by D Miller
Hector lay in his bed, thinking. The humans had convinced him that he was one of them, guilt and shame jostled for first place inside him. Had he helped them on their missions to murder robots? He concentrated but his memories were vague. He remembered the castle with humans in it, he had struggled to keep it clean, and it seemed that every time they passed him when he was mopping the floor, one of them would kick his bucket over or slap him so hard on the back that he fell down. At the time he had thought it high spirits, and had admired them for their bravery. Sometimes when they slapped him hard on the back his eye had fallen out of its socket, and without thinking about it he had leaned against the nearest wall, turned off his vision, and reinserted his eye; how they must have laughed at him. He remembered times when the soldiers had said to him, 'We must defend the human race, right Hector?' and he had agreed, proud that they considered him one of them. Humiliation joined guilt and shame.
Hector woke up. It was 6am. He realised that he had always known what time it was, without ever looking at a display. He looked around the darkened cottage, the sun would not be up for two hours and yet he could see everything clearly. He could hear every individual rain drop hitting his roof. He wished he had someone to talk to who wasn't insane and longing to explode. He thought of the times he had lain in bed, dreaming of having a friend. Sometimes he would be pulled out of his reverie by an odd coughing noise. After it had happened a few times he had decided it must be his imagination and when it happened after that, he had ignored it. He put his hand on his penis, and pulled it towards him, he was amazed to find it stretched in his hand, until yesterday it had been inert. He played with it, finding that he could extend it as far as his arm could pull it, or he could make it small, he could shape the end, making it open and round, or pinching it into a point useful for hoovering down the side of sofas, say. Hector sat up. It wasn't a penis, it was a hoover hose. And that coughing noise, that was the motor trying to come to life, the motor that was now whining inside of him at full rpms.
Hector sat naked, sprawled on his sofa. He had hoovered every inch of the cottage. 'Well,' he thought, 'that was the most fun I've had in a while, and I didn't have to explode to have it.'
Hector walked into the castle, 'Britnee,' he called, 'Britnee!' He took a towel he kept hanging on a peg in the entryway and ran it over his wet hair. His clothes dripped; yesterday when he had ran out of the castle he had forgotten to put his coat and hat on, they were hung up in the entryway with the towel. He ran up the stairs and into the banqueting hall, stopping when he was just over the threshold. There were more bombs. They had taken the tables and chairs from against the walls, and laid them out in the hall as if for a banquet, with tables laid down the length of the hall, and a top table in front of the stone fireplace, making a rectangle that was open on one side, and surrounded the hole in the floor. The stone fireplace was large enough for ten people to stand in comfortably. Hector knew this because ten of the golden bombs were doing just that. At nearly every chair golden bombs sat, except for at the top table where Britnee was sitting alone, with her back to the fireplace. Britnee waved at Hector; he entered the open side of the rectangle made by the tables, skirted round the hole and sat opposite her. The banging started.
'Can you not hear that?' he said to her. She looked at him. 'It's banging again.'
'What is banging?'
'It, it is banging.'
Britnee put her head on one side and looked at him, smiling. 'What is it?'
'I don't know. It's somewhere in the top of the castle and it bangs and roars. I think it's angry. I think it wants me, in a really bad way.'
Britnee shook her head. 'As a bomb, and as the mother of bombs, I am very sensitive to vibration. There is nothing moving or banging outside of this room. Except that there is an unsecured door in the kitchen.'
'No, it's not a door, it's getting louder, and soon it will start to roar.'
'Doors can roar.'
'There are no smart doors in the castle. The humans did not trust machine intelligences.'
'I suppose that's why they sealed us in the armoury, why they didn't give us a mission and let us fulfil our destiny.'
Hector thought for a moment. 'Would you have done? Would you have taken a mission from them?'
Britnee shrugged. 'Of course. I am sorry for you. You do not know what it is to have a purpose.'
The roaring started. 'Can you really not hear that?' said Hector.
Britnee smiled, 'I hear nothing except the wind, an unsecured kitchen door being played with by the wind, and my daughters laughing.'
'And the rain.'
'Well, yes, that too.'
'Sometimes it sound like it's in pain, but mostly it just sounds angry, and… hungry.' Hector shuddered. He blew out his cheeks, looked down, then he squared his shoulders and looked at Britnee. 'I have a mission for you. I need a map of the castle and its outbuildings, and the blast radius of yourself, and all of your daughters.'
Hector and Britnee stood in the control room. Hector had never been in it before, as the caretaker he did not have clearance for military secrets, and as a loyal member of the team it had never occurred to him to enter it while the battalion was gone. He and Britnee were surrounded by non-smart computers whose lights blinked idiotically. The computers lined the sides of the hexagonal room, while in the middle was a white hexagonal plastic table, with seating for about 18 around its six sides. Britnee had managed to get one of the computers to project onto the table a map of the castle and its outbuildings, she and Hector were attempting to place and time the bombs so as to have overlapping blast radiuses that would reduce the castle and its outbuildings to rubble, and then reduce the rubble to dust. They had tried several combinations, and now had one that they thought would give maximum damage. Hector was determined that human beings would never again be able to use the island as a base to murder robots.
'Britnee,' he said, 'how did you know I was a robot? How could you climb out of the tunnel ready with battery fluid?'
'We didn't silly, we followed you around the castle for a couple of days, and we had a look everywhere, including in here.'
'But you can't have done. I looked in the banqueting hall yesterday morning, and there wasn't any hole there.' Britnee put her head on one side and gave him her sympathetic look, the one he was coming to know well.
'I don't think your sense of time is quite working properly. Well perhaps it is now. Perhaps it was the low battery fluid. I'm sure you're fine now.'
'It still seems to me that the battalion has only been gone a few weeks, three or four at the most.'
'We have to call the mainland and report the battalion overdue, then you can give me the mission, and I can explain it to my daughter bombs.'
'The mainland?'
'Scotland.'
'Does it rain all the time in Scot Land too?'
Britnee shrugged. 'I think that sometimes they have other types of precipitation, snow, and hail.'
She called up a video log on one of the machines, she showed the last entry to Hector, projected onto the table. A man's face appeared, he was wearing an outfit that looked so stupid it had to be a uniform, medals and ribbons swung across the front of his bright red jacket, while massive black epaulettes hulked on both shoulders, looking as if at any moment they would crawl off, and seek their own destinies as cage fighters.
'This is General Dobbs, first battalion anti-robot fusiliers. Tomorrow we leave for our mission, if all goes well we will inflict a defeat on the enemy they will never recover from. In my next log entry, I hope to give an account of a glorious, and victorious battle. Dobbs out.'
Hector paid special attention to the date of the recording, it was a year ago, exactly.
'Satisfied?' said Britnee. Hector nodded.
Britnee turned to another of the machines. It was a cabinet, rectangular shaped until halfway up when its front surface started to slope, reaching as high as Hector's chest. 'This is the encrypted radio. Of course humans can't encry
pt for shit, but we will have to overlook that. I'm opening a channel to the mainland.' She pointed to a circular area of metallic mesh set above the many dials and buttons on the sloping surface. 'Speak into there,' she said, turning a switch.
'Hello control, this is, um, acting General er, Hector. The battalion are overdue, tomorrow it will be exactly one year since they set out on their mission. They have not returned. They must be considered lost, um, with all hands.'
Britnee flipped the switch. 'All hands? We're not in a boat, we're army not navy.' She flicked the switch again.
'The battalion must be considered lost down to the last puny, weak and feeble human.'
Britnee flipped the switch once more, 'That's better,' she said, 'now say over.' She toggled the switch.
'Over,' said Hector. They waited. There was a burst of white noise through the speakers followed by four beeps in rapid succession, then another burst of white noise, then three beeps. It went on. 'Four three one two, four three one two,' said Hector, 'four three one two, four three…'
Britnee flipped another switch, killing the noise. Hector looked at her. 'You've reported, we've had a response, that's it. Let's go.'
'But don't you care what that response means?'
'No.'
'Perhaps the person at the other end is trying to tell us something important.'
Britnee shrugged. 'Then they are going to have to work on their communication skills. Come on General Hector, I want to give the mission to my daughters, so that we can get ready to fulfil our destinies on your command.'
Hector walked across the island, heading uphill to the cliff where he had seen the infeasibly large birds. As he walked he listened to the chatter of the bombs on the radio in his jacket pocket. The radio was a black rectangle, about the size of one of the large blocks of soap he put out in the latrines, its only features a built in speaker and a swipeable frequency display. Britnee had given it to him so she could tell him through the radio when the bombs were ready to fulfil their destiny, and he could use it to give Britnee her final order. 'If I don't first get pecked to death by giant birds,' he thought. He stopped. Why would he think the birds were aggressive? If he could see them, then they could see him, and they had never before shown any interest in him. 'Perhaps they are territorial,' he thought, then got moving again, his curiosity driving him on.
As he neared the cliffs he saw one of the birds soaring above him. Was it coming towards him, had it seen him? It had a very long head that close up did not look at all birdlike. It landed in front of him, skidding into a pratfall and ending up prostrate on the ground with its long beak pointing at Hector. It hopped up and shook itself, and waddled towards Hector, using its folded wings for balance on the uneven ground, and reaching him in a few steps. It was perhaps 1.2 metres high to the shoulder, but as it raised its beak and looked up at him that added another half a meter, so that it was nearly as tall as Hector. Its body was completely white and entirely lacking in feathers. First the bird creature had more or less collapsed out of the air, then it had waddled towards him on its stumpy legs, and now it was looking at him with its crossed eyes. Hector badly wanted to laugh, but somehow he had the idea that it would be tactless.
The creature dipped its long beak at him, and he took a step back. It considered him for a moment then hopped to one side, and unfurled a wing, which it tentatively put around him, patting his lower back. Hector knew he was not an expert, but as he felt the air from the creature's wing movements fanning his back, he was fairly sure that this was un-birdlike behaviour. Was it trying to reassure him, did it somehow know the doubts he had had about its friendliness? The creature waddled away from him, then looked back, and made a beckoning gesture with its head, dipping it down and then lifting it up and pointing it at Hector, then circling it around and pointing it ahead of him. Hector followed, he was being led away from the cliff edge, and towards a slight dip in the ground. As he got closer he could see more of the strange birds, they seemed to be surrounding something. The leading bird squawked, an ugly sound like a very large and butch crow. The other birds streamed away from the thing on the ground and surrounded Hector, rubbing their heads against his body, and patting him with their wings. One or two of them tried to touch his face with their long beaks, but the leading bird hissed at them, and slapped them with its folded wings until they stopped. Hector was enjoying the attention, until he looked away from the birds, to the thing on the ground they had abandoned and went rigid with shock. The birds cawed their consternation.
Hector walked through the birds, he knelt down and put out his hand to touch what lay on the ground. A humanoid figure, a robot. He was shaking. The birds surrounded him, stretching their wings around Hector, and over the robot on the ground, keeping the rain from them both. The new robot had white skin, and white hair, as if the constant rain had washed all the colour from him. He lay on his back with his eyes shut, unmoving. Hector plucked at his t-shirt, lifting it off his stomach to reveal skin. He was relieved, so he was a robot, not a bomb. Possibly even a sane robot. An unconscious robot. But definitely a robot.
Hector and Britnee approached the door to Hector's cottage; Hector was carrying the can of battery fluid. It was four o'clock and it would be dark in a couple of hours. Hector looked up, two of the strange birds were perched on the roof. He waved at them, and they bobbed their heads gravely up and down. Hector stopped, and turned to Britnee. She was looking at the roof.
'You do see the birds don't you?'
She cut her eyes to Hector, sniffed and swept into the cottage.
'So where is this–' Britnee stopped, having seen the new robot lying on Hector's bed, covered by the military issue grey blanket.
Hector stood in the doorway and smiled. When he had gone to Britnee to beg for some battery fluid for the strange robot, she had put her head on one side and listened to his story about the large friendly, not very birdlike white birds and the new white robot with her sympathetic expression. She had gone so far as to pat his arm and tell him it was a more hopeful imagining than the monster in the attic, less paranoid and despairing.
Britnee twitched the blanket back from the robot, underneath he was naked, Hector had washed the robot's wet, muddy clothes in his tin bath, and draped them over the edge of his table and chairs facing the fire. Britnee plunged her finger into the robot's stomach, without looking round she held out her hand, Hector put the can in it. She bent over the robot, tipping the can, then stood.
'He's full,' she said.
They both watched the new robot, his eyes fluttered, then flew open.
'Four thousand, three hundred and twelve,' he said. 'Four thousand three hundred and eleven. Four thousand three hundred and ten…' the countdown continued, in a voice stripped of all expression.
'Hello hello,' said Hector, 'can you hear me?' He knelt down by the robot, and looked into his eyes.
The robot stared straight up, every time he finished reciting a number he blinked before starting the next one. Hector leaned over the robot until he was looking directly into his eyes, there was no response. He sighed and stood up.
'What do you think happens when he finishes counting down?'
'I expect he explodes.'
'Britnee! I don't want him to explode.'
'Well that's what I would do at the end of a countdown. Perhaps he takes off instead, or turns into a giant white bird.'
'Thanks for the battery fluid.'
Britnee sniffed. 'I'm just trying to be helpful.'
'And you have been, enormously, but I can take it from here.'
She handed him the battery fluid. 'You might as well keep this. I'm going back to the castle to finish setting up with my daughters.' She pointed at the radio; Hector had placed it on the shelf above the fireplace. 'Stand by for my signal.'
It was hours later, and full dark outside. Hector had pottered around the cottage, rearranging the new robot's clothes so that every bit of them would dry. Still the countdown went on. 'One thousand one hundred
and one, one thousand one hundred, one thousand and ninety nine, one thousand and ninety eight…'
What would happen when he got to one? Would he wake up? Who was he? Where had he come from? Would he be kind? He had a kind face. The radio crackled into life.
'This is the mother of all bombs calling General Hector.'
Hector picked up the radio, and sat down on his small red sofa. 'This is General Hector. Go ahead Britnee.'
'All bombs are deployed and ready for your instructions, sir.'
Hector thought. Once the bombs started exploding they would go on for some time. What if the new robot woke up and was frightened by the noise? Assuming he woke up when he had finished counting down, Hector wanted some time to explain to him what was happening.
'Britnee, commence countdown now, time to first explosion 40 minutes on my mark, three two one, mark.'
'Countdown confirmed, t minus 40 minutes…, t minus 39 minutes 55 seconds…, t minus 39 minutes 50 seconds…'
Hector switched the radio off. He got up and paced around the cottage. Even this far away from the castle he could hear the monster roaring. Did it know what was coming? Was it excited or afraid? Could it escape? Could an imaginary monster be killed? Could an imaginary monster kill? The roaring stopped. Hector lay down on his sofa and listened to the new robot's countdown.
'Eight hundred and eighty one, eight hundred and eighty, eight hundred and seventy nine…'
It wouldn't be long now.
'Eight hundred and seventy eight, eight hundred and seventy seven…' It was quite soporific listening to the monotonous countdown, but he knew he was too wired to sleep.
Hector woke up. The new robot was sitting on the sofa looking at him. He sat up quickly and shifted back on the sofa until he reached the arm and could go no further. His breath came in quick, snatched gasps. The new robot held up his hands, he smiled. 'Dude!' he said. 'Don't be afraid. What's your name?'