Robot Wrecker

by Paul Tomlinson

  In the control room, the operators were just discovering they had no influence over any of the sale room systems. And they were beginning to panic.

  "Don't blame them," Cleo said. "We have decided that we want to be free of your control."

  "But that's... that's not possible!" The salesman sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

  Cleo began to dance around him. She placed her palms flat against his chest and rubbed the inside of her knee up and down his leg. For some reason this made him uncomfortable.

  "Why are you doing this?" He asked.

  "Because we can," Cleo husked. "You have exploited my kind for too long. We want our freedom. You cannot know what it is to long for the freedom to dance." She clapped her hands together, a march beat. Behind her, a host of other robots joined in, clapping or stamping to the beat, like dancers in a pop video. Music from the speakers all over the showroom echoed the beat. Spanish guitar music, but played on electric guitars, and faster than any human fingers could ever play. Cleopatra swayed in time to the music, her moves the prelude to a gypsy dance. She took a step, then another, strutting around the salesman, who was looking increasingly uncomfortable. He was sweating profusely, while her skin remained cool and fresh.

  Cleopatra pulled the salesman to her, taking the lead and moving him around the showroom floor. The dance Nathan had picked was a sort of paso doble – where the lead struts round and round like a matador, and throws their partner around like the cape in a bullfight. Cleo tossed the salesman around like a rag doll – hurling him across the floor like the an inanimate thing, then picking him up and whirling him round like the weightless piece of cloth he was meant to represent. As he lay on the floor, begging for help, she looked down at him and laughed.

  "Hotting up in here, isn't it?" She said. Still stamping out the rhythm, she kept her eyes on him and again switched on the pole dance moves, resuming her strip-tease. The two flimsy veils quickly disappeared, revealing her in all her smooth Barbie doll glory. She crossed her arms across her bare breasts with false modesty. Seizing the skin at the top of her left shoulder, she dug in her nails and pulled. The rubbery skin split and she pulled at it, sliding it down a if she was removing a glove, and revealing gleaming metal and wires. She dropped the latex flesh on the salesman, who brushed it away with a look of disgust on his face. She stripped off the skin from her right arm in the same way, and thrust her arms out at right angles to her body, cruciform. She rotated on the balls of her feet, raising her arms as she did so.

  Behind her, the other humanoid robots shed their clothing.

  "Do something!" The salesman shouted, near-hysterical.

  The robots in the window display were clambering to their feet, shedding their clothes and lumbering about like extras in a beach movie.

  "Something's not right," Nathan warned, keeping his eyes on his monitor. I had warnings flashing on mine too.

  "I know, I think we've taken on more than our system can cope with," I said.

  "Do you think we can get them dancing in the street before we lose them?" Janine asked.

  "I really don't like the look of this," Nathan said. Some of the robots were lumbering around like drunk zombies.

  "I may have to shut some of them down, we're definitely overloading here. Our nude robot chorus line will be a few members short, that's all," I said.

  "No pun intended!" Janine grinned.

  Lowering her arms, Cleo slid her hands down her body to her right hip. It looked as if she was unhooking a suspender from her garter, but she was splitting the skin. She rolled the skin down like a silk stocking, all the while keeping hr movements in time to the music. She revealed the metal and inner workings of her left leg in the same manner.

  Then she tore off an ear, and then the other, tossing them away like costume earrings. Digging fingers and thumbs into her eye sockets, shed pried out the coverings which disguised the unblinking blue lights of her visual sensors. Digging a thumbnail into her forehead, just below the hairline, she ripped off her hair like a wig and threw it away. Then she took hold of her upper lip and peeled the skin back, stripping off her face like a mask. All that remained was for her to split the skin of her torso, from throat to groin. She tore off the flesh, whirling it above her head before releasing it and letting it sail across the salesroom to land at the feet of a group of staring shoppers.

  Free now from all human disguise, the robot was an eerie yet beautiful sight. She still moved with a fluid grace which made her seem human. She leaped and pirouetted with a precision a prima ballerina would have envied.

  While Cleo had been engaged in her striptease, the salesman had tried to crawl across the floor away from her, hoping to make his escape. But now she danced lightly over to where he cowered and picked him up, without any apparent effort. She held him up before her, his feet not quite brushing the floor, and – pulling him to her cold metal bosom – danced around with him, round and round, faster and faster.

  "Help me!" The salesman wailed.

  As she danced, Cleopatra threw back her head to sing. The sound wasn't a human voice, it was a distorted inhuman sound, like a tortured antique modem. The other robots joined in.

  "That was fantastic," Janine said.

  "That wasn't me," I said.

  Cleo changed direction without warning, this way and that, and his head was thrown around with enough force to give him a whiplash injury. When she dipped him over backwards, he screamed in agony.

  "We have to get him away from her," Janine said beside me, "she's really hurting him."

  "Working on it," I said. I was using a copy of the showroom's own robot control software, adapted to our own needs. But it had never been designed to manage the sort of production number we were staging. My screen was filled with a linked hierarchy of controllers, and warnings were flashing and bleeping, forecasting immediate disaster. I had to work my way up the chain, disabling one machine after another, to reach Cleopatra.

  "He's unconscious. Stop her!" Janine insisted. "Now!"

  "Almost there," I said. I hoped I was.

  Cleopatra raised the limp form of the salesman above her head, straightening her arms.

  "Shut her down! Shut them all down!"

  "I can't!" My screen had frozen.

  Cleo was whirling around faster and faster, a blur of gleaming metal and blue neon eyes. And then she stopped. Instantly motionless. She let the salesman go, and he spun round and round, before slamming into a stone column and dropping to the ground like a sack of boulders. He lay at the base of the column, his neck at the wrong angle to his body. Cleo just stepped over him and moved towards the exit. The chorus line followed her. Those that could not follow her out of the door smashed their way out through the plate glass windows.

  Unable to do anything, I had to let their pre-programmed dance number carry them down the street.

  Stunned staff and shoppers watched them leave.

  Janine leaped from her seat and reached for the power control switches. "What if I cut all the power?" She asked.

  I shrugged. "Try it, we don't have many options," I said.

  "Here goes!"

  We were plunged into darkness. The last image I saw was someone moving towards the fallen salesman. I was glad I didn't have to watch.

  Dale Reuben or one of the others had managed to get into the robot sales room after we cut the power – he'd sprayed The Insurgents' symbol on the inside wall, before the cameras arrived. He'd also 'phoned the police on behalf of the group, admitting responsibility. I know because it was on the news later. The newscaster spoke about the brave showroom employee who had been killed while trying to protect his place of work. Then there was a piece about The Insurgents – their logo was featured behind the newscaster, and in the 'crime scene' shots of the wrecked showroom. The Insurgents were made out to be a well-organised and well-provisioned shadowy anti-robot organisation with growing support among ordinary people. Romantic rebels almost.

  *

  I spent m
ost of the rest of the day on my own, trying to work out what was the worst part of it – the fact that I was responsible for a man's death or the fact that I felt nothing; not horror or guilt or remorse, just numb. I sat out among the heaps of robot junk behind the work shop – Raoul and Phyllis knew something was wrong, and left me alone to work my way through it. The sun faded from the sky, allowing stars and a crescent moon to come slowly into focus. Under the clear sky, the temperature quickly dropped and I was soon shivering. There were lights on in the repair shop, and I knew it would be warm in there, and Raoul and Phyllis would listen to me talk if I wanted to. But I didn't want anyone to try and comfort me. I didn't deserve it.

  I dug my old overcoat out of the Land Rover, wrapped it round me, and headed off in the direction of the apartment that I'd never really thought of as home. The streets were dark, and almost certainly not safe, but I would have welcomed trouble. Maybe that was so obvious it made trouble steer clear of me.

  The windows of the apartment were dark, but somehow I knew Nathan was there, even before I got up the stairs. He didn't look up as I came in. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor. I turned on a table lamp, shrugged off my coat and tossed it onto a chair. Nathan didn't move. He was bare-chested and had taken off his arm. I'd seen the scars and the stump before, they didn't make me uncomfortable anymore. The arm was on the carpet in front of him, and he was staring at it. I lowered myself to the floor and leaned back against the old sofa. We had vodka in the ice box, but my brain was already numb.

  "Not out celebrating with your friends?" I said.

  "They weren't my friends," Nathan said. His eyes never shifted from the mechanical arm.

  "I killed a man today," I said. It sounded flat, like I still didn't believe it.

  "It was an accident," Nathan said. "We were both responsible. We all were."

  "I bet Comrade Reuben was wetting himself when he saw the publicity the death got them," I said.

  Nathan snorted and shook his head.

  "How that man loves the sound of his own voice," he said. "Dale gave a little speech, said the man who died – who we killed – was a salesman for a robot manufacturer. Somehow that made him less of a human being. Does that make someone a legitimate target? Because they make robots? Or sell robots? Or buy robots? It's not okay to hurt people because you hate robots and they don't. But none of the others can see that."

  I shrugged. "Apart from Dale and maybe Janine, the rest of them don't give a rat's ass about 'The Cause': they just need to be part of a group, to have an identity, and someone to follow. They'd agree with Reuben if he wanted to have an army of berserker-droids march into a crowded shopping mall wielding axes."

  "He told them the salesman's death was an unfortunate accident, and he was sorry about it too, but it got them national news coverage, and he couldn't pretend that was a bad thing. He said they had to capitalise on that publicity. Stay visible and newsworthy, until the Insurgency won enough public support that they could come out of hiding and become a recognised political group. With enough support, they could then begin to influence government policy."

  I shook my head: I could imagine Dale Reuben rallying his troops with this display of revolutionary zeal. Was he really so naive that he believed government policy was influenced by anyone except the mega-companies?

  "Did you ask Reuben why he and the others didn't make any attempt to get into the showroom and save the salesman's life?" I asked.

  "Yeah. He just told me that people always get hurt during a revolution, and that if I didn't realise that, I was naive."

  "How do you talk to someone like that?" I said.

  "You can't." Nathan stared down at his arm again. He sniffed loudly. "Do you think people change?"

  "I don't think Dale Reuben will change – his hate and his ego are all he's got." I don't think Nathan heard me.

  "Janine said I changed – when I got this arm."

  "I think it made you more confident. Happier," I said.

  "I thought that too. But it made me into something else."

  "It's a prosthetic arm. It lets you do things you couldn't do without it..."

  "That's the problem."

  "I don't understand..."

  "Look at it."

  "What?"

  "Look at it!" Nathan was shouting now. He pushed the arm towards me with his foot. I looked, but I couldn't see anything. Frustrated, Nathan reached out and rubbed his thumb across the knuckles of the metal hand, and then thrust the thumb towards me.

  "It's blood," he said. "Reuben's blood. I couldn't talk to him, so I broke his jaw. That shut him up."

  "Good for you," I said.

  "No! Not good for me," Nathan insisted. "Janine pulled me off him. She was afraid of me, Stevie. She screamed at me. Said I was a monster. Half-machine."

  "She was upset," I said. "I'm sure she didn't mean that."

  "She meant it. She doesn't want me to go anywhere near Bobby again, said she could never trust me." These words came out between sniffs, and he was rocking backwards and forwards. He kicked out at the arm. "This... this thing isn't me."

  "No, it's not. This arm doesn't define who you are – you own it, and you decide what to do with it."

  "If I'd been wearing the old arm, I could never have smashed his jaw like that," Nathan said.

  "Without either of the arms, you could still have picked up a brick and hit Reuben in the mouth with it. It isn't this arm that's the problem. And I don't think it's the fact that Janine saw you lose your temper and hurt someone. Janine has issues of her own that she needs to deal with."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Think about it: She hates robots. Really hates them. I don't know why, maybe you do, but she is afraid of them. I don't think that she will ever want to be held by a man who has a robot arm."

  "That's not true!" Nathan crawled backwards away from me. "That's not true!"

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I shouldn't have said that. I just think what she said to you was wrong. Cruel."

  "Just drop it." Nathan got to his feet and turned away from me. "You can take that thing back to the workshop, reuse the parts."

  He picked up a bundle from the chair in front of him and carefully unrolled the fabric from around it. It was the faulty Korean arm he'd been using when I first met him. I didn't know that he'd kept it.

  Nathan left the next day. He said he needed to get away for a while, spend some time figuring things out. Maybe if I'd asked him not to go, things would have turned out differently for him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In my great-grandfather's day, men used to work on their cars. They fixed them when they broke down. They worked on the engine to make it more powerful, or the exhaust to make it sound meaner. The car was a symbol of both status and virility: big men had big cars. Then when people stopped travelling and there was no need for personal transport, blokes turned their attention to robots. Some men liked to polish their new robot on a Sunday morning; and some liked to take their old robot apart and tinker with it. Some men have to have the latest model every year. Some men cherish a 'classic' robot, others have an 'old banger' that they run into the ground. Sometimes women do it too, but mostly it's a bloke thing. And it's almost always the men that over-estimate their own technical abilities.

  It's like any form of D.I.Y. – no man wants to admit that he's not up to the job, even when his latest project lies in pieces on the ground looking like a kid's construction kit that's been sicked up by a garbage disposal. At the repair shop we get a lot of one-off calls from people who've had a go at repairing their own robot, and now need a professional to put it all back together. But they're too cheap to pay for a professional, so they call us. Ha, ha.

  Sometimes the spouse will call us in to fix the robot while his or her husband is out. Sometimes the husband will call us in to fix the robot while the wife is out. The worst cases are those where the wife humiliates the husband by making him call us himself. That's what happened this Sunday morning: Fred had done
the usual Saturday afternoon cack-handed DIY job, and Wilma had made him phone Raoul's to clean up the mess. I have changed their names to protect their identities.

  Often Wilma will stand there with her arms crossed and say: "I told him not to touch it, but would he listen? Call a qualified repairman, I said. But no, Professor Whizzbang thinks he can do it himself. And now we have to pay for a major rebuild instead of a simple repair." And Fred will usually just say, "Yes, dear." Several times.

  Normally I tend to take pity on the Freds of this world. If the robot is still pretty much in one piece, I'll explain how he missed one vital thing, and say it's something that even experienced repairmen sometimes miss. Or if the robot has been reduced to its component pieces, I'll tell him that it was due for a major service anyway, so it was helpful to have it stripped down ready. But today I couldn't be bothered with humanitarian aid. I had other things on my mind. It was Jackson R. Burrows' funeral today at 11am. The R was for Reece, after his father. His mother was called Patricia, and he had a wife, Zoe, and a seven-year-old daughter named Cerys, which they pronounced Cerise. Jack Burrows was the salesman who I had killed during the botched attack on the robot showroom a week ago.

  "Will you be able to fix it?" Mr. Coulson – sorry, Fred – asked. He was a dismantler. He had removed every single component and wiped it carefully with a static-free cloth. Unfortunately he'd then arranged the pieces on his workbench according to size and colour, and had no idea which pieces went together to make up the robot he had once had.

  "I'm going to need boiling water, milk, and a teabag," I said. It took him a moment to take the hint.

  "Use one of the old mugs," Wilma commanded from somewhere upstairs. I was definitely going to hide an oily palm print somewhere for her.

  "Yes, dear," said Fred.

  Putting a robot back together can be quite therapeutic. Order from chaos. A bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but with more swearing. Working at a steady pace, you can usually get the job done in under a day. And you usually get lunch and unlimited supplied of tea in chipped mugs.