Tales of the Talking Picture

by Tom Slemen

  ‘And what do I do? Make the coffee?’ Rob felt left out of the seemingly ingenious scheme.

  Roach threw his arm around Rob Davenport’s shoulder. ‘Your role, Rob, is just as important as any of ours. Your in-depth knowledge of the banks of this city and their security systems is invaluable.’

  Rob thought about the outrageous proposal for a while. ‘I don’t know Harry, all this sounds a bit unreal.’

  Harry gave a little mock laugh and squeezed Rob‘s fist. ‘All the best plans do until they’re successful. Going to the Moon was unreal once wasn’t it? Now people go there on holiday!’

  ‘My aunt got deep-veined thrombosis when she went,’ Alex put a damper on Harry’s analogy.

  ‘It would be a beauty of a crime - if it’s feasible,’ reasoned Rob, smiling faintly as he envisioned going down in the history books as one of the first crooks to use a robot to rob a bank.

  ‘The programming involved, the schematics and all the algorithms - ‘ whispered Alex Maxwell, his thoughts lost among googol-bytes of hexadecimal data, of subroutines and artificial intelligence downloads.

  ’That’s my boy!’ Roach slapped his hand on the youth’s back, startling him.

  Rob stood up and announced he was in on the job. ‘Look, Harry, if you think you can pull this thing off, go ahead. Use whatever you see around here.’

  ‘I admire your far-sightedness Rob,’ Harry playfully patted his friend’s head.

  Rob yelped. His skull and the back of his eyes still ached from the bouncer’s assault.

  By two in the afternoon, the industrious quartet had completely tidied up the place with a little help from two sluggish but almost-reliable domestic robots.

  ‘Okay, take a break,’ said Rob, all motherly, entering the room with a tray of coffee, sandwiches and biscuits. It was a comical sight to Harry and Jimmy but they stifled their chuckles.

  They all sat down at the round table and discussed the first steps of the task at hand.

  ‘Now,’ Doggerty chomped an egg and cress sandwich, ‘what comes first? The software or the hardware?’

  ‘I hate people who eat and talk,' Alex replied. 'The hardware, obviously.' He sipped the cheap bitter coffee and then explained his strategy. ‘We have to design a robot first, then work from scratch, and that won’t be cheap.’ ‘No way!’ vociferated Roach, pointing a dunked biscuit at Alex Maxwell, ‘we haven’t got the time for all that. We’ll take a short-cut.’

  Alex returned a puzzled and indignant expression.

  ‘We kidnap a working-class robot,’ Roach explained, ‘preferably a street-sweeper model, because they’re very resilient - then all we have to do is reprogram it, make a few hardware modifications, and give it a little cosmetic treatment.’

  ‘And how do we kidnap a vandal-proof street sweeper robot? Those things weigh a ton?’ Alex wanted to know.

  ‘Simple,’ Roach gulped the hot black coffee. ‘All we need is a length of cotton thread, a piece of newspaper, a hammer and a wheelbarrow.’

  In a badly-lit alleyway near the shop on the following morning at 5.30 a.m., as night ghosted into dawn, Rob was becoming impatient. A mild drizzle of bio-disinfectant sprayed from nozzles on lampposts to clean the streets. Then the infraheat elements on the lampposts evaporated dampness within seconds. Private robotic parcel trains hummed about unseen beneath the streets, collecting packages from special blue pillar boxes. Doggerty watched cartoons on his TV specs, but kept glancing over at Alex Maxwell with envy because the young man had a much superior MP7 entertainment system built into his contact-lens-style viewers.

  There was still no sign of the early sweeper robot.

  ‘Maybe it’s broken down,’ Rob suggested, ‘or maybe it doesn’t clean this street today.’

  The long-awaited robot suddenly appeared at the top of the main street, pulling its yellow refuse cart.

  ‘Hide, quick!’ Harry Roach whispered to his partners in crime, and they dashed off silently. Harry placed a crumpled piece of newspaper in the gutter and retreated down the dark back-street to a doorway. From this position, Harry gave a slight tug on his end of the cotton thread and the ball of newspaper jerked slightly at the other end. Everything was set.

  Doggerty waited anxiously in another doorway with a sledgehammer by his side. Davenport, meanwhile, stood poised behind the corner with a wheelbarrow, while Alex Maxwell kept watch from the back door of the shop.

  The robot appeared at the top of the back-street. Its retro-reflective eyes caught sight of the dark amorphous shape in the gutter. A pesky black cat had come on the scene, and was sniffing at the rumpled rose of newspaper. The cleansing simulacrum rested its multi-functional sweeping brush against the cart and reached down to grab the feline. The robot’s Quantium brain, for all of its sophistication, had mistaken the tomcat for a piece of litter. The cat arched his back and hissed, then flitted off down the back-street. The robot then returned to its cart and took hold of the brush. It began to sweep the pavement.

  Roach was livid at the idiotic automaton‘s actions. How could it miss a big piece of newspaper like that?

  Footsteps approached. Roach froze and leaned back against the door. Experience told him that the rhythmic measured footfalls were that of a policeman - and he was heading his way. The officer of the law passed the top of the back-street with a huge German shepherd in tow. As the policeman passed the sweeper, the dog barked furiously at the mechanized figure. It didn’t like soul-less robots.

  ‘Rexy!’ the policeman shouted, and yanked the dog’s chain leash, ‘Stop it! Rexy!’

  Rexy whined, then growled at the sweeper robot, which paid no attention whatsoever to the neurotic canine. Minutes after the policeman and dog had turned a corner, the robot noticed the ball of crumpled-up newspaper and bent down to grab it. Roach gave a skilful tug and the ball evaded the robot’s hand. The sweeper couldn’t resist chasing the piece of roving litter, but whenever its plastic-coated fingers of metal came within centimetres of seizing the paper ball, Roach would mischievously pull it away, leading the working-class humanoid machine further into the darker recesses of the back street.

  As the automaton turned the corner in its innocent pursuit of the paper ball, Doggerty brought down the head of the sledgehammer squarely on the back of the robot’s head, dislodging its occipital plate.

  Kerrang! The robot went down onto its knees, then fell forwards onto its face. The ear-piercing anti-vandalism alarm erupted from small speaker grille in the sweeper’s back. In total panic, Alex Maxwell dashed over from the back door of Rob’s Cheap Robots and pulled the sledgehammer out of Jim Doggerty’s hands. The terrified young redhead held the hammerhead aloft, and was about to swing it down onto the robot’s vandalism siren when Roach dashed to the prostrate mechanical figure and expertly inserted a tiny thin screwdriver into the grill. In seconds he had disabled the siren. The shrill of the high-decibel alarm would probably alert someone at that time in the morning. There was no time to lose now. Doggerty smashed the rusted padlock of a deserted garage with the sledgehammer, and Alex pushed the street-cleaner’s cart into the place, startling rats and breaking cobwebs with his face. Rob, meanwhile, charged down the narrow alleyway with a wheelbarrow. He, Jim and Harry strained themselves trying to haul the dead-weight robot into the barrow. Alex assisted them and all eight hands were needed to lift the mechanical corpse onto the wheelbarrow, which was then steered with devilish difficulty to the shop.

  ‘Before you start fiddling around in there, put these on,’ Alex thrust a pair of heavy duty rubber gloves into the hands of Jim Doggerty, who was poised to make an attempt at opening the robot.

  ‘Tut tut, Jim. You could’ve electrocuted yourself,’ said Roach, patronizingly, peering over his little colleague’s shoulder.

  Doggerty put on the gloves and grabbed a motorized screwdriver. He tackled the screws dotted around the robot’s head.

  ‘You’d be quicker if you opened it from the front,’ Alex advised.

  ‘Why?’ Doggert
y asked over the whine of the screwdriver motor.

  ‘There’s a service panel in its chest,’ Alex explained with a subtle gesture of superiority in his knitted eyebrows.

  ‘Yeah? Oh that’s right there is,’ Doggerty’s face burned with embarrassment.

  ‘Are you going to get this done or should I order lunch?’ Roach asked.

  Jim Doggerty undid four screws on a rectangular plate on the robot’s chest and removed it to reveal a plate that read:

  CAUTION! TO PREVENT ELECTRICAL SHOCK, DO NOT

  REMOVE PLATE. NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE.

  REFER SERVICING TO QUALIFIED PERSONNEL. THIS

  WORKING-CLASS X-11 ROBOT IS THE PROPERTY OF THE

  HYGIENEX CORPORATION. PATENT PENDING Y953C.

  MADE IN POLAND.

  Doggerty removed the six screws of this warning plate, then located the long cylindrical power fuse and gently removed it from its terminal clips. That was the dangerous voltage out of the way.

  ‘Now for the brain surgery.’ Doggerty inspected the seam that ran horizontally around the robot’s skull. He poked the screwdriver into the groove and tried to prise off the skull.

  ‘No!’ Alex intervened, ‘here’s how you remove it.’ He delved into the rectangular opening in the robot’s chest and flicked a small toggle switch labelled: CARAPACE UNLOCK – Quantium Brain Inside.

  Two curved plates in the robot’s skull slid elegantly apart, revealing the glittering high-density microchips of its Quantium brain. Fifty googol-bytes of data could be stored in that sparkling miracle of electronic know-how, yet only one-twentieth of that memory space had been used by the programmers because this robot was just a street-cleaner. The blow from the sledge-hammer had cracked one circuit board in the lower-priority circuit boards.

  ‘How did you know exactly where to strike the robot to disable it?’ Alex asked.

  Doggerty said Roach had told him exactly where to hit it.

  ‘I learned all that from a misspent youth,’ Roach confessed, reminiscing on the good old days. ‘You’re too young to remember the Ludds I suppose?’

  Alex was in awe of Harry now. ‘I read about them; they were a group of neo-Luddites who used to dress up like the Teddy Boys and smash machines up years ago.’

  Harry grinned proudly, yet feeling so old.

  Alex analysed the beautiful transputor Quantium brain with a handheld scanner, and read off all of the impressive data.

  ‘You and Harry have to turn that tinsel brain into the electronic mind of a virtual bank robber,’ Doggerty told Alex.

  Alex and Harry Roach plugged interface cables into the twinkling silver brain and analysed all of its programs. Upon a huge monitor they saw all of the things the robot had seen as it cleaned the streets. Youth’s throwing stones at it, cars swerving to avoid it, and even a drunken female student attempting to kiss its face.

  ‘All we have to do now is delete its role-program,’ said Alex smugly.

  Roach objected immediately. ‘Look, don’t delete the useful subroutines as well, like walking programs and navigational stuff that tells the robot where it is in the world.’

  ‘I’m not stupid Harry, trust me will you?’ said Alex, in an annoyed tone.

  The experienced hi-tech criminal and the young robotics engineer sat at keyboards, constructing programs in languages that looked like gobbledygook to Rob and Jim. They downloaded pirated artificial intelligence programs from the HyperNet and as the days wore on, the project became more and more exciting. Rob’s knowledge of the most vulnerable banks and their security layout was fed into the Quantium brain. Its artificial neuron cells flashed with high-speed data. Rob and Harry poured over detailed streetmaps of the target banks and decided where they’d strike first.

  ‘Carlton Bank,’ Rob suggested, thumping his index finger on the map. ‘It’s a major new bank, handles zillions. Here’s what the security’s like Harry. They have the usual closed-circuit TV camera and a double-door bulletproof entrance area to prevent the average gunman from making an exit. It’s usually activated by one of the tellers. Some banks have automatic gun scanners, but the Carlton doesn’t. A guy took a woman hostage in the Carlton a year back, and when he got between the inner door and outer doors they trapped him. He threatened to kill the hostage but they used knockout gas. It just came hissing through a grille in the wall and it acts as fast as nerve-gas. He had a mask on and it still got him - and the hostage.’

  ’What else does the Carlton have?’ Roach enquired.

  ‘The bank has one armed security guard on duty Monday to Saturday.’

  ‘One guard? In a bank that handles millions?’ Roach was doubtful.

  ‘Yes Harry, because the security devices are that good, the bank people at the Carlton are talking about phasing out guards altogether. They make the customers uneasy and they’re not cost effective as gas and bulletproof cubicle traps.’ Rob explained.

  ‘Are the guards armed with deadlies?’ Roach thought about the vulnerability of the robot to high-impact slugs.

  ‘No, they have Taser battery bullets - stun slugs that are charged with a high tension voltage charge. They only penetrate skin and clothing.’ Rob explained.

  Roach flash-scanned the map and transferred its digitised information into the robot brain.

  It took three days and nights of tortuous trial and error until the robotic bank robber was working to plan. At 6.30 in the morning the last bundle of optic fibres was fastened into place, the last screw tightened.

  ’Well done, everyone.’ Roach yawned. He went to the small toilet and with little effort, he rubbed the three days of stubble from his face with Shaverase gel.

  Doggerty pressed the primary activation key on the computer and the piezoelectric filaments of the robot’s muscles contracted and expanded all over its body chassis, making it shiver. It sat up, and the reinforced table supporting its tonnage creaked under the strain. It awaited instructions. Doggerty wore a modified virtual-reality body-suit to control the robot. He lifted his leg, so did the robot. He touched his eyebrow in a salute, so did the robot. Doggerty also felt some of the things the robot felt through the transducers in the suit, so he could feel the trigger of the gun as the robot fired a bullet miles away - if the robot had to resort to gunplay of course. What the robot saw with its binocular television camera system was relayed to Doggerty’s TV specs. The sounds the robot’s dual microphones picked up were likewise transmitted with perfect digital clarity to the headphones Doggerty wore.

  Roach approached the robot rather cautiously. Doggerty jabbed the air, swinging upper-cuts and throwing left-hooks, and the robot did the same - its huge lethal fists of metal and impact-plastic missing Roach by inches as it fought an imaginary opponent.

  ‘Careful!’ Harry Roach warned the over-enthusiastic Doggerty.

  Jim took terrible revenge on Elize, the robotic mannequin who had forced him to tango. He directed the robot bank-robber over to her, and Alex quickly guessed what the little thief’s intentions were.

  ‘No!’ Alex cried.

  A quick succession of immensely powerful blows from the hydraulic muscles of the transformed street-sweeping robot sent Elize twirling across the room - in several pieces.

  Alex screamed at the wanton act of cyber-violence, and was about to charge at Doggerty when the robot suddenly stepped in the way. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Doggerty said softly into the small microphone arm which ran from the pair of headphones he wore. The phrase he uttered blared out of the robot’s mouth with frightening amplification.

  ‘Don’t you start going on a power trip Jim!’ Harry warned his friend, and Jim Doggerty apologised to Alex for smashing up the mannequin and promised he’d help repair Elize when they were all a lot richer after the bank job. Jim had no intentions at keeping this promise of course.

  ‘All he needs now is the human look, like a realistic head,’ said Rob, who was a little intimidated by the motorized brute.

  ‘Yeah,’ Roach agreed, ‘and he also
needs some decent clothes.’ Harry looked Alex Maxwell up and down. ‘You’re a tall guy,’ he said.

  ‘He’s not wearing my clothes,’ Alex threw cold water on Harry’s unspoken suggestion. ‘If something goes wrong, my DNA would be found on the clothes, skin cells and so on.’

  ‘You’re fingerprints are probably all over that thing,’ Roach nodded to the robot.

  ‘No Harry,’ said Doggerty via the robot’s voice speaker, ‘Alex and I made sure we wore gloves when we worked on the bot, and we also cleaned the parts of it we handled without gloves when we brought it in.’

  ‘Ok I’ll get some clothes for the thing,’ Harry conceded defeat, ‘I suppose Alex is right.’

  ‘Where are we going to get a face for this thing?’ Rob pondered out loud.

  ‘Simple,’ Roach replied, and he picked up the head of Elize the mannequin. ‘This face will do fine,’

  ‘No, not her face,’ Alex tried to take the head out of Roach’s hands.

  Roach pulled the head away from his grasp. ‘Alex, get a life! Are you listening to yourself? It’s creepy!’

  Doggerty laughed so loud he caused ringing feedback from the robot’s voice speaker.

  ‘Harry, you’re not going to put that female face on a macho robot like that?’ Rob was very bemused at the surreal proposition.

  ‘We’ll stick a moustache on the face and spray on a little stubble. Thicken the eyebrows, use your imagination, Rob,’ Roach told the ex-jailbird.

  A few hours later, the robot was clothed in a second-hand suit, and wore the latex covering of Elize’s head. After all of the effeminizing treatment, the face looked quite masculine.

  Roach took a grass-green trilby from a hatbox and placed it on the bald head of the robot. ‘Now how’s that for the finishing touch? I name this robot Mechanizmo!’ Roach said quite seriously.

  ‘Mechanizmo?’ Rob queried.

  Roach smiled, and cast his mind back to his childhood. ‘When I was a kid, I stole a little toy robot off a boy I knew. It was called Mechanizmo. Even then I was dreaming about having an army of robots who could steal for me.’