The Age Atomic

by Adam Christopher

  Jennifer joined the detective. “Terrific,” she said, nodding at the body on the warehouse floor. “Out with a single punch? Not bad, Mr Bradley.”

  “I used to box, or so I’ve been told. I’ve got a medal and everything.” He reached forward with his good hand and felt Cliff’s neck, his heart racing a little. There was no pulse and more than that the skin was cold, apparently the same temperature as the frozen air of the warehouse.

  “He’s dead,” said Rad, not quite believing it himself. He looked at Jennifer.

  “Depends on your definition of dead, I suppose,” she said.

  Rad’s jaw moved up and down but he couldn’t find the right words to answer. He carefully lifted one lapel of Cliff’s trench coat with his injured hand and reached inside with the other. Maybe there was some ID, or something else that would be useful. Instead, his fingers closed on the smooth metal of the hip flask. He pulled it out and looked at it.

  Well, he needed a damn drink, and it didn’t look like Cliff was going to mind much. He glanced back to the body and uncapped the flask to take a sip.

  “Wait!”

  Rad ignored Jennifer as his nostrils caught fire, reacting to the poisonous fumes from the flask. His throat closed in a reflex action and he choked – then coughed, hard. Through watering eyes he saw Jennifer move in front of him and he gasped as she knocked the flask out of his hand. The detective retched and bent over, and saw the flask on the warehouse floor, a thick liquid spilled from the open top.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Rad said, his voice a rattling croak. He coughed again and stood. Jennifer scooped the flask up and held it away from her, looking at it like it was about to explode.

  Rad’s throat was raw. Jennifer tipped the flask upside down, letting the rest of the liquid escape. It was bright green and pooled on the cement floor like oil. The smell was sharp, like gasoline and coal smoke and lemon juice.

  Rad managed to find his voice.

  “What is that?” He peered closer, fascinated by the evil liquid on the ground. Jennifer crouched near to the floor to take a closer look.

  She looked back up at the detective. “It’s anti-freeze,” she said.

  “He was drinking chemicals?”

  Rad stroked his chin with his good hand, and looked down at the dead body in front of them. Dead? His punch hadn’t been that heavy, unless maybe the guy had had a fractured skull to start with.

  He looked at the wet mark shining on Cliff’s chin. Then he swore and knelt down again. He poked at the thug’s face.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Rad as he pushed hard at the shiny patch, enough for the skin to slide back over the bottom of the jawbone.

  Except it wasn’t bone, not at all. The shining patch was metal, silver. The whole goddamn jaw was made of it.

  Rad jerked his hand away, only for Jennifer to take over. She pulled at the torn skin, then gripped at the edge with both hands and yanked. She rocked backwards on her heels as a rubbery beige something that had been Cliff’s face came cleanly away.

  “They’ve started already,” she said, and she stood, tossing Cliff’s face to one side and putting her hands on her hips. She pursed her lips in thought.

  “He’s a robot,” said Rad. “And you’re not surprised. Who’s started already? More robots? And where do robots like this guy come from anyway? The only robots I know of are the ones that the Navy used to make. He doesn’t look like one of those.”

  Jennifer looked at him and nodded. “It’s been modified. Upgraded.”

  “Oh,” said Rad. He had that sinking feeling again; here he was, helping someone who knew more about what was going on than he did.

  Jennifer pushed Cliff’s head to one side, revealing the rear half of the skin-mask. She pulled the robot’s hat off; Cliff’s hair was still in place, slick and proper just like any self-respecting crook would like it. But beneath, in the dim warehouse light, his real face shone, all silver and wet and angular, a whole lot of triangles and rectangles that explained Cliff’s special kind of handsome. Inside the metal mouth were teeth which looked pearly white and human enough, as did the eyes set into the steel brow.

  Rad felt a little ill and rubbed his finger against his pants. He wasn’t sure what the flesh-like material was that covered the robot but he had a feeling he didn’t want to be touching any more of it. He looked down at Cliff again. For a robot, it sure had gone down easy. Maybe he’d punched out a fuse. Not a great design for a mechanical gangster.

  Rad coughed and sniffed and turned away, directing his attention to the closest stack of wooden crates behind him as he wrapped his arms around his chest, trying to beat some warmth into his body. His feet shuffled through the straw on the floor, his toe nudging a small silver metal rod, like half a pencil, the blunt ends wrapped in copper.

  Rad picked up the rod and turned, holding it out, but Jennifer was hunched over Cliff. Rad closed his mouth and slipped the rod into his pocket and turned back to the crates.

  He pulled on the lid of the one nearest him. The nails slid out with surprising ease; the crate had been opened before, recently.

  Rad pushed his hat back on his head and pulled a few handfuls of straw out of the crate, his punching hand functional but sore.

  “I don’t know what these guys were moving,” he said over his shoulder, “but it’s not booze or guns.”

  Rad pulled a gunmetal grey something out of the crate. It was a cylinder about six inches long and three wide, capped at one end by black glass and finished at the opposite with some kind of electrical terminal. Rad shoved more packing out of the crate and found a length of curly cable secured with a wire twist, long plugs on each end, clearly designed to mate with the end of the cylinder. He looked for a third time in the crate, and saw at the bottom a sort of trapezoidal box like a radio with dials and buttons on the front, and a handle in black plastic on the top. He gave the handle a tug but the object didn’t move much. It felt heavy.

  Rad turned back to Jennifer and the robot, cylinder in one hand and cable in the other.

  “You wanna start telling me a little about all this? Because if you want my help then you’re going to have to fill me in on this one. And we’re going to need to discuss my retainer.”

  Jennifer stood and looked Rad in the eye. “He said you could be difficult.”

  “Who did?”

  “Captain Carson. Who else?”

  Rad blinked. “You know Carson?”

  “Sure I do. I work for him – worked, anyway. Nobody’s seen him since–”

  “Since he walked over the ice and disappeared into the fog,” said Rad. “Yeah, I know. So you wanna tell me why I’m rescuing one of Carson’s agents from a robot gangster? I would have thought the Commissioners would send the big guns in, one of their own in a mess like this.”

  Jennifer laughed. “Big guns? There aren’t any. Or haven’t you noticed? Not since… well, not since before, anyway. Carson had some grand plans, but now with the Fissure and the cold, the whole place is a mess and…”

  Rad waved his hand. He didn’t like to be reminded of the status quo, because the status quo was bad. Carson, the new City Commissioner was gone, abandoning his post when the transdimensional tear that connected the Empire State to New York City – the so-called Fissure – vanished. And with the Fissure gone the city was slowly turning into a solid block of ice, one apt to shake itself to pieces too, if the tremors were going to keep up like they were.

  Rad had heard things were bad at the Empire State Building. There was no one in charge, no one to give orders, no one with any kind of solution, because the one man who knew how any of it all worked had apparently committed suicide.

  “Yeah,” said Rad. “I got it.”

  Jennifer nodded. “Carson spoke highly of you. Said you were the best. Said to call you when things got difficult.”

  “So things are difficult?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You said they’d started already.” Rad gestured around the warehouse, h
is eyes scanning the lock-ups. “I take it you’re on the trail of something?”

  “Yes,” she said. She straightened and moved to the nearest of the roller doors, giving the padlock at the bottom an experimental kick with her boot. She pushed at the door, rattling it, but it held firm. “We need to see what they’ve got in here.”

  Rad gently pushed Jennifer to one side and knelt next to the lock. He took a pair of lock picks from inside his coat pocket, holding them up for Jennifer to see. She smiled and folded her arms.

  “Useful.”

  “Hey,” said Rad. “Detective’s best friend.” He turned back to the padlock and got to work. The padlock was large but nothing special, and within moments Rad had it sprung. He stood, one hand on the roller door release, but then paused and looked over his shoulder at Jennifer. He had a bad feeling about this.

  “Ready?”

  She nodded. Rad sighed, and pulled the door up. As the roller snapped into its housing, he yelled in surprise and jumped back nearly a foot.

  “What in the hell?”

  Jennifer darted forward before Rad could say anything more.

  “God damn,” she said, her breath clouding in front of her.

  The lock-up was filled with robots, tall and silver and inactive. They filled the space wall to wall, five in a row. Rad stood on his toes and counted ten rows to the back of the space.

  “Fifty,” he said, his eyes wide. “There’s fifty robots in there.”

  Jennifer stepped closer. Each robot had glassy eyes that were dark. She stared up at the closest one, then reached up and tapped the front of its head.

  “Careful!” said Rad, tugging on Jennifer’s arm. She didn’t resist as he pulled her back, but when he turned her around he was surprised to see her smiling.

  “We need to get out of here,” said Rad. “I don’t like this one little bit.”

  “Open another.”

  Rad huffed in the cold air. “What?”

  “They’re not active,” said Jennifer. “Open another lock-up.”

  Rad was frozen to the spot. Behind Jennifer the ranks of inactive robots stood like life-size children’s toys.

  “OK,” he said, finally, not quite believing what he was doing. He moved to the next roller door on the left and picked the padlock. The door shot up with a bang that made him jump.

  Inside were more robots. Another fifty. Rad looked down the length of the warehouse, then turned and peered into the gloom over the other side of the vast space. The building was lined with the lock-ups, at least sixteen on each wall. Sixteen times fifty was…

  “He’s been busy,” said Jennifer. “They have warehouses all over the city. If they’re all filled with robots…”

  Rad shook his head. “Someone is hiding a robot army in the city?” He swept the hat off his head, the scale of the mystery he’d stumbled into almost too big to comprehend. He licked his lips and decided to focus down on something a little smaller. He moved to the nearby stack of crates.

  “What about this stuff?” He lifted out the metal cylinder again. “Any idea what this is?”

  “It’s a Geiger counter,” said Jennifer, “part of one, anyway.”

  “That so?” Rad raised the cylinder to his eye and tried to look into the end that was black glass, but it was totally opaque.

  “It detects radiation.”

  Rad looked at her over the metal cylinder.

  Jennifer blew out a breath and it steamed in the air between them. “Welcome to the age atomic, detective.”

  THREE

  Rad sat in his chair behind his desk. He was turned around, not facing the office door and the grandfather clock in the corner, but the large square window immediately behind his desk. The blinds were up, and it was night, the light in the office turning the window into a big mirror.

  Funny how things had come full circle. It hadn’t worked out with Claudia, although they’d tried their darnedest, but the truth was their marriage was an echo of something which had never happened, not in this dimension. That was the worst part, knowing what the Empire State was and what it had done to them. It had worried at Rad and it had worried at Claudia, and eventually it had pushed them apart. But maybe that was for the best. Rad didn’t like change, although he knew that might have been the Empire State pushing him again. He liked his job and his liked his office. He had looked around for better, of course, but none had that window and the view, so Rad had stayed put and the little room next to the office was still his home.

  Rad watched his reflection, and he watched the corners of the room behind him. Then he sighed and took a sip of his coffee and sighed again. The coffee was good. Real coffee, from the other side, from New York. He had Mr Jones to thank for that. Except now the Fissure was gone and the city had begun to freeze, and while the coffee was warming Rad knew he needed to keep an eye on his supply because suddenly it was a limited resource again.

  Huh. Jones. Rad wondered if Nimrod’s agent from New York and Carson’s agent from the Empire State were connected, or even the same person, in a way.

  Rad had secured the lock-ups and they’d hidden Cliff’s body in an empty crate in the warehouse. He’d be found eventually. Rad wasn’t sure if that meant the clock was ticking or not, but he had the feeling that time was most certainly running out. Hundreds – thousands – of robots hidden in warehouses all over the city meant something big was on the cards, something well beyond even the organized gang crime that Rad had been investigating. Something calamitous. Jennifer knew much more than she had let on, but had left without so much as a goodbye. As Rad slinked back to his office he hoped she knew what she was doing.

  The chair creaked as Rad shifted his weight. The Fissure was gone and the city was freezing, getting colder every day, but that didn’t stop Rad watching the reflections in his office. Reflections – mirrors – were one way the Empire State and New York were connected, at least if you knew the trick. And Rad knew that even with Carson gone on his side, there would be people working on it on the other. The problem of the Fissure would be affecting New York, Rad knew that – New York was the Origin, the template, and it led to a whole wide world, a universe beyond. The Empire State was the Pocket, an imperfect duplicate of New York, reflected through a hole in space-time thanks to the fight between the Science Pirate and the Skyguard, the two former protectors of New York.

  But the Fissure did more than connect the cities; it tied them together. One could not exist without the other anymore. Which meant if the Fissure was gone and the Empire State was freezing up, then Rad knew New York would be in trouble too. He only hoped that Captain Nimrod, Carson’s “original”, hadn’t taken a little walk as well. Nimrod had a whole damn government department dedicated to the Fissure. Nimrod was working on it, Rad knew that. He had to be.

  Which is why Rad sat in front of the window in his office most nights. Watching and waiting. The mirror-like quality of the window at night would let Nimrod see into the Empire State. And with Carson gone, Rad was one of the few people left in the Pocket dimension who had any clue how the world worked, so it would make sense for Nimrod to get in touch with him first.

  So the theory went.

  Rad sat in front of the window and the grandfather clock ticked time away in the corner, and he sipped his coffee and flexed the fingers of his sore hand. After a while Rad turned around on his chair to look at the item on the desk.

  It was the small rod, the one he’d pocketed. It looked a little like a fuse, and Rad thought that maybe it had fallen out of Cliff’s head, loosened by Rad’s punch, the reason the robot had gone over so easily. He’d meant to ask Jennifer about it but he’d clean forgotten. He could show it to her next time they met, if there was going to be a next time.

  He rolled the little cylinder on the desk, picked it up and looked at it closely, like he would suddenly recognize it for what it was. He put it back on the desk.

  “Huh,” said Rad to himself. “The age atomic.”

  Rad jerked his head up at the
sound. It was still night outside, and Rad could see himself reflected in the window. The office behind him was still and empty.

  The phone was ringing. Rad blinked, then spun around on his chair and grabbed at the stem, pushing the earpiece against the side of his head.

  At last, the call.

  “Nimrod?” he said. He squinted into the emptiness of his office, like that would improve his hearing.

  “I think you have something of mine,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  The line was crystal clear and the voice was loud, and more important it didn’t belong to Nimrod, didn’t have that strange clipped accent he shared with Carson and which Rad had learned was “British.” The voice on the phone was a local call.

  “Who is this?”

  The man on the end of the phone clicked his tongue. It echoed strangely, although Rad wasn’t sure if that was the phone or… something else. Maybe a gas mask worn by someone from New York acclimatizing to the Empire State’s different environment. There was something else too, in the background. Music. Jazz music; the phone line stripped the bass out but Rad could hear a bright piano and drum beat.

  “Where are you from?” Rad asked, before the man on the phone had a chance to say anything else.

  “Oh, patience, detective, patience. You have something of mine. You picked it up at the warehouse. I’d like it back.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Rad. He glanced at the clock in the corner. It was three in the morning. He’d dozed off, which explained the crick in his neck. “Must be pretty important for you to call at this hour.”

  There was a dull scraping on the other end of the phone. “Oh, it’s late. I’m sorry. You tend to lose track of time, job like mine.”

  Another hint, another clue. Rad smiled. “Lot of fancy stuff in that warehouse. Specialized equipment. Not to mention the toys you’ve got in cold storage. Quite an operation you have running.”

  Too much information? Rad winced and sucked in his cheeks. He needed some sleep and possibly not any more coffee.

  The man on the phone laughed. It was just a quiet chuckle, slow, steady. Rad listened, but there was nothing else on the line except the man laughing and the faint music.