The Forbidden City

by John McNally

There was no greeting from Kelly, who was standing over a smouldering mechanical carcass. The rail guns had missed him, but succeeded in destroying the Frankenstein bot.

  Across the hall the cluster was glowing less, but growing more, as bots streamed in from all directions.

  “What do we do now?” said Finn.

  The line down into the booth tugged, and Kelly and Finn began to haul Stubbs up. When he got to the top, he was wearing the blue plastic bag that had contained the sandwich.

  “Parachute,” Stubbs explained, and then sighed as he took in the blasted Frankenstein bot.

  “Can you build another?” Kelly said.

  Before Stubbs could even think, there was a scream from below –

  “THERE!”

  On the floor of the hall, directly beneath them, distorted through the glass, was the snarling face of Baptiste.

  O!” yelled Kelly.

  Finn grabbed the brain box and they leapt on to the raft.

  Below, Spike and Scar were running in between the stacks of hyper-servers, screeching like jackals.

  Stubbs hit the power lever and the thrusters kicked to life. Finn clung to the boards as they rose fast, the raft blessed with balance and speed now it wasn’t disturbed by the constant turbulence caused by bots and cooler fans, until – BANG!

  A shot ripped past, a slug of solid metal the size of a white van that nearly rolled them, Kelly and Finn throwing their weight across the raft to correct the swing. Stubbs clung to the tiller. They were a macro-metre clear of the stacks and rising.

  Baptiste screamed at Scar who’d fired the shot. “ALIVE!”

  “Go high! Get outside!” urged Finn, pointing at four columns of weak pre-dawn-light filtering into the hall from the open air-con vents in the roof.

  Stubbs took them up in a tight spiral. Beneath them, Spike and Scar scaled the hyper-servers, like chimps, trying to swipe at them.

  At the edge of the hall Baptiste ripped a long section of white plastic cable trunking off the wall and screamed at the others to open up a gap in the cluster of server towers beneath them.

  “He’s going to try and hit us with that!” warned Finn.

  Kelly grabbed the Minimi.

  The hyper-servers were on rails. Spike and Scar shifted the towers apart, creating a new layout with a gap beneath the vent. Baptiste, wielding the three macro-metre length of plastic trunking like a medieval pikestaff, ran into the gap, braced himself on the server walls either side of it and climbed rapidly up, like a flexible X.

  The raft hung just below the vent, bathed in the pre-dawn glow. They could smell fresh air outside. They had risen from hell and could smell freedom … But the devil had other ideas.

  “The thrusters are dying,” Stubbs warned. “We’re not going to make it.”

  Finn looked down. Baptiste was pulling up the plastic pikestaff.

  “Dammit!” said Kelly, aiming the Minimi down over the side. “Take us as far away from him as you can!”

  Stubbs angled them into a dive.

  WHOOOOM!

  The raft rocked. The tip of the white plastic trunking, as thick as a tree, whipped past. Baptiste was on the other end, at full stretch. Kelly looked down the barrel of the Minimi and let him have it right in the eye – DRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTR!

  Baptiste roared with pain and nearly toppled, twisting and raging like King Kong. Again he swiped at the raft. Again Kelly fired – DRTDRTDRTDRTDRT! – but now Baptiste turned to let the bullets sting his scalp rather than blind him.

  THWACK! – the tip of the plastic pikestaff clipped and spun the raft.

  “Arrrggghhh!” shouted Finn as he clung to the raft’s tornado deck. Stubbs jumped across him to save the brain box. Kelly was clinging on to the raft’s outer edge.

  The spin took them away from Baptiste, but they were falling too fast.

  “BAG!” Kelly yelled.

  Finn yanked the blue plastic bag from Stubbs’s back and hooked the handle ends over the outboard at the back of the raft and immediately it snapped open as a parachute, halting the spin and slowing their descent.

  “THERE!” Baptiste screamed, pointing at them as they drifted down between the stacks, back into the darkness, two precious macro-metres or so clear of the end of his killing stick.

  WHAM! – the descending raft swung into the side of the servers. With more inelegant scraping and bashing they fell down a server canyon and hit the ground hard, spilling across the floor. Immediately they heard the running Tyros, their sneakers squeaking on the polished concrete floor as they ran to roll the towers apart and expose them.

  Kelly sprang to his feet.

  “MOVE!” yelled Kelly as the north side of the canyon began to shift on its wheels.

  “This way!” called Finn, leading them south beneath the server stacks.

  Stubbs broke into a shuffling trot, clinging to the brain box. Too slow. Kelly scooped him up over his shoulder while Finn grabbed the brain.

  The Tyros barked and screamed. Hunt on. Blood up. If they rolled the right stacks in the right sequence they could soon cut the crew’s cover down to a single stack. But this was hampered by the darkness and the number of stacks that needed moving, confusion mounting as the Tyros struggled to get a nano-radar fix on their fleeing prey.

  In the darkness beneath the stacks, Finn and Kelly were trying to run through a lethal jungle of wiring, components and cable ties that poked beneath the bottom of the circuit boards.

  “Go go go!” Kelly urged Finn on even as he dropped behind. Stubbs and the Minimi slowing his progress.

  They’d managed to run four stacks south when a blinding white light stopped them.

  Finn turned. A flashlight on a phone was being directed underneath the line of server stacks, a face pressed hard against the concrete floor beside it.

  “Up!” said Kelly, dropping Stubbs. All three scrambled up among the dangling wires, one light beam, then another, swept past.

  Finn tried to hold still in a hammock of ribbon connector. He’d left the brain box on the floor. Would they spot something that small amongst the random dirt and debris? It was barely bigger than a grain of sand. For a moment the beam lingered on it … then passed.

  Then Stubbs lost his grip on the underside of a relay unit and fell heavily to the floor with an “Urrgh!”

  The beam of light instantly returned.

  “Play dead!” hissed Kelly.

  “I nearly am,” Stubbs mumbled, face fixed, holding it together in the blue-white light.

  There was a brief discussion, then a scraping …

  Stubbs looked around and saw the guillotine edge of the white plastic trunking hurtling towards him – twice his height and banshee-screeching across the concrete –

  “Arrrgghhh!” Finn heard him cry as it hit him. A cry of fear as well as pain. Finn swung himself down to help, but before he could hit the floor, Kelly dropped like a trapeze artist to grab the old man and haul him back up into the undergrowth.

  Stubbs passed out, a sack of old bones in Kelly’s arms. Blood dripped from a gash across his chest forming a dark puddle below.

  DAY FIVE 06:58 (Local GMT+8). Roof of the World, Shanghai.

  “What just happened?”

  Nobody knew.

  The last drone flight had shown two of the Tyro figures entering the Shen Yu. Then the feed was destroyed by a bot attack and dawn had made further infrared flights redundant. The Chinese troops on the ground had been driven back as far as Sector 7 before the bot attacks had stopped.

  “Are the bots still concentrated on the Shen Yu?” the US President demanded.

  The Chinese politburo members looked uneasy.

  “Impossible to say. Though we know they have the power to reach at least Sector Seven,” said Bo.

  “Which rules out the surgical strike option at this moment,” concluded Commander King.

  He looked to Al for confirmation. Everyone looked to Al, but he was distracted, watching a looped replay of the tiny gesture that had told Delta that t
he “fourth Tyro” from the earlier infrared feed was her sister, Carla.

  It made his insides twist. If it was Carla, then Finn was likely to be with her.

  “If a surgical strike is out then we have to start looking at the nuclear options,” he heard General Mount suggest on a screen from London.

  Voices rose. “Now hold on a minute …”

  Delta said nothing in her Skimmer, just checked her fuel level, her ammo and that her nPhone still had charge.

  Then the door to the helipad opened as two soldiers came in. Delta accelerated the Skimmer towards the gap, but the door shut just before she could reach it. She pulled hard right out of the run and turned to face the man she knew had slammed it in her face.

  Al.

  “Get out of my way!” yelled Delta.

  “No! There is still time, there are still options, there is a solution – we just haven’t figured what it is yet,” said Al.

  “That’s my little sister and I’m going in!” yelled Delta.

  “Yes – you are!” Al yelled back. “But not like this!”

  DAY FIVE 07:36 (Local GMT+8). Eurofighter Typhoon, 30,000 feet.

  Woof …?

  Was it a dream? A screaming dream?

  Yo-yo’s mind was spiralling back to consciousness.

  He could smell: Hudson, bad-smell #73463482 [aviation fuel], and another …

  When Hudson and The Men had arrived, Yo-yo had assumed they were going to take him for a walk, but at some point Hudson had patted him, given him a treat, then everything had disappeared.

  Now everything was coming back and they seemed to be locked away in a great screamingness. Naturally, he felt obliged to out-howl the noise in order to establish his dominance.

  HOOOWOWOWWWWOWOOW!

  “It’s OK, Yo-yo! It’s OK! Chill! Good dog, nearly there!”

  Yo-yo opened his eyes and saw a bright blue sky and a boy in a mask looking down at him. The boy flicked the side of the mask open to reveal his face.

  To see Hudson again was heaven itself.

  Yo-yo wagged his tail.

  DAY FIVE 08:11 (Local GMT+8). Song Island, Taiwan (disputed).

  Kaparis looked out from the highest point on Song Island, and waited.

  He was an impatient man. Impatience and a vile temper had served him well. It was a universal quality, he noted, common among those few other exceptional individuals he considered his equal, from history and the international marketplace.

  However, he could not yet speed the progress of celestial bodies.

  The dawn sun hovered over the horizon like a ripe blood orange.

  He had regarded it with fury for the last sixteen minutes.

  When a computer alarm indicated it was now high enough for its beams to hit the roof of the Greenharbour Inc. building in the Forbidden City he said –

  “Issue the instruction.”

  Li Jun, who’d twice narrowly escaped with her life in the last twenty-four hours, obeyed.

  KAPCOMMS>>EVE. KAPARIS>>LET THERE BE LIGHT AND THERE WAS LIGHT. THIS IS THE WORD OF KAPARIS.

  EVE.>>QUERY?

  KAPCOMMS>>EVE. KAPARIS>> PROOF: LET THERE BE LIGHT AND THERE WAS LIGHT – THEREFORE – THERE WAS POWER.

  EVE.>>QUERY? LOCATION?

  KAPCOMMS>>EVE. KAPARIS>> LOCATION LAT311887 LNG121289433

  Kaparis smirked. Fate was about to fall for his charms once again.

  “I think, Heywood, we should prepare the champagne.”

  EVE. sent out SCOUT bots to the specified location. They landed on a roof, on a solar panel, where photovoltaic crystals were turning daylight into precious, life-giving power …

  After seventy-four seconds the datum relayed back to EVE. from the Shen Yu Hall was:

  >>SCOUTBOT 47RYBD4378HH84: POWER NODE .0756 KW LAT311887 LNG121289433

  After four more seconds, eight further reports from the same area came in.

  EVE.>>ALLBOTS GENERAL DISPERSAL ORDER>> >>DISPERSE TO POWER NODES [FOLLOWS]>> LAT311887 LNG121289433 …

  z­s­s­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­z­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­z­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­z­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­z­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­z­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­s­s­z­s­z­z­s­s­s …

  The core cluster began to glow again, began expanding and dissolving as hundreds of thousands of bots moved in liquid sequence streaming towards the four columns of dawn light on the roof, escaping the Shen Yu Hall in great swirls and currents, seeking out the new source of electricity.

  “They go!” reported Baptiste, watching the bots disappearing like smoke through the roof of the Shen Yu.

  Kaparis gurgled with delight and called up the perfect song by a perfect soprano, just as Heywood arrived with the champagne.

  The screen array was filled with bot video-feeds of the Forbidden City, bathed in pink dawn light, and the soprano sang:

  “The sun whose rays are all ablaze with ever-living glory

  Do not deny his majesty he scorns to tell a story …”

  Bot after bot sprang from the roof of the Shen Yu and soared into the life-giving light. The first million or so headed for the Greenharbour Inc. building in Sector 2 and the extensive glass solar-tile array that covered its roof – supplying 4.24kW of clean electric power once the sun was at a 23-degree angle. Six more buildings in Sector 3 boasted similar arrays as did many more across the Forbidden City, which had been constructed, down to the last detail, with impeccable green credentials.

  “I mean to rule the earth as he the sky

  we really know our worth the sun and I …”

  Heywood dripped Vintage Krug ’98 champagne on to a dull toad of a tongue and Kaparis allowed himself to feel a measure of satisfaction. He even eyed Grandma as she knitted to see if she was impressed.

  Knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one …

  “Champagne, Mrs Allenby?” said Kaparis.

  “Thank you. I’d prefer a J 2O, do you have one?”

  “I’ll ask the kitchen, madam,” said Heywood.

  “Don’t ask the kitchen,” said Kaparis, determined not to let her spoil the moment. “It is very good champagne and I think it’s important to be able to discern the finer things in life, no matter what one’s age.”

  “Pardon?” said Grandma.

  Kaparis blinked in irritation.

  “Don’t say ‘pardon’, say ‘what’,” Kaparis said. “People of quality will think you common, suburban or an ignoramus if you say ‘pardon’.”

  “Really?” said Grandma, intrigued.

  “Yes, the same applies to ‘lounge’ for sitting room or ‘toilet’ for lavatory, and there are many others.”

  Grandma nodded, knowingly.

  “What?” said Kaparis.

  “Do you know, Dr Kaparis, all the murderers and psychopaths I’ve known, one way or another, are a bit like that.”

  “A bit like what?”

  “Ghastly little snobs.”

  The iron lung stopped dead. Heywood froze. A vision played through Kaparis’s mind of Violet Allenby tumbling over and over as she fell towards the rocks below … He was on the very point of summoning Hans when –

  “EVE. is back online,” reported Li Jun. “Data incoming.”

  Li Jun fed the direct feed from EVE. across his screen array.

  EVE.>>KAPCOMMS>>

  BLESSED IS THE WORD OF KAPARIS

  EVE.>> ALLBOTS>> RUN CONFIG. >>NORMAL>> ASSIGNED BOTS>> RESUME TASK HUNTER>> 23423 235354 756 345635 4353457 67457 2345235 456 5674364 ….

  Thousands of bot idents started scrolling down the screens.

  Kaparis forgot about Grandma and gurgled some more.

  The sun would rise further, power would increase, but not enough to restart production at a significant scale.

  He was back in control, but for how long?

&nb
sp; Time enough to force the pace and break the power of EVE.

  Time enough to reel in Infinity Drake.

  Time enough for the bots to escape the Forbidden City in a great exodus, and thereafter to take over the world.

  The Tyros were still in the Shen Yu Hall playing cat and mouse with Infinity Drake. Kaparis addressed them now.

  “Baptiste,” said his master into his ear. “Listen carefully …”

  s soon as they heard the Tyros leaving the hall, they dropped from their hiding places to the floor, Kelly still cradling the bleeding Stubbs.

  Finn had a hateful, familiar lump in his throat and couldn’t have spoken if he’d wanted to.

  They turned Stubbs over.

  A gash ran from his collarbone across the top of his chest. Kelly jabbed in a hypodermic syringe of morphine, then pressed the two sides of the wound together. The old man groaned like an ancient vacuum cleaner.

  Finn, using his ripped-up shirt for a bandage, bound it as tight as he could.

  “Where’s the brain?” Stubbs asked weakly.

  Finn held up the Frankenstein brain box.

  “Help me get him up,” said Kelly.

  Gingerly they lifted Stubbs and slid him carefully into the hammock of ribbon connector that Finn had been hiding in. He opened his eyes and looked down on them, pale as a ghost.

  “You have to catch a live one before noon, long before,” he said faintly. “Then do some brain surgery. No anaesthetic. Take off its shell, pull out the brain unit and replace it with this one. Plug and play.”

  “Catch one?” said Kelly.

  “You must have been fishing as a boy?” Stubbs said, in an otherworldly way as the drugs kicked in. “I can’t manage it, not before I’ve had a nap …”

  Kelly took a swig from the canteen of water, gave Finn a swig, then put it in Stubbs’s hands along with the huge Colt .357 Magnum pistol from his holster – his personal sidearm.

  “Just sip enough to keep your lips wet – and watch for the kick on that,” Kelly said, indicating the pistol.

  “Oh do get on,” Stubbs said.

  “You heard the man,” said Kelly and started to pick up the brain box to leave.