Robot Wrecker

by Paul Tomlinson

  Several of the Talos Industries vehicles had negotiated the hazards of the construction area and were now moving to block where we'd planned to take the Strider through the fence. It looked as though they were setting up some heavy artillery too.

  "Do you think they'll risk damaging the Strider?" Nathan asked.

  I laughed. "I think they have instructions to stop us, no matter what the cost," I said.

  "Damn!"

  "If we can hold them off until the TV crews get here we'll be okay," I said. "They won't blow us up on camera, it'd be bad publicity."

  "We have to get off this site fast. They'll be calling up reinforcements to cover every road for miles around," Nathan said.

  "Time to test this thing out over uneven ground, I think."

  I turned the Strider away from the fence and headed into the middle of the construction area, picking a way through the girders and concrete-filled trenches, along a route which the wheeled vehicles couldn't possibly follow. That left only the other Striders to contend with.

  "They're moving up fast: I think they've had more practice at this sort of thing," Nathan said. "I don't think you'll outrun them."

  "I don't plan to outrun them, just to get far enough ahead of them. We're not going to run away, we're going to turn and fight!"

  "We?" Nathan said.

  "You want me to stop and let you out here?"

  "No, no, I'm with you all the way."

  A Strider is something like eighteen feet high, and possibly the same across the shoulders: not the easiest thing to play hide 'n' seek with. Eventually we were far enough ahead of the other Striders for me to duck aside without them seeing, and hide in the shadows. I cut the headlights, the cab lights, and the music, and set about investigating the controls for the Strider's arms.

  To compensate for the imbalance of weight when the Strider picked up a heavy object, a combination of gyros, hydraulics and tightening cables was employed. Most of it was done automatically, but the driver had to make his lift smoothly and evenly to ensure that the automatics could respond adequately – it's the sort of thing that eventually comes with experience, I guess. Me, I had to trust to luck. I turned the Strider through seventy or eighty degrees on its central joint, bending the legs into a near crouch to keep the machine balanced, and then reached forward with the arms to lift a girder from a nearby stack. It's probably one of the combinations of moves the user's manual advises against. There was a brief moment as the girder was raised that the whole rig seemed in danger of toppling forwards, but the cables and hydraulics took the strain, and we stayed upright, poised like a baseball player ready to swing.

  As soon as the first of our pursuers came into view, I turned and straightened the Strider, sweeping the girder in a fast arc which knocked the legs out from under our opponent. I released the girder and stepped backwards in a move which I hoped would prevent us falling forwards in the follow-through. It almost didn't work, and I had to back-pedal a few steps before the gyros sorted out our balance. In front of us, the enemy Strider seemed to fall in slow motion, belly-flopping into the dirt.

  "One down!" I yelled.

  "Three to go," Nathan said.

  "Keep an eye out for the guys in exo-suits," I said. "I'll take care of the iron chickens."

  The pursuing Striders stepped carefully around their fallen comrade and continued after us: I'd hoped that at least one of them would stop and see if the fallen driver was hurt. Silly me.

  Those huge concrete pipes they use for drains are delivered on big wooden pallets, held in place by X-shaped bits of wood. If you knock one of these bits of wood out of place and then lean on the stack of pipes, you get a sort of concrete avalanche which can flatten a Strider if you're not careful. The remaining two Striders separated, moving around the still rolling pipes on the left and right, aiming to come at us from two directions. I moved towards the one on the right, picking up speed and bearing down on him.

  "My God, you're going to ram them!" Nathan warned, as if it might not have occurred to me.

  Have you ever played chicken in an iron chicken? I was watching the other Strider closely, waiting for the first sign of hesitation. You see, I'd just discovered another little feature of the Strider: guy-lines. To secure themselves in place in awkward situations, the Striders could send out wires which would fix themselves magnetically to steel structures, or use grappling hooks for other anchor points. These magnetic guy-lines could also be used offensively, if your aim was good. The other Strider stopped, ready to step nimbly aside and trip me as I thundered past, no doubt.

  I stopped too, planting my Strider's feet firmly, and the moment the other driver lifted his machine's foot to take another step, I fired the magnetic-tipped cable. It hit the other Strider's leg with a satisfying clang, and I reeled in the cable as quickly as the capstan mechanism would allow, yanking the other Strider's leg up and out from under it. It toppled over backwards with an even more satisfying crash, and a cloud of dust and builders' sand. I released the guy-cable.

  Three down and –

  "One behind you!" Nathan warned. "And armed guards coming down the slope to the left."

  I turned, firing a volley of rivets up the slope to discourage the guards, and then faced our final Strider opponent. The final showdown. High Noon. He was about ten yards away. Waiting. Almost subconsciously I called up The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from the music database. Keeping my machine's feet as close to the ground as possible, I began to back away from the other Strider: I wasn't about to let him yank a leg out from under me with a guy-line.

  "How far away is the fence back there?" I asked.

  "A hundred and fifty feet, maybe. But it's up the slope: there's no way you could get this thing up there," Nathan said.

  "Says who? The military do it in their Defenders all the time."

  "Those things are designed for uneven terrain, they're special military models. Tanks."

  "Principle's the same."

  I turned us about until we were facing the slope. The other Strider began to move towards us.

  "Once I start this thing moving, there'll be no stopping: I have to keep the momentum going or we'll never make it to the top. You think you can fire that gun out the back window and keep the other Strider from following us up?"

  "The back window doesn't open," Nathan said.

  I handed him a large spanner. "Improvise."

  The plastic gave out under the second blow.

  "Fire off a couple of shots to make him wary of getting close, then I'll just jog this thing on up the hill," I said.

  "You any idea what we'll find when we get up there?" Nathan asked. He took aim at the enemy Strider.

  "There's a road runs along the top there: it's probably swarming with Talos Industries troops by now. But, we'll worry about that when we get there."

  "If we get there," Nathan muttered. He fired. "Hah! Took out a headlight." His next shot went wild, but then he managed another which left a white spiderweb on the other Strider's windscreen.

  I sprayed the slope ahead of us with the last of the rivets, to keep the guards out of our way, and some dry clumps of grass caught light. Then we took a couple of steps back.

  "Any last words for posterity?" I asked.

  "Get us the heck out of here!" He said. Or words to that effect.

  Nathan was probably right, about those military Striders being specifically designed to tackle terrain like the slope we were heading for. I hoped the TV news crews were in position to film this, because one way or the other, this was going to make spectacular footage. If we made it, they might even use it in the next Strider commercial.

  I fired a guy-line up towards the fence above, using a grappling hook to attach it to one of the posts: I hoped it would take the strain.

  "Hi-ho, Silver, away!"

  It wasn't quite a gallop, more a sort of ungainly waddle, as I kept the legs as far apart as possible and the cockpit close to the ground, reeling in the cable as we went, like a drunken two-legg
ed spider. The Strider's feet gouged out clods of earth and kicked them every which way. The machinery whined, creaked and hissed, but we were too busy being all shook up to worry. Nathan crashed into the back of the seat, then rolled sideways and lay huddled against the door, hanging on for dear life.

  Half way up I almost lost it. The Strider was leaning too far backwards, threatening to send us tumbling butt-hole over tea-kettle into the arms of the enemy below. I panicked and quickly reeled in the guy-cable to drag our bulk forwards. It was touch and go for a couple of seconds, and then we were heading up the slope again.

  As soon as we reached the fence, I used one of the Strider's arms to anchor us to the post, and the other to tear away the chain-link, creating a gap for us to pass through.

  We stepped over the ditch, which was narrower here at the side of the road, and out onto the tarmac. Talos Industries armoured cars were already racing up the hill towards us, monocycles just ahead of them.

  "You know what the top speed of this thing is?" Nathan asked.

  "Thirty or forty max. We aren't going to be able to outrun them," I said.

  We were heading for the breast of the hill.

  "Any suggestions?" Nathan asked.

  "I suggest that now might be a good time to panic," I said.

  "We could wait until we get over the top of the hill and when we're out of sight, put this thing in a walk cycle and bail out," Nathan suggested.

  "It seems a pity to ditch it now that we've got this far," I said.

  "Myself, I'd just settle for getting out of this alive and a free man," Nathan said.

  "I can see the attraction of that," I said.

  "We won't get much further, anyway," Nathan said. "They'll have a roadblock set up at the cross-roads."

  "You're right," I said. "We won't get far on this road."

  "Then we abandon ship?"

  "Hell no, we abandon the road!"

  I turned the Strider and slowed it so that I could get it to step up onto the low wall at the side of the road, and crouch there, bird-like.

  "That's a thirty-foot drop!" Nathan wailed.

  I grinned. "Hold tight, the iron chick is about to make its maiden flight."

  The Strider jumped.

  I knew that if I could pitch the hydraulics right and keep the Strider moving when it hit the ground, we'd make a spectacular escape and leave the security men up on the road agape and unwilling to follow. I also knew that if I misjudged it, there'd be one hell of a crash, and the security men would have to scrape us off the inside of the wreckage.

  The Strider seemed to hang in the air for a long moment, then fell, plummeting towards the ground like a brick in battle armour.

  "We're going to die!" There was a slight note of panic in Nathan's voice.

  We hit the ground hard. The crash was deafening. The Strider lurched horribly. Joints and bodywork screeched and groaned, and the whole thing began to pitch forward. Nathan fell forwards, hitting the back of my seat, then sliding to the floor of the cockpit. I grappled with the controls, trying to get the machine's left leg far enough forward to keep us upright.

  Somehow I managed to keep us moving in a staggering run, stability warnings wailing and hydraulic pressure lights flashing. I slowed the Strider then, steering it under the cover of the trees growing along the bottom of what had once been a railway track and then a footpath for nature-lovers, and which was now neglected and overgrown. I kept the Strider moving at a steady pace, aiming to get as far away as possible before they brought in an air patrol to locate us.

  When I was a kid, I loved setting traps for robots. On a rainy afternoon, there was nothing finer than sitting at the top of the stairs listening to the junk-yard clatter of a domestic robot hitting concrete, or to hear its high-pitched electronic scream as it discovers that a door-knob has been wired to the mains. The smells of fried circuit boards and hot metal bring the memories flooding back even now. It's not that I hate robots exactly, they were just the only legitimate targets I had as a child. If I'd had a brother to torment, my life might have turned out very differently. But I'd grown up an only child, and both my parents were indentured MinoTech desk slaves. Most of the time it was me in a house with five domestic robots. And their leader, Boris.

  Permanently disabling Boris would have meant shutting down the whole house: no food, no clean clothes, no hot baths; so I had to devise ways of catching him which would cause embarrassment rather than incapacitation. Boris' blank-faced, humourless, unquestioning smugness was too much like the people around me: of course he became my target. I wanted to shake him out of his calm, unflappable obedience, wanted him to stir the other robot slaves into rebellion and persuade them to cast aside their shackles. But like his adult human masters, Boris was content to tirelessly followed his carefully programmed life as he always had. I once blocked up the fountain in the entrance hall and then disconnected the pump from the water supply and attached it to a drum containing a mixture of my own concocting. Boris was walking around covered in day-glo pink varnish for over a month!

  You should try it. If you ever feel threatened or clumsy beside your shiny, efficient robotrix, trip her up and send her flying under a tram. You may feel that your robot is too valuable to risk seriously damaging, but don't let that stop you demonstrating your superiority over it: paint yellow and black stripes on it and glue springy antennae to its head; remove its normal feet and attach instead a pair of huge cartoon chicken feet and watch it attempt to walk with dignity; swap its left and right hands; anything that makes you feel that you're the one in control. It was thinking like this, along with a series of reports concerning 'disruptive behaviour' at school, which led an educational psychologist to 'encourage' my parents to send me to the MinoTech 'college' – a sort of boarding school cum military academy for all the 'difficult' kids of corporate employees. This is your last chance to conform, they warned. And it was at the academy that I discovered my attacks on robots were little more than practical jokes compared to what some of the others could do. I needed to up my game. Which leads us back to my current predicament.

  The Strider was in a steady walk-cycle, with the only evidence of its recent abuse being a slight limp. I looked over at Nathan. His face was pale, and he was holding his left arm to his side.

  "Wild ride, huh?" I said.

  "I think I crapped myself," he said glumly, then he grinned.

  "What happened to your arm?" I asked.

  "I think it's bust," he said.

  "Does it hurt?" I asked.

  Nathan looked down at his arm and laughed. He rolled up his sleeve and exposed the damaged mechanism of the prosthetic. He stared at me, as if to gauge my reaction.

  "Looks like the elbow joint's dislocated," I said.

  He nodded. "It's worn out. It hangs together for a while, but eventually it gives out. Korean crap."

  I moved towards him, but he pulled back, hiding his arm like a wounded animal. "I can slip the joint back into place," I said. "It'll need fixing properly, but at least I can stop the elbow bending the wrong way."

  "How come you know about prosthetics?"

  "I don't, but they're a lot like the mechanisms in robots." I reached for his arm, and this time he didn't pull away. I wanted to ask how he lost his arm, but didn't think I knew him well enough. I sensed he wasn't comfortable with the artificial arm: the challenge in his eyes when he had revealed it told me that. He'd been daring me to say something about it.

  "It's okay," he said, as I moved to get a grip on his upper arm. "It's fake to the shoulder."

  Holding the arm above and below the elbow, I forced my thumbs into the joint and levered it apart, slipped the ball of the combined radius-ulna into its socket: it was a pretty primitive mechanism, the joint allowed no east-west rotation, and the cabling which acted as 'muscle' could provide only jerky stop-start motion. His hand looked real enough, if you didn't look too closely. But there was no cladding or fake skin above the wrist, just the bare stainless steel and nylon constr
uction. When I commented on this fact, Nathan shrugged.

  "Why pretend it's something it isn't? Besides, the damned thing breaks down so often it's easier to leave all this exposed." Nathan flexed his fingers, their workings giving out little metallic clicks. He bent his arm at the elbow, testing it warily.

  "It'll stay in place, probably, but if you try lifting anything it'll just pop out again. You need to get a someone to look at it, adjust the tension between the servos," I said. "I'll do it when we get back, if you want; I think I have the right tools."

  Nathan shrugged. "Okay." He looked at me, as if expecting me to ask about the arm. I didn't like to make any observations about the quality of the prosthetic: criticising a bloke's artificial arm probably ranks up there with commenting on the size of his dick.

  Nathan rolled his sleeve down and began talking without looking at me.

  "I lost the arm in a road accident a couple of years ago. I was into motorbikes then, had been ever since I was a kid. Real motorbikes, like you see in the movies, not the plastic disposable racers the Japanese build today. My parents were dead set against me having anything to do with bikes: the usual prejudices, I guess; they never had an original thought between them. Anyway, I got hold of an old bike, renovated it myself in a lock-up garage I rented in The Outskirts. I built an engine for it that ran on alcohol I distilled myself from vegetable waste.

  "I suppose it was a freaky looking machine, but man I was proud of it: I used to cruise around The Outskirts in my shades, even when it was dark. I bought a leather jacket and dragged it down the road behind the bike to get just the right look. I was so cool." He looked up at me, or through me, and laughed. "I got hit by some rich kid who was racing around The Outskirts showing off his new air car to the poor folks, keeping it just far enough off the ground so people could see it had counter-grav. He didn't stop. A witness got his registration number, but the police said they couldn't trace it. He was a rich kid, you see.

  "My arm was too badly damaged for the doctors to save."