Twisted Metal

by Tony Ballantyne

  It engulfed the Raman, swept them before it. And then it engulfed Nicolas and his squad, still glowing blue-white hot from the burning petrol.

  The pain was like a shaft of lightning.

  The pain was almost beyond endurance.

  Hot metal steamed and then cooled too quickly. It snapped tight around robot bodies, it crystallized, hard and brittle. The world was full of the crash of water, and Nicolas’s squad was sent tumbling down through the earth, pushed deeper and deeper down caves and passageways, all spinning and crashing as they went. They bashed against rocks, and metal that had been heated and cooled too quickly shattered. Brain casing splintered and twisted wire unravelled and sent minds spilling and then untangling into nothing more than so much metal.

  Bashing and crashing, tumbling and swirling. Dizzy and hurting. Gradually the motion slowed down, and the percussion of the unheard noise died away, and Nicolas was left beached on cold stone, his body dented and aching.

  Other men and women lay around him, along with broken and shattered parts from dead robots. Water dripped from metal onto stone.

  People began to stir. Nicolas looked around in anguish. There were no other Artemisians there present, only Raman.

  Nicolas rose unsteadily to his feet. His balance felt off. He needed to strip apart his body and get a close look at the gyroscopes, but he didn’t have time. The Raman soldiers had noticed him. They were already pointing in his direction.

  ‘Hey,’ said Nicolas. ‘I surrender.’

  They were looking at him oddly. Pointing to the dented casing around his body. Nicolas looked down and saw why.

  He had changed. In the light from his own eyes, his body shone with a dull grey lustre.

  Nicolas began to twist this way and that, examining himself.

  The few Raman who had managed to hold onto them drew out their awls, short and wickedly cruel. They began to advance on Nicolas. Poor, weakened Nicolas, his electromuscles shrivelled by the heat.

  Three, no, four Raman soldiers, all badly dented by their passage through the water.

  Four awls were raised. Four awls were brought down on Nicolas’s body. Nicolas flinched as the blades struck home; he felt the pain as they cut into the circuitry beneath, felt . . .

  He felt nothing. The blades had bounced clear. The Raman looked puzzled. They struck once more. Again Nicolas flinched and again the blades were deflected, leaving not even a scratch on his body.

  Heated by the explosion of the petrol bomb and then explosively cooled by water, Nicolas’s body had been at the sweet point. He had hardened like the blade of a katana.

  Now he was indestructible.

  Again and again the Raman struck. Eventually they tired, their electromuscles drained of energy. The five robots stared at each other.

  ‘Why can’t we kill you?’ one of them asked Nicolas.

  Nicolas raised one weak arm and reached out for an awl and took it from the unresisting hand of the Raman woman who had asked the question. He reversed the awl, weighed it in his hand. Then he reached forward and drove it up into the skull of the woman opposite him. She gave off an electronic scream that made the other soldiers back away.

  Nicolas stabbed again. There was a nick at the end of the awl, a barb. This time, when he withdrew the point, twisted wire trailed from it. The woman screamed louder.

  Nicolas stabbed again and again. He pulled at the twisted wire and unwound the woman’s mind. She died.

  The other Raman soldiers had frozen in silent, helpless contemplation of this horror. They watched as the body of their companion slumped lifelessly to the wet ground: they watched as Nicolas, his arm tangled in the twisted wire of her mind, began to cut himself free of their dead companion. Then, finally, as Nicolas stepped weakly towards them, they turned and ran, fleeing up the long passageways to the surface.

  Nicolas stripped the body of the woman. He pulled out her overlong electromuscles and cut them shorter to fit into his own limbs. Awkwardly, one-handedly, he took apart her hands and replaced the muscles in his own with hers. He studied the circuitry of her ears and found it inferior to his own burned-out sense, but at least her ears still worked. He took them and he could hear again. Raman State occupied the mountains and the coast. They built their eyes to see long distances. Nicolas was impressed by their design, and he incorporated it into his own body.

  It took him several hours, but finally Nicolas rose again. The Raman had destroyed his entire squad. Now he would have his revenge.

  Nicolas rose from the depths, clad in his dull grey shell and carrying a Raman awl. One by one he caught up with the fleeing soldiers and stabbed the awl up into their chin before winding out the twisted wire of their minds, their hands scrabbling all the while at his indestructible body.

  It took him days, weeks, wandering in the dark, water-formed passageways, but there at last came a time when he rose from the ground among the moonlit peaks of the Raman mountains.

  Behind him, sealed in the earth, were the bodies of his troop.

  Behind him, dead in the darkness, were the disassembled minds of his enemies.

  Now Nicolas had returned to life, to Artemis, to his destiny.

  Nicolas was a new man. A robot in an indestructible body. A robot destined for great things. All would fear him. All would envy him.

  And there, in the night, in the starlit, moonlit peaks of the Raman mountains, Nicolas came upon a still pool of water and looked into it and beheld himself. And his fate descended upon him, and Nicolas saw himself for what he was.

  A coward.

  For now all robots would desire his body. All would try to take it from him. He would never be able to rest, never be able to drop his guard for fear that someone would strip his mind from its indestructible shell, just as he had taken the parts from the Raman woman, deep beneath the ground.

  Nicolas did not want his wonderful body. He did not feel strong enough to be the one to own it.

  And so he lay in wait by the caves from which the Spontaneous emerged. The same caves he and his squad had entered just a few weeks before.

  He waited by the entrance as day followed night. Waited there for seven days. And on the seventh day a robot emerged.

  A man, dark in metal and slender in build. Black rock still clung to him from his emergence from the ground.

  Nicolas came upon the man and killed him. Unwound the man’s mind from his body and placed his own there instead.

  He left the indestructible body there at the mouth of the caves, its skull cracked open for any robot to take.

  And then he walked down from the mountains.

  Karel

  ‘What happened to him?’ asked Banjo Macrodocious. ‘No one knows,’ said Karel. ‘He just vanished.’ ‘What happened to the body?’

  ‘It vanished too. Some say that somewhere a robot still wears it, but painted, disguised.’

  ‘Your body is painted,’ observed Banjo Macrodocious.

  Karel tapped at his chest plate. ‘This is not so hard.’

  ‘I can hear that. So what is the point of your story?’

  ‘That Nicolas was given a great gift and yet refused to use it. Your intelligence is the same.’

  ‘I am not intelligent,’ said Banjo Macrodocious. ‘I would not want to do as Nicolas did, to kill in that fashion.’

  ‘No robot should. That is an intelligent thing to say. Listen, Banjo Macrodocious, don’t deny your gift. Would you be Nicolas the Coward?’

  ‘I have no preference.’

  Karel clenched his fist, wanting to smack the door beside him in frustration. The pain in his bent right hand caused him to pause just in time.

  Gates was waiting right outside the door to the isolation area.

  ‘So, what’s the verdict?’

  ‘He’s intelligent all right,’ said Karel.

  ‘Thought as much,’ said Gates.

  ‘. . . but I can’t formally declare him so. He refuses to pass any of the tests. I’ve warned him and warned him, but he re
fuses to listen. He doesn’t seem to care. It doesn’t seem to care. I can’t call it him, as it’s not a robot. It’s technically a possession. It shouldn’t be that way, it’s not right, but that’s what the rules say. The stupid Tokvah is so stubborn.’

  Gates frowned. ‘Hmm. Do you think it’s being threatened? Or playing a game, or something?’

  ‘No. I honestly believe that it thinks it’s unintelligent. Hah, that’s an oxymoron isn’t it?’

  ‘I think it’s a trick. Artemisians are cunning. It’s the sort of stunt that they would pull.’

  ‘Yes, but why? What could they hope to gain?’

  They began to make their way back along the walkway, back out of the holding area. The chatter and clanking of the immigrants fell silent as they walked by.

  ‘They all know what’s in there,’ said Gates. ‘They are all wondering what it is. They’re wondering what you’ve decided.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Karel.

  ‘Well, make a decision fast, Karel. I need it out of here. I need the space. Just look around you.’

  Karel shook his head. ‘I’ve no choice. It refuses to accept citizenship. Mark it as unintelligent.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Gates. ‘It makes no difference to me.’

  ‘Well, it should do,’ said Karel. ‘You sound like an Artemisian.’

  Eleanor

  Wien had fallen long before most of the combatants were aware of it. Like old metal thrown on the family forge to be melted down and cast anew, the city stood apparently firm whilst all the time being on the point of dissolution.

  The Wiener Stonewall Troops that had organized the last solid resistance were not to know that behind them the core of the city was already breached. The Artemisian Storm Troopers repeatedly breaking themselves against the marble ramparts that ringed the city did not realize that the terms of surrender were already being discussed at gunpoint. They weren’t to know that one resourceful Artemisian unit had already breached the city’s security and made its way to its heart.

  Wien was a beautiful city, built half on land, half on the handful of islands that dotted Wien bay, but above all built on the riches brought by the plentiful coal fields that sloped from just below the city out to the seabed. While the aristocracy walked the marble bridges linking the lush green islands – their polished bodies rippling with the sunlit reflections of the calm silver water – the working classes laboured deep beneath the earth, dressed in iron that glowed dull red with the heat of radioactivity and the friction of the continental plates.

  For the working classes things would change little, but the aristocrats were due a rude awakening. They would not enjoy their way of life for much longer.

  Wien had fallen to Artemis.

  Twenty-four hours later and Wien City reverberated to the steady stamping of victory. Artemisian robots marching to take key positions stamped to the rhythm; Artemisian robots guarding forges and metal stores struck time with their feet; Artemisian robots plundering the defeated kept up the shaking beat.

  The cracks in the broken streets of Wien City were shaken wider, black lightning zigzagging up the white marble towers until yet another wall collapsed in a white rockslide. Bouncing rubble tumbled over the robot bodies strewn through the streets. There were too many to completely remove, even for the plundering victors and the desperately scavenging defeated searching for upgrades or replacement body parts.

  So many dead bodies. Dirty smoke rising into the sky; bent, scorched metal; twisted wire spilling from skulls, twisted wire wound amongst the broken machinery of war, like the trap webs of metal spiders from childhood tales. And everything shaking and rattling to the relentless stamping of the victors. Stamp, stamp, stamp; stamp, stamp, stamp.

  Here another cracked marble tower shook and slipped and fell in an accelerating avalanche of rubble that danced and slid through the wrecked streets. Broken stones bounced and rolled to a halt, and then began to bounce and shake again to the relentless stamping. Stamp, stamp, stamp; stamp, stamp, stamp.

  Here a Wiener worker family, sheltering in the remains of their forge, heard the approach of Artemisian troops, heard the door slam open, saw the sleek, powerful bodies of their victors as they entered the room, their eyes glowing green in the half-light, their entry accompanied by that never-ending percussion: Stamp, stamp, stamp; stamp, stamp, stamp.

  Here in an aristocrat’s hall, the finely engineered and oh-so-delicate bodies of a noble family were being pulled apart by the rough hands of the invaders, spring by spring, plate by plate, electromuscle by electromuscle. And all the while the noblemen thought on the folly of selling coal to the Artemisians. It had been such easy money at the time, but how it had come back to haunt them all.

  White dust rose into the smoke-choked evening, the sun barely seen, merely a pale yellow shape across the silver sea. To the accompaniment of endless stamping, it was setting for the last time on Wien.

  All that within twenty-four hours. And now the morning sun had risen on this newest corner of the Artemisian Empire.

  The robot sat on the cracked rim of the marble fountain that occupied the middle of the square, his matt-black Storm Trooper body seemingly untouched by the bright sun up in the blue sky. He was picking apart the body of a dead Wiener commando with practised efficiency, running a finger down the seams, popping the rivets apart to expose the mechanism underneath. His assault rifle lay propped on the rim of the fountain beside him, matt-black too, even the cruel bayonet at its tip smoke-blackened after last night’s action.

  The Storm Trooper had not noticed Eleanor yet; it was too interested in examining the composition of the body it was taking apart. Eleanor knew what it would be thinking: the Storm Trooper’s mind would have been woven by its mother to be a Storm Trooper, and so it would think like a Storm Trooper thought, and it would build its body like a Storm Trooper built a body. The design of the body it held in its hands would seem wrong: more crafted than built. The Wiener body would seem too weak and too fragile. No wonder the Storm Trooper found it so fascinating. No wonder it hadn’t noticed Eleanor’s approach.

  Finally, it heard her, heard the measured tread of Eleanor and the rest of the troop as they moved into the square. Without pause, sleekly, silently, it took its rifle and rolled into a crouch position, sighted along the length of the barrel.

  ‘There’s a Storm Trooper training its gun on us,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘Ignore it.’

  Eleanor did so. She walked on, one of nineteen infantryrobots, dressed in grey-painted armour, their bodies identically built and maintained. They had been walking through the broken city all morning, looking for a place to rest and repair themselves. The sun had nearly reached midday in a blue sky still tainted by streamers of rising black smoke. That same sunlight failed to find a purchase on the Storm Trooper’s matt body. Eleanor glanced back towards it and saw, to her surprise, that it had vanished.

  ‘It’s gone!’ she said, scanning the square for movement. There was a scraping sound, and rattle of bricks and suddenly it was there beside her, rising up behind another of the grey-painted infantry, an awl pressing up against the soldier’s chin.

  ‘Gotcha,’ he said, peripheral vision tracking the grey bodies that were still turning in his direction. He was already releasing the soldier, spinning around, coming to stand in the middle of the group. ‘My name is Arban. Who’s in charge here?’ he asked.

  The infantry looked from one to the other.

  Eleanor spoke up. ‘Our sergeant was caught by a grappling hook five days ago and dragged down into the sea.’

  ‘Dragged into the sea, sir,’ corrected Arban.

  Carmel stepped forward, just another grey infantry-robot, identical in every way to Eleanor.

  ‘There’s no calling of “sir” in Artemis,’ she said calmly. ‘Why should there be when we are all nothing but twisted metal working to a common purpose?’

  Arban exploded into flashing movement, pushing her arms to one side, reaching around behind her
neck to snatch out the interface coil there. The light in Carmel’s eyes went out, and her metal body slumped to the ground. Arban held up the silver coil that was the link between the twisted wire of the brain and the rest of the body. Slowly, he crushed it between his fingers.

  ‘Answering back a superior? I don’t like this sort of thing, you know,’ he said, conversationally. ‘There are minds and there are minds. Soldiers who are more loyal to themselves than to the state. Only fighting when they can see the advantage to themselves . . .’ He dropped the broken coil to the stone flags and ground it beneath his foot. ‘. . . and not for the greater good of Artemis.’ His electromuscles were powering up with an audible hum. ‘Now, some people say you should blame the parents. Blame the mothers. They twist a mind that follows Nyro’s pattern for most of the way, making a child loyal to the Artemisian state, but then they leave that last little inch at the end, that little voice telling the child that when things get really tough, when things aren’t going well, they should just cut and run. Their mothers make them put their own survival first. Can you blame the child if its mother made it that way? They ask. Maybe they have a point.’ He looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘But I don’t think so.’

  The remainder of the grey infantry looked on warily as Arban tapped the side of his head with one metal hand. ‘I wasn’t made that way,’ he explained. ‘My mother twisted my mind to think first and last of the greater good of Artemis. That’s why I keep my body strong and in tune. That is why I constantly seek to improve it.’

  The power in Arban’s electromuscles was building to a peak. It must hurt, thought Eleanor. Arban held that pain for just a moment longer, revelling in it, and then he released it in one great explosion of movement, springing upwards and backwards to land by the soldier behind him, who had been on the point of raising his gun. Arban gripped the top of the soldier’s body armour and tore at it, electromuscles in his arm discharging painfully as he ripped the metal free of the man’s body. The mechanism beneath was exposed to the sunlight, pitiful and embarrassing.