Return to Mech City

by Brian Bakos

“W-what happened, Jimmy?”

  “Darnedest thing,” Jimmy said. “A load of lumber fell on me. I’m afraid we’ve been going too fast, Boss, we’re making mistakes.”

  Winston forced himself to be calm. “Can you walk all right?”

  “Sure, Boss.”

  “Then get over to the RDI,” Winston said. “They’ll fix you up.”

  “Good idea, Boss.”

  Jimmy started to leave.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” Winston said, “while you’re out there, ask Quincy and Jack if they’d like apartments in the penthouse.”

  Jimmy looked baffled.

  “You want them staying here, Boss?”

  “Of course not,” Winston said, “but we’d better make the offer. Later on we can talk them into fixing up their current digs.”

  Enlightenment spread across Jimmy’s rigid face.

  “I get it,” he said, nodding with admiration. “Ah, there’s only one Boss!”

  He moved down the street and disappeared around a corner. A small dust devil followed his progress.

  Winston felt even more alone now, and quite helpless. The authority he’d come to enjoy so much began to evaporate. He knew in his deeper levels that the real Boss had departed. How long before the others knew it, too?

  Get a grip, Winston!

  He wanted to go to Star’s place, but that would not be possible until Jimmy got back. Somebody had to be in charge here, even if he didn’t know the first thing about construction work.

  Hopefully the arm repair wouldn’t take long, especially after Quincy and Jack learned about the penthouse apartment offer. They’d want to demonstrate their appreciation to the Boss, wouldn’t they?

  Later he could appeal to their vanity – why should two renowned experts like themselves inhabit the REX with so many lesser robots? Wouldn’t renovated accommodations at the RDI be more fitting to their status? He’d make it seem like their own idea.

  Winston entered the lobby and observed the frantic tempo of the paneling crew, the hurried pace of robots trundling up and down the stairs. Star was right.

  “Okay boys,” he announced, “twenty minute break. Then slow things down a bit when you get back to work. We don’t want any more accidents.”

  “Yeah, Boss!”

  It felt good to issue a real order. His sense of well-being began to trickle back. His thoughts returned to Star.

  Yes, I’ll go see her ... when I’m good and ready.

  21: Unannounced Visitors

  Jimmy was not the reflective type. His brain was programmed for practical matters with little room left over for conjectural thought. But there was no getting around it – the day was turning downright spooky, even to his limited imagination.

  He’d never seen such ominous weather as on this three kilometer hike to the RDI. Lightning crackled, sending eerie flashes through the thick cloud cover. Ferocious gusts of wind howled along the streets. No rain had yet fallen, but it might come pouring down any second. Rain, or perhaps something worse.

  The boys had better work indoors today, he thought, no running around outside for deliveries and such.

  The Boss would see to that, he was confident. As long as the Boss was around, everything would be okay. Jimmy’s left arm hung useless, but his legs carried him along at a good pace. He walked close to the buildings, ready to duck inside at the first hint of a deluge. Mini tornadoes hurried him along.

  Finally, he was traversing the lobby of the Robotics Development Institute main building. Then he was walking down the long hallway, his steps echoing in the dead air. Even in here, protected from the sinister weather, the atmosphere was dense and foreboding.

  Don’t be so jittery. Act worthy of the Boss!

  He nudged open the workshop door with his good arm and poked his head inside. He saw Quincy and Jack standing at an operating table amid a pool of light thrown by powerful overhead lamps. The rest of the big room was cloaked in shadow, except for some eerie rays streaming though the high back windows .

  They were working on something – a large robot, it seemed. Jimmy couldn’t tell exactly because a sheet covered most of it. He decided to venture an interruption.

  “Sorry to disturb you guys.” He entered the workshop. “But I wrecked my arm pretty bad.”

  A mech wolf slipped behind him and slammed the door shut with its paw.

  Jimmy spun around. “What th-?”

  A vicious four-legged creature blocked the way out. Another one drew alongside it with bared teeth and flashing red eyes. Growls rumpled in their throats.

  “Ahhhh!” Jimmy cried.

  He retreated toward Jack and Quincy. “W-what’s going on here, guys?”

  “Don’t worry, they won’t bite,” Jack said, “unless they want to.”

  Clawfurt emerged from the shadows beyond the glaring lights. Jimmy felt his knee joints weaken with terror.

  “Oh man,” he said, “this is definitely not my day. How about if I leave now? Who needs two functioning arms, anyway?”

  “It gets worse,” Quincy said.

  The robot on the slab began to sit up – slowly and methodically, like the rising of a great drawbridge. Its shroud fell to the floor. Jack and Quincy cringed away from their handiwork while Jimmy gasped with horror.

  The head of old Nilo sat perched atop a massive body! Malignant joy distorted its face.

  Then the head began rotating a full 360 degrees, taking in every detail of its surroundings. Jimmy seized a workbench to keep from falling over.

  “Nilo ... is that you?” he managed to say.

  The monstrosity dropped down from the table, and the floor shook from the impact of its great bulk. It stood dominating the room. Even Clawfurt looked much less significant beside it.

  “Bah!” the thing said. “To hell with that Nilo business.”

  The voice was recognizably Nilo’s, but now it boomed with the resonance of the giant body – like a small human belch enhanced by a megaphone.

  The creature strode a few giant paces to where Nilo’s decapitated body lay on the floor and kicked it with brutal contempt. The corpse flew across the workshop and shattered against a wall.

  Then the creature turned massively toward the others. A fierce, triumphant expression glowed on its face.

  “I am Fascista Ultimo!” it boomed.

  Absolute silence greeted this announcement. Seconds dragged by under the monster’s steely gaze. Then, incredibly, a benign smile spread across its face.

  “I’m also known as ‘F.U.’ to my friends,” it said in a quiet, almost sheepish tone.

  Jimmy and the repair bots stared at each other, dumbfounded.

  Then the ferocious expression returned. Fascista Ultimo leaned in on Jimmy. The air compressed under the monster’s bulk.

  “And you don’t qualify as my friend, metal man. Got it?” he said.

  Jimmy shrank back. “Y-yes, of course, anything you say ... Mr. Fascista ... sir.”

  “That’s good,” Fascista Ultimo said. “Keep to your place and there won’t be any trouble.”

  He gestured to the storeroom in the back of the workshop. Its heavy door with the tiny window stood open.

  “And right now, your place is in that store room, metal man.”

  “B-but what about my arm?” Jimmy said.

  Fascista Ultimo glanced at Jimmy’s injury with utter contempt. “Oh, very well,” he said, “be that way.”

  He turned to the repair bots. “Fix up his arm first, then lock him in the storeroom.”

  “Will do,” Jack said.

  “And be quick about it,” Fascista snapped, “or else you’ll end up in there with him.”

  “But ...” Quincy said.

  “No ‘buts’ about it,” F.U. said. “Or would you rather have Clawfurt turn you into a pile of scrap?”

  Chink! Chunk! Clawfurt flexed his claw eagerly.

  “Y-yes, sir,” Quincy said, “right away.”

  ***

  Winston was very much
the reflective type, and as the hours passed without Jimmy’s return, he grew increasingly agitated. What could possibly be keeping him?

  Not long ago, instantaneous contact between all corners of the Earth had been taken for granted. Humans walked around with communication devices stuck in their ears; computers linked people everywhere.

  But those days were gone. Now there were no phones, no computer networks, nada. Winston couldn’t even contact his foreman, although Jimmy was certainly no more than a few kilometers away.

  As far as communications went, Winston had been thrown back into an earlier century – except for his radio. But most robots did not have radios, and those that did generally possessed only short range devices with very limited capabilities.

  Suddenly, without a conscious directive from Winston, his radio receiver went into scan mode. Indistinct messages faded in and out on certain frequencies. Winston thought he could catch a word now and then, but the overall effect was gibberish.

  The messages must be encrypted.

  Who was sending them? And why did the damn radio always kick in when he was at his most insecure and paranoid? The situation was not resolving itself. He had to take action.

  “Sam!” he called to the assistant foreman.

  “Yes, Boss?”

  “I’m going to find out how Jimmy’s doing,” Winston said. “Keep everybody inside. Let them work on their personal quarters if they want.”

  “Right, Boss,” Sam replied. “The boys will like that.”

  Yes, Winston thought sourly, if I told them to go jump off the roof, they’d probably like that, too.

  Such a heavy burden of trust these workers had placed upon him! Now that Jimmy wasn’t around, everything Winston said carried even more decisive weight – whether he knew what the hell he was talking about or not.

  “You want one of the boys to go with you?” Sam asked.

  “No, no,” Winston said. “Just carry on.”

  “Right, Boss.”

  Actually, Winston wouldn’t have minded a companion, but it didn’t seem quite appropriate. He was the Boss, after all, and he should be able to handle this little matter by himself. No doubt he was “making a mountain out of a molehill,” as his former master had said on occasion. He’d bump into Jimmy along the route and they’d enjoy a good laugh on the walk back together.

  Winston headed toward the RDI alone. Before long, a sense of deep foreboding began to accompany him on his trek across the deserted town. It spun along within the dust devils and grew more powerful at every street corner. He encountered not a single robot to allay his distress.

  Damn, where is everybody?

  Just about every resident of Mech City must have either been working on the renovations or standing around watching. Everyone except Star, that is.

  He wanted nothing more than to make a bee line for her apartment and get out of this terrible atmosphere. He wanted to experience the thrill of her presence, he wanted to get past the dumb misunderstanding they’d had. But duty called him to find Jimmy first.

  He should have brought somebody with him. Why did he always have to be such a macho idiot?

  In his haste he took a wrong turn and found himself moving along the rim of the great bomb crater. He came to a large open area that had once been a public square, but now terminated abruptly at the rim of the crater. An eerie, silent space that had once bustled with human activity now engulfed him like a cemetery.

  The crater was a good two hundred meters across. Its middle was occupied by a stagnant pond where little water spouts danced like wraiths along the surface. Winston hurried away, a troubled breeze pushing him along. He drew some of it across his olfactory sensor. The air smelled worse than usual.

  Finally, he was traversing the lobby of the Robotics Institute, then he was walking down the hallway, his steps echoing in the dead air. Even here, protected from the awesome weather, the atmosphere was weird and foreboding.

  Don’t be so jittery, act like the Boss.

  He nudged open the workshop door and poked his head inside. Quincy and Jack were standing at an operating table amid a pool of light thrown by powerful overhead lamps. The rest of the big room was shrouded in dimness, except for some eerie illumination coming through the high back windows.

  They were working on something – a robot presumably. Winston couldn’t tell exactly because a sheet covered most of it. He decided to venture an interruption.

  “Sorry to disturb you guys.” He entered the workshop. “I’m looking for Jimmy.”

  A mech wolf slipped behind him and slammed the door shut with its paw.

  Winston spun around. “What th-?”

  A vicious four-legged creature blocked the way out. Another one drew alongside it with bared teeth and flashing red eyes. Growls rumpled in their throats.

  “Ahhhh!”

  Winston retreated toward Jack and Quincy. “W-what’s going on here, guys?”

  “Don’t worry, they won’t bite,” Jack said, “unless they want to.”

  Clawfurt emerged from the shadows beyond the glaring lights. Winston felt his knee joints weaken with terror.

  “Oh man,” he said, “this is definitely not my day. How about if I leave and never come back?”

  “It gets worse,” Quincy said.

  The floor trembled as a huge figure approached from the back of the workshop.

  “Yeah, a lot worse,” Jack said.

  Something beyond belief emerged from the shadows. ‘Frankenstein’ was the first word that barged into Winston’s benumbed brain. The thing looked down at him with a friendly, though ominous expression on its face – on Nilo’s face! Winston gaped at it with horrified astonishment.

  “Hello, Winny!” the creature boomed. “I’m so glad you came.”

  Winston grabbed at a work bench for support.

  “Nilo ... is that you?” he managed to say.

  The creature laughed, a hollow, booming noise that sounded like it came from an empty oil drum.

  “No, no, Winny, that’s all in the past,” it said. “My name is Fascista Ultimo. That’s ‘F.U.’ to my friends.”

  Winston struggled to recover his composure.

  Man, I should have figured on something like this. Nilo always was more than half nuts.

  Fascista placed a massive arm around Winston’s shoulders in an avuncular, though ominous manner. Winston suppressed a cringe.

  “I’d like to include you among my friends, Winny,” Fascista said. “Can I do that?”

  Winston glanced around the workshop. Numerous mech wolves were emerging from the shadows now, others pushed their way in from the hall – yet another one stared up from the operating table.

  Winston took in the clawed horror, the terrified faces of Jack and Quincy. He visualized himself trapped in Clawfurt’s great pincer, the life being crushed out of him, consciousness snuffed out forever, his shitload of data lost. A fleeting glimpse of Star’s face ...

  He gulped, electronically speaking.

  22: The Genesis of Roboto Fascism

  some weeks earlier:

  The test bed robot, Nilo, lay helpless on the operating table. His chest gaped open under the blaring workshop floodlights exposing the experimental radio set that Dr. Calderon had installed earlier that day. Calderon himself was tinkering with the device, cursing under his breath.

  Foul-mouthed bastard! Nilo thought.

  No robot would waste energy on such invective, not even the lowly metal man types – and especially not the advanced Humanite inheritor race.

  Nilo’s only desire was to be put back together and left alone, but a familiar voice calling from the doorway shattered this hope.

  “How’s it going with the new radio?” Dr. Blake asked.

  Calderon looked up from his work. “Not too good, Frank. I’m ready to tear the damn thing out.”

  “Well, be quick about it,” Blake said. “It’s ‘Screw Around with Nilo’ time!”

  Nilo cringed. “P-please
sir,” he said, “I must p-protest ...”

  Blake snarled a malicious laugh. “Get this, our robotic friend p-protests!”

  Calderon joined the merriment. The two mech heads chortled as if they’d just heard the world’s funniest joke.

  “B-but I feel that ...” Nilo said.

  “Oh, it’s got feelings now,” Blake said. “Isn’t that something? Come on, Vicente, hurry it up.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Calderon asked.

  “How about some ‘Electronic Blaster’ to start off?” Blake said.

  “Sounds good,” Calderon said.

  “Nooo,” Nilo moaned.

  As Calderon uninstalled the radio, Blake attached electrical hookups to Nilo’s torso. The old test bed robot looked on with terrified desperation, but dared not speak again. He knew from bitter experience that more objections would only make matters worse.

  One thing mitigated his distress, however: Dr. Blake was wearing sunglasses. This meant that he could not handle the bright workshop lights any longer, which meant that the pupils in his eyes were not contracting properly – and this meant that he had early stage plague!

  Nilo almost shouted with joy.

  “Let the good times roll!” Blake cried.

  Electrical current jolted through Nilo. His body thrashed like a fish thrown up on the shore. His limbs beat a maniacal rhythm on the table surface, and his brain turned into a static wasteland.

  The current stopped, then started again in spurts, each one throwing Nilo into violent spasms. The mech heads roared with laughter.

  “Just the thing for a slow work day, huh?” Blake said.

  At last the agony stopped. Nilo lay exhausted, his limbs twisted at grotesque angles. The powerful seizures had damaged internal components, he could tell, but his brain had returned to normal.

  He glared up at the mech heads with absolute hatred. They were both scrawny weaklings of men – wimp bullies who would have been pounded into jelly if they’d tried to inflict such punishment on another human.

  They’d even been afraid of the old Chief Designer and had waited until the Director had been killed before they ganged up on him and stole his position. Sure, the old guy was a bit peculiar, but he’d never mistreated Nilo like this.

  “How about some cranium catch?” Blake said.

  Nilo froze. Of all the cruel games played on him over the years, this was the worst: his detached head thrown around like a beach ball, his eyes bugged out in terror as the workshop scenery blurred past, frenzied prayers to the Great Technician in the Sky –