“Do it faster. Remember, you’re not going in, the RescueBot is. As long as it’s turned on, its armor will protect it. You’re not liable for anything, as long as you’re acting within your training. The main things you should be asking in your safety assessment are ‘Is the threat going to return?’ and ‘Is there a safe place from which to operate the RB?’”
“That’s what I’m doing. Um, it looks like the ’copters aren’t circling back this way, so maybe whoever did this has moved on. And yes, I think we can operate the RB from across the street, without worrying about those beams hitting us.”
“Good. I agree. What’s next?”
“Assign the RB parameters.” Dora pulled out her control tablet and zoomed the city map down to this particular intersection. She set boundaries at the corners of what used to be the Opera House, a ceiling of ten feet above the ground, since that was the largest pile’s height, and a floor of twenty feet below ground, since there seemed to be a basement. “Then I power up the RB. Then I hit ‘activate.’”
“One step missing.”
Dora squinted at the tablet, hoping it would give her a clue. “I power up the RB. Then I choose between ‘survivors’ and ‘bodies.’ Then I hit ‘activate.’”
“Good. And which are you choosing here?”
“Survivors.”
“Why?”
“Because the scene is fresh.”
“And?”
“And?” Dora repeated.
“And because there’s at least one person shouting for help in the rubble. Hear ’em? Get moving already.”
Dora got moving. She followed the steps she had just recited. The RB4 belched some smoke. She pressed “activate, “ then leaped aside as the bot whirred off across the street. She followed its progress on her tablet, with quick glances up at the actual scene.
“Scanning,” reported RB4.
“Direct it toward the shouting, so it doesn’t go quadrant by quadrant,” Ms. Frazier said.
Dora pulled the map up again and tapped a spot on the site’s rear wall.
“Hang on. Help is on the way,” the RB4 said.
“Life signs detected. Physical and emotional distress detected,” it reported back to Dora. A heat signature flashed on her screen.
She toggled from heat to camera. All she could see was rubble. The wall had caved inward.
Ms. Frazier looked over her shoulder. “Good. Now?”
“Assign a tool. I’m thinking the shovel first? It looks like a lot of crumbled brick.”
“That works. Make sure to shift to something finer before you get close to the victim.”
The RB4 shoveled quickly, and she switched it over to the scoop, on a setting between “gentle” and “archaeology.”
A deep voice spoke from beside her. “Oh, goody. Amateur hour.”
Dora looked up to see that an ambulance had arrived. Two EMTs stood surveying the area. The deep voice belonged to a statuesque black woman. Her muscled shoulders and back strained her uniform. Dora thought she looked a lot like the First Responder, but if she were a cape, surely she’d be here in that capacity, not her civilian identity.
“Are you—”
The woman glared at her. “Am I pissed our city has subcontracted rescue operations to a group of software operators and their pet robots? Yes.”
Ms. Frazier glared back. “Our pet robot is keeping you from getting beaned by a beam or zapped by a live wire. You can still do all your medical magic after we do the hard work. You aren’t benched. This is a relay, not a team sport.”
The RB4 feed interrupted them. “Victim identified: human male. Adult. Spinal injury: negative. Puncture wounds: negative. Open fractures: negative. Move? Yes/No?”
“Say yes, Dora,” Ms. Frazier said.
“Y’all are going to get sued one of these days,” the second EMT said. He was half his partner’s size, but looked equally tough. “You’ve got the order of things all wrong.”
Dora pressed “yes,” then engaged the forklift.
“Broadcast, Dora! Give the poor guy some warning.” Ms. Frazier grabbed the tablet and hit the microphone. “Hello. This is Brenda Frazier, operating RescueBot 4. We’ve come to get you out. Sorry for grabbing you without warning, there, but we wanted to get you to a safer location as quickly as possible.”
She handed the tablet back to Dora, who tried to hide her embarrassment.
The tall EMT snorted. “Trainee software operators, no less. This gets better and better.”
Dora pushed the RB4 up to ten feet to clear the debris, then put it on high speed to cross the street. She thought maybe the EMTs were a little impressed at how fast she had given them someone to work on. They busied themselves with the victim, who was shaken but not badly injured.
“I’m the janitor,” she heard him say.
“Was there anybody else in the building?” Dora asked over the big EMT’s back.
“The office manager, maybe. She’s usually there at this hour, but I hadn’t seen her yet.”
More people were gathering now. Some wandered into the rubble to help with the search.
“Where are the police? They should be cordoning this off,” said Ms. Frazier. “One of these amateurs is going to fall through to the basement any second.”
Dora wasn’t counting, but she guessed it was forty seconds later that an amateur fell through to the basement. She sent the RB4 down after that person. He had managed to impale his calf on some rebar. After sawing off the rebar, the RB4 brought the man and his new piercing back up to the EMTs. They were more enthusiastic about this injury than the previous one.
She also noticed they weren’t mocking the RB4 anymore. Either one of them could have wound up like the rebar guy if they had gone climbing into the rubble. The ambulance left with the second victim, leaving the first with a blanket, an oxygen mask, and a promise to send someone else for him.
Two police cars arrived and another ambulance. They started taping the area off, yelling for the civilians to clear out of the wreckage. “We’ve got robots for that,” they said, as if they weren’t half an hour late to the party.
Dora sent the RB4 back in again. There weren’t any other voices calling for help, so she set it back to its default quadrant search.
“Can you tell me what happened?” A police officer asked the janitor.
“No clue. I waxed the stage first thing when I got in this morning. I was heading out to the loading dock for a smoke when the building came crashing in.”
“Anybody else see it?” the officer asked the gathering crowd. Most shook their heads.
“I did,” said a man in a polo shirt with “Parking King” emblazoned on the pocket. “It was some kind of sound wave. Brought the whole building down. Knocked me off my feet.”
“How did a sound wave flatten the cars in your lot?”
“Oh, it didn’t. That was something separate, maybe two minutes before. A giant leapfrog. Landed right in my lot, then leaped again. Then a whole bunch of police cars and choppers, then Power Star and the Patron flew by. I was watching all that when BOOM! Down goes the Opera House. Unrelated, I’m pretty sure.”
“So it could have been an ordinary gas explosion?”
“You heard me say sound wave, right?”
“An ordinary sound wave?”
“Sure. I’m just glad my lot got hit by the frog. We’ve got insurance for giant animals, and Acts of Villainy. Never heard of BOOM insurance.”
“Did you hear anyone monologuing before or after? Were there any ultimatums?”
“BOOM. That’s it.”
Dora hadn’t realized she wasn’t paying attention to the RescueBot until Ms. Frazier called her attention back. “Dora. Respond?”
Dora glanced down at her tablet. Emotional distress detected. Victim identified: humanoid. Scan: malfunction.
“It says there’s a malfunction in the scan, Ms. Frazier. What do I do?”
“Sometimes non-human humanoids mess with the sensors. Switch to camera and take a look for
yourself.”
That made as much sense as anything. The RB4 had reached what used to be the stage. Its sensors were aimed at the piled curtains and the fallen lighting scaffold. The camera showed a large form pinned beneath. Dora deployed the anchor tripod to get enough traction, then used the claw to shift the scaffolding and peel back the curtain.
Underneath, a blonde woman.
“Manual scans, Dora.”
Dora switched to manual. She had the robot scan for breathing.
“Breathing: affirmative.”
Broken bones?
“Negative.”
“Spinal injury?”
“Negative.”
“Head injury?”
Dora read out loud. “’Indication: positive. Move? Yes/No?’”
She looked at Ms. Frazier for reassurance, then gave RB4 the go ahead. This time, she remembered the broadcast, even though the woman appeared to be unconscious. “Hello. This is Dora Silver, operating RescueBot 4. We’ve come to, um, to get you to a safer location as quickly as possible. Sit tight and the RescueBot will carry you to safety.”
She engaged the forklift.
“Warning: over load capacity,” the RB4 reported.
That didn’t seem possible. The RB4’s load capacity was two thousand pounds. It was designed not to body shame anybody. It should have been able to lift a Clydesdale. Dora glanced over at Ms. Frazier, who was talking to an EMT. Getting them ready for their next patient, maybe. She could handle this.
She switched to manual. The RB4 was already in position, so all she had to do was override the warning and order it to lift. She glanced up from her screen: a smoke plume wafted from the stage’s general direction. Smoke meant it was working.
“Attention, citizens!” A powerful soprano voice boomed across the street.
Dora watched as the smoking RB4 rose haltingly from the rubble, carrying a tall blonde woman with two long braids and a helmet. It sank a few inches, then stuttered again toward its ten foot cruising altitude.
RB4 broadcast to the tablet. “Health update: victim has regained consciousness.”
Dora could see that. The woman was definitely not unconscious. She stood astride the RB4’s wobbling forklift, looking suspiciously like she was about to monologue, or at least disclaim.
“Attention, citizens!” she said again, in a Scandinavian accent. “You may be wondering what happened to your opera house. I, Sigrdrifa, happened to your opera house. I have happened to opera houses all over the world. I bring down the house because—”
A policewoman started advancing on Sigrdrifa. Sigrdrifa interrupted her own monologue with a short burst of song. It blew the officer back ten feet. “You dare interrupt me? I will lay waste to your entire city!”
Dora scanned the skies. Where was the Patron? Where was Power Star? First Responder? Were they all dealing with the giant frog? This was obviously a powered individual. Or a god, maybe? That might explain the weight warning. Gods were often denser than their mass suggested; she had learned that in Introductory Superphysics.
“Warning: load capacity exceeded,” the RB4 messaged Dora again. “Warning: fan overheating.”
It was already on manual override. The smoke turned black and dense, nothing like the plume that reassured Ms. Frazier. Dora wasn’t sure what else she could do, and the scene looked like it was becoming less safe by the second. She had a feeling Lifeguard Inc. wouldn’t approve of whatever she did next. She flipped through the icons looking for a command to fix things.
And there it was: emergency shutdown. She pressed the button.
“Emergency shutdown? Yes/No?” flashed on her screen.
She pressed “Yes”.
“Warning: RescueBot 4 unit is airborne. Armor will disengage in emergency shutdown. Emergency shutdown may cause damage to the RescueBot 4 unit. Proceed? Yes/No?”
She hesitated a moment. If a broken RB4 came out of her wages she’d be paying for it for the rest of her life. Still.
Yes. Proceed.
It was instant. The RB4’s air cushion died, and it dropped like a rock—no, really, like a rescue robot that had lost its air cushion while carrying a Valkyrie. Its gyros must have been compensating for Sigrdrifa’s mass, because as it fell, it tipped forward on its forklift, dropping her and pinning her beneath it.
A moment later, the Patron dropped down from the sky. She was covered in some kind of slime and was more than a little out of breath. “Wherever the arts are threatened, I am there,” she panted.
“You’re a little late!” called one of the onlookers.
She looked around and fell to her knees before the remaining pillars. “Too late, too late. But this is only the edifice. The arts cannot be killed. They will rebuild, better than before!”
When she was done, an officer pointed her to the spot where Sigrdrifa had fallen. It took the Patron, Ms. Frazier, Dora, and two others to lift the smashed RB4. The Patron took charge of the unconscious villain, and Ms. Frazier spotted a handcart in the rubble. They levered the RB4 onto it.
“That was a pretty clever thing you did back there, Dora,” Ms. Frazier said as they wheeled the RB4 back toward the van. “I think you’re going to get fired for it, but it was clever anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” Dora whispered to the RB4 when she had a chance. “You were a very nice robot.”
She wondered what its scans would say if it read her now. Emotional distress? Some part of her was distressed; she was definitely getting canned. But on the plus side, she had totally taken down a powered villain all on her own, maybe even a minor god. This was going to look great on her resume.
Sarah Pinsker is the author of the 2015 Nebula Award winning novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” was the 2014 Sturgeon Award winner and a 2013 Nebula finalist. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Galician. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife and dog. She can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.
Torch Songs
Keith Rosson
Scorched Madam, seared Madam, melted Madam Glass—the townies file past her while she sits on her tin throne, a line of men and women and their children all wide-eyed and awed and lusciously sickened, lusciously frightened as they shuffle past her little roped-off section of the tent, as she sits in her sequined gown and gazes for hours at a spot above their heads, her eyes hidden behind their dark lenses, the goggles riveted through scarred flesh to the orbital sockets of her skull, moored to the very bone—Madam Glass.
“Good Lord,” says a man in line. He spits, and a dark thread of tobacco juice arcs to the straw floor. “Gal straight got smacked with the ugly stick. All melted and shit, Jesus.”
The woman with him, heavyset and holding a cup of soda emblazoned with the carnival’s logo, says, “Looks like someone’s dinner what got left on the stove, is what.”
His eyes crawl across Madam on her chair, horrified and enrapt. “Her face, you mean?”
“Yeah, her face. All over.”
“Makes me want a chili dog, honestly,” says the man, and winks.
The woman laughs, swats him playfully on the arm, and casts a wistful, almost sad glance at Madam. “Does it hurt?” she asks.
Madam sits silent on her throne.
Madam gazes at a point on the far wall.
Madam stoic. Madam charred.
“Ah, she ain’t gonna answer you, Eileen,” says the man. “They just supposed to sit there and look messed up, is all.”
“Let’s go then.” The woman sighs. “I wanna go ride on that ride where they throw you upside down and whatnot. The Frightenator or whatever it is.”
They move further down the line, past Madam
(though with their necks craned back, taking one last deep sip at the ruined river of her face), and then they are on to the monstrosities beyond her: Ernie the Lizard Man, and Two-Mouth Tina, and the Raptor, and Mister Fog. Oddities all.
More people—a ceaseless, trundling line of people. Madam Glass on her beaten tin throne, a half-melted wax dummy for all the liveliness she gives them. All the movement. They can’t see her eyes behind the dark lenses of the goggles, of course.
That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
If they could see her eyes, if she looked at them, it would all be over, wouldn’t it?
• • •
Five days they’ll stay in one spot, usually, then two off for breakdown and travel. Sometimes it fluctuates; maybe the next town is farther away, or the crowds just can’t sustain five days worth of tickets and concessions and game play. And monsters. But all things end, and eventually the hands break down the tents, the games, the booths, the Ferris wheel and the Frightenator, the Demon House and, for the little ones, the slaloming teacup ride with the faces of beavers and mice and puppies and kittens on the front. Five days on, then two of travel, and right now they’re in the middle of their stretch and somewhere in the middle of America, as well. Missouri? Oklahoma? Impossible to tell exactly where, and pointless besides—the carnival forges its own country. Forms its own borders, crafts its nation from arcing mazes of power strips and gurgling generators, cotton candy and cigarette smoke, grease-spotted paper trays and the clang of bells, the stink of diesel, the shriek of children—both happy and not. The great tidal sound of the carnival. Indiana? Iowa? It doesn’t matter. Only the light of the sky ever changes, the heaviness of the air. All else is the same—the tide of people and Madam Glass on her throne (they all have their beaten tin thrones, a half-handed nod at supposed royalty, save for Mister Fog, who is neither liquid nor solid, really, and either way is wholly incapable of sitting on anything). Five days a week she sits, her face like gleaming meat, her goggles covering her eyes like two discs of black smoke.
The oddities and their scant families sleep in Airstreams and campervans and VW buses; part of Madam’s deal had included an off-the-showroom-floor Ford F-250 and a 30-foot Sportsmen 3052 camper, and it’s this that she walks to as the night takes hold, as the floodlights bracing the carnival begin to clack and shudder off behind her, as her shadow grows longer and longer before her scissoring legs. The Department of Justice had dragged their feet at buying the trailer, but Sergeant Liberty, all cleft chin and sparkling blue eyes and gleaming bandoliers of .50 cal ammunition, had surprisingly agreed to her demands. Though maybe not that surprising after all. She remembers him as unable to meet her gaze, even though they’d already drilled the lenses into her face, rendering her powerless. Guilt singing through him like a river crying out through a tuning fork.
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