Tinman

by Simon Fairhead

  “Art!” Franco held out his hand. As Art reached to shake it, Franco changed his mind and gave him a bear hug instead. “You don’t write, you don’t call, you don’t VC - “

  Art nodded, shrugged, waved his arms dismissively and began making a round of the lab as Franco pointed out changes and on-going experiments. Art half-listened while he made his way steadily to a presence in the far corner of the lab.

  “How’s it going, Dawkins?

  Neatly camouflaged by the bank of experimental instruments behind him, Dawkins turned on his wheels and put down the device he had been tampering with. “You’ve lost some weight. The Army food must be agreeing with you.”

  “You’re looking well, Dawkins. Franco, you’ve made him look nice.”

  Franco blushed. “Brushed titanium. I couldn’t leave those hydraulics exposed any more, dust was getting in. What do you think of the face plate?”

  “My design,” interjected the robot.

  Dawkins’s head was an upright oval of chromed steel mounted on a telescopic crane and universal joint. The front of the oval was open to reveal a circular screen. Behind was an enclosed cradle supporting a living brain. On the screen was an avatar’s face, a human face, a big, strong face emerging from a black background with warm eyes and expressive eyebrows and a mouth ringed with laughter lines. A good, honest face.

  Art smiled up at Dawkins. Dawkins smiled back. The eyes twinkled. Art laughed. “You are going to be very popular, Dawkins.”

  “Hurrah, my creator approves,” Dawkins replied.

  “Leave out the God shit, you.”

  “Yes, master.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I hear and obey.”

  Franco clapped Art on the shoulder. “Six is in the conference room. I put his head on a little runabout, so he’s been having a look round. All I’ve had since he arrived is questions. You’d better talk to him.”

  They all went through into the conference room. There was a long table, ten chairs and six monitors on one wall. Six stood in front of the biggest screen, watching Tom and Jerry cartoons. Jerry was tied to a train track while Tom rode a toy train towards him like a maniac, eyes wide, teeth bared. Franco switched it off.

  “Six? Mr Parrish is here to see you.”

  Six turned slowly on the flimsy runabout. His heavy, armoured head teetered alarmingly on this makeshift body. Lenses whirred as they focussed, irises dilated as they adjusted to new lighting conditions. “S/0097134 Private Parrish A.”

  “That’s right, Six,” said Parrish, approaching the robot. “But I’m off duty now, so you can call me Art. How are you?”

  No response.

  “Sorry, Six. Report operational diagnostics.”

  “Weapon systems off-line. Locomotive systems modified. Request locomotive upgrade. Operational efficiency 12%.”

  “We’ll deal with that later, Six. Now, an upgraded vocabulary programme has been loaded into your cortex. Have you assimilated this new information?”

  “Programme corrupted.”

  Art turned to Franco. “You said he had spoken a few new words.”

  “Only like a two-year-old. Something got through. There may be a virus.”

  Art moved closer to Six and examined the armoured skull. “No, I think it’s a security device to stop enemy hacking. The Duosphere’s easy to modify normally. I think the first thing to do is get it out of this army head. Come on Six, we’ll get you fixed in no time.”

  “Pass me the electric screwdriver, would you Franco? Thanks. Now…”

  Six’s head stood forlornly on a table in the lab, surrounded by the debris of the workshop. Some robotic engineers kept a clinically tidy lab – it impressed clients and potential sponsors alike – but Art liked everything in full view. It inspired him. And the conference room had its own entrance, so visitors could be shown expensively produced presentations instead. He began to unscrew the top plate on Six’s head.

  An alarm screamed “Armed. Ten seconds. Nine. Eight –“

  “Shit. Franco, help me get this cover off – “

  “Six. Five – “

  The tool whined into life. Screws uncoiled like silver worms and tinkled onto the table. “It’s stuck! Art!”

  “I’ve got it. One more screw at the bottom…”

  “Three. Two – “

  Art ripped the cover off. “No…”

  A small, grease smeared keypad faced him. He had to enter a code. But what?

  “One. Thank you.”

  A small bang like a gun going off sounded from the basement storage room beneath them.

  Art unlocked the basement door. Franco rushed in with a fire extinguisher. Papers, some on fire, floated down from the ceiling. One of the packing cases in which Six had been delivered lay in small plastic bits all over the room. Franco squirted foam over the flames and knelt to examine the case. “Well, that’s the power housing gone. Looks like the engineers did some serious dismantling before they sent him here.”

  “The detonating charge went off.”

  “Yes, and that is normally connected to the power source for the chassis and weapon system. The military removed the power source.”

  “Shit…”

  “What?"

  “The power source is a 0.2 megaton nuclear pile…”

  They stared at one another. Not a word was exchanged, but both men knew this would never, ever, be discussed again.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was the following morning before either man dared tinker with Six’s head again. Dawkins stood beside the dismembered automaton and with mechanical precision slowly arced a hand-held x-ray camera over the armoured cranium. Art and Franco huddled by a nearby monitor, watching the live image.

  “Well,” said Art, standing erect and lighting a cigarette, “I don’t see any other surprises in there.”

  “I thought you quit,” scowled Franco, crossing to the window and opening it a crack.

  Art smiled. “It’s new. They’re called Airettes. Made from genetically modified tobacco plants. The smoke molecules break down particulates in the alveoli. ‘Smoke Yourself Well!’ it says on the packet.”

  “They stink like shit.”

  “They do mint, bubblegum and vanilla flavours, but I’m a traditionalist. Just think, you’re passively inhaling something that’s doing you good.”

  Franco made a dismissive grunt and went back to the monitor. “So, where do we get in?”

  Art leaned close to the screen. “Dawkins, show us the left hand side of the keypad, would you?”

  The image panned slowly across the screen, the vertical and horizontal lines of hidden mechanical structures bent out of true by the wide-angle lens of the camera. Opaque shapes in shades of green and grey slid across their view. Now they could see the edge of the keypad as ghostly rubber keys. Wires in grey and black, and the silicon mazes of a circuit board showed through from underneath. Stretching away from the keypad into an out-of-focus blur was a ragged black line with the letter K stamped on it.

  Art tapped the screen with his lighter. “Weld joint. We’ll cut there.”

  “Cut it? Can’t we disassemble it?”

  Art stubbed out his airette. “Franco, the army builds things to last. We’ll use the carbon dioxide laser.”

  “What about the duosphere?”

  “The army engineers added a sealed outer layer of oil as a sort of anti-shock device. The duosphere floats in it. Good design innovation. Anyway, it’ll give us five millimetres or so of leeway.”

  Franco was not convinced. “Whatever you say, Art.”

  By the end of the day, Six’s brain, the Halliday Duosphere, was free of its army housing and mounted on its Halliday supplied cradle. It appeared a deceptively simple object – two matching gunmetal grey hemispheres divided by a hoop of brushed steel slightly indented from the two halves – but underneath was a large gleaming orifice, again made of steel, but left smooth and shiny like chrome. It was an irregular shape, a circle with numerous notches and i
ndentations, and deep within could be seen a miniature forest of gold-plated rods and slats. The cradle was a heavy lump of steel, a raised dais upon which the brain rested, with a hollow in its centre. In the middle of the hollow was a rod shaped object, topped with more gold-plated rods and slats. This mirrored the spine assembly of every Halliday robot, and it was onto this rod that Art slipped Six’s brain.

  The cradle was linked to his computer. As soon as the spine assembly recognised the make and model of the brain, a window popped up on Art’s screen. “Your computer system will require 5.76 billion terrabytes of disc space to download the information recorded on Halliday Duosphere 6/T1n.”

  Art pressed enter, then spun round on his swivel chair to Franco, who was watching the news on his ‘EZeyes’ glasses.

  “Franco, why don’t you go and see Kate and rustle up one of your fantastic tomato sauces?”

  “You’re on the news, you know,” he replied, not moving from his seat.

  A rush of fear set his fingers tingling with adrenaline. “Now what? This was supposed to be an internal army inquiry.”

  “People died. A lot of people. Their families want to know what’s going on.”

  “What are they saying?”

  Franco pressed the earpiece of his glasses to hear the report better. “There’s a rumour you had something to do with it. Why else would the robot leave you alive?”

  Adrenaline surged harder, setting Art trembling. “It’s an army robot. I’ve got nothing to do with programming. Am I accused of anything?”

  Franco sat up in his seat and leaned forward. There was a pause. When he spoke, it was clear and quiet. “There’s talk of you being an accessory to murder.”

  Art scrabbled for his airettes. With a tinny chink he sparked up his lighter and lit one. He drew the smoke down deep and wished it was a proper cigarette. “But the army’s still in control of the situation, right?”

  “Yeah. But your face is all over the TV.”

  “Shit…!” he scraped his hands through his hair and over his face. “What if they get hold of my address? The press’ll be down here like a shot.”

  Franco slipped off his glasses. “You gotta learn to love the press, Art; if they come down here, they’ll be shooting you with cameras. If some relative with a grudge turns up, he might try shooting you with something else. You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “You gotta keep the press close. You ain’t done nothing wrong. Talk to them, keep everything open and honest. This is an army problem. We gotta turn it around. Tell them to talk to the military. They’re the ones to blame for all this shit.”

  Art blew out a lung full of smoke.

  “Art, you find out what’s on that brain; me, I’m gonna make you a tomato sauce so good, you’ll forget your own name. Okay? Hey, we'll get through this."

  Art, Franco and Kate ate together in Art’s house that evening. Spaghetti with something very similar to minced beef in tomato sauce with plenty of garlic, a red wine to wash it down.

  “So they’re going to try the robot for murder?”

  “Looks that way, Kate,” said Art, wiping a piece of bread around his plate.

  She frowned, sipped her wine; thought for a moment. “This is a man-made brain, Art.”

  Art lit an airette. “The problem is, is destroying the brain good justice? That’s what they’ll do if they find Six guilty of killing those soldiers. He even killed Bailey, and Bailey wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  Franco looked down at his plate. “I liked Bailey.”

  “He was a library technician, halfway through transferring the works of Edgar Alan Poe onto crystal. He never should have been there…”

  “Surely it’s Halliday himself who’s responsible?” interjected Kate, pouring herself another glass. “He designed the brain.”

  “We’re entering unknown territory, Kate. Halliday laid down the neural network and designed the early learning programme; the literature is all there – modules on morality and ethics, the basic differences between right and wrong, according to human thought – he covered everything. And they don’t give the Nobel prize to just anyone.”

  “Then the army is to blame,” said Franco, getting up from the table and switching on the coffee-maker. “They put a civilian brain in a military unit. Maybe they overrode the civilian programming.”

  “You do that, Franco, and you start creating conflicts within the programme. And let’s not forget, the Duosphere is organic, seeded from stem cells.”

  “Then we should look at the donor cells,” said Kate.

  Both men turned to her. “And here we enter restricted territory,” replied Art. “Strictly speaking, the Duosphere has no single donor, according to official documentation. Off the record, it is a single donor, normally the aborted offspring of checkable parents. Very off the record, it’s normally stem cells from someone close to the Duosphere programme. Everyone wants immortality, and the Duosphere can offer that. It replicates brain cells like cancer cells, immortal cells without telomeres to tell it when to shut down. The electronic inhibitor circuits kill off the excess cells, to contain it."

  Kate gave Art a long, critical stare. “You never told me that. Cancerous brains in army hardware. Frankenstein meets Action Man. So you helped construct a brain made from someone who wanted to live forever, and put it in a military vehicle, armed with the latest anti-personnel weapons?“

  Art drew long and hard on his airette, then stubbed it out on the cut-glass astray on the table. “I constructed the brain, that’s all.”

  Kate slowly put her wine glass down on the white linen tablecloth. “Who donated their brain-cells, Art? And why?”

  “That’s restricted information.”

  “Is that what you’re going to tell the court that accuses you of being an accessory to murder? ‘Sorry, Your Honour, that’s restricted information?’” There was a tear forming at the corner of her eye.

  Art tried to hold her gaze, but it was too intense. He stared hard at the ashtray. Franco rubbed at his temples with care-worn hands.

  “Kate, if we tell the court everything about the Halliday Duosphere programme, they’ll shut us down. We have made close to five thousand brains, and this is the only one that’s malfunctioned. The only one.”

  “You fucking idiot…” Kate rose from the table, unable to look Art in the eye any more. She leant against one of the kitchen units, and looked down into the sink. “You precision engineer these brains to within a millionth of a millimetre, to within a millionth of a centilitre, balancing the biological form and chemical levels to a degree unprecedented in medical science, in laboratories so clean you could eat your dinner off the floor after an eight hour shift, and yet you take the raw materials from whoever happens to be in the room at the time? I bet some of your cleaner’s stem cells are in one of these brains.”

  Art and Franco shared an uneasy glance.

  “Oh, have I hit a nerve? Fucking hell, Art, I thought you were running a respectable laboratory, not a fucking fun-fair side-show! ‘Give us a swab and we’ll make you live forever!’”

  Art stood up. After a moment, he raised his head and looked at her. She wanted all the answers. Now.

  “We take stem cells from donors. Six was from the Special K batch. These are cells that have yet to differentiate into cells of a particular function. We do not take the personality of the donor, just the DNA. You look at early pregnancy pictures of human embryos, they’re not so different from very early fish embryos, or lizard embryos. We all come from a common ancestor. We all came out of the sea. All I’m taking is the raw biological material as a brick, a building block. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, as long as it is human. The Halliday programme does the rest.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Kyko Halliday swivelled back on his white leather power chair and lit a cigar. Smoke plumed away from his face, white and thick against the wide, blinded, sunlit window behind him. His small neat face remained resolutely obscured, a black knot
of shadow. He manoeuvred himself around the desk and placed himself firmly in the centre of his office. His chair bobbed lightly in the air, humming.

  Art stood before him, already intimidated. To get access to Halliday he had had to pass through security checks that had identified him down to a molecular level.

  “I understand a military brain has malfunctioned in the field.”

  “Yes. Nineteen people died.” He wanted to say eighteen plus a monkey-man called Ronson, but he was in enough trouble already.

  “I make brains, not military hardware, Art. The error lies with them.”

  He glided around Art, and flicked ash into a huge copper bowl on a stand. There were brand new shoes on his withered legs.

  “I need to prove that, Mr Halliday.”

  “Are you a lawyer?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Then get one.”

  “You’re not taking any responsibility at all?”

  Halliday moved in close. Art’s shoes began to heat up from Halliday’s chair.

  “Responsibility costs money, Art. Never admit to anything. Take some Prodraxil on your way out. End of story.”

  “Prodraxil? Just kill Number Six?”

  “It’s what they want, ultimately. Provide them with justice. It’s like telling them to fuck off. With chemicals.”

  “Mr Halliday, we have a responsibility to every brain we create. We are creating living beings. People. They have thoughts and dreams and hopes just like the rest of us.”

  “Murderers and psychopaths are people too; real people in real bodies. But we execute them every day. Why not execute a brain in a metal shell?”

  “Don’t you care?”

  “Mr Parrish, a brain is born with autonomic functions and basic survival instincts. Over the years, it absorbs sights and sounds and smells and tastes. If it’s lucky enough to be born into an organic body, it also experiences all the delights of touch, of warmth and cold and the joys of physicality. Six is a C – grade military defence unit, Special K batch. We've made a hundred of those this year. Just get rid of it and offer them twenty new ones at a ten percent discount.”