by Chris Ward
The thing tried to lift its head again, but the mounting cracked and it bumped against the side of its body.
‘Can you move?’ the man in the shawl asked.
‘Ready and willing to take orders,’ it said, although it didn’t move.
The man in the shawl inspected its outer casing. In one end a handle had been fitted, perhaps for the very event that its propulsion motors might fail. Slinging his bag of human flesh into an empty carry compartment built into the machine’s top, he unclipped the handle and began to pull the cart along behind him. He was far stronger than the scrawny body gave away, but every few steps he had to stop to clear away an accumulation of scraped ice from around the machine’s caterpillar treads.
As his building appeared like a grey shadow out of the gloom of the winter night, his excitement grew. His raging hunger was long gone, replaced by an impatient desire to begin tinkering with the machine, to open up its body, to investigate its components.
Sometimes, in his darkest days, he felt like none of his life had ever happened, that he wasn’t an aging monster so disfigured as to be more scar than skin, but that innocent child sitting around on the floor of his mother’s hovel, taking apart junked video players and food processors and pieces of circuit board and fashioning them into something wondrous.
Back when he had just been a boy who made robots.
Part I
The Cold Little Town in the Middle of Siberia
1
The man who consumes other men
He had forgotten many things over the years, but one thing he had always remembered was his name.
It was pronounced ku-row and written in Romanised letters as Kurou. It was the British businessman Rutherford Forbes who had first named him for the bird that his name so resembled, in part for his inability to pronounce an unusual Chinese name and partly for what the boy’s face reminded him of on those few occasions when he had no choice but to look at Kurou eye to eye. The bony outcrop where the nose should have been, the thin, pinched lips reminiscent of a bird’s tongue, the tiny black eyes, and the tufts of calcified hair that looked like the feathers of some starving, emaciated bird. Kurou’s body, too, was misshapen, twisted and scrawny, the wiry strength greater than two bigger men combined no consolation for a need to hide himself from every reflective surface.
In some ways it was ironic that Forbes had bought him to attempt the very thing that he wished he could bestow on his deformed young charge; remove a mind from one place and insert it into another.
It would be easy to exclaim that his childhood was harsh, but after being taken from his mother he was never mistreated. He was merely institutionalized, a lab rat, grown up in a sterile environment and given all the tools necessary to develop into the scientific genius Forbes had predicted from the moment his clumsy foot unwittingly crushed Kurou’s most prized robot into the muddy floor of a dirty Chinese hovel.
That genius came easily, in a rush that built momentum as the years passed, a flood of scientific knowledge that washed away any possibility of normal human emotions. The seedlings of such primitive feelings as compassion or love or empathy were ripped from the ground and swept away, while darker sensations such as anger and resentment took years to flourish as he became more of a machine than those he was charged with building.
Inside his own world of manic, relentless creation, he was content. He needed nothing, wanted nothing that wasn’t provided on whim, and in exchange for maintaining his day to day comforts, all he had to do was what he had wanted to do all along: experiment and build. His master would occasionally make requests, and while as Kurou’s teenage years gave way to young adulthood he began to realise that he was controlled far more than he had realised, it was an easy favour to return. Improve the crop yield of X seed, increase the muscle percentage of X cow to X percentage, build a missile that can hit X target at X range. It was all too easy. His mind was a box filled with assorted jigsaw pieces. All he had to do was tease each pretty picture out.
The robot fascinated him. It was no more than the work of a keen amateur, but there were modes and components in its electronic makeup that brought back fond memories. It was designed as a work companion, an automated transportation machine, capable of bearing heavy loads over uneven terrain. It was old though, and while Kurou found signs of love in the attempts to repair and maintain it, the replaced components were poorly fitting and showed signs of wear, most likely picked out of the remains of junked electrical appliances.
Some of the handiwork made him smile. His own hands had fashioned such imperfections many times over the years. There was never an end to the learning curve. No matter how accomplished you became—and he was the best he had ever known—there would always be a million things to learn. You could never learn everything, because then you would be God, and there was no such thing.
With the stink of cooked human flesh as his accompaniment, he worked long into the night, tinkering, adjusting and repairing, using what crude tools he had accumulated over his years of seclusion to restore the robot as best he could to working order. Were an outsider to peek through a crack in the door Kurou could imagine what he might look like; a deformed, scarred outcast striving to restore life to a semblance of a friend.
His motives, however, went far beyond.
Repairing the robot was just the start. He wanted to find the owner.
He awoke to a chill breeze gusting in from the chimney, the shaft of which emerged at street level. He disentangled himself from the mess of stinking blankets he called a bed, and looked at the repaired robot by the opposite wall. A wire fed out of an electrical outlet into a little power generator. Kurou wasn’t sure if the batteries would charge, but there was only one way to find out.
‘Do you still sleep?’
The robot lifted its head. ‘Coming in loud and clear, master … oh. No. You’re not.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Who wants to know?’
Kurou scraped a handful of tile shards off the floor and flung them at the robot. They cascaded off its metal casing like hailstones off a tin roof.
‘Bending you to my will is easier than driving a car, robot. Giving you a life of chewing rocks is easier than climbing a rope. Tell me where he lives and I’ll make sure he gets you back.’
The robot, outwardly unperturbed by Kurou’s thinly veiled threats, rattled off a complex-sounding Russian address. Kurou knew every street in Brevik by heart, having made it a point of his residency to do so. The inventor’s location was a mere ten-minute walk away.
‘Thank you for your compliance, robot. You just earned yourself a ticket to freedom.’
The robot stared at him. Its strange head bobbed up and down as if some pendulum mechanism inside was propelling it. The lights positioned where a human’s eyes might have been—a quaint but often useless touch that many amateurs used in their pursuit of an anthropomorphic creation—flickered as if the robot was blinking. Kurou stood up, giving it a wide berth as he made his way towards the room he used as a kitchen, mildly concerned about the possibility of hidden weapons.
As he returned with a slab of dried flesh and a handful of nuts he had pilfered before the winter set in, he heard a clicking sound coming from the robot’s chest.
‘You’re recording me, aren’t you?’
‘Sound and visuals.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
‘Erase all visuals. That’s an order. Remember what I said before?’
The robot’s head continued to bob up and down. ‘Visuals erased.’
Kurou smiled. ‘Wow, compliance. What a wonderful thing. Tell me, robot, are you alone?’
‘Alone?’
‘Are there more of you? Did your master make you alone, or are there others?’
‘Others.’
Kurou nodded slowly. ‘How many?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He has equipment?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No capability. Just recording for review later.’
Kurou rubbed his chin. He wanted to meet this young inventor, but it was unlikely the inventor would appreciate meeting him in return. He would have to engineer the situation, gain the inventor’s trust first.
The knock on his door was barely audible over the roaring of the fire. At first Victor thought it was the splitting of a log, but then it came again, short and sharp, three quick raps.
Was that the police? What could he have done to attract their attention? Or what if it was one of the gangs? He had heard about people being dragged out of their houses and beaten to death in the streets for no reason other than to alleviate the boredom of the out of work factory workers turning to crime and drugs to numb themselves against the pain of a broken future. He had been working on something downstairs in his basement that could protect him, but it was unfinished, held up by a couple of design flaws he couldn’t get his head around.
As the minutes ticked by, no more knocks came. At first Victor felt relieved, but his relief soon gave way to curiosity. It was only five o’clock, but the sun had been gone for hours already, hidden first behind the grey skies and later the snow-covered hills to the west.
In the corridor outside his small living room the cold had taken hold, and he shivered as he wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. The over-large Soviet-era front door loomed huge, hiding the world and its secrets. The handle was ice cold. Victor felt his thudding pulse in his wrist and winced at the chill.
Opening the door a crack was not an option. The moisture in the air made the wood swell enough to make it drag on the stone step, meaning only with a heave could he open it. Once there had been a spy hole, but it had long since gummed up. Composing himself, Victor twisted and jerked the door handle, flinging the door open on to the storm of a Siberian winter like some Dickensian villain.
The few street lights that still worked illuminated circles of swirling ice flurries and the closed doors of his neighbours, people he rarely saw and avoided when he did. Further up the street he heard the rumble of a car and for a moment twin cones of light swung across the front of his house and then were gone.
Something was sitting in the snow on the pavement in front of him. At first he had mistaken it for a pillar or post because the ice had done its work, covering it in a film of blue, but his nerves had imagined a structure there where there had always been none.
He stepped forward and swiped away the ice, gasping in surprise.
It was the cart.
Someone had returned it to him.
‘Cart?’
The head swung up out of the front of the cart’s casing, and its eyes flicked on. ‘Ready and waiting for orders, sire.’
It wasn’t until a couple of days later when Victor had taken the cart down into the basement and opened up the casing that he found the note.
It had been written on the back of a scrap of cardboard in a coppery coloured ink that for some reason made Victor shiver. The extravagant curls and flourishes that looked out of place with the Cyrillic script identified the writer as a foreigner, albeit a learned one. It came as some relief to Victor, who held on to a suspicion of every part of the world he knew best like a generations-old family feud. Whatever stranger this was who had found the cart, he was trying to help, although Victor guessed that suspicions ran both ways, otherwise the stranger would have waited around to talk to him.
I have repaired your machine for you. I have made some small changes to improve its performance. If you have other machines that require amendment, leave them in the location I advise.
At the end of the note was an address for an abandoned café on the outskirts of town. It was the kind of remote place where not even homeless people would bother to hole up, and Victor was certain his mysterious correspondent lived nowhere that could be linked to either the café or Victor’s place. From the handiwork on the cart’s systems it was obvious that the man was thorough.
Victor spent the rest of the day running tests on the cart, figuring out what the other man had done. There were a couple of modifications to the cart’s front casing that remained a mystery, but he felt sure that with enough investigation he would work it out. More of a mystery was the identity of his mysterious benefactor, and even more so his motivation. Finding someone in this dead end town with a will to create rather than destroy was akin to winning a prize on the state-run lottery.
Night had fallen, bringing with it the deeper chill that the weak sun spent all day trying to shake off. Victor was beginning to think about retiring for the evening, when a sudden muffled boom shook the glass in his windows and made a vase on the table top fall over.
At first he thought of earthquakes, but this part of the world was far from a plate boundary. Something had happened to one of the factories. A gas leak, perhaps. It happened from time to time. No matter how much the pipes were insulated, the cold had a way of stripping away the layers until whatever was underneath just popped.
It was no particular concern of his. By day Victor was a general electronics dogsbody, everything from wiring to computer programming, a perennial fixer of problems for people wealthy enough to have them. In a society where few new products were available and people had to make do with old and dated technology, his skills were in great demand. Had he chosen to move to a larger city he could have made real money, but he had been reluctant to leave his old town for reasons he could still barely understand.
The sound of shouting came from outside. His curiosity finally piqued, Victor went over to the window and pulled back a corner of curtain to look out on to the ice-shrouded street outside.
A handful of people were walking northwards up the street in the direction of the industrial district. So, his guess had been right then, he thought, but something in the way the people were gesturing and conferring made him nervous. There was a greater urgency than there should have been for a simple gas explosion. Dangerous as they could be, they were too regular to be a surprise anymore, yet here people were milling about in greater and greater numbers as if some disaster were about to engulf the whole town.
He pulled a thick jacket off a hook behind his door, pulled a fur hat down over his ears and went out on to the street. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted at the nearest person, a bearded man in his fifties with the bloodshot eyes of someone never far from the filthy homebrewed vodka that soaked these parts.
‘We just got hit, Comrade,’ he said, using an old greeting that Victor hadn’t heard in years. ‘They’re coming.’
‘Who?’
The man gave victor a grimace that revealed the blackened stumps of what had once been teeth. ‘All of them. Time to put us to rest at last. That’s the munitions factory they just took out.’
‘What … I don’t—’
‘We’re under attack, Comrade,’ the bearded man said. ‘Time for the last curtain to fall.’
With those last ominous words, the man hurried off, leaving Victor standing in his wake, dusty swirls of week-old ice kicked up by the wind around him.
2
The woman with the wild hair
Drones.
That was what people were saying. The munitions factory had been taken out by drones. There was some optimism that with the sole valuable asset of the town now a smouldering ruin, there would be no further attacks, but the general consensus was that a land attack would soon be forthcoming. Brevik was not so far to the east to be of no strategic value, but for the townsfolk there was literally nowhere else to go.
A couple of days later, Victor attended a hastily arranged public meeting in an old auditorium where only one in three overhead lights worked. On the stage the mayor, Pavel Andrev, and his chief aide Lena Patrova, alongside other members of the town council and several prominent local businessmen, outlined vague plans for protecting the city or moving the people out.
Victor knew about the war in the west, of cou
rse, but Russia was so huge that her western frontier might as well have been a world away. Few people cared as long as the war stayed there. The harshness of life here in central Siberia would switch the skin off the back of anyone who let their guard down, so what was happening thousands of miles to the west was of little concern. Victor guessed that the products the great smoking factories made went to aid the war effort, but once the trucks and trains left the city limits they belonged elsewhere.
The meeting descended into a debacle of name calling and arguments, culminating in a section of the crowd throwing their chairs towards the stage. Victor slipped out of a side entrance along with other disgruntled members of the crowd, unsure quite what the final decision had been.
Unless ordered, he had no intention of leaving. Brevik was all he had ever known, and he couldn’t leave his life’s work behind. Without it, he might just as well string himself up from the nearest petrified tree.
He didn’t head home. Instead, he turned north and hurried through the freezing streets towards where Isabella lived. She hadn’t spoken to him in almost a month, but if ever there was a time to end their estrangement, it was with the threat of war hanging over their heads like a great big thundercloud.
Isabella’s father, Robert Mortin, was a foreman in one of the copper mines in the hills north of town. His wife had died some years before and now Isabella tended a cold, charmless house while looking after two younger siblings so wild as to be almost feral. Unlike most of the town’s young women, she had neither been pushed into an unhappy marriage nor fled for one of the cities further to the south, preferring her father’s protective influence, rough though it might be. There were rumours, of course, that in her mother’s place Isabella warmed not only Mortin’s house but also his bed, but Victor tended not to listen to the hearsay spouted by the drunks who littered the bars around Brevik’s only train station.