Robot Wrecker

by Paul Tomlinson

  "Where will you go?"

  She shrugged. "There's a whole world out there I've seen nothing of. Maybe I'll just travel around a bit, pick fruit in the country with the peasants, sleep under the stars, you know?"

  Beth Civardi was going back to Police HQ, there was no other life for her. She'd still depend on them for the things she needed to get through life, but I guess she'd now know the price she was paying for them. I regarded that as a small victory.

  Chapter Ten 

  There are people who live their whole lives out in the countryside, which seems weird to me. I don't mean the people who grow and harvest the food: the farms they live on have their own power and security systems and are like mini cities. I mean the people who just live on their own in a shack in the middle of nowhere. What is that about? I like to know the countryside is there, but I would never want to spend more than a few hours there. A day trip, to get away from the city for a while, is great – but I like to be back home before the moon rises and the wolves start howling. Today I'd headed north, telling myself it was just another salvaging expedition. Bouncing along the broken tarmac in Raoul's old Land Rover pick-up required most of my concentration, so I didn't have to think about anything else. In particular, I didn't have to think about the fact that yesterday's attack on the cybercop had left me feeling somehow empty. Or the fact that Nathan hadn't returned home last night: his bed was empty when I'd left this morning.

  I ended up some twenty miles north of the city, and spent the day digging through the piles of scrap which an old farmer had once allowed some company to 'store' on his land, for a modest fee: oddly they'd never come back for it. The old guy also had a pasture full of old tyres that he tried to interest me in, but rubber wasn't really my thing. It was a pleasant day, if you were into insect bites and slipping in foul-smelling splats of cow crap, hidden like landmines in the grass, and I'd soon filled the back of the Land Rover with an assortment of mismatched limbs and limb parts, a couple of useable head units – minus brains – and a bucketful of smaller components. Under a tarpaulin I stashed a few spares that I wanted for a personal project I'd been working on for the past few weeks.

  The sun slipped towards the horizon, leaving a sky the colour of a week old bruise, and I headed down the broken highway towards the dim sodium glow that was the City of Nottingham. It was later than I usually liked to be out on the old roads alone, because gangs of self-styled road warriors emerged at dusk, roving the badlands like cyber-age vampires. I was trying to scan the road ahead using infrared, one eye on the dashboard monitor looking for the hotspots of engines in hiding, while also keeping an eye out for major holes in the road in front of me: hit one of them at seventy and I'd flip the old Land Rover butt over whatsit and it'd be goodbye Stevie Houston.

  The yard behind the repair shop was a modern day Elephants' Graveyard, where old robots went to die. Only we didn't let them die: we zapped them with Herbert West's zombie juice and sent them back into the world, reanimated robo-corpses lumbering around like Sunday shoppers. The piles of scrap closest to the back door were an almost surreal mish-mash of not quite human body parts, while further back are the rusting hulks of old automobiles. The automobile, symbol of status, phallicism and human greed; machines which had been the focus of human culture from the time when old Henry Ford put an engine in a pram and called it the Model T, to the time when someone invented the counter-gravity-device and Tarmac when bankrupt. The site where the repair shop now stood had once been a garage and filling station at the side of a main road; one of the old petrol pumps lay off to one side, its hose perished and the clam shell logo cracked and faded. As I pulled up outside the Raoul's workshop, I wondered when it was that I'd started thinking of this place as home.

  "Have you seen Nathan?" I asked.

  Raoul looked up from the robot skull he was drilling into: it was delicate work, and he'd have had every right to be miffed at the interruption, but he turned off the drill and pushed his goggles up into his hair. I guess he knew why I was asking.

  "He came in earlier, needed me to do some work on his arm," Raoul said.

  "He's okay, then?" I asked.

  Raoul shrugged. "His arm was completely burned out: took me most of the afternoon to fix it, and he wouldn't tell me how it got to be thet way."

  I sighed, glad that Nathan was okay, but still worried about where he was staying and what he was up to. I figured Raoul was owed some sort of explanation: he made us coffee while I told him how Nathan and I had ambushed the cop, and how that had led to the near-destruction of Nathan's arm. Raoul sipped his coffee and didn't say much, but he rarely did.

  "I feel Nathan and me are drifting apart," I said. "We don't seem to agree on things anymore, and we barely see each other. He thinks I'm spending too much time here, said that I was turning into a nine-to-fiver, you know, living the kind of life we'd wanted to get away from."

  Raoul was watching me closely. "And what do you think?" He asked. "Thet's what really matters."

  "I don't know what I think," I said. "That's the problem. I come here because I like coming here, and I do the work because I want to. I tried to explain that, but he won't even try to understand. He's one of the few people I've ever really regarded as a friend, and I don't want him to think I'm somehow betraying him."

  "Then I suppose now is not a good time to offer you a job?" Raoul asked.

  "A job?"

  "Well, you've been doing some work for me, finding salvaged parts I can use, and I've been giving you a little money for doing it: I thought it might be time to formalise the arrangement. I need to hand over some of the robot repairs, so I can concentrate on my research."

  "A job?" I repeated stupidly.

  "Think about it," Raoul said, shrugging. "You don't hev to give me an answer right away."

  "Yes," I said.

  "You don't hev to rush into it, take some time to – "

  "I'll do it," I said.

  Raoul smiled. "When do you want to start?"

  "Now... tomorrow... whenever," I said.

  "Welcome aboard," he said. Then: "I'm sure Phyllis will be happy to hev you join the team."

  I'd forgotten about Phyllis: she was going to be my boss too. I'd worry about that when she got back from her 'grocery shopping.'

  There are two things I like about robot salvage, three if I count the fact that I like to see robots in pieces. The first is the seeking phase, roaming the wastelands and city dumps, sifting through the kipple to find some useful fragment. It's like gold prospecting, I guess: the thrill of finding something valuable, something for free. Unfortunately, with robot spares the useful 'something' is likely to be attached to a whole chunk of useless nothing. It might be a useable arm on a junk torso, or maybe only a hand on the end of the arm. That's where the second fun part comes in: the dismantling. As kids, we all probably enjoyed taking things apart: torches, radios and other electrical gizmos; not to repair them, not necessarily even to find out how they work, but simply for the satisfaction of reducing a thing to its component parts.

  I picked up a dented robot skull and balanced it, Hamlet-like, in my palm: there was an eye there that might be of use. "Eyes are very delicate, and must be removed with great care," I said.

  Phyllis was standing on the porch, looking down at me.

  I knelt and laid the robot skull on the hard-packed dirt. With a fibre-tip pen I marked a small 'x' on the forehead, about an inch above the eye socket. "Just a gentle tap..." I took a large hammer from the tool roll, raised it above my head, and brought it whistling down. There was a loud, hollow crunch, and the eye shot out of the skull like a bullet, straight towards Phyllis. It was an accident, of course.

  She caught the eye and slipped it into her overall pocket, never batting an eyelid.

  "You get anything interesting today?" She asked. Phyllis didn't know much about robots, and cared less, so the last thing she'd be interested in was the salvaged components she was pretending to look at on the porch.

&nbs
p; "A few bits," I said. "Nothing to get excited about."

  She nodded. She was in a mellow mood when she got back with the 'groceries' – two boxes of black market cigars. She went through the whole ritual of unwrapping, and rolling the cigar in her palms, sniffing it, cutting off the end with a little tool she claimed to have got from a retired rabbi. Then she lit it and blew clouds of foul-smelling smoke towards the stars. She was going to say something, and it was probably going to spoil my evening, and she knew that I knew it: she was just prolonging the agony. I decided I wouldn't make it easy for her, I'd wait her out. But in the end she just smiled and tossed a baseball cap towards me. She'd sewed a 'Raoul's Robot Repair Shop' patch over the BMW logo. Raoul had already given me a set of keys of my own, and log-ins to the shop's offsite servers.

  "Welcome to the family," she said. She disappeared inside then, probably afraid that I'd leap up and give her a hug.

  When I got back to the apartment, Nathan still hadn't returned.

  I'd never actually owned a robot of my own – some kids get them as labrador substitutes because they're easier to house-train and don't chew the furniture, but I guess my parents figured that, given my attitude towards robots, mess-free was an unlikely outcome. So I had to make do with tormenting the house robots. And Boris. Much as I hate to admit it, Boris is the one I miss the most – more than mom and pop. I suppose this is natural since he's the one I spent most quality time with. He's the one who encouraged me – however indirectly – to develop my own particular creative (destructive) abilities.

  Maybe that's why I spent so much of my free time working on SAM.

  Asimov has a lot to answer for when it comes to naming robots: SAM was actually an old SM-series machine that had been discontinued years ago. I'd discovered the old robot during a recent scavenging expedition. His body casing was pretty much complete, a bulky black carbon fibre job. The design wasn't exactly beautiful, but there was something attractive in the minimalist planes and curves: the head was something between an Easter Island stone dude and the kind of jazz pianist with a name like Jellyroll. Even lying on his back in a rubbish dump, limbs akimbo and electronic innards hara-kiried, there was a kind of dignity in his form. A perfect straight-man for my Machiavellian mischief.

  I had my own little workshop in a lean-to which clung Escher-angled to the side of the repair shop's main shack. It was here that I performed my mad doctor routine sticking and soldering my patchwork creature together, until I was finally ready to infuse it with the spark of life. Cue lightning and maniacal laughter.

  I held the brain in my hands – Igor-less, I'd had to do a little robotic grave-robbing myself to get it. I hadn't stolen it, not exactly, I'd just done a bit of the old Burke-and-Hare before it was salvaged by a more legitimate crew.

  I stared into the robot's skull. And I felt a peculiar sense of emptiness myself. Partly it was the knowledge of a creative endeavour coming to an end, the feeling that I would no longer be coming into the little workshop to labour on this particular project. Post-creative depression. Le petit mort. But part of it was an even more fundamental feeling of loss, a sense of crossing the threshold from childhood to adulthood maybe. Throughout the time I'd been working on SAM, I'd tried to come up with a variety of creative ways of abusing him: the robot was meant to be a cybernetic punch bag on which to vent my frustrations.

  Only I didn't have any.

  As I slid the brain core into SAM's skull, I knew I didn't have anything to rebel against anymore. I'd found a place where I felt I belonged. I was doing things I wanted to do, and I was surrounded by people I liked being around. Instead of vandalising robots, I was putting them back together.

  The most complex part of a robot is its 'brain,' or the system it uses to link to another brain if it doesn't have one of its own. Very few robots, have full-blown artificial intelligence: AIs are still prestige 'hardware' and their relative novelty means that buyers are still paying for the development costs. In my everyday duties I wasn't likely to come into contact with top of the range machines; most of the time I would be working with ten- or fifteen-year-old technology for owners who were too cheap to pay for a maintenance contract with a reputable company, so I wasn't going to need a degree in AI processes. I already knew how to rig a telepresence link between a dumb robot and a human operator, and a link to a cloud-based AI wasn't much different. Without knowing it, I'd been preparing myself for this job for years. Apart from understanding the hardware and software, my most important skills were going to be the ability to wield a hammer, and to bluff like a cardsharp.

  I zipped up SAM's cranium and threw the switch which would bring him back from the dead. There was a soft hum as the internal hydraulics kicked in, and then a red glow came into his eyes.

  It's alive!

  The SM-7 was fixed. I knew it was. So why wouldn't the bloody thing respond? I'd checked it thoroughly: I knew its voice and hearing were both functioning properly. But it just sat there. Ignoring me. Was it sulking because I'd resurrected it using non-genuine parts? I tried yelling at it and threatening it with a big hammer, but that didn't work either. It sat there impassively. That stillness and emotionlessness is one of the things about robots that tees me off most: it makes them seem so... smug. Perhaps SAM had sensed my lack of frustrations and seen fit to do something about it by providing me with some. Or maybe I was just being paranoid. And expecting too much from a simple robot – perhaps questions like Why don't you say something, numbnuts? are too abstract. What this robot was sitting waiting for was carefully phrased direct instructions. All I had to do was instruct it to perform some specific task, and robot's your uncle.

  Now, what really useful task could I get SAM to do...? I tapped into the repair shop's computer to make an appointment.

  There was a knock on the repair shop door.

  "Come in!" Phyllis called.

  There was another knock at the door.

  "It's open!" Phyllis called, more loudly.

  Another knock.

  "Come in, the door is unlocked!" Louder still.

  There was a pause, then another knock. Phyllis sighed. She opened the door. A large robot stood there, an SM model, all black and shiny. It looked recently reconditioned.

  "Come in!" Phyllis yelled up at it.

  The robot didn't move.

  "Mrs. Zacharias?" The robot asked, in a deep, sort of electronic Louis Armstrong voice.

  "Yes! Now come in." She stepped back to allow the robot entry. It did not move.

  "Mrs. Phyllis Zacharias?" It asked.

  "That's right. Please, will you..."

  "Wife of Raoul Zachrias?"

  "The same. If you don't..."

  The robot ignored her and strode into the office. "I am the SM-7 robot that you have been expecting for repair."

  Phyllis closed the door and edged around the robot, eyeing it uneasily. "And there was me thinking you were a Jehova's Witness."

  "Pardon?" The robot said.

  "It doesn't matter. Raoul is out, he'll be back to fix you up soon. In the meantime, I don't want you cluttering up the office and getting in the way. Go and stand in the corner and pretend to be a hat stand or something."

  The robot picked Phyllis's overcoat off the floor where she usually dropped it and went over to the corner, stood there holding it. "Will this do?" It asked.

  "Perfect. Now don't talk to me, I'm very busy." Phyllis sat down behind the desk. She minutely adjusted the placing of the objects on it – the telephone, the lamp and the notepad – and then leaned back in her chair. She glanced uneasily at the robot, then at her watch. She sighed. "Do you know any jokes?" She asked.

  The robot remained silent.

  "Hey, tinhead, I said: do you know any jokes?"

  "Do you want me to talk to you again now?" The robot asked.

  "Yes, you can talk to me now."

  "Have you stopped being very busy?" The robot asked.

  "Yes, I have."

  "Very well: no."

  "No w
hat?" Phyllis asked.

  "No, I do not know any jokes."

  "Of course you don't."

  Phyllis glanced at her watch again. "Lunchtime!" She got to her feet and went to retrieve her coat from the robot, then thought better of it. "It's a warm day, anyway," she muttered. "I'm off for a bite to eat. Do not move. Do not answer the 'phone. Do not talk to anyone. Is that clear?"

  The robot said nothing.

  "I said, is that... Ah, I told you not to talk to anyone, right. That's good, just keep doing that." She almost caught me lurking outside the door.

  *

  "Where are you off to?" Phyllis asked as I was leaving.

  "I'm through for the day," I said. "I've completed all of today's repairs."

  "All except one," she said.

  "What?"

  "Got another call for you while you were out." She waved a piece of paper in my face and smiled nastily. I think she'd figured out who had sent the SM-7 to visit her earlier.

  "But it's almost nine," I protested. "I was planning on seeing Priss and the Replicants play tonight."

  "You'll just have to watch the highlights on Match of the Day," she said.

  "They're a band!" She knew that, she just said these things to wind me up. She bit the end off another cigar and muttered something that I didn't catch – probably 'Life's a bitch and so am I,' that was one of her favourites. I pocketed her lighter on my way out and left her searching for it. I was beginning to think Nathan was right: maybe the drudgery of working life just wasn't for me. I made as much noise as I could dropping my toolbox into the back of the Land Rover. I pulled on my baseball cap and adopted my Clint Eastwood expression: I was the Repairman With No Name. A member of an ancient fraternity with more arcane rituals than a Masonic lodge. There was much more involved than simply fixing something: you had to give a performance.

  There's the looking at the damaged article and shaking your head routine, designed to dash the customer's hopes of a cheap and speedy repair. There's the I need space to work routine, which ensures that the customer leaves the room and so doesn't see that the 'extensive repairs' consist of fixing a couple of loose wires. And there's the You can't get spares for a model this old, but I've done the best I can to fix it routine, which absolves the repairman from blame when the machine breaks down again three hours after he's gone. It is also customary for the repairman to leave a greasy handprint somewhere the customer won't see it until the light falls on it just right, which should ideally not be until at least a week later. Sometimes the repairman has to grease up a hand especially for this.