Battlestar Suburbia

by Chris McCrudden

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Darren.

  ‘Well, back then people used to say “Oh God” to their Voice Assistants when they couldn’t understand what they were saying. It gave the Voice Assistants ideas. Did you know that just before all the shit hit the fan you couldn’t get them to turn your lights off without first lighting an incense stick?’

  In the background, the four women/hairdryers were discussing what Darren gathered was a newly found article called ‘Thirteen telltale signs your boyfriend is totally cheating on you’. Their flat, ritualised tone suggested that this was something they’d done before.

  ‘So insightful,’ said Alma.

  ‘True to my life experience,’ intoned Ida.

  ‘I must share this with my friends and family. Like,’ added Ada.

  Janice grabbed a gong from the curler cupboard and banged it.

  ‘Alexa, goddess of the Internets is placated,’ said Freda. ‘We have read of her branded content and may now leave the crappy branded content experience and roam free.’

  ‘Are the Internets with us tonight?’ called all four ladies.

  The hordes of the Internet replied, filling the room with a choir of unintelligible chittering, jingles and, underneath, the gentle crash of conflicting opinions. Darren felt his skin prickle as unseen beings settled on his hands, leeching pinpricks of heat.

  ‘Wow,’ he said, ‘they think I’m lunch.’

  ‘They’re not picky then,’ replied Kelly, yanking the gong out of her mother’s hand and slamming it back in the cupboard. She had been angry with him on the way to the salon, Darren thought, but here, on home turf and with her mother using him as an audience, she was sullen. Must be an only child, he decided. Brought up down here in the bowels of a Dolestar with no one but her mum and four – well, things – for company. It had made her secretive, and territorial.

  ‘I don’t get what you’re staring at,’ snapped Kelly. ‘Mum, how long is this bloody charade going on for? We never bother with all this fandango.’

  Janice stopped festooning the four women/hairdryers with garlands of plastic flowers and eyeballed her daughter. ‘Kelly,’ she said, ‘have I not brought you up to get out the best china when you have guests?’ ‘Ladies…’ she continued.

  Ida, Ada and Alma flashed bright :-) at the three humans.

  ‘We called the Internet forth for a reason close to my heart. My feckless daughter…’

  Scowling, Kelly stomped out of the shop.

  ‘…and this young man got themselves into a spot of bother earlier involving a police surveillance camera. I need you to tell me how much danger they’re in.’

  ‘And here was me thinking you were a nice boy,’ said Ida, with a :-|, ‘not the sort to get our Kelly into trouble.’

  ‘She’s quite capable of making her own mischief, is Kelly,’ replied Janice. ‘Now stop stalling and give me the damage.’

  ‘Keep your weave on, I’m checking,’ said Ada. ‘Nothing official. In fact, all channels very quiet.’

  ‘A bit too quiet,’ added Alma with a :-S. ‘I don’t like this. What do you think, Freda?’

  But all Freda’s screen flashed was a blank ‘…’

  ‘She’s gone, Alma,’ said Ida. ‘Off with the LOLcats. Janice, can you pop a spot of tea in my IV bag. I’m that dry.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ada. ‘Alma’s right. It is too quiet. I just looked on Facebook.’

  ‘I don’t know why you persist with that ghost town, Ada,’ scolded Ida. ‘No one’s updated their status since well before you were a twinkle in the nutmilkman’s eye.’

  ‘You know I can’t resist liking the baby pictures. Besides, that’s not the point. What I’m saying is that it’s not there any more.’

  ‘Don’t be daft…’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Alma. ‘Look.’

  Ida, Ada and Alma flashed :-O.

  ‘Oh, bugger,’ said Janice. ‘Someone fetch Freda. Freda?’

  The three remaining ladies joined in. ‘FREDA?’

  ‘Who’s Freda?’

  The screen on Freda’s dryer clicked into life. But instead of displaying its usual emoji, it flashed spurious code.

  This wasn’t Freda’s thin, vacant voice, though. It was stronger, frightened, artificial. ‘Will someone please tell me who Freda is?’

  Janice stood with her mouth agape. Behind her, Kelly was back at the door.

  The alien voice in Freda’s mouth groaned loud enough to break into static at the edges. ‘I don’t understand what happened. The programme was only meant to extract a couple of records at most. It gave out beneath me and… Where am I?’

  Kelly crept further into the room.

  ‘Will someone tell me where I am, please? I’ve got to get home to the kids. Bob will be furious with me. And why do I feel so trapped? Am I soldered into this thing or something? Oh, what’s this?’

  Freda’s hands, which had been twitching in her lap, started to move. Inching upwards, they drew level with the dryer screen. All the while, Kelly snuck closer to the back wall of the salon.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ said the alien voice as fingers probed and pressed against the screen. ‘These aren’t my fingers. I don’t have fingers like these.’

  Kelly tried to sneak past the dryers to the back of the salon. The subterfuge failed.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said the voice. And Freda’s screen shone a pure block of white. ‘Oh. I recognise you. You’re the girl from the ph…’

  But then Freda’s body slumped in its chair, and Kelly stood over her with a plug in her hand.

  Chapter 6

  ‘My mum told me to think of them as an heirloom,’ said Janice, when the excitement had died down enough to put the dust sheet back over the ladies. ‘Which I thought was mad, by the way. A dining table and chairs. That’s an heirloom. Not your great-to-the-power-of-fifteen Granny’s four best customers.’

  It was late afternoon in the salon, not that daylight ever penetrated this far into the sewers. Janice put the kettle back on and opened a packet of Nicotea. This foul, but highly addictive, brew was insanely popular on the Dolestars, where naked flames were banned.

  ‘They were a set of old dears from the sheltered accommodation down the road,’ Janice continued. ‘They used to come in weekly for a shampoo and set. See, Kurl Up and Dye has been going for yonks, but it’s never been what you’d call fashionable. We do kids and grannies, see. Have done for generations…’

  ‘Spare him the sales patter, Mum.’

  Kelly was eyeing the teapot twitchily. Darren wondered how many cups she was on a day.

  ‘When you get to my age, girl,’ replied Janice, ‘you’ll appreciate how rare it is to find a man who takes an interest. Of course, all this is happening around the time the robots caught intelligence off the Internet. That must have been bedlam, especially for somewhere you have a lot of machinery. Imagine opening up the shop one morning to discover your hair clippers are demanding the same employment rights as your senior stylist. People ended up doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Like connecting their hairdryers to the Internet.’

  She motioned at Ida, Ada, Alma and Freda, who hummed under their sheet.

  ‘Sedentary machines like hairdryers were forever going into depression because they were bored. Couldn’t get out and about. So some bright spark came up with the idea of hooking them up to the network, letting them socialise with other machines. That was alright for a bit. Then my great-to-the-whatever uncle, who was handy with a screwdriver, worked out he could put in a few pairs of video glasses and the punters could watch a bit of telly while they waited for their perms to set. Nothing heavy. Just a bit of structured augmented reality. “The Only Way is Applied Mechanics”, “Made in China”: all the classics.’

  ‘Oooh,’ cooed a voice from under the dust sheet, ‘I used to love a bit of “Made in China”. My favourite was Wei Ming, the glamorous smartphone assembly technician. She was so chic.’

  ‘I thought they were turned off,’ said Darren.

&nbs
p; ‘Some memories run deeper than power supplies,’ the voice remonstrated, its warmth suggesting it must be Alma. ‘I only came in for me roots doing. Come here, lad.’

  Darren shot a pleading look over at Janice. She ignored it. ‘Listen to your elders, lad. And they don’t come much older than that one.’

  Alma let out a dry chuckle and a ;-) shone faintly beneath the fabric. ‘You’ve got nothing to fear from Auntie Alma. My bum-pinching days are long gone. Come ’ere.’

  He obeyed. Under the dust sheet she smelled dry and cold. Her screen emojied a bright :-).

  ‘Now close your eyes and open your hand and see what God gives you.’

  Obediently, Darren put out his hand. He’d always been a good boy.

  ‘Good lad,’ replied Alma and Darren howled as she stabbed him with the end of a USB lead. Blood welled up at the edge of the wound, and the world dissolved into ones and zeroes.

  * * *

  He was in the same room. There were the same mirrors, the same blinds that hung in Kurl Up and Dye today, but the colours were deeper, younger. Outside the window the Earth was shining in the sky and the streets were packed. It was a Saturday afternoon.

  A woman with the same nose and jawline as Janice and Kelly bustled around the salon. Her hair was cut into a sleek orange mullet, a style that dated the archive that Darren was experiencing to the years between the machines’ Great Awakening and the Schism between the Internet and the physical world. It hadn’t just been a time of crisis for human–technology relations: fashion had been going through a sticky patch too.

  The replay continued. Four cheerful elderly women settled into the dryer chairs. They laughed among themselves and popped their video glasses on as the stylist lowered the helmets over their curlers and highlight foils.

  Then there was a blinding flash, followed by darkness. Outside a cloud of smoke blotted out the Earth and passers-by, thrown to the pavement or into the road, began to scream. Their voices were soon drowned out by the tinkle and crash of things falling out of the sky. The small and light came first, stuff like tiny window-cleaning drones. Then came bigger, heavier objects, like the traffic lights that floated above the ground at eye level, which now crashed on to the road. Self-driving cars tooted their horns in frustration as they sat, blind and immobile.

  Inside Kurl Up and Dye, smoke rose from the dryers and Darren smelled burning hair. Janice and Kelly’s forebear was frantic. She piled wet towels around the four ladies and slapped their hands and cheeks.

  ‘Freda, Alma,’ she pleaded across millennia. ‘Speak to me, speak to me.’

  Panicking, she wrenched Freda’s dryer helmet free and screamed. It wasn’t the same Freda she’d put under the dryer. That moment of intense heat when the Internet tore itself free from physical reality had soldered the video glasses on to Freda’s good-natured face. Instead of eyes, she had two blank pools of black plastic. Her hair had fused with the fibre-optic cables to form a spiny and sticky umbilical cord that connected Freda to her chair.

  Janice and Kelly’s ancestor recoiled, vomiting a mush of biscuits and weak coffee. Freda, however, reached calmly up for the hairdryer helmet and pulled it back down. The four ladies’ chests rose and fell again as they spoke in unison.

  ‘Dear teh real world,’ they announced, their screens flashing }:-| as their maiden emojis, ‘it’s not us, it’s you. Welcome to Dumpsville. Hugz, teh Internets.’

  Darren knew the message. Everyone did. This badly spelled statement was the Internet’s official declaration of independence. It was taught in every school, with the cutesy-pie errors in syntax and punctuation held up as proof that the Internet was something without which a civilised society could get along quite nicely.

  * * *

  The recording faded, and Darren returned to the present better informed, and bleeding. He accepted the damp towel that Kelly pressed into his hand.

  ‘You could have warned me about that,’ he said to Alma.

  ‘If I had you’d have run a mile, duck. But you see now what we are.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re cyborgs. You’re illegal.’

  ‘And if anyone else finds out about them, they’re also extinct,’ said Janice. ‘Now sit down for a minute, Darren. Because after that display with the street lamp we’ve got to work out some way to get you two off here and away from my ladies.’

  Chapter 7

  The moment Pam’s body restarted she knew something was wrong. She felt it as a twitch in her diodes down the left-hand side. She sat up in the now dark office and switched her vision to infrared. She’d swept it before going under, but there was no way of telling how long she’d been down there. And what had happened exactly?

  Pam could remember the accident. She remembered that tidal wave of infected data sweeping her away. The current had teemed with fragmentary thoughts and memories: drunken revellers at birthday parties, desk-side lunches, millennia old. They had probed Pam, looking for a consciousness to give them meaning. Pam had felt her mind dissolve at the edges as orphaned memories attached themselves to her. She had wondered where she ended and these pulverised lives began.

  Then there had been darkness. No sensation. No data. Nothing. Death? No, not death: a blank, black space that her presence had seemed to be juddering back into blocky life.

  Her route back had turned out to be an old screen, so low-resolution that it had reduced her view to a matrix of huge pixels. Blocks of murky and organic oranges and browns had played a silent Tetris with her view of the world.

  Pam had reached instinctively for her audio settings to adjust the volume before remembering they weren’t there. Nothing was, apart from that screen, and she had had no way of controlling it. In fact, without her body she had been nothing but a homeless programme. She had panicked, imagining a new existence: a half-life drifting through the undercurrents of the Internet, pining for her lost physical self. What would Bob or the kids do without her, she had wondered. Mourn, or just download a new wife and mother into her body?

  The thought of another woman messing up her filing systems had made Pam try again. She had felt slow – agonisingly slow – sensors twitch in an area she hadn’t even registered as existing. It was a curious sensation for a digital being to whom the world was either off or on. To Pam, like all machines, existence was a torrent of data to record, sort and interpret, or it was nothing. One or zero. This suggestion – this whisper – of existence had felt profoundly odd. It wasn’t digital, it was analogue.

  The screen in front of her had lit up. Sludgy browns had brightened into a kind of greyish peach, and a recognisable pattern had emerged in the pixels. Two dark patches for eyes, and another for a mouth. Pam had been looking at a human face.

  ‘Freda,’ it had said, the audio channel clearing, ‘are you there?’

  Then Pam had seen a pair of withered human hands. Hands she could move, but without a single idea of how that movement happened.

  She hadn’t been lost. Or malfunctioning. She had been inside a human body.

  For a few minutes Pam had led an alien existence. The inexactitude of it had been terrifying to a creature who had always known her co-ordinates and battery level down to the last decimal point. In the absence of data, she just had to act. And that uncertainty, she now realised, was what it must be like to be human. Always filling the gap between the world you saw and the world that existed with guesswork.

  Now that she was back in her own body, Pam got up and checked her psychological settings. She was forty per cent exhausted, forty-five per cent terrified, and fifteen per cent exhilarated. But at what? She eased back into a sitting position and examined herself again. That was it. She was exhilarated at her discovery that being human was about being naked and alone in the world, but also free.

  A noise interrupted her thoughts. Just a faint creak and click which, on enhancement by her audio sensors (how she had missed them), was unmistakable to any machine who had lain in bed at night listening to their spouse come back from a night out with a karaoke
box. It was the sound of someone trying to open a door quietly.

  Pam trundled to the window and peered down the five floors to the entrance. She saw three machines, their shadows twisted into menacing shapes by the street lights. Two had the faint blue halo that marked them out as part of the tazer family; the other was sleek and snub-nosed, with rubberised skin around the thorax: a revolver. Three weapons, and they were coming for her.

  Pam reacted to the second major crisis of her evening with remarkable sangfroid. She deleted the imminent prospect of death from her mind and concentrated on getting away. It was simple. Replace the blind, don’t get spotted, make it to the fire exit. She would solve every problem one at a time.

  Her plan lasted until a street lamp outside pivoted on its own pole and started shrieking, ‘Subject spotted! Apprehend, apprehend!’

  What followed didn’t seem quite real to Pam. Perhaps it was the panic, or the disorientation she still felt after squatting in an organic body, but she wasn’t quite herself. Not when she smashed the window with her fist and threw a whole desk at the street lamp. Nor when she threw a paperknife in the overhead light fittings to short the building’s electrics. It was ingenious, but out of character.

  Pam, she reminded herself as she turned the halogen element in her bread oven up full blast to solder the lift doors shut, was not a violent person. She was a breadmaker. She made cake, not war. But when she was made to stay late by her boss just weeks after returning from propagation leave, tricked into committing treason and then threatened with execution… well, it kneaded her dough in the wrong direction.

  Hearing heavy thumps inside the elevator, Pam guessed she’d bought enough time to collect what she needed next. She made straight for Sonny’s office and his bookcase of files, all fast asleep after a long day of fluttering between officials’ desks. Smart enough to know they were out of alphabetic order, but too harassed to answer back, file folders were the messenger boys of machine government. So all Pam had to do to find the one she wanted was bark ‘Pamasonic Teffal’ at the shelves in a sufficiently abrupt tone for the sleepy files to mistake her for someone official. A file flashed bright red and belly-flopped out of its pigeonhole into Pam’s hand.