The Robots of Gotham

by Todd McAulty

  I looked back down the hall. If I ran for the elevator and didn’t make it in time, there wouldn’t be many places to hide.

  “I’m headed down,” I said. I rounded the corner, and jogged quickly down the escalator.

  I got halfway down when I recognized the figure. It was the cloaked thing I’d seen with the dinosaur.

  “Aw, crap,” I whispered. I reflexively checked my pocket; the jammer was still there. And as far as I knew, it was still working, and I was still invisible. But nonetheless, something about this robot really unnerved me. I froze about halfway down.

  It wasn’t moving. Sergei waited patiently for some kind of update. I backed up two steps on the motionless escalator.

  I heard voices behind me, on the second floor. Distant, but getting closer. I was between a rock and a hard place, for sure.

  “Screw it,” I muttered. I moved slowly down the escalator.

  The figure stood like a statue, hands folded at its waist. Its face gradually became visible as I neared the bottom.

  It was a robot. Its face was not the gleaming silver I’d glimpsed on its hands under the arc light in the lobby. Instead, it wore the ornate, stylized mask of a beautiful woman, strangely painted. Its eyes were completely black; its features dark, African. I couldn’t make out much detail in the shadows. The cloak completely covered her feet—if she even had feet. The work bag containing her tools was slung over her shoulder.

  She was staring straight at me.

  She made no hostile moves when I reached the bottom, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was aware of me. Waiting for me there, in fact. Like a viper.

  I took a step to the right, keeping an eye on her. Then another.

  Her head turned, following me.

  Shit. She made me far more nervous than the soldiers. I briefly considered going back upstairs, taking my chances with them. Or maybe I could outrun her? She didn’t look very fast.

  Instead, I steeled my nerve and took another step. And then another. I moved into the hallway, keeping my eyes on the small cloaked figure.

  “Mr. Simcoe,” she said.

  I jumped. Her voice was quiet, and definitely feminine. I kept walking, but without turning my back on her, trying to get as much distance between us as I safely could.

  “Your dog has an infection,” she said, very softly.

  I stopped. “What?”

  She still wasn’t moving. She fixed me with her dark robot eyes.

  “Your dog. She is infected with adenovirus. The infection is in the early stages, but it has already damaged her left ocular nerve.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Treatment is relatively simple,” she said. “Specialist Vulka has the antiviral agents you require. But I urge you to act quickly.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Sergei said.

  The voices at the top of the escalator were getting louder. I advanced another step, looking around for a fast exit. The corridor leading east was deserted. “Where’s your pet dinosaur?” I asked, as much to play for time as anything else.

  “Resting,” she said. “She has slept for sixty-six million years. A few more weeks are no great burden.”

  Gahhhh, she was creepy.

  “What do you expect from me?” I asked her.

  The voices upstairs were seconds away now. “I suggest you run, Mr. Simcoe,” she said.

  I took her advice. Without saying goodbye, I turned my back on her and ran east, deeper into the museum.

  “Get me out of here,” I told Sergei.

  “Da. How far are you from atrium?”

  “Not the atrium. No place with dinosaurs. I need an exit that features no dinosaurs whatsoever.”

  I heard Sergei typing. “Most access points are sealed. I can guide you to loading docks.”

  “Fabulous.” I reached a T-intersection and took a quick left turn, looking back the way I’d come.

  She was gone. There were two dark silhouettes at the top of the escalator, one with a rifle—soldiers. I pulled back into the shadows.

  “There is problem,” said Sergei.

  “Talk to me.”

  “Cameras. I was able to arrange outages for cameras along our planned route. I did not account for such serious deviation in our route.”

  “We’ll have to risk it. Find me an exit—as fast as possible.” I started to make my way north along the corridor.

  “Da,” said Sergei.

  Sergei was as good as his word. Within five minutes I was at the loading docks at the back of the museum. I watched the ramp and the approach to the building for several minutes, but there was no sign of activity. Less than twenty yards from the end of the ramp was a thick line of bushes that would provide good cover all the way north to the road.

  “I’m headed out,” I said, starting to open the door.

  “Wait,” said Sergei.

  I slid the door closed again. “What now?”

  “I cannot account for all cameras.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have disabled cameras one, two, and four. I cannot find camera three.”

  “Maybe it’s offline.”

  “I do not know. Wait.”

  More clicking on the keyboard. I watched for any signs of motion outside. All seemed quiet.

  On my right was a long corridor, leading back the way I’d come. It was almost completely dark, except for some emergency lighting. As I waited, I heard a door slam.

  I froze, listening intently. Nothing. No footsteps, no conversation.

  “Sergei,” I whispered.

  “Wait,” said Sergei.

  I made a decision. I took three quick steps to the last open door. Inside was a table; on top were the three neatly folded towels I’d seen when I passed this way two minutes ago. I grabbed one and wrapped it around my face like a scarf. It was hardly perfect, but it should hide my face from any cameras Sergei missed.

  “I’m headed out,” I said.

  “I cannot access camera three—”

  I was on the dock. The door clicked shut behind me. The early-morning air was cold and damp. I strode down the ramp. An eighteen-wheeler was parked next to the ramp; the hood was covered with dead leaves, and it looked like it had not been moved in months. I tightened the towel around my face, crossing the road and then the short stretch of lawn to the bushes.

  Within minutes I was making my way north in the woods. Once I was sure I was out of range of the cameras, I pulled the towel off my face and gave Sergei an update.

  It had to be close to morning, but the eastern horizon was still dark—except for intermittent flashes of lightning. “Am I going to get rained on?” I asked.

  “Not likely. Sunrise is blocked by cloud formation over Lake Michigan.”

  The clouds overhead weren’t as red as they were on my approach. “The dig seems quiet this morning,” I said. My view to the east was blocked by woods, so I couldn’t see if fireballs were still erupting out of the lake, but there did seem to be less activity.

  “I think Croaker may be sick,” I said, after a few minutes. “Did you check on her?”

  “Not yet. Sick how?”

  “With aden . . . with adenovirus.”

  “Possible,” said Sergei.

  “Is that serious?”

  “Yes. For weak dog, can be very serious.”

  “Can you take care of her?”

  “I can start treatment this morning, if she is strong enough. How do you know this?”

  “Interesting question,” I said. “But not the really fascinating one. I know because a robot I met in the museum told me.”

  Sergei’s constant typing stopped.

  “How did robot know you have dog?” he asked.

  “That’s the really fascinating one,” I said.

  Securing the bag to my shoulder, I headed for home.

  XI

  Saturday, March 13th, 2083

  Posted 12:19 pm by Barry Simcoe

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  When I woke up this morning, Croaker was at the side of my bed, upright but very shaky. She wagged her tail ferociously when I stroked her head and tried to climb onto the bed. She was too weak to make it, and she whined until I helped her up. She immediately flopped down next to me, eyes closed and still a little trembly.

  I took the opportunity to clean her eyes again, using a cloth dipped in a glass of water at my bedside. Both eyes looked infected now. Sergei had wordlessly handed me medicine for adenovirus when I got back to the hotel, and I’d mixed it in with the food I’d given her last night. She was eating every few hours now, like a newborn. Not a lot yet, but her appetite was definitely getting better. It looked like she was gaining a little weight, too.

  She lay outside the tub while I showered, and I almost stepped on her when I got out. As weak as she was, she still followed me around the hotel room on trembling legs as I dried off and got dressed. I made her breakfast, measuring a small amount of the antiviral agent into her paste, and fed it to her by hand. She ate everything and licked my fingers before collapsing onto the towel I’d laid down for her by my desk.

  When I was sure she was comfortable, I went down for breakfast. I ran into Martin in the buffet line at the hotel restaurant. “Come join us,” he said, waving at a table in the corner. I spotted Mac, Sabine, and Mike Concert there already.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Thought you were going to join us for poker last night?”

  “Yeah, so did I,” I said. The best lie is always something that approximates the truth, I’ve found. “I had to help Sergei with some errands. Sorry about that.”

  “Was that you I saw, carting all those boxes through the lobby this morning?”

  “Yeah,” I lied. “Medical supplies, mostly.”

  We took our seats at the table. It looked like they had restored some bandwidth to the hotel. There was a TV set on the wall nearby, although the Venezuelan censors were blocking everything except a single Venezuelan news feed. Not much variety, but at least it was a start.

  “What’s he doing with all that stuff?” Martin asked. “Runnin’ a little pharmaceutical business on the side?”

  “Who?” said Mac.

  “Barry’s new friend Sergei,” said Martin.

  “The Venezuelan medic?” she said.

  “That’s the one.”

  It annoyed me a little that these folks didn’t respect Sergei. I’d managed to get a few hours’ sleep, but when I checked on him before breakfast he was still hunched over at his desk. He hadn’t slept in about thirty hours. And busy as he was, he’d still made time to test Croaker and confirm she had adenovirus last night—and then give me something for her this morning.

  “Sergei’s not Venezuelan,” I said defensively. “He’s Russian. He’s not part of the Occupation Force. He’s with the peacekeeping troops—the AGRT. He arrived after all the shooting was over.”

  “They’re all the same,” Mike said. “Sure, the Venezuelans agreed to an international peacekeeping force after Memphis, but everybody knows they’re still calling the shots. The AGRT doesn’t make a move without getting approval from the old San Cristobal Coalition—and especially Venezuela.”

  “What’s he working on that keeps him so busy?” Mac asked me.

  “Vaccines,” I said, glad that someone was willing to give Sergei the benefit of the doubt. “Takes it pretty seriously, actually. He’s sort of a mad genius when it comes to biowarfare. Something he heard from the front a few nights ago has him spooked. He’s been working all morning producing serums and antibodies and crap.”

  Sabine put her orange juice back down without drinking it. “Are you serious? I knew there was something else the Venezuelans weren’t telling us. Is this something we should be worried about?”

  Suddenly, all eyes at the table were on me. Uh-oh, I thought. That was a mistake. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I didn’t really think about it.”

  “He’s cranking out military-grade vaccines all night, and you didn’t bother to ask what for?” Martin said.

  “Well . . . it’s not like he can confide stuff like that in me,” I said. “I’m sure it’s all confidential.” I needed to find some way to get off this topic.

  Mac shook her head dismissively. “I don’t want to start talking about plague again.”

  “Again?” I asked.

  “There was a scare during the evacuation of the city,” Mike said. “Four city workers in one of the evacuation sites died of N1-C.”

  “Was it contained?” I said.

  Mike shrugged. “In a way. It’s hard for a plague to spread when the city is deserted.”

  Mac shot him an ugly look. “It’s not just Chicago that was at risk,” she said to me. “The displacement camps are at the worst risk from infectious disease. All the crowding, the conditions . . . And when the relocation plan for half the country fails because people are too panicked to go to their evac center . . .”

  “The whole system starts to fall apart,” Sabine said.

  “Is that what happened in Chicago?” I asked.

  I caught a warning glance from Martin. He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Too late I realized that this was probably a trigger issue for Mac. She’d put down her fork and was looking a little distressed.

  “Bunch of idiots, overreacting as usual,” Mike said. “They deserved what happened to them.”

  Mac was shocked. More than that, it looked like this hit her on a personal level. She stared at Mike with her mouth open. Mike continued eating, oblivious.

  Sabine had picked up on it, however. “Hang on—I think the international news is coming on,” she said hurriedly, changing the topic. She pointed at the monitor and signaled our server to turn the volume up. “Maybe they’ll say something about Chicago.”

  “Good idea,” Martin said, with relief in his voice. “But don’t expect much real news—everything that reaches us is censored. The only things we’ve been getting lately are propaganda and Latin soap operas.”

  “Oh, I love those,” I said.

  The broadcast was in Spanish. I watched with everyone else, but couldn’t follow much. The lead story, accompanied by rather gripping visuals, was about some kind of missile impact in China.

  “Damn it, I wish we could get something in English,” Mike said, annoyed. “What the hell happened?”

  “Kingstar,” said Mac, her voice flat. “Apparently he built an ICBM and a hidden launch facility in Ecuador, just to destroy a single rival machine. He launched a missile last night, and it hit a building complex in Nanjing eighteen minutes later.”

  I exchanged a surprised glance with Martin. I guess some real news slipped through from time to time after all. There was stunned silence around the table. Mike didn’t seem to have noticed. He crammed another forkful of eggs in his mouth, saying, “Yeah? Which one?”

  “Kuma,” said Mac quietly.

  “I remember him. A Sovereign Intelligence, right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, good. Let these goddamned machines destroy each other,” said Mike.

  After the lead story there was some patriotic coverage of the Venezuelan peacekeeping efforts in America, with a brief segment on all three sectors under Venezuelan jurisdiction, including Sector Nine in Buffalo, and Sector Ten in Indiana. The segment on Sector Eleven included a long shot of stalwart Venezuelan soldiers, looking resolute and surprisingly well fed as they patrolled Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago, then an attractive young woman standing in front of a downed Union combat mech—a big one, too, at least sixty tons or more—and speaking with urgent, emphatic gestures.

  Then there was an airborne close-up of the smoke-shrouded works in Lake Michigan. It was the best image I’d ever seen of the massive arches. The news drone soared alongside o
ne of them, showing where it rose out of the water, reached altitudes far greater than anything on the Chicago skyline, and then plunged back into the water and the smoke. The drone dove down close to the oil fires on the surface, tracking a great submerged machine moving purposefully between the arches. A second later, the image shifted to a nighttime view of the same project, as a massive fireball lit the night sky from the center of the lake.

  Mac was translating for Mike. “The announcer is saying that this is . . . an engineering project beyond the scale of anything ever undertaken before,” said Mac. “Work continues day and night, and went on even during the worst of the fighting near Chicago.”

  The sheer size, complexity, and alien nature of the dig made me uneasy—and the close-ups of the massive fireballs, reaching up into the sky like a live volcano less than fifteen miles away, didn’t make it any easier. I was relieved when the image changed again.

  Until I realized the screen was showing a picture of me.

  I sat motionless, a fork of eggs halfway to my mouth, staring at the monitor. It was me, no doubt about it. The image was framed from an odd height and a rather severe angle, and it had the grainy resolution usually associated with infrared cameras. But there I was, sauntering down the ramp of the loading dock of the Field Museum this morning, clutching the sample bag. A towel was draped loosely over my head.

  They played the clip twice, and the commentator kept up a stream of narrative patter in Spanish, her voice professional and indignant.

  “Look at that idiot,” Martin said, regarding the screen and shaking his head. “There’s someone who’s dying to be a martyr.”

  Through sheer force of will, I managed to slowly lower my fork. “What’s . . . uh, what . . .” I cleared my throat and tried again. “What’s the commentator saying?”

  “They’re saying . . .” Mac listened for a moment. “This is footage of an American terrorist who planted bombs . . . and stole supplies from a medical station in Chicago last night. All the bombs were un-abled . . . were disabled . . . but the supplies have not yet been recovered.”

  “Bombs,” I said. Bombs, no less.