Runaway Robot

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  ‘I haven’t got time to be patient!’ I wailed.

  By then, Eric was there. He didn’t ring the bell once and be patient. He strolled through the door as if it were made of paper. We had to scrabble over the broken fragments to get in after him.

  Above the storm of screams and shouts came:

  I AM ERIC. YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.

  Arty. Your brain activity flew up and down like a demented yo-yo.

  WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

  Someone said, ‘Arthur.’

  And for a moment, none of us understood that it was you, Arty. It was such a small sound.

  It passed so quickly.

  It meant so much.

  Did it really happen?

  ‘Did he . . .’ said Mum, stepping closer to the bed. ‘Did my boy . . . did he speak?’

  Then I shouted, ‘Eric! NO!’

  Because Eric had grabbed the sword by its blade and swung its big blunted hilt towards you.

  I shouted, ‘Eric, stop!’

  But Eric’s limbs were making such a racket that I was drowned out. His knees squealed and cranked as he knelt down by your bed, the hilt of his sword pointing towards you. ARTHUR. FELIX CULPA! he said, and he lowered his head.

  Then the second amazing thing happened, Arty.

  Your fingers closed round the hilt and held it tight.

  There was no doubt this time. Your hand stayed on the hilt.

  Mum gasped. ‘Arthur – you moved your fingers. You moved! Good boy!’ She put her hand over your hand and twined her fingers into yours, like a grown-up holding a toddler’s hand when they’re learning to walk.

  The tiny doctor came in to see what was going on.

  Mum looked up at her and grinned. ‘He won’t let go,’ she said.

  The tiny doctor was not even looking at Arthur. She was staring at Eric.

  I HAVE ONE MESSAGE FOR ARTHUR.

  How could Eric have a message for Arthur?

  He spoke, but his voice was not his usual voice. It sounded like a woman trying to make herself heard over a burning engine . . .

  IT’S THE FUEL LINE. IT’S BURST. THERE’S NOTHING WE CAN DO. SAVE ARTHUR. TELL HIM THAT I LOVE HIM, AND I’M SORRY. I’M PRESSING YOUR EJECTOR BUTTON NOW.

  Just like the DustUrchin, Eric could save and repeat messages.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Mum.

  ‘My grandmother,’ said Dr Shilling, her eyes glistening, looking as though she was about to cry. ‘The Arthur she was talking about was my father.’

  It took a while to work out exactly what had happened. I went back to the hangar with Shatter and Tyler and D’Arcy. We stood next to the hole in the ground and looked up at the legendary hole in the roof.

  ‘That’s where Eric. Fell through,’ said Shatter. ‘And that’s where he. Landed.’

  ‘He fell through the roof and made a hole in the floor,’ said Tyler.

  ‘So it was Eric who made the legendary hole in the roof,’ said D’Arcy. ‘The roof broke their fall. So little Arthur got away safely.’

  ‘Though he probably didn’t know where he was,’ I said. ‘Or what had happened. Accidents can make big holes in your memory as well as in roofs.’

  A plane flew over. Shatter said it was going to Dublin.

  ‘Eric’s knightly duty was to take care of Arthur. That was his noble quest.’

  ‘His leg must have. Got stuck but that. Didn’t stop him,’ said Shatter. ‘He left it behind and went. Looking for. The boy.’

  ‘That explains why his leg was here,’ said Tyler. ‘But it doesn’t explain how he ended up in Lost Property.’

  ‘Of course it does!’ I said. ‘Eric takes things literally. He’d lost Arthur. Where’s the most logical place to go looking if you’ve lost something?’

  Tyler smiled. ‘Lost Property.’

  ‘While he was in there looking for Arthur, he slipped into battery-saving mode, and he stayed there. Everyone forgot about him. Like King Arthur asleep in his cave. They say King Arthur will wake up when he’s needed. Well, I needed Eric, so he woke up. He was told to take a message to Arthur, and that’s what he did. Just not exactly the right Arthur. I guess it’s what you would call a happy accident.’

  Mum keeps a notebook of all the times you open an eye or move a hand or say a word. The days that you do that get closer and closer together now. Sometimes, you do two or three on the same day. Sometimes I think you must feel like I do on a winter’s morning, when it’s time to get up, but I roll over and shut my eyes for five more minutes.

  ‘It’s exactly like that,’ says Mum. ‘Except it might take Arty five days, five weeks, five months. We don’t know. And you know what? It doesn’t matter.’ She reached down and wound her fingers in with yours again. ‘I could sit like this forever, as long as I know he’s coming home.’ She had a look on her face that I’d seen somewhere before. But I couldn’t think where, just then.

  Even after we found out that he didn’t cause the crash, Eric was still controversial. There were consequences for sheltering and repairing an unlicensed robot. We were all taken to the Robot Decommissioning Authority for questioning. The Robot Decommissioning Authority was a very small man with very big teeth. When he smiled, it looked like his teeth were trying to run away and find a bigger mouth to live in. He asked us loads of questions. Then said the only absolutely safe solution was to take Eric to R-U-Recycling and put him in the crusher. ‘This should have been done weeks ago,’ he said. ‘When Alfred Miles had the misfortune to discover this Eric thing in Lost Property.’

  ‘No!’ begged Dr Shilling. ‘Eric was built with noble intentions. When the plane crashed, he was behaving nobly. Bravely. He saved my father’s life. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Eric.’

  ‘There are plenty of robots who can do anything that Eric can do far more quietly and efficiently and with far less squashing of police cars and disrupting of airports.’

  ‘My grandfather built Eric,’ said Dr Shilling, ‘to protect my father. Thanks to Alfie, he has come down to me through the generations. He is like family. He’s all the family I have. Please.’

  The Authority agreed that Eric was a robot of historical interest and that Dr Shilling could keep him in the museum.

  I was glad that he was not going to be destroyed but a museum? Really? Surely Eric was good for something more than being looked at.

  A plane flew over.

  ‘Twelve fifteen. From Sarajevo,’ said Shatter. ‘Wednesdays only.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ asked the Authority.

  ‘Because next. Wednesday I’m going to be. On that plane. Sarajevo is my home. I’m going. Home.’

  ‘She’s from Bosnia,’ said Tyler. ‘That’s why her home is in Sarajevo, which is the capital of Bosnia. She had her foot blown off by a landmine during the war there.’

  ‘Surely not,’ said the Authority. ‘The war in Bosnia ended in 1995.’

  ‘But I stepped on. A landmine last. Year,’ said Shatter. ‘When my dad. And me were. Picking. Blackberries.’

  ‘I always thought you were fighting in a war,’ said D’Arcy.

  ‘No. Picking. Blackberries.’

  ‘The war was over before she was born,’ said the Authority.

  ‘You think. So?’ Shatter glared at him. ‘A war is only. Over when it stops. Hurting people.’

  Which is when I had my great idea. I put my hand up. ‘Eric’s a knight,’ I said. ‘All he needs is a quest. I think I’ve got an idea.’

  Dr Shilling took me and Mum to the airport to wave Eric off. Shatter was going with him. They had to turn off the metal detector so that he could go through Departures without setting off every alarm in the place. He introduced himself to all the security people:

  MY NAME IS ERIC, THE WORLD’S MOST POLITE ROBOT. PERHAPS WE CAN BE FRIENDS.

  Dr Shilling said, ‘Goodbye and take care.’

  Eric said, I’M SORRY. I’M PRESSING YOUR EJECTOR BUTTON NOW.

  Which made no sense unless you knew that he was sp
eaking in the voice of Dr Shilling’s grandmother. He was reminding her that he was sort of part of her family.

  Then he looked at Shatter and said, FOR GLORY!

  ‘See you some. Time,’ Shatter said to me.

  ‘See you sometime,’ I replied.

  And then they were gone.

  We still need to keep talking to you to keep your brain patterns busy. We tell you what we’re up to and what’s happening in the world. Mum keeps a note of anything that makes your brain activity spike. The biggest spikes always come whenever we see Eric’s quest on the news. Mum always brings a tablet in and plays the reports about ten times at maximum volume.

  ‘At over six foot and weighing half a ton, Eric looks a bit different from the robots who clean our floors and deliver our pizzas,’ said the news reporter. ‘Some people have called him the Mechanical Knight, partly because he has courtly manners and partly because he looks like a gigantic suit of armour.’

  The film showed Eric walking around a hillside somewhere, a group of people watching him from behind a Perspex screen.

  ‘Look!’ shouted Mum. ‘Isn’t that your little friend, the fierce one?’

  Shatter was right at the front of the crowd. Dr Shilling was standing right behind her.

  ‘This is one knight,’ said the news reporter, ‘who has found his quest!’

  On the screen Eric took one more step and – Blam! – the ground beneath his feet exploded. Eric crashed to the ground.

  ‘Yes!’ said the news reporter. ‘The mechanical knight has gone into battle against the scourge of landmines left over from the war. His method is very simple. He looks down at the location of the landmine and says, “I AM ERIC. THE WORLD’S MOST POLITE ROBOT”, then he steps on the mine and it explodes.’

  As she said the last bit, Eric staggered back on to his feet. His body was dented. His head had gone a bit wonky and his arm was hanging off.

  ‘Poor Eric!’ gasped Mum, holding her hands to her face.

  ‘Don’t worry about Eric,’ said the reporter, as if he had heard her. ‘With a bit of welding and some WD-40 the metal man can be made good as new. The man of steel is virtually indestructible.’

  At the end of the report they interviewed Shatter. They said she’d invented Eric, but she put them right. She said her friend had found him and she’d helped fix him. We cheered when she said my name. And your brain activity peaked when we cheered. ‘He’s a. Warrior,’ said Shatter, grinning with pride. ‘He goes round fighting. For kids.’ BLAM! ‘So they. Don’t get. Hurt I. Love explosions. Brilliant! We’re going to. Travel all over. The world destroying land. Mines in Egypt, Cambodia, Uganda – you. Name it.’

  After that they interviewed Dr Shilling. ‘It was my grandfather,’ she said, ‘who originally repaired Eric. Many years ago. He would be so proud of the work that Eric is doing now to protect children all over the world. For many years Eric was missing. I’m so glad that Alfie Miles found him.’

  The camera showed Eric inspecting his damaged arm. When he realised the camera was on him, he adjusted his joints and said:

  A GENTLEMAN LOOKS HIS BEST AT ALL TIMES.

  Sometime later. Maybe it was five weeks or five months.

  Sometimes it seems a short time.

  Sometimes it seems a lifetime.

  Whichever, we went to the airport to welcome Eric and Shatter home. We waited in arrivals, clutching our ‘WELCOME HOME, ERIC’ sign.

  Really waiting for someone feels very different from just pretending to wait for someone. You don’t think about other people’s food. You don’t look too much at other people’s faces. You just stay focused on those big doors, waiting for them to open.

  Now I realised where I’d seen it before - that look that Mum had on her face when she sat on the end of your bed, watching over you. It’s the look that people have when they’re looking at those big automatic doors, waiting for someone they love to walk through them.

  It’s the look we had on our faces that afternoon at the airport.

  We weren’t the only ones with ‘WELCOME HOME, ERIC’ signs, by the way. Eric’s famous now. Everyone loves him for getting rid of landmines. But they love him even more for the explosive ways he does it. Eric’s all over YouTube. You can get Eric mugs, gifs and ringtones.

  When he finally came clunking through those big doors into arrivals, there was a thunder of applause and a lightning storm of camera flashes. I’m part human/ part machine. I’m a bit bionic. But Eric is part human too. His body is metal but it only works because we filled it with our imagination, and our memories, and our hopes. Also WD-40.

  We waved our ‘WELCOME HOME, ERIC’ sign in the air. Not going to lie, it wasn’t the biggest or the sparkliest sign there. I wasn’t sure he’d even seen us. His huge blue eyes flickered over the crowd. Someone shoved me forward. People stood back to let me pass. Someone else shouted, ‘Go on, Alfie!’ Everyone seemed to know that I was the one who’d found Eric. Everyone thought I was the one he was looking for.

  But I wasn’t.

  He looked past me.

  He looked straight past Mum,

  and D’Arcy

  and Tyler.

  Eric walked straight through the crowd, bent down and looked into the face of the person next to us.

  WHO ARE YOU?

  ‘I’m Arthur.’

  Because it really was you. It was your first day out of the hospital.

  HOW DO YOU DO?

  ‘I’m doing OK,’ you said.

  I AM ERIC, THE WORLD’S MOST POLITE ROBOT.

  ‘I know who you are.’

  Eric held out his hand. You put your hand in his. He squeezed. You squeezed back.

  The he held out his other hand. I put my hand in his. He squeezed. Lefty squeezed back.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  I AM YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.

  Then we walked out of the airport – you and me and Eric.

  There really was a mighty robot called Eric, and he really was built by Captain W Richards and his friend Alan H Reffell. Eric made his first public appearance at an exhibition in London in 1928. Originally the Duke of York was due to open the exhibition, but when he couldn’t make it Richards and Reffell decided to build a robot to take his place.

  Eric’s nervous system was four kilometres of wire. His skin was aluminium. His bloodstream was 35,000 volts of electricity, which made his teeth shoot sparks. He could stand, sit and answer fifty questions. He couldn’t walk, though. Captain Richards liked to say this was because Eric was only six months old and hadn’t learned to walk yet.

  Mr Reffell imagined that Eric would be able to get a job – maybe answering the phone in an office, or giving out information in a railway station. But from his first appearance he was a sensation.

  ‘Aluminium Man Startles London’ ran one headline.

  An American paper published a full-length interview with him, in which Eric revealed that he didn’t drink, or smoke, or run around nightclubs at night.

  ‘Girls!’ declared the interviewer. ‘Eric is the perfect man.’ And he compared him to a chivalric knight.

  Then, during the war, Eric disappeared. Maybe someone – worried he might be damaged during the bombing – hid him in a cellar for safekeeping. Eric was almost forgotten. Until, in 2017, the London Science Museum had an exhibition of all the greatest robots from history. The curator – Ben Russell – found some of the plans for Eric and asked the robot maker Giles Walker to rebuild him. He even let me come and see Eric while he was being rebuilt. It was an amazing experience. Thank you very much, Ben. And thanks to my son, Xavier, who came with me and asked much more interesting questions.

  When Eric was first created, he looked like the future. By the time Ben and Giles rebuilt him, he was history. He was a mechanical Rip van Winkle. He fell asleep in a world where hardly anyone had seen a robot. When he woke up, the world was full of robots. But none of those robots looked anything like him.

  As I type this, I can see a robot lawnmower wa
ndering around next door’s back garden nibbling the grass like a big plastic hedgehog. Modern robots come in all shapes and sizes – from next door’s hedgehog to Oppy, the robot that roamed the surface of Mars taking photographs and rock samples for fourteen years. It only stopped when it was swamped in a Martian dust storm. Oppy’s last message was, ‘My battery is low, and it’s getting dark.’

  We have robot checkouts in supermarkets, and robot cameras quietly watching our streets. The internet is run by a vast army of invisible ‘soft’ robots, who monitor our spending, translate languages, recommend books and holidays. More importantly, some of the things we have learned in making machines that act ever more like humans have in turn inspired us to make better and better artificial parts for our own bodies.

  Prosthetic legs now often have Bluetooth to help regulate the speed and the length of your stride when you walk on them. They’re also often made of carbon fibre, which feels warmer and more ‘human’ than wood or metal. Myoelectric and biometric technology uses signals from our own muscles to operate new hands and arms. Alfie’s story was inspired by the true story of Daniel Melville’s ‘hero arm’, which was built for him by Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne’s company Open Bionics, whose motto is ‘welcome to the future, where disabilities are superpowers’. Daniel’s amazing arm was based on the arm of his favourite hero: Adam Jensen, from the video game Deus Ex, and he was kind enough to talk to me about how it feels and what it takes to be part-bionic. Massive thanks to Daniel.

  As well as speaking to a really bionic person, I also got help from a real robot-maker. His name is Professor Andrew Vardy and he teaches at Memorial University in Canada. His robots are the exact opposite of Eric – they’re tiny, tame and very helpful to humans.

  It’s a pity, of course, that one reason we need to learn to replace human hands and legs is that humans spend a lot of time, money and technology injuring other humans. Shatila – like thousands of other children – lost her foot to an unexploded landmine. Landmines are planted during wartime, but they don’t vanish or stop working when the war is over. They are a kind of terrible legacy – staying in the ground, hurting innocent people for many years afterwards. Shatila is from Bosnia – a place I visited shortly after the war there had finished in 1995. People were already trying to clear the landmines then. More than twenty years later that work is still not finished. There are landmines like this in countries as far apart as Cambodia and Somalia. Some of the landmines that are still dangerous in Egypt date back to the 1950s. They’re still killing people today.