It was time to find out what Atoms for Peace were really doing.
In the elevator Nimrod punched the button for level B6, the last-but-one sub-level listed on the panel, and to his surprise the key lit around his thumb. If Atoms for Peace were hiding anything, it was going to be down there, under the city.
Level B6 was a series of plain corridors, lined with polished grey concrete and lit by functional utility lights. Nimrod’s footsteps echoed as he walked down one corridor after another, each intersection he came to presenting him with a choice of three equally featureless alternatives. He counted each as he passed through: First right, second straight, third straight, fourth left. There was no signage, no doors, no cameras, no mirrors. He had passed no security stations, no gateways or doors or screens. He was alone.
Was it normally like this? Or were Atoms for Peace otherwise engaged elsewhere, their Director included? Nimrod stroked his mustache as he walked, aware that his unimpeded progress was likely deliberate. They were letting him in, giving him free reign. Setting a trap.
After five minutes, Nimrod arrived at the first obstacle, a tall green door. Underground and despite counting the intersections, Nimrod had lost his sense of direction, though he knew he must be several blocks out from the Chrysler Building already. His own Department was just a floor of the Empire State building and some of its sub-levels. It was staffed and run more or less like any government field office, albeit one more covert.
This… this was something else. Atoms for Peace were building a web under the biggest city in the United States. How far the web crept, Nimrod was now determined to find out.
The green door opened at a touch, and led to a short corridor that ended in an identical door. Halfway along the corridor were two smaller doors, black iron with shuttered windows like the doors of a cell. One was locked, the other opened into a small, sparsely furnished office. Nimrod didn’t much like the idea of working underground, where you would never be able to keep track of the time. Standing in the doorway, Nimrod glanced around the office. There was no clock.
The other green door was also unlocked, and led into a laboratory-cum-workshop.
“Hello?”
Nothing. Nimrod’s voice echoed up to a high vaulted ceiling, much higher than the ceiling in the corridors outside. The concrete here was older, damp stains trailing down from the ceiling. The room was old, part of something else — the city’s water or sewage system, reclaimed by Atoms for Peace.
Against the opposite wall was a square metal cage. Its doors were open, and within was a frame with horizontal armrests, though it looked far too big for a man. The frame was connected to pieces of electrical equipment inside the cage and out. The main slab was shiny at the center and dark around the edges, like it had been recently cleaned. On the cement floor in front of it was a large, irregular dark patch that reminded Nimrod of spilled blood.
Nimrod stuffed his hands into his pockets and turned slowly on his heel, taking in the contents of the workshop. There was a regular oscilloscope, a rotometric signal dampener, and, against the wall, next to a small coat rack with six hooks to hold laboratory coats, a sequential field inverter, the device as big as a car, with modifications and upgrades Nimrod didn’t recognize.
He stopped, and found his heart rate was a little high. He had been hired by the US Government for a number of different skills, one of which was his expertise with electronics, cybernetics, and robotics. Although he was not as knowledgeable (or as pompous) as his Empire State counterpart, Captain Carson, he was expert enough to understand the purpose of the facility.
It was a robotics workshop, similar to the ones set up in the aftermath of the Empire State incident. As had happened at the end of World War II, when Nazi rocket technology had been stripped out of Germany and taken to the United States along with Germany’s scientists, so the Empire State had surrendered some of its robotics technology. There was a rumor that a scientist had been brought across as well, a Pocket universe version of someone who already existed in the Origin universe; Nimrod had dismissed the story, but now he wasn’t so sure. That would have explained the office, and the cell-like quarters. If a scientist had been brought across, to allow him the freedom of the city would have been far too dangerous.
Nimrod turned back to the stain on the floor. He was getting a very bad feeling about what Atoms for Peace were doing in their secret laboratory.
It was time to go lower.
The button lit, and the elevator descended. Nimrod knew now that his journey was being controlled from elsewhere, that he was being observed.
Level B7 — the last button on the elevator panel — appeared to be the same as the floor above: concrete corridors, utility lights, and not a soul. Nimrod decided to head in a straight line, and thought that he had, but soon found himself back at the elevator lobby. He shook his head, and rubbed his mustache, and checked his watch — he’d been stalking the underground portion of the Atoms for Peace base for nearly two hours, and he was tired and footsore.
The elevator was still open, and Nimrod walked into it, his eyes on the floor, his hands in his pockets as he considered his next move. He reached for the elevator controls and stopped, his hand in midair. The panels in the elevator were different — there were just two floor buttons: “1”, which was currently lit, and “2”, beneath.
Nimrod frowned. He was in a different elevator.
Nimrod punched “2” and the doors slid shut.
The descent to level 2 was longer than Nimrod expected, the elevator taking him deep underground. When the doors finally opened, the scene was very different from the floor above. The architecture was still bare concrete, but the elevator opened directly into a single corridor, lit in a deep, flickering orange from the opposite end. Raising his hand to shield his eyes against the light, Nimrod saw the corridor end in a black door with a square window, through which the fire-like light shone.
Reaching the door, Nimrod could see nothing through the window except a bright point of orange light and a lot of black space. The room beyond was clearly enormous.
The door opened onto a viewing platform, constructed out of metal grilling. Looking down, Nimrod could see through to the floor beneath, thirty feet below. To his left and right metal staircases headed down, weaving back and forth twice before they reached the bottom.
Nimrod stepped forward, and gripped the platform’s handrail as he looked out into the space. The metal was cold against his palms, and as he looked out he gripped them tight enough to feel the cold against his bones.
The space was truly cavernous, as big as the largest Air Force hangar he’d seen above ground, hidden in the desert. It was lit from above by large white floodlights, but they did little to dispel the orange glow coming from the center of the room, where a huge torus was held in mid-air by a framework of silver struts. Above the torus was another black metal platform, perhaps octagonal, around the edge of which looked to be control panels and instrument banks. Two twisting black staircases led from the platform to the floor.
The torus was the source of the light. The entire object was glowing orange, like iron in a fire: darker around the edge and almost white in the center. A brighter light moved around the ring, anti-clockwise, throwing the orange light around the hangar, and across the robots assembled on the floor — robots surrounding the central structure from one side to the other, filling the room wall-to-wall, end-to-end.
Nimrod gasped. Robots. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Each identical, tall and silver, row upon row upon row. Nimrod counted fifty units from one side of the room to the other, then lost count as he tried to count the rows going back.
The robots were vaguely man-shaped, but huge; from his elevated position, Nimrod estimated each was at least seven feet in height, with rectangular torsos that were wider at the shoulders than at the waist by a considerable girth. The worst thing was the heads — each had a face, each identical, a toy-like parody of human features: triangular eyes, and a mouth that stret
ched across the square face. The mouth was a black plate, angled and vicious, a separate piece that could clearly open and close like the robots could… eat something.
Each robot had a black circle in the center of its silver chest; as his eyes adjusted to the orangey gloom, Nimrod could see the discs shine, like dark glass portholes.
Nimrod squeezed the handrail and shook his head, trying to understand what he was looking at, remembering the Director’s talk of war.
And here was her response. Atoms for Peace were indeed preparing for war. They were building an army. An army of robots.
The robotics laboratory was one thing; this was entirely another. The Secretary of Defense be damned — this was going straight to President Eisenhower.
There was a sound as Nimrod turned, like a button of his jacket clicking against the platform railing, an innocuous sound he barely registered before a black bag was yanked over his head and his arms were pulled back sharply.
He cried out and got a mouthful of dry cotton. He spat the fabric out and struggled, pulling his shoulders around, trying to break free, but the needle that entered his neck was thin and sharp, and the last thing Nimrod felt was pain and then numbness and the last thing he heard was the roar of the ocean, far away.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The night in Harlem was cold, the world frosted with ice, the air heavy with freezing mist.
The streets were empty, the buildings too: empty shells staring with empty black eyes out onto deserted streets. It seemed the very fabric of the place was rotting away, brick crumbling, concrete fracturing like wet chalk. If the Empire State was an imperfect copy of Manhattan island, then the Pocket universe’s Harlem was where the data degradation was worst. The cold wasn’t helping, nor the tremors. The whole world shook as it fell apart; here in Harlem, the quakes loosened mortar and pushed stones, making cracks, weakening everything.
The people stayed inside, huddled in small communities that gathered around fires to keep the dark away, to keep the creeping cold out. Some areas were better than others; here people could move around, try to continue some semblance of normal life, with shops and bars and businesses struggling onwards as the endless night drew on and the temperature dropped, and dropped again.
The area around 125th Street was not one of the good places. Here the night was stained a violent green when the lamp atop the tower at the back of the King’s theater was lit. Other times the shadows were deep, the darkness a perfect place to hide. Nobody walked these streets, not anymore, because the King had gathered his faithful from all over the city to this one spot, and here he kept them in darkness until they were needed.
So they waited, in small groups and sometimes ones larger. Their numbers fluctuated as the King took them inside his operating theater, where they were saved.
He was a great man, they said. A great man, blessed with miraculous skills. He would save them all, return them to their old lives, the ones they had before they marched willingly into the robot yards downtown, before answering their conscription papers, or, for some, before they were snatched in the dead of night and woke to find themselves in the middle of a slaughterhouse, waiting their turn for their limbs to be separated from their bodies and their hearts removed and replaced with rubber pumps to push machine oil around their internal mechanisms.
Tonight, the green lantern flicked on, bathing 125th Street and the surrounds of the theater in a deep, sickly haze.
It was necessary. The King said so himself. The green light kept enemies away, kept them safe. And it would not be long now; the King had said so, many times. When the green light came on, when the pain started and the robots scurried to the shadows to escape its hellish glare, the King and his servant would appear, on the veranda that jutted out from the front of the theater, out over the main entrance. They would stand on this platform, this stage, and the King would tell them that everything would be fine, that everything was going to plan, that soon they would be saved, all of them, from their torment. Just a little while longer, just a little more time, and then they would be ready.
Because, he said each and every time, the city owed them. The Empire State had taken their lives away, stolen them. It had treated them like machines, like just more tiny cogs in great wheels, sending them off into the fog, never to return. Feeding them to the Enemy, to keep it complacent, satiated.
And when the time was right, when the work was complete, the King would lead them back downtown, where they would liberate the Empire State from itself, and take back what the Empire State had stolen from them.
Then, after he had spoken, the green light would turn red, and the relief would be a blessing. The robots could come out and bathe in the light, the light that healed, energized, the light that gave pleasure, not pain. And then the King would be on the street, within reach of the pawing hands and claws and clamp and servo units. And with the help of his servant, he would administer the nourishment, the magical green elixir that kept them alive while they waited to be called into the theater.
But tonight was different. The green light had come on, but there was no appearance, no speech. Robbie and the others hid in the shadow of a stairwell close to the entrance; it was a good spot, and his group had fought hard to claim it, and every night defended it as best they could. It was difficult, dangerous, and soon Robbie’s gang had been reduced to the strongest — Robbie, with his telescopic arms and domed head filled with stained glass; Ratings 112363 and 112463, two soldiers nearly intact; and a small man who refused to give his name, who appeared to be more human than robot but when he moved — and move he did, so very quickly — there were flashes of silver beneath the ragged blankets he wrapped himself in.
The green light had come on, and they’d waited, but there was nothing. Robbie sat with his back against the stairs, facing away from the theater. He waited, ignoring the rambling conversation of the two Ratings, each repeating the words of the other, not quite in time, over and over until it became too much for Robbie’s ambient microphone to bear and he turned the input volume down. With his telescopic arms wrapped around his legs, he sat and rocked his curved carapace against the cement of the stair block.
He needed it. Oh boy, did he need it. He could feel it, that aching deep within his alternator, a sensation, a tension, creeping out across his hydraulic system, a chill that cooled his valves until he thought their glass would crack. He licked the roof of his mouth — he still had a tongue, although his upper palate was a plate of copper, unfinished and corroding, like most of his torso. He rocked against the stairwell, leaving verdigris stain on the bricks.
The green light suddenly went off, and there it was — the red. He could feel the relief coursing through his circuits, even from here, hidden in the shadow. He looked ahead to the street, the icy ground bleached pink-red.
Oh man, all he had to do was stand up and walk out into the light, and he’d get the first part of the hit. He almost couldn’t stand it, it was like the control gyros where his stomach used to be were shorting out, going haywire, creating a pins and needles sensation that swept across his framework, like being tickled with a feather back when he had skin. Perhaps that’s all it was; maybe his motivation dampener was too cold and was accessing the memories of the man he used to be, memories that were supposed to be locked away, suppressed forever.
Robbie didn’t like it. The King hadn’t spoken, and while the green light had gone off and the red one had come on, something was up. If he stepped out into the red, and the King wasn’t there to dispense the green, the hit, then the pain that followed would be too much to bear. It was better to stay here, unmoving, corroding into the brick and concrete than to suffer that pain. The relief of the red was intense, but temporary — to get the hit, you had to have the green too, not the light but the elixir, and that was dispensed by the King and the King alone.
“My brothers!”
Robbie’s head rotated almost automatically at the sound, as the directional microphones mounted next to the primary op
tical unit behind the angled stained glass filters in his head kicked in. There was movement near the theater, near the main doors, not on the balcony. Something wasn’t right, but the voice was crosschecked and identified: it was the Corsair, the King’s servant.
“My brothers,” came the voice again, “the King has sent me to bring the green. Come and receive the green from your King, and rejoice in his majesty.”
Ratings 112363 and 112464 chattered excitedly, their shared words piling over each other and vanishing into a rush of static. Robbie could understand the feeling, the want, the need to get the hit, to get the green.
Robbie retracted his arms and stood, his body rotating towards the theater. His optics adjusted to the red light and he saw the Corsair standing in the doorway of the castle, holding out one hand. Robbie zoomed in, and saw the small rectangle of something dark on the Corsair’s upturned palm. Nearly a whole ounce of green. On the ground next to the King’s servant was an open metal box, and within, stacked in neat piles, more wrapped hits, one for each robot, except the larger ones that needed two.
The absence of the King himself was unusual, but it didn’t matter — his servant had brought the green instead. Already there was movement across the street as robots pulled themselves out of shadows and out of alleyways, from behind stairwells, up from basement entrances. The street was soon filled with moving machines, although perhaps fewer than the night before. More had succumbed to the cold, the low temperature sucking the life from their batteries. The green fixed that, or at least it made it feel like it did.
The nameless robot in the blanket behind Robbie didn’t move. Another one gone.
The robots moved across the street, but Robbie was closest — that was why his group defended the stairwell with such desperation, because it was closest to the theater, which meant Robbie was first in line for the hit.
The Corsair turned towards him as Robbie approached. Robbie’s rubber skirt slid on the ice, making it look like he was gliding if it wasn’t for the slight bobbing up and down of his short steps. The Corsair held out his hand; Robbie paused, the red light flooding his sensors, the knowledge that the hit was just seconds away almost too much for his logic gates to handle. He heard them clicking inside his carapace, and gears moved inside his head as the optics zoomed in on the Corsair’s gloved hand and the prize it held.
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