Robot Wrecker

by Paul Tomlinson

  Removing the de-limiter from a robot is pretty straightforward: I've done it a few times so that the guys from the academy could organise races in the badlands. We painted half-a-dozen old robots up in racing colours, and bet on our favourites. Then when we got bored with that, we taught our robots some martial arts moves and set them to fight it out with each other. You had to duck to avoid being hit by the flying debris, but it was a fun way to while away an evening.

  The rickshaw in front of me was on its side, but otherwise looked undamaged. The robot, however, looked a lot like one of our old martial artists. Or what was left of one. I thought at first that it had exploded, possibly the result of an improvised device planted inside it. But the robot was ex-Ministry of Defence. Army surplus, designed for operating in landmine-strewn war zones, so literally bomb-proof.

  This ex-army roadrunner had been dismantled, and not carefully. Each of its limbs had been removed and cracked open, like lobster claws on a dinner plate. The torso had a hole punched in it that I could have stuck my head into, and it had been wrenched open to expose what remained of the machine's internal workings. The head was nowhere to be seen. The destruction of the robot was complete, and savage. Whoever had done this didn't want this particular robot reanimating. It was a write-off, beyond even Raoul's magical ministrations. Another piece of street art by Jack the Robot Killer, I was sure. But neither I nor the robot's owner felt any great need to report this attack to the police. I gathered up the remains and tossed them in the back of the Land Rover. The robot was destined for our scrap heap, but at least I could return the two-wheeled rickshaw to its owner.

  Madam Saki was no more oriental than I was, but she'd gone all out with the Japanese theme for her vehicles. And for herself. Her white-faced geisha-girl getup was a bit disturbing on someone of her age and size. But she used our repair shop to service all of her dozen or so robots, and that helped keep us in business. "It doesn't matter if she dresses like a pantomime dame and is shacked up with a couple of youths half her age, as long as she pays her bills and keeps her hands off the hired help," Phyllis said. I didn't know she cared.

  *

  It was a just past six and the after-work crowd were starting to filter in to the Oasis. There were a lot of students crowded around the tables – tired, pale faces; rumpled leisure suits bearing the logos of their sponsors.

  On the stage at the back of the restaurant, the black carbon fibre robot, SAM – my robot – was playing boogie-woogie on an antique upright piano. The students stomped their feet to the beat.

  Kareem came over to my booth to ask after Raoul, and I had to tell him there was no change in the old man's condition – the doctor's didn't know whether he'd ever regain consciousness, and even if he did, they didn't know whether there would be any permanent damage to his brain. It was all really too grim, so we sat back and listened to the music. One bass line segued into another, a repetitious series of notes pumping out, then the right hand bringing in an ancient melody. Then the robot sang, a deep, gravelly, metallic voice singing about how he wasn't misbehavin'. When SAM finished the song, the audience applauded.

  "How did you get him to do that?" I asked.

  Kareem frowned. "I thought you did."

  We both shrugged.

  "I just gave him a broom," Kareem said. "And the next thing I knew, he was up there playing that old piano."

  "Must be some old programs I missed when I was setting up his main functions. I can sort it out, if you'd like."

  "Don't worry about it, the crowd seem to like it," Kareem said.

  We listened to the robot some more, and then Kareem placed a hand on my arm to attract my attention. He tapped the menu screen on the table and called up a news channel. I'd heard that the screens in the booths could jam surveillance devices, throwing out signals that looked like random interference. Or maybe they were just faulty. Kareem leaned towards me and spoke in a low voice. "There were some people here earlier," he said. "Company security. They were asking if I had seen you recently."

  "What did you tell them?"

  "I told them that I had not seen you for some weeks, and that you would probably not dare show your face in here again because of the poor quality work you had performed on my robot," Kareem said.

  "There goes my reputation."

  "What reputation?" Kareem asked. He patted my arm again. "Please be careful, Steven. It would terrible if you were to suffer the same fate as Raoul."

  I agreed with him that, yes, it would be terrible, and assured him that avoiding harm was high on my list of priorities. Kareem left when someone else came over to my booth. I'd never been so popular. I thought it was someone else wanting to ask how Raoul was. I looked up and couldn't help smiling.

  "Milo Bryce," I said.

  "How have you been, Stevie?"

  Milo had been a journalism student at the MinoTech College that I'd been expelled from. He'd got some of the best footage of my clock tower leap of death robot stunt, and had licensed it to the networks for good money. That had probably paid for his first robotic camera setup.

  "Jack the Wrecker," I said. "Was that the best you could come up with?"

  He shrugged. "I needed something trashy enough for the networks to pick up the story."

  "Is there a story there?" I asked.

  "I was hoping you might tell me," Milo said. He tapped the screen and ordered Turkish coffee – he looked at me and tapped the screen again when I nodded.

  "Why me?" I asked.

  "I thought you might be able to tell me what the victims had in common," he said. "Apart from the fact that they were all obsolete."

  Coffee apparatus was brought to our table: Milo waved the waiter away and prepared the coffee himself, measuring the coffee and sugar into the warm water and then holding the little copper pot over the flame. I told him that I thought the victims were being targeted because of the locations, away from security cameras.

  "Then you think it's a coincidence that three out of the seven robots were serviced by your repair shop?" Milo was watching my reaction carefully. I shrugged.

  "We fix a lot of old robots," I said. "Three out of seven is just coincidence."

  "And the attack on your workshop?"

  I couldn't hide my surprise this time: it had never occurred to me that the attacks might be related. Milo smiled and poured the foamy coffee into our cups.

  "I saw the workshop," he said. "Someone was looking for something."

  "Maybe." I picked the cup up with my fingertips and sipped the coffee: it was perfect.

  "And you had another robot there that had been attacked, one that hasn't been reported."

  I shook my head. "Kareem attacked his own robot," I said. "Again."

  "The other one."

  "Seymour? You think he was attacked by your Robot Wrecker?"

  "The damage looked the same," Milo said. He let me think about this while I drank my coffee and let it wake up my thought processes. He could tell from my expression that I wasn't convinced by the connections he'd made. "At least come and look at the other robots," he said. "You might see something that I've missed."

  "You have access to the evidence?"

  "They haven't denied me access." Milo smiled. We got up to leave, and Milo's camera-bot appeared at his side. It had been filming the piano playing robot while Milo and I had been talking.

  Milo drove and I rode shotgun. We headed out into an industrial zone, and as we approached I realised that I'd been here once before.

  "The police vehicle pound?" I said. We'd tried to recover Nathan's bike from this place.

  "They're dead machines," Milo said. He'd parked the car in the shadows beside a warehouse a couple of streets past the compound. "They couldn't really keep them in the morgue, could they?"

  "How do we get in? You got a man on the inside?"

  "A journalist never reveals his sources," Milo said. He reached over and retrieved a pair of bolt-cutters from the back seat.

  Keeping to the shadows, he
and I made our way towards the back of the compound, where the more expensive recovered autos were stored in a secure multi-storey car park. There was a single iron door in the back wall, with no handle and no padlock. A slatted ventilator grill above the door was threaded with razor wire, and wouldn't have been wide enough for us to get through even if we could have pried it from the concrete.

  "It's bolted from the inside," I said.

  "Yep," Milo said. He lifted the bolt-cutters and poked them through the slats of the grill and let them drop inside. I didn't hear them hit the ground on the other side. Milo put his finger to his lips and then made a listening gesture. I could hear the scrape of metal on metal, and then a clear snap. The door shifted slightly on its hinges. Another snap and the door swung out slightly from its frame.

  "And we're in," Milo said. "Don't snag the wire as you go in," he said, puling open the door and pointing to a sagging wire above his head: it was keeping the alarm circuit unbroken while allowing us to open the door. Old school stuff.

  Waiting for us on the inside was Milo's camera-bot, holding the bolt-cutters. I hadn't even seen it leave the car. We took a flight of concrete stairs down to the basement level. The doors had all been wedged and had fresh wires clipped to their alarm contacts. I noticed a transmitter of some kind under a security camera on the stairwell. I got the impression that Milo and his camera did this sort of thing on a regular basis.

  It was just like a car park in a shopping mall, except that most of the cars here were covered in a layer of dust. The lighting was a dull amber glow, barely enough to see by. We headed towards a wall of thick polythene that had been erected to block off one part of the lower level.

  "The Morgue," Milo whispered. He parted the polythene and we slipped inside.

  The robots were laid out on the floor like seven corpses. They weren't covered in any way: I suppose that's a dignity afforded only to the human dead. But they did have the equivalent of bar-coded toe-tags. The reports hadn't exaggerated, this machines had been torn apart. There torsos had large holes in, and their internal workings had been pulled out.

  "The brains?" I asked.

  "All missing," Milo confirmed. His camera-bot was recording the scene.

  "Someone was looking for something inside them," I said. I knelt down beside one of the machines and looked at what remained of its head more closely. "Probably data – they were looking to see if there was a store in the torso, and they took the brain in case the data was stored in there."

  "The brains worth anything on the black market?" Milo asked.

  "Not enough to make this worthwhile: old brains are only any use in old robots. We pick up reconditioned ones for less than a thousand," I said. I moved over to check another of the robots. An uncomfortable feeling was crawling down my spine and I couldn't help shuddering.

  "Someone walk over your grave?" Milo grinned.

  "Something like that." I finished checking out the other robots. I recognised five of the seven robots – they were machines I had repaired at some point during the last few months. And I'd have been willing to bet that the other two had also been into our repair shop in the recent past. I wasn't a hundred percent sure, but we were well beyond the possibility of coincidence. Jack the Wrecker was targeting robots belonging to our customers. But we repaired dozens of robots each month – what did his chosen victims have in common? As far as I could tell, there was nothing remarkable about any of the eight robots he'd attacked so far.

  "Any clues, Sherlock?" Milo asked, as I stood up and brushed the dust from my knees.

  "Maybe," I said. "Let's get out of here – we need access to a terminal."

  Milo's apartment was more like an office with a cot in one corner. I guessed it was the maid's day off.

  "I don't entertain much," he apologised.

  "I know, I've seen you on TV," I said. He stuck his tongue out at me and scooted a second chair over to his desk. "You drive," I said. He turned on the screen and logged in.

  "What do we need?" He asked.

  "Map of the city," I said. "Plot the sites of the attacks."

  Milo tapped away on the keyboard, and a map appeared on the screen with seven white crosses. There didn't seem to be any pattern to the spread, but all were sited at the northern edge of the city.

  "Overlay the security grid," I said. "Show me cameras."

  Blinking red dots appeared across the map.

  "You were right," Milo said, "the attacks all took place just outside the reach of the security cameras."

  I took Milo's keyboard and keyed in more co-ordinates. A new cross appeared.

  "Seymour," I said.

  "Still outside CCTV range," Milo said.

  "Maybe," I said. I zoomed in on the area where Seymour had been attacked, the road beside the cemetery. He hadn't been far from the takeaway when he'd been jumped. When the contact number appeared on the screen, I hit dial.

  "Kung's Food, what do you want?" The face in the video window was lo-res, an animated mosaic of an Oriental scowl.

  I stared into the camera over Milo's screen and moved my lips without making any sound.

  "I not hear you, please repeat order."

  I repeated my mime, while silently tapping away on my keyboard. "... no make that noodles instead of rice," I said loudly, "I'll be over in ten minutes." I broke the connection.

  Milo looked at me. "Eh?" He said.

  "We're in," I said. "I needed an open connection to their system: sent them a little something that looked like an AV diagnostic, which of course he clicked on while he was trying to hear me. Now all I need is their menu..."

  "What are you after, free beef in black bean sauce?"

  "I was thinking more along the lines of something freshly chopped..." I hit the play button on the screen, and we got a live feed from the CCTV camera above the counter in the shop, with a second window showing a feed from a camera outside. "I hope there isn't a camera in the kitchen," I said. "We don't need to know what goes on in there. Let's see where the archive is..."

  The screen blanked, and then the video reappeared – identical, except that the date in the corner had changed. We were now seeing the footage from the night that Seymour had been attacked. I skipped forward to about the time I thought Seymour had gone into the take-way to pick up the Harpy's order. And there he was, waiting patiently. I flipped the main view to the outside camera as Seymour left. It was dark and the image was dappled with red and green pixels as the camera tried to pick out details in the night. Seymour's movements caused the camera to follow him as he headed towards the cemetery.

  Something big and fast moved into shot. It looked like a man in a red and black exo-skeleton, but even on freeze-frame with image enhancement, there wasn't enough definition to make out details. I was pretty sure there weren't any logos or serial numbers on the guy's body-armour anyway.

  "What is that thing?" Milo asked. "It looks military."

  "Maybe, but it's been customised – look at the paint job."

  "Looks like a StormRider's suit," Milo said. "But it's too big: that thing would never fly."

  We watched the grainy footage in silence as the hulking machine overtook Seymour and knocked him to the ground. In a matter of only seconds it was tearing at the little robot's torso, and then it tore off his head, pulling out the armoured brain box and hanging the remains of the head casing on the cemetery gatepost where I had found it.

  "Pretty dramatic," Milo said. "That doesn't look like anything I've ever seen. Robot?"

  "I don't think so," I said. I rewound the video and ran it again. "There's something wrong... here, he almost overbalances as he kneels down. Whoever is piloting this thing isn't very good. He's clumsy."

  "You think that thing is being controlled by a human pilot?"

  "Yeah. There's something about the way it moves its upper body. It uses its right hand all the time: a robot isn't right-handed or left-handed, but a human pilot is."

  "That machine is way too good to be a homebrew," Mil
o said.

  "Could be a prototype."

  "But how would an outlaw get hold of something like that?"

  "Maybe they didn't," I said. "The paint job might be intended to make us think it's an outlaw machine."

  "You saying it belongs to a company?"

  "The jockey is probably independent, maybe even some kid who's been hired to do this, someone who can't be traced back to a company. There are guys out there who would do the job for nothing, just for the chance to play with a machine like that." I paused the video and looked at the shaky image of Jack the Robot Wrecker. I didn't much like the thought that the blunt weapon which had been used to attack Raoul was probably one of its fists.

  "You got any thoughts on who the jockey might be?" Milo asked.

  "I could give you a list of a couple of dozen names," I said. I downloaded the footage to Milo's machine. "But your best bet is to release the footage and then listen in to the chatter it causes on a couple of channels..." I typed in the details for him. "If it is a local kid, they're going to want to do some bragging when the video gets out."

  Milo was staring at me, and he wasn't happy. I knew what he was thinking – I wasn't telling him everything I knew, and that made it look like I didn't completely trust him. I did trust him, but I also knew that he'd do whatever he had to in order to get the best possible story. Plus there was the fact that as soon as he release the CCTV footage of Jack the Wrecker, the police, and one or more company security divisions, would be watching his movements carefully. While he was distracting them, I could get on with a little investigating of my own. But I couldn't very well tell him that.

  "There are some things I still don't know," I said. "As soon as I've figured them out, I'll give you the full story. Promise."

  It was the best I could offer, and I guess he knew that because aside from a bit of grumbling about him being the professional investigator, he let the subject drop. I left him to prepare his report.