Dot Robot

by Jason Bradbury

  It hadn’t occurred to Jackson that the robotics professor might have something to say about the theft of his daughter’s multimillion-dollar machine, but there was no time to think about it.

  He thumbed the wireless gamepad’s left analogue stick and the vehicle’s 500-horsepower engine gave a guttural growl. Professor English jumped back, his eyes wide, as Jackson used his mouse to shift into DRIVE, and his gamepad to wheelspin the high-performance machine down the driveway.

  ‘I’m going to rescue Brooke!’ Jackson shouted. It made him feel better, even though the one-way audio system meant Professor English couldn’t hear him.

  Jackson could see the crumpled remains of the station wagon in the rear-view mirror. There was no way J.P. would be following him in that.

  CHAPTER 25

  Jackson coaxed the heavyweight robot car northwards. He had left the ornamental ranch gates swinging off their hinges, but now seemed to have the measure of the Hummer and was managing to maintain a steady 60 kilometres per hour. From where he sat, in front of his computer, surrounded by empty chocolate wrappers and console controller in hand, there wasn’t a great deal of difference between Brooke’s real car and the kind of hotrods he piloted when playing driving games. The whole driving on the right-hand-side thing was a little unnerving, but the wide country roads were quite forgiving and Jackson was confident he had cracked his tendency to send the vehicle into the path of oncoming traffic when cornering. His arrival at the first town, however, was a trickier proposition.

  The square-nosed 4×4 lurched its way up to the first of several intersections that criss-crossed the busy main street. Jackson had found he could dispense with the mouse and keep both hands on his gamepad. And as long as the throttle stick was full back, the hulking gas-guzzler could be brought to a smooth and solid stop. But accelerating smoothly away from the lights was proving more difficult. However delicately Jackson applied his thumbstick throttle, the seven-litre engine would violently launch the vehicle forward and his attempts to control it merely caused it to bounce and buck its way along the high street. As Hummers went, this H3R was hardly stock; it had been re-engineered to drive itself, and its metallic bodywork was decked with high-tech apparatus. There were five light-detection and ranging scanners, a satellite dish on the roof, and a bank of radar and laser sensors along its front fender, which, all in all, gave it the appearance of a Klingon battle-cruiser. Even for a state accustomed to big ol’ cars, Tin Lizzie was a bit conspicuous.

  Dwight T. Gumption pierced the yokes that sat atop a generous mound of corned-beef hash. Their golden liquid flowed down the sides of the potato and pulped-meat mountain and pooled around the edges of the plate in a way that always reminded Dwight of a volcano. It was his third volcano this week and he had three more to look forward to before his day off. Twelve eggs a week for twenty years; 12,480 in total. And they ain’t done me any harm, he told himself, while tucking the top of his napkin into his shirt collar and forcing the bottom section between the edge of the table and his stomach. The relish he took in his customary breakfast was sweetened by the fact that Dwight had never paid a penny for it, nor the tankerful of coffee he must have swilled down over the years. And quite right too. He was the Sheriff, after all. If the most important lawman in the county couldn’t expect a few perks, then who could?

  Sheriff Gumption wiped away the eggy residue that coated his coal-black moustache and squeezed himself out of his favourite booth. Then he swaggered out of the Angry Bear Diner, with a stride he had perfected by watching every John Wayne movie ever made. He would have liked to swing his leg over a horse, but was happy enough with his chrome-plated ride, a Harley Davidson Electra Glide, the prettiest police motorcycle ever made.

  As he waited at a stop sign, the air-cooled twin-cam power plant throbbing between his bowed legs, he wasn’t sure what annoyed him most about the monstrous vehicle roaring past him. For one thing, it was clodhopping along, stopping and starting its way down Main Street – louder than even Dwight’s finely tuned two-cylinder, despite the thunderous exhaust he’d been given at Bob Duke’s Custom Cycles by the Duke himself. And this 4×4 was ugly. Real ugly. If he had ever watched anything other than westerns, he might have compared it to a Klingon battlecruiser. And, unless the Sheriff was mistaken, as the butt ugly monstrosity twitched and jerked its way past, the driver was so preoccupied with scrabbling around on the floor with his CD-multi-changer or some such other newfangled-satellite-powered-doohicky that he was driving without looking where he was going. He couldn’t even see the driver’s ‘about-to-be-put-in-jail’ head. Dwight flicked a switch and lit ’em up.

  Jackson noticed the blue flashing lights in his mirror view and what appeared to be one of the Mario Brothers in mirrored shades, riding a motorcycle that under anyone else would have looked massive.

  He wasn’t quite sure how he was going to handle this one. He could hardly pull over. Chances were, the moment the police officer realized there was no one in the driver’s seat he’d radio in, and, assuming J.P. had already raised the alarm, the might of the county’s police force would descend on him. The other option of accelerating away wasn’t much more attractive either. If the cop could handle his bike, he’d be impossible to shake.

  Jackson reckoned his best bet was a combination of the two.

  The officer slid off his mechanical steed and hitched up his belt to show he meant business. The high-def camera that was bolted to the ceiling of the Hummer’s cabin had a wide-angle lens and, while it distorted the image of the chubby officer, making him seem even more grotesquely fat as he waddled up to the driver-side door, it enabled Jackson to see him as he peered inside.

  Jackson saw the bushy monobrow above the officer’s mirrored shades rise as the automatic gear selector slid into the REVERSE position, apparently of its own accord. He could still make out the amazement on the moustached face as the gas pedal depressed itself and the hulking machine shot backwards until its big back tyres rode up and on to the gleaming Harley Davidson with a grinding crunch. Having knocked the vintage machine flat and ground its hand-finished metalwork into the road, the driverless monster lurched forward and sped off, leaving the stupefied lawman at the side of the road.

  Relieved, and trying not to laugh too much for fear of crashing, Jackson used Google Earth to navigate away. With a quick snap of the ALT and TAB keys on his keyboard, he was able to switch from his driver’seye view to the sophisticated 3D program. He had satellite images of the whole planet at his disposal, but all that interested him right now were the few squares of topographical information between his current position and his goal – the abandoned mining town in the Galiuro Mountains. Eventually he’d have to take his chances amid the perilous peaks and gullies that cut off Copper Creek from civilization but, for the next couple of hours at least, he could count on smooth roads and freeways.

  The sounds of gunshots rang out before Jackson even noticed the headlamps flashing on the vehicle behind him. He would have preferred a second camera feed from behind, rather than the crudely positioned rear-view mirror. But there was no mistaking the mirrored sunglasses of the man who was driving the absurdly small Fiat 500, barely a centimetre from his rear bumper. It was the Sheriff, one arm out of the window wielding a six-shooter, the other on the teensy car’s steering wheel. And by the terrified look on the little old lady’s face in the passenger seat, it looked like he truly believed the difference in vehicle size was no barrier to getting his man.

  Luckily for Jackson, he’d picked a fight with a county sheriff who was too pig-headed to call for backup. Sheriff T. Gumption had only ever let one perp get away in his long and distinguished career and that was because his trusty bike couldn’t float. On that occasion, the runaway jailbird had driven his stolen convertible off a bridge and floated downstream on the white water rapids. Dwight’s cousin Willy had found his body a few days later during a fishing trip, but the Sheriff still couldn’t chalk him up, on account he had made it over the state line. Now Jacks
on was dangerously close to crossing into Arizona. And given he’d recently reversed over the Sheriff’s motorcycle, which he’d called Darlin’ and kissed every night before putting to bed, Jackson was in trouble.

  The Sheriff was convinced that he’d witnessed some techno-wizardry that enabled the reckless lawbreaker to drive from the back seat, where he’d obviously been hiding, so that he and his homeboys could watch TV or do whatever these rich record-producin’, ride-pimpin’ Hollywood types did to while away a journey. Jackson checked out the Hummer’s rear-view mirror to see if the Sheriff intended to follow up on the initial warning shots. With the same rush of bloodlust that he felt when he and Willy had a deer in their sights, Sheriff T. Gumption raised his handgun and aimed.

  The first bullet was deflected through the rear passenger door by its passage through one of the huge batteries that crowded the trunk. Bullet number two ricocheted off the inside of the rear seat and bit a football-sized chunk out of the front windshield’s bottom left corner, taking Brooke’s dash-mounted satellite-navigation receiver with it. Jackson’s screen didn’t register the third metal slug make it through one of the computers, ripping into a circuit board and smashing the main cooling fan.

  Jackson was annoyed with himself – he knew he could out-drive a vehicle like this on any driving game. He pushed the thumbstick and swerved, throwing up rocks that hit the car behind with a satisfying crack of the windscreen. He accelerated hard, leaving the tiny Fiat in his wake and crossing smoothly over the invisible state line into Arizona.

  In the Hummer’s wake, unnoticed, a line of fuel dripped steadily from the hole made in the fuel line by the final bullet.

  CHAPTER 26

  The dark, humid bedroom, together with Jackson’s hunger and lack of sleep, had made his driving dangerously erratic. To avoid any unwanted attention that an unmanned Hummer might attract, Jackson knew he needed to be much more alert.

  His wireless controller at least allowed him to stretch his legs. He wasn’t about to test its range, but knew he could move safely within the boundary set by his desk and bed. He set the Hummer to cruise at a conservative 60 on the freeway and managed to reach out and poke his bedroom window open. He drank in the warm night air, its oxygen and sour city scents sparking his second wind. He poured the dregs of every Coke can he’d ever failed to bin down his parched throat, and tentatively revisited a pack of biscuits he’d lost behind his computer sometime last year. Soon his display was showing the town of Mammoth and the small road that branched north-east, towards Copper Creek.

  There were no other vehicles on the road, and Jackson was thankful for that as now his navigational skills were being tested. He was covering the throttle and steering with one hand, while switching between the car’s video feed and the 3D map with the other. Within a few kilometres the trees thinned and the road began to narrow until it was little more than a footpath. The aerial pictures that had guided him here showed little more than pixellated rock patterns between the end of the road and the point that marked Brooke’s location. All Jackson could do was point the vehicle in the general direction of the abandoned town and hope for the best.

  After some time, the Hummer crested a rough-hewn plateau and Jackson caught a glimpse of the shimmering canyon. He could almost feel the heat coming off the searing landscape beyond his computer screen as the off-roader tore down the next poor excuse for a track. Each stone and pothole shook the suspension as the beast of a vehicle spat them out. Then the barely visible trail vanished altogether, and the car was rolling down a steep incline. Jackson carefully applied some back pressure to his controller’s left thumbstick. But the brakes failed to bite – the vehicle just kept on rolling.

  His first thought was that his gamepad had malfunctioned, but he still had steering and the engine growled as impressively as ever when he tried the throttle. But without brakes, the machine was in virtual free fall down a steep slope of loose grit and shingle.

  There was nothing Jackson could do.

  Prison has its advantages, pondered Brooke. At least if I were in jail, as opposed to cooped up in this filthy hole like a rat, I could ask to be let out on a chain-gang. It was proof of Brooke’s desperation that breaking rocks with a pickaxe all day would be considered an improvement. She had considered applying similar muscle to the walls of her cell. But her engineer’s experience told her the hundred-year-old joists keeping the air shaft open were looking for an excuse to retire, so any efforts in that direction were likely to leave her buried alive in silt and copper.

  Worse than thoughts of cave-ins were the titan-like proportions Brooke’s imagination had given to the critters that shared her hole. She was no scaredy-cat. Life on the ranch brought its own share of snakes, scorpions and bugs, but, like the rest of the population of California, they were too busy relaxing in the Sunshine State’s perfect climate to go around getting angry and biting folks. But this was Arizona – the devil’s own blacksmith’s forge, with Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth, down the road somewhere, and heat this fierce made everything mad as hell. Something stirred in the back of the cave. A rat? A bat? A jackrabbit? Or was it the sound of something more deadly? Brooke started to shout.

  Shouting, Brooke had discovered, was her one guaranteed method of ruining her captors’ day. For the two hired hoods guarding her, this was quite a cushy job. They had a tent each, and a barbecue – if they felt inclined to spice up their daily intake of pizza – with an amply loud satellite radio, care of their truck. All things considered, they had enjoyed three days of sunbathing, cook-outs and heavy-rock classics. The latter wasn’t their first choice. If truth be known, both men would much rather have listened to sport. Indeed, the quieter of the two men hid a penchant for classical music and had found it diffi-cult these past few nights not to give away his secret by loud humming as the majesty of the night sky out here filled his head with Gustav Holst and Chopin. Tuning to a heavy-rock station was their only way of drowning out Brooke’s wailing banshee act.

  Brooke was screaming now and, in the opinion of the quiet man, it was a pitch somewhere between a soprano saxophone and the top ‘A’ from Elgar’s Cello Concerto. The reason for the screeching was harder to discern, so he walked over to the wooden staves that he himself had used to turn the entrance to the ancient mine shaft into a jail. He was good with his hands and would have liked to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and become a carpenter. But there were other ways of making money from strong hands and fists and, where he came from, it was hard to resist easy money.

  As he leaned down to peer inside, two eyes looked out of the darkness like a tiny set of headlamps and a scrawny hand shot out and grabbed him by the forearm.

  ‘There’s something in here,’ the girl declared angrily. ‘You can either come in and get it, or give me your flashlight and let me deal with it. But while you make your decision, I’m gonna keep on screamin’.’

  From this close up, the sound the girl could make was ear-splitting. No way was he going in there. He pulled the Maglight from his belt and placed it in a gap between two pieces of wood before the cold metal tube was snatched inside.

  After rooting behind the pallets and rusted oil drums stacked against the rock wall sealing the shaft, Brooke found the cause of her concern. A family of dormice were caught in the flashlight’s beam, a mother and at least four babies in a nest of twigs and chewed shreds of plastic. Brooke smiled. ‘Well, ain’t you as cute as a bug’s ear?’ she said, carefully placing a thin sliver of wood over her fellow prisoners.

  She walked back to the tunnel entrance and was about to start winding up the man who waited for his torch, when she noticed the unmistakable outline of Tin Lizzie coming down the slope above the camp. Realizing she needed to conceal the sound of its approach, Brooke acted fast.

  She started screaming.

  To Jackson’s astonishment, the Hummer was still on its wheels, despite a section of incline so steep that it could only have been one or two degrees off vertical. Having ease
d off the throttle completely, the speedometer was still showing 60 kmph, which now seemed pretty unnerving. With no sign of the brakes working, the car hurtled downwards to the first crumbling ruins of the old town.

  The Hummer took the side clean off the first roofless shell of a building that got in its way, and continued to bound over the tiers cut into the canyon as the slope smoothed out. Then Jackson spotted two bright blue tents and a jet-black Range Rover on a small patch of scrubland beyond his bonnet. The high-speed 4×4 reached the camp in a matter of seconds and, swerving to avoid the tents, he aimed the machine at the softest-looking part of the rock face in front of him.

  Brooke instantly computed the speed of the incoming vehicle and realized it had run out of stopping distance. She dived backwards as the wooden gates of her jail exploded, covering her with chunks of timber and rock. The bull-bars on the front of the Hummer smashed through the sturdy wooden front of the mine, leaving the shiny nose of the vehicle buried inside the cave, like a faithful dog sniffing out its owner. Suddenly the ancient timbers began to buckle, sending a cloud of dust rolling towards her. Instinctively scooping up the tiny nest of brown mice, Brooke sprinted towards the light, blindly leaping on to the bonnet of her car.

  Jackson had expected to see either a blank screen or a burning inferno of twisted Hummer parts. Instead Brooke’s filthy face filled his screen and one word boomed in his headphones: ‘Drive!’

  Fumbling for his mouse, he dragged the on-screen gear shift into REVERSE, throwing the Hummer backwards through two tents and a barbecue and into the side of a Range Rover. He slipped into DRIVE, applied the throttle to maintain traction, and launched the car towards the only available exit, almost turning one of Brooke’s captors into road-kill.