Runaway Robot

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  When I sat down to eat, the TV announced it had picked a news item that might interest me. ‘Your teacher is on TV. Shall I stream it for you, Alfie?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  There was a whole thing about Eric on the news. It showed the CCTV footage that the drone had shot of him crashing around the estate with me on his shoulders. It ended with a blurry whirl, where Eric had whacked the drone out of the sky.

  ‘Robots,’ said the reporter ‘are an essential part of all our lives. We live alongside them. They do the jobs we don’t want to do. But what happens when robots go rogue? We ask someone who knows the answer better than anyone. Police Officer Grady.’

  Police Officer Grady turned out to be the very police officer whose car Eric had crushed. The answer to the question, ‘What happens when robots go rogue?’ seemed to be, ‘It makes Police Officer Grady sad.’ Because, not going to lie, he looked like he’d been crying for a week.

  Officer Grady: ‘This is one bad robot. He’s assaulted a Pizzabot, wrecked a drone and gleefully and maliciously destroyed my car.’

  Reporter: ‘That is bad.’

  Officer Grady: ‘He crushed it into a little cube.’

  Reporter: ‘So if a member of the public sees this robot, what should they do?’

  Officer Grady: ‘First of all, keep away. This robot is dangerous. It has enormous strength. We believe it might have weapons . . .’

  ‘He hasn’t!’ I shouted at the screen. ‘All he wants is to do a bit of ironing and melt cheese!’

  Officer Grady: ‘Keep well away. Inform the police. We will act swiftly to decommission this bad machine.’

  In case you didn’t know what ‘decommission’ meant, they showed a clip of the crushing machine at R-U-Recycling chewing up mouthfuls of metal.

  Reporter: ‘Is there a reward for the capture of the rogue robot?’

  Officer Grady: ‘Yes – there will be a reward. A HUGE reward.’

  He stared into the camera lens, right into the room, right over the beans on toast and into my heart, and said, ‘And if we catch the person responsible, they will pay a heavy, heavy price.’

  I dropped the empty beans tin . . .

  into the recycling bin.

  The DustUrchin said thank you and then did its Mum impersonation. ‘Hi, Alfie. Sorry I’m late again. Message me and let me know that you’re all right. I’ve just heard about this business with the rampaging robot. The house has already updated me to say that you’re home, but you know how I worry. Give me a call – I like to hear your voice. Go to bed and don’t forget to say your prayers.’

  That night, I did remember to say my prayers. Or to think about them. Is it all right to pray for a robot? Praying for pets is controversial. It’s debatable whether dogs and cats go to Heaven. It felt awkward asking God to help me save a robot. Especially one that was scaring people, smashing up police cars and interfering with their pizza deliveries. You don’t want to put God in a difficult legal situation.

  How could I keep Eric safe? I went to sleep thinking about what Dr Shilling had said about the planet Mars being entirely inhabited by robots. I imagined somehow taking Eric to Mars. I saw him in my mind, happily chatting to the other robots. Mars only has about a third of the mass of Earth, so he’d only weigh half as much. He could skip around doing ballet like D’Arcy, free from gravity and safe from all the people who wanted to destroy him.

  When I got ready to leave the house next morning, the DustUrchin played me a message in Dr Shilling’s voice. ‘Don’t forget. If you see the rogue robot, contact me immediately.’

  When I opened the front door, the house said, ‘Have a good day, Alfie. Watch out for the rogue robot.’

  There was a message from Mum on my phone, ‘Home in time for tea tonight. Keep in touch. Worried about rogue robot.’

  I passed the bus stop where a crowd of people were talking. I couldn’t hear all they were saying, just odd words. Namely, the words ‘massive’, ‘rampaging’ and ‘kidnapped a kid’. In the underpass, school kids’ conversation echoed around the tunnel like a trapped bird.

  Everyone was talking about Eric.

  Nobody was saying anything good.

  I went straight back to the hangar. I say ‘straight back’ – I took a detour at the end so that I wouldn’t pass too close to the house where I’d heard the weird noise. It seemed deader than ever in the daylight. How could there be an eye inside? Maybe it was just a pigeon or a rat?

  Around the hangar, the brambles and nettles that Eric had trampled had sprung back up, as if they were under some kind of enchantment. I had to push through them to reach the entrance.

  IT IS NOT POLITE TO ENTER A BUILDING WITHOUT AN INVITATION FROM THE OWNER.

  ‘Eric!’ I called. ‘Is that you?’

  DO COME IN.

  In the morning light, it was surprisingly bright inside the hangar. A power shower of daylight was pouring in through that hole in the roof, splashing around on the broken wood and rusty tins, old springs and bits of wire and metal. I could see everything.

  But I couldn’t see Eric.

  The tarpaulin I had hidden him under was bunched up in the middle of the floor.

  How come I could hear him but not see him? He wasn’t exactly easy to miss.

  ‘Eric, where are you?’

  I’M SORRY. I CAN’T ANSWER THAT QUESTION.

  Then I saw him.

  Not all of him. Just his head.

  It was sitting on the windowsill, facing away from the tangle of brambles and nettles that covered the glass. It was not attached to the rest of his body.

  Someone had decapitated Eric!

  I gasped. ‘Eric – where’s the rest of you?’

  He didn’t answer, but something made me look down at my feet.

  Have you ever sat near a baby in a high chair, and the baby is trying to eat its own dinner but keeps missing its mouth, so there is like a MOUNTAIN of Weetabix on the floor? Well, that’s what the floor of the garage looked like. Or what it would have looked like if the baby had been eating electrical equipment instead of Weetabix and dropping bits of wire and screws and nuts and bolts instead of gloops of milky cereal mulch.

  That’s when I realized.

  The mess on the floor – was Eric.

  Someone had taken him to pieces and scattered those pieces on the floor.

  All except his head, perched on the windowsill, looking down at the mess that had once been his body.

  I popped open my finger torch and scanned the floor, looking for something that was really Eric – something that wasn’t just a nondescript scrap of metal. A mechanical brain or an electronic heart, perhaps. But there was nothing like that. Just a load of random components. Who could have done this?

  I tried not to think too hard about that question because the first thing that popped into my head was the creature in the ruined house. The eye behind the letter box. What if they were still here, hiding in the shadows?

  I tried to calm my imagination by concentrating on putting Eric back together again.

  But where would I begin?

  And if I did put him back together, would he be the same robot? Would he still be Eric?

  Whatever, I wasn’t going to leave him in pieces on the floor. My foot touched a metal jug with a thermostat inside. It looked like the kettle Eric used to make tea.

  I looked for pieces that would fit into it. There was a kind of funnel, which must be where the water gets in. A box with some tea leaves in it. It took me ages to fit them together. Lefty has an inbuilt screwdriver hidden inside his thumb and a range of grips for holding things steady. I used my flesh-job hand to adjust my state-of-the-art fingers and tools. It felt like it had taken me hours to put together something that was really just a complicated tea-making machine.

  Something moved.

  Was it inside the shed or outside?

  There was a faint tinkling sound.

  I held my breath.

  ‘Eric,’ I whispered. ‘Is that you?’ />
  The tinkling sound stopped, then started again. It was Eric. He was trying to get a grip on his shivery rivets.

  ‘Are you scared of something?’ That was a worrying thought. Anything Eric was scared of must be really scary.

  But Eric’s rivets were not the only things that were shivering. The paint pots on the shelves were shaking like a row of little tin people desperately needing a wee. Spanners and screwdrivers hanging from a rack on the wall shook and chimed like little bells.

  Something flashed past my head.

  It hit Eric’s chest and stuck there. A rusty old spanner – like the ones you use for fixing the seat of your bike. A paint pot tumbled by, dripping paint like a fat clumsy bird dripping poo. It landed on Eric’s back and perched there like a tin parrot. A flock of screws whirled through the air and stuck to him like spiky measles. Keys and coins and a little metal pencil sharpener flew out of my pocket.

  ‘Eric!’ I yelled. ‘You’ve gone magnetic. Stop it, before I get stabbed!’

  I AM LOST.

  The pile of splintered wood and metal in the middle of the floor – the stuff that had fallen from the ceiling when whatever it was crashed through it – moved.

  Something was crawling underneath it.

  I was staring at it, terrified, when something much bigger and noisier skidded past me along the floor. At first, I thought it was a bundle of clothes. Then it spoke.

  ‘Make. It stop.’

  It was Shatter.

  She skidded across the floor. The metal in her new toes was attracted to Eric’s magnetism. She clanged into Eric.

  ‘Eric! Stop!’

  Eric stopped shaking.

  Metal objects stopped flying.

  Shatter’s leg hit the deck.

  The pile of wood stopped moving.

  D’Arcy and Tyler strolled in through the doorway.

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘You did this. You killed Eric.’

  ‘You can’t kill. Something that. Isn’t alive. It’s a. Machine. A rubbish. Machine by. The way. It has no. Weapons.’

  ‘How did you find him?’

  ‘Well—’ began D’Arcy.

  Shatter shut her up. ‘Not your. Business. No. Need for you to. Know,’ said Shatter.

  ‘Why? Why did you do this to him?’ I said, looking around at the mess on the floor.

  ‘Revenge,’ said Shatter, as though it was obvious.

  ‘She wants to get her own back,’ explained Tyler.

  ‘I know what revenge means.’

  ‘He dropped Shatila from a great height,’ said Tyler. ‘So she needs to get even.’

  ‘He only did it because he thought she asked him to. He takes things literally.’

  ‘Then on the news last night,’ said D’Arcy, ‘the police said there was going to be a reward. So we’re going to turn him in for the money. I’m going to use the reward to fly to Moscow to see the Bolshoi Ballet. What about you, Tyler?’

  I pointed out that they couldn’t very well turn him in if he was in pieces.

  ‘I think the. Head will do,’ said Shatter.

  I AM THE WORLD’S MOST SOPHISTICATED ROBOT.

  Eric’s disconnected head spoke. We all jumped in fright.

  I HAVE SIX THOUSAND, THREE HUNDRED AND TEN SEPARATE COMPONENTS . . .

  ‘Oh, that was disturbing,’ said D’Arcy.

  ‘He’s talking about how complicated he is,’ said Tyler.

  I said, ‘He wants us to put him back together.’

  I AM LOST.

  They all jumped again.

  By the time they calmed down, I was back on the floor, doing what I was doing before they’d turned up – namely fixing Eric. I never said anything. I never looked up. If they wanted to try to stop me, they could.

  I spotted a washer, which seemed like it might fit round the kettle pipe. I went to pick it up, but couldn’t get my finger under it. I tried adjusting one of Lefty’s fingers so that I could flip it into my hand.

  ‘Shatila doesn’t want you to do that,’ explained Tyler.

  ‘In my. Country, people. Are blown to. Pieces all the time. And no. One cares. Why are you so. Bothered about a. Rubbish robot?’

  ‘Shatila thinks,’ said Tyler, ‘you’re too emotional.’

  I didn’t reply. I just slotted the metal washer into Lefty’s Osprey Grip so that I could slide it into place. There was a horrible, gurgling, hiccoughy sound coming from somewhere in the room. I looked up. Shatter’s eyes were crinkled, and her face was red. She was biting the back of her own hand.

  ‘Shatila,’ explained Tyler, ‘is laughing at you.’

  That time, I actually did need a translation. You would never have thought that sound was a laugh.

  ‘You can’t even. Do Lego, so how. Are you. Going to fix. Him?’

  ‘She thinks you can’t even do quite simple things with your hand, so assembling something with over six thousand moving parts is really not going to happen, to be fair.’

  I didn’t look up because I was pretty sure there were tears in my eyes. If Lefty would just work properly, then I could do this easily. I didn’t let them see, but I was trying everything I could to get my hand to listen to what my brain was saying. I tried visualizing its fingers opening and closing. I stormed the wrist with thoughts. I tried thinking about it. I tried not thinking about it. I tried so hard.

  Still not looking up, I said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll try to fix him, and you sit there and laugh at me. Is that a deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ agreed Shatter. ‘It is. Dead. Funny.’

  ‘You mean we can just sit here and laugh while you fail?’ said D’Arcy.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That actually does sound like fun.’

  Shatter carried on laughing. The other two joined in.

  There is one big difference between robots and humans:

  Give a robot a job to do, and it will just get on and do it. It will carry on doing it until there’s no more job left to do, or until it breaks down.

  If a human says they’re going to do something – for instance, laugh at my attempts to fix Eric – they will probably start OK, but then other stuff happens: Boredom, Distraction, Needing a Wee, or Wanting to Do Something Else Instead.

  Shatter and her mates had decided that they would stand there and laugh at me while I worked on Eric. They made a decent start. They laughed a lot when I’d nearly fixed one entire hand, then dropped it, and all the fingers fell off and skittered away over the concrete. They also laughed fairly loudly when I dropped one of Eric’s elbows, and it rolled under the chair. But I knew it would only be a matter of time before they wanted a change.

  Tyler broke first.

  When that elbow ball rolled under the chair, he rolled it back to me. He wasn’t being kind. He was being bored. He wanted to watch the big silver ball rolling more than he wanted to watch me struggling. I rolled it back to him, just to see. He rolled it back again. I tried to pick it up with just my left hand. He came over and put it in Lefty’s palm. Just then, I spotted the other elbow and asked him to pass it to me.

  He glanced at Shatter. She glared at him. He didn’t pass the elbow to me.

  Then another plane flew overhead. So low, you could see the tread on its tyres. Shatter looked up at it.

  ‘The Iberian Airways flight. From Barcelona,’ she said, checking her watch. ‘It’s early.’

  While Shatter was busy watching the plane, Tyler passed me the elbow. I said thanks, but he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. I tried to fit the elbow on to the rest of the arm, but you had to get it at just the right angle. It must have been annoying to watch me struggling, because Tyler finally bent down and held it still for me.

  I snapped back Lefty’s thumb to reveal its hidden screwdriver-and-pliers combo.

  ‘Your hand is impressive,’ admitted Tyler, ‘even if you can’t work it properly.’

  He carried on holding Eric’s arm still while I tightened the nuts of his elbow joint with my thumb spanner.

&n
bsp; Shatter got rattled when she saw what was going on. ‘What’s going on?’ she said.

  ‘I’m just doing this bit,’ said Tyler. ‘It’s like Meccano. I used to love Meccano before my accident . . .’

  There were holes in Eric’s armour where the metal had splintered into tiny spikes, which would cut you if you brushed against them. Tyler used his metal fingers to just press them back into place.

  ‘It’s all about aligning the pieces,’ he said. ‘They went together once, so they should fit together again.’

  I HAVE SIX THOUSAND, THREE HUNDRED AND TEN SEPARATE COMPONENTS . . .

  If you’re watching someone do a jigsaw puzzle, there’s no way you can stop your eye wandering around to see if you can spot the missing piece before they do. And if you do spot it then you want them to know about it. That’s what was happening to D’Arcy.

  ‘Look!’ she whooped. ‘There. I remember those braceletty things. They go round his ankles. Definitely.’

  But when she bent down to pick them up, Shatter went off like a burglar alarm. ‘Don’t touch that!’

  ‘I wasn’t touching,’ said D’Arcy. ‘I was pointing.’

  I picked them up and tried them. They fitted perfectly.

  ‘They fit perfectly,’ said D’Arcy.

  ‘So,’ said Shatter, ‘what?’

  But when Shatter looked up at the 10.40 KLM flight from Amsterdam as it roared by, D’Arcy started to help too.

  Nearly all of Eric’s insides were back together by then. They looked like a big copper squid lying on the floor surrounded by tentacles of rubber and wire. But with two steel arms.

  ‘You know, I would hate to have to look at MY insides spread out on the floor,’ said D’Arcy. ‘Maybe we should turn his head round so he’s looking the other way.’

  I AM YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.

  The feelings you get from putting someone’s body back together while their head is talking to you from a nearby shelf are definitely complicated. Tyler – who had now started to translate for Eric as well as Shatter – said Eric was asking us if we wanted him to help.

  ‘How?’