Runaway Robot

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  Then it was time to wake him up.

  ‘OK, Eric,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you up on your feet so that you can walk out of here . . . Arise, Sir Eric.’

  And Eric arose.

  He placed his hands on either side of his body. He pushed himself up. Blue flames flowed down his arms and crackled over his joints.

  ‘Eric, are you OK?’ I said.

  Every move he made flashed and sparked. He was a lightning storm with his legs. I backed away.

  He was standing on his own two feet. He thrust his hand into the air and roared:

  I AM SIR ERIC. AND NOW MY QUEST BEGINS!

  He sounded pretty pleased with himself. He moved one leg towards me. Wobbled. Steadied himself. He looked like he was going to move the next one.

  ‘Whoa, steady,’ said Shatter. ‘Steady, Eric. Get used to standing. Up first. Keep it. Nice and slow.’

  Straight away, the fire and lightning stopped. It seemed as though he was sucking all that energy back inside himself, trying to concentrate on keeping his balance.

  I AM YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.

  ‘Sometimes, I think a word,’ I said, ‘can trigger his memory. Like when I said “armour”, he started to talk like a knight. Maybe if we just said, “Walk, Eric”, then just walking could be his quest.’

  He stayed still, but tense like someone on the edge of a diving board, getting ready to take the plunge. Like he was considering his options. In my mind I seemed to see all the different ways there are of walking. Shatter swings her arms like a boxer swaggering into the ring. D’Arcy’s blades make her bounce slightly, like someone walking on the moon. Tyler walks with his head down, as though he’s looking for something. Everyone’s walk is different. I wondered what Eric’s walk would be like.

  It was like an earthquake.

  The floor groaned for mercy wherever he planted his massive feet. Chunks of the ceiling fell in his wake.

  Shatter and I hurried after him, like when a mum or dad runs after a kid who has just learned to ride a bike. He kept going. He was way better than any of the robots you’ll ever see on YouTube.

  Eric could actually definitely and completely walk.

  It’s a pity that he used that skill by walking AWAY. But we’ll get to that later.

  The point is we did it.

  We taught Eric to walk.

  ‘He’s going. Out. Side,’ said Shatter.

  It was true. Just like on the day he brought me here, he seemed to know where he was going, like he was looking for something.

  I AM LOST.

  Eric sounded more like a Marvel superhero announcing his name than a robot lost in an airport.

  He stepped up towards where the broken door still lay on the floor. He put his foot on it. He lost his balance. He was going to fall.

  I ran to him.

  I grabbed his hand.

  I held it tight.

  With Lefty. Without me even thinking about it – without even trying – I had closed the fingers of my state-of-the-art hand around Eric’s fingers. Lefty had come to life. He was part of me at last. I was holding hands just like the toddler-me in the photograph.

  That’s when I remembered.

  Holding someone’s hand had triggered my memory, and in my mind, I saw . . .

  You.

  Memories bulleted through my brain. Some of them were too fast to catch, but one exploded like grenade.

  The accident.

  I remembered that it wasn’t just my accident. Someone else got hurt.

  You.

  I let go of Eric’s hand. Just like I must have let go of your hand on that day.

  Eric must have said something, but I wasn’t listening. I ran out into the woods and kept running until I got home.

  Mum was at the front door. I stopped in front of her.

  ‘Mum . . .’ I said.

  I didn’t need to say any more. She could tell just by looking at me.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, taking my hand. ‘You’ve remembered, haven’t you?’ She led me into the kitchen and made me sit down. ‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘I’ve waited for this to happen for so long. I can wait a bit longer.’

  Words and pictures and feelings were still streaming into my brain. Sometimes, they’d stop as if they were buffering. Sometimes, they’d torrent into my head like a super-fast download.

  It was you.

  I’d finally remembered you.

  My little brother, Arty.

  How could I have completely forgotten about my own brother?

  ‘Mum, where’s Arty?’

  This time, I was the one who didn’t have to wait to hear. Asking that question was like clicking ‘open’ on a zip file . . .

  A bus is coming down the road.

  I’m holding your hand. You’re on your scooter. It was a really sunny day. We’d been up to the shops at the Circus. You want to dash out into the road. It’s a game. The buses stop and back up if anyone runs in front of them. It’s in their programming. So they are totally one hundred per cent safe. The bus stops. You wave at it, and it flashes its lights at you. Every kid loves that. Everyone is always doing it, just to see the lights go. I yank you backwards on to the pavement.

  ‘That,’ I said, ‘is reckless.’

  ‘I’m big four,’ you said.

  You thought being four years old meant you were indestructible.

  I held you back. We were going home. We’d been scootering down the underpass. You loved the underpass because the ramp made the scooter go fast, and the tunnel because it made your screams go loud.

  The bus goes by. Nothing else is coming, so we step into the road. Someone must have stepped in front of the bus after it went by, though, because it stopped. Then it backed into us.

  The picture goes a bit fuzzy after that.

  I remember my hand in the road and not being able to figure out how it got there. I don’t remember any pain. I remember lots of fear. You were lying in the road. It didn’t look like there was anything wrong with you. You were perfect. No bruises or cuts. Not in my memory anyway. It looked like you were asleep.

  The bus just drove itself away. It left you lying in the road. And me kneeling next to you . . .

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘is Arty . . .’

  ‘He’s in hospital. I sit with him every day as soon as I finish work.’

  Other thoughts and memories shot into my brain after that. Like the fact that Mum was normally nearly always there. We always did stuff together. Went places. The three of us. For weeks and weeks, I’d been mostly on my own. I’d never normally have got away with going to the airport all on my own. Mum had been missing.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s time you came with me.’

  Hundreds of years ago, there was a philosopher in France called René Descartes. He went to see one of those mechanical dolls I’d seen when I’d been searching online for Eric. I think it was the one that could play the flute. Or maybe the one that could poo. Anyway, he did some philosophy about it and decided that humans were just robots with extra features. Their hearts and livers and kidneys were just a squishier kind of clockwork. Humans just did what they were programmed to do.

  He used to look out of his window in Holland at all the people rushing off to work and school and think, How can you tell that they are people and not just robots with hats and coats on?

  I’m not a French philosopher. But I do know Descartes was wrong. There’s one big difference between robots and people.

  If a robot falls apart, you can put it back together again with a screwdriver and some duct tape. If its brain stops working, you can reboot it. If it loses its memory, you can reload it from the Cloud. If all that doesn’t work, you can call the helpline.

  In your face, Descartes. People are nothing like machines.

  Mum tried to keep cheerful as we walked along the hospital corridor. A cleaner bot was working its way towards us, polishing the floor.

  ‘Look!’ Mum said. ‘A Tiggy-Winkle. That’s the same as our DustUrch
in, but it has polishing skills too. I’d love one of those.’

  ‘Happy anniversary of the invention of the television,’ said the Tiggy-Winkle for something to say.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mum.

  A few seconds later, Father Mangan came round the corner. He’s our parish priest, but he also does all the priest-things that need to be done in the hospital. He’s good, but his suits are always too big for him – like he has shrunk in the wash, but his clothes haven’t.

  ‘Alfie!’ he said. ‘We don’t see you here very often.’ He put his hand out to shake mine. He had to pull his suit sleeve up a bit to get enough of his hand out to shake.

  ‘How’s your hand?’ he said.

  I held it up for him to see.

  ‘State of the art,’ he said. ‘You look well. When you think . . .’

  He looked at Mum. She nodded. There were more holes in this conversation than in a cheese grater.

  ‘It gives you hope,’ he said.

  Mum nodded again.

  ‘I’ve just been in to see Arty,’ he said.

  Mum looked worried.

  ‘I was just passing. We had a nice chat. Well, I did the talking. We have to have faith that he can hear us. The more you talk to him, the easier it is to believe, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum.

  ‘Well, I’m around all morning, if I can help at all. Keep believing, eh?’

  Once he’d gone, I said, ‘Why would I think Arty couldn’t hear me?’

  Mum didn’t answer.

  Arty is missing. We know where his body is – on a bed in the HDU, hooked up to three different drips: one for nutrition, one for hydration and one for medicine.

  But we don’t know where Arty is.

  If you want a description – he has thick curly black hair. He never ever walks, but always runs.

  We don’t know where that Arty is.

  We know where Arty’s favourite things are because the doctors told Mum to bring his favourite things in and put them round his bed to make it feel more like home. There are his plastic jousting knights, his toy cars and action figures. The ‘dragon’ is actually an educational toy chameleon.

  We don’t know where Arty is.

  Where are you, Arty?

  There were wires clipped on your fingers and taped to your chest, connecting you to machines to measure your breathing, your heartbeat, your brain activity. Monitors were beeping and blipping.

  You really are part boy, part machine. Much more like Wolverine than me.

  The bed was jacked up at an angle so that your eyes would have been staring straight ahead, if they’d been open. But they hadn’t been open for ages.

  Mum told me to say hello to you and believe that you could hear me.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  One of the monitors beeped, and the graph on its screen jumped in jagged peaks.

  ‘Wow,’ said the nurse who was checking Arty over. ‘He’s really pleased to hear you, isn’t he?’

  I looked at Mum. She smiled and nodded, but when the nurse had gone, she said, ‘It does that sometimes. I just don’t know if it’s true. But do keep talking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I know. That’s the hard thing.’

  Your head was in a kind of brace. That was to keep your brain safe. I thought about what Dr Shilling had said about the head not being the safest place to keep the brain. I wished I could lift your brain out and put it in the safest place in the house.

  Mum was telling me about how she talked to you every day.

  ‘But you do run out of things to say after a while,’ she whispered. ‘I start by telling him what I did the day before. But if all I did the day before was sit in a plastic chair talking to him, well, that doesn’t leave you with much to say, does it, Arty? Come on, Arty: one blink for yes; two blinks for no?’

  I tried to start talking to you. But it was only when Mum went off to talk to the doctors that I really got going. Because it was only then that I started to talk about Eric. It might be controversial, but it felt good. Just me and you knowing about him.

  I kept watching the heart monitor. It went up and down all the time, but I was nearly definitely sure that it went higher during the funny bits and during the scary bits. I slightly exaggerated a bit sometimes to make the funny bits funnier, and the scary bits scarier. The more I did it, the higher the peaks were.

  A very small doctor in a very bright hijab came in to do some tests on you. She glanced at the brain monitor. ‘Wow! That was a good conversation! Look at those peaks and troughs. It’s called the attention differential. You should definitely come again.’

  ‘I’ll come every day,’ I said.

  ‘Did you enjoy your big brother’s story, Arty? One blink for yes. Two blinks for no.’

  No blink.

  ‘How about squeezing my hand, then?’

  No squeeze.

  She pulled the curtains around your bed and told me and Mum to go and wait in the atrium. There’s a play slide there shaped like a dragon with big eyelashes and a cherry-red smile. There are mountains and rainbows painted on the wall behind it. No one was playing on it just then. I was thinking how much you would love it.

  There were a couple of couches, a coffee machine and a big window with a view towards the airport. No one was looking out of the window because there was also a telly in there with a screen so big you felt like you might fall into it. The sound was switched off, and for some reason this made it really hard to look away from. My eyes were hypnotized by a programme about people who restore vintage cars. But my brain was only thinking about you.

  I knew I’d forgotten some big, important things, but I’d always thought that thing was the accident. How could I have forgotten you?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I wanted to,’ said Mum. ‘I really wanted to. But the doctors said give it time; it will all come back. The mind needs time to recover just like your body does. You had enough to cope with accepting that you’d lost a hand without having to think about Arty.’

  ‘That’s why you were always late from work. You were coming here. On your own.’

  ‘I did think that, in the end, you would start to wonder.’

  ‘And the room – Arty’s room.’

  ‘You never went near it. It was like you couldn’t even see it.’

  Now all kinds of memories of you were torrenting. Memories of you running around everywhere, pretending you were riding a horse—

  Oh my days – I’ve just thought. That Lego that Mum put out for me to practise with – that’s your Lego, isn’t it? And the scooter I used for Eric’s leg – that’s your scooter. And the photograph of the toddler learning to walk – that’s you in the middle of that photograph, not me. I am in the photograph. It’s me – not a big cousin – holding your hand.

  I’m your big brother. I’m supposed to look out for you.

  Mum said, ‘You OK, Alfie?’

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘tell me something. The accident – was it my fault?’

  ‘No, Alfie. Nothing to do with you.’

  ‘So, will Arty be OK?’

  ‘Let’s talk about it later, shall we?’

  She didn’t look at me when she said that. I knew she was keeping something from me. Something my brain didn’t want to let in. Like maybe it wasn’t exactly my fault, but maybe there was something I could or should have done that might have saved you.

  Mum guessed what I was thinking about.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

  Her eyes were unusually shiny. At first, I thought it was just the reflection of the telly, but when I turned round to check there were actual tears coming out of her eyes.

  I’d never seen Mum cry before. She must have done a lot of private crying since the accident. I had no idea what to say, so I shuffled up and gave her hand a squeeze. She looked down at our hands.

  ‘Alfie,’ she said, ‘you – you just squeezed my hand.’

  ‘Sorry.’

&
nbsp; ‘With Lefty! You squeezed my hand with Lefty. You’ve finally learned to use your hand. Alfie, that’s amazing.’

  She squeezed back. I swear I could feel that squeeze all the way up in my brain.

  On the way out, we met another doctor in the lift. She asked if I was your brother and said she’d heard a lot about me. ‘But no one,’ she said, ‘told me what a great storyteller you are.’

  ‘How’s that?’ said Mum.

  ‘He was excited to hear your voice, Alfie, and the story just kept the ball up there. I’ll show you.’

  She tipped her tablet towards us. There was a graph on the screen that looked like a cross-section of the spikiest mountain range in the world.

  ‘These peaks,’ she said, ‘are when Arty’s brain is most active. Look here. All these peaks bunched together, that’s when Alfie was talking to him.’

  ‘So . . . he really can hear us?’ said Mum.

  ‘He’s in there somewhere,’ said the doctor. ‘And he likes to hear his brother’s stories.’

  I thought Mum was going to cry again.

  ‘It’s been so hard talking to him,’ she said, ‘when you don’t know if he can really hear. But now . . . Oh, thank you, Alfie.’

  ‘What were you talking to him about, if you don’t mind my asking?’ said the doctor. ‘Must have been thrilling stuff.’

  ‘Oh, just stuff.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  ‘Stuff I did. With a friend of mine.’

  The lift stopped.

  ‘This is my floor,’ she said, and stepped out. ‘Don’t forget, Alfie – keep telling the stories.’

  It was thinking about that graph on the doctor’s tablet that gave me the idea. That’s when I thought – if holding Eric’s hand woke my memories, maybe if you could hold Eric’s hand it would wake you too.

  I don’t know if the accident was my fault. But I do know that I can do my best to make you better, Arty. Because I’ve got something better than just a story. I’ve got the real thing.