to take me away from the house, in a storming-out-of-this-relationship sort of way.

  I was bewildered; so I found another pub and drank some more, which didn’t do anything for my bewilderment, but which made that condition more tolerable. I decided to sort it out in the morning, and made my way to book into a hotel. But my credit card was declined at the desk, and I didn’t have enough ready cash to put a deposit on the counter, so I was compelled to leave that place.

  I don’t want to dwell on all this. I wandered the streets like a tramp. I was a tramp. Nobody knew me. I tried a friend’s house, but they shunned me. And worse than the rejection, and the cold, worse than having to sleep round the back of Sainsbury’s in a nest of discarded cardboard and bubble wrap - was the not knowing what was happening. Why had the world decided I was a stranger? I puzzled and puzzled; and faced with all the evidence of the reality of my past I still, somehow, came back to the notion that I had lost my mind.

  I hadn’t, th
ough.

  I’m not trying to keep you in suspense as to what happened to me. I’ll tell you what had happened to me: I had slipped, or moved, or been propelled from one reality to another. It’s common culture that the multiverse is a sheaf of alternate realities. We’re all familiar with that; it’s the currency of television shows and books and so on. Now, it took me a while properly to figure it, because - I suppose - I had assumed that the different realities would be very different in evident ways. I assumed, in other words, that I would find myself in a world in which Hitler won the Second World War, or dinosaurs never died out and thus shared the world with humans. Things of that nature. So does pulp entertainment bend reality around its lines of force. But it’s not like that. I passed through hundreds of realities, jolting from one to another every three days, more regular than a clockwork manikin; and every single reality was exactly the same. Perhaps there were subtle differences, or differences too subtle for me to notice; or differences in some other portion of the world that I didn’t see. But in the part I did see, every reality I visited was indistinguishable from every other. Except in this one respect, of course: that I started in a reality in which I had a life and people knew me, but in all the other realities I visited I had no history, no identity and nobody knew me at all.