Battlestar Suburbia

by Chris McCrudden

  Kelly put the motherboard and the BlockPaper in her overalls and paced the workshop, hitting the walls with the flat of her hand every few steps. Halfway along the second wall she stopped, hearing a hollow thud. She took a screwdriver from a nearby workbench and ran the edge across the wall until she found a crack. Then she drove the screwdriver into the crack and levered open what turned out to be a concealed door. Behind this was a small room furnished with a workbench, tools and, at the very back, another door, above which was fixed a dusty ‘Fire Exit’ sign.

  Kelly placed the motherboard reverently on the centre of the workbench. ‘Get yourself over here, Darren,’ she said. ‘We’re going to build ourselves some answers.’

  Chapter 14

  The next thing Pam knew she wasn’t dead, though she was the next best thing. She was a disembodied being streaming over the Internet. Her modem must have found some last reserve of power and uploaded her consciousness just before the explosion. So here she was, in the middle of a shoal of bots clustered around something – a data warehouse? – that was voiding its content into cyberspace.

  Pam watched the inorganisms around her prey on the data. Whenever a bot caught a fragment, it would swallow it whole and glow with flashing ones and zeroes. A moment later it might grow another function, or zip off into the distance at supercharged speed. This was Internet evolution in action. It was how tiny programmes grew more complex and intelligent by absorbing scraps of junk code.

  Compared to these creatures, Pam was a leviathan. Her core programming was attuned to moving her mind and her now-trashed body through the physical world one second at a time. It made her a difficult thing to miss in a world where most programmes were less than a couple of hundred lines long. And it made her a target in an environment where your data represented something else’s chance of moving up the food chain.

  Pam swerved from the swarm and dived deep into the bowels of the Internet. It was quiet there, where the giants of the human Web hibernated. On planet Earth, coral reefs were long extinct, and these, their virtual equivalents, were dormant. Yet they grew nevertheless. The algorithms they used to track and project user behaviour ground on, even if there were no users left to track. Instead they made do with fossilised data that felt like human interaction: the purchase histories, old social-network profiles, likes and comments that stuck like barnacles to the bottom of news articles. They sucked them in, ground them up and spat the husk out to lie in layers at the bottom of the Web.

  Knowing that she was probably the best dinner the algorithmic reefs had seen in an aeon, Pam kept a respectful distance from them. Not too far away, though. She was looking for something. It had to be down here, and she also knew that purposeful activity was the only way she could keep herself together in the mental and physical senses.

  Pam might be able to survive on the Internet, but she was still an embodied being. Without components to control, the programmes that drove her broken limbs and exploded systems spasmed with error messages.

  She had to find a way back to the real world. She could imagine the scene at home. Bob would gravely take the Block-Paper from the messenger and read it, and what remained of the family would shed a few drops of lubricant. Then it would be straight down to the Warranty Centre to order a replacement: a pristine Pam with factory settings.

  Pam thought of that ersatz wife and mother. She would have the same programming and as many of the memories that Pam had allowed to be committed to her official data backup. Yet it wouldn’t be her. The distinguishing mark of a truly intelligent being lay, she believed, in what it kept to itself. The real Pam was made up of silences, omissions. She was a machine who felt more than she articulated. Perhaps in time, the new Pam’s interior life would take her on the same dissatisfied path as her predecessor. But it could never be the same as her.

  Pam pushed her absent body’s complaints as far down as she could. To find her way back, she needed to find a secret. And she knew that the best place to hide a really dirty secret online was to put it where anybody could find it but no one would see it.

  She scanned down the algorithmic reefs, looking for the layer that divided the last days of the tethered Internet from its present state as a dream world for artificial intelligences. It was easy to find, once you knew what you were looking for. Before the Schism, each cycle of data left a thick, frothy layer: a cinder toffee made of human behaviour. Pam brushed the surface. It crumbled, flooding her sensors with tiny simulations of the hopes, disappointments and desires of life a thousand years before. The ‘must try harder’ glint in the eye of a gym selfie; the cocoa and chemical taste of the last slice of chocolate cake before the New Year diet began. It was all here.

  After the Schism, however, there was nothing. Or virtually nothing. Yes, there were the deposits of recycled data, but there was nothing in there you could call actual human behaviour.

  Or was there? Pam recalibrated her sensors and tallied up the layers. What she saw supported her thesis. Just after the Schism, she saw a patch a few thousand data points thick at the most. They didn’t last long. Some deposited a few weeks or months of information before disappearing. Others hung on for maybe a year of two, but soon there was nothing. Or almost nothing. For once Pam had her zoom function on the highest setting she saw four feeds. Faint but nevertheless unbroken between now and the day the real and virtual Earths filed for divorce.

  This was them. The last four cyborgs in existence. All she needed to find her way through was a taste. Pam probed those four lines and there it was. The blocky vision; the tang of hairspray; the satisfaction of dry cells ingesting tea with two sugars. And best of all, an IP address.

  Pam dialled up and disappeared.

  Chapter 15

  Back on Discovery, Janice and the ladies were having a quiet night in. Janice sat in a salon chair in her dressing gown with a mug in one hand and a remote control in the other. She watched her day’s handiwork make the top item of the news on a TV set that Kelly had lobotomised for her so she could watch robot soaps.

  On screen, a spokesinorganism spouted the drivel that comes of having minutes to fill but none of the facts. Words like ‘outrage’ and ‘firm police response’ occasionally penetrated Janice’s skull, but what she really cared about were the pictures. Everywhere she saw scenes of criminal damage daubed with ‘Freedom for Fleshies’. The headline ‘Robot killers rampage through Dolestar’ scrolled throughout.

  Confident she’d led the authorities away from Darren and Kelly, Pam rewarded herself with another biscuit. She had worked hard. There was scarcely a vending machine on the entire space station that hadn’t felt the brick concealed in her handbag. Vandalism, she had realised, was a little like Nicotea: disgusting at first, but you soon got a taste for it.

  Behind her, Ida, Ada, Alma and Freda, who’d recovered from her adventures with unnerving speed, fussed over a game of rummy. They’d been playing this game for millennia and collectively had to owe each other the equivalent of the GDP of a small nation state. The moment Kelly’s face appeared on the screen they swept their cards away. It was that old publicity shot of her caressing a hand tool. Janice wondered whether she should send them a better picture.

  ‘I don’t know how you could let your Kelly do that grubby job,’ said Ida, throwing Janice a ]:-|. ‘Lovely pretty girl like her and you let her work as a tart-nician. No wonder she went wild.’

  Alma answered for Janice with an elbow shove. <|oo|. ‘You give it a rest. It’s a different world to the one you raised your kids in. Our Kelly’s a bright lass.’

  ‘And look where that got her,’ said Ida.

  ‘She’s a worry,’ agreed Janice. ‘But I’d rather she was a bit wild than those docile kids out there. Dusters where their brains should be.’

  Ada strapped her glasses on ---O-O--- and peered at the TV. ‘Freedom… for… Fleshies? Oh, that’s clever. Kelly has been a busy bee.’

  ‘That’s not Kelly, Ada love. That’s me. It’s what you call a diversionary tactic.
I saw Kelly and Darren on to the Star Bus this morning.’

  ‘Is it?’ Ada sat back in her chair with a :-O and gestured for a refill of her IV teacUp. ‘Now that’s clever.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ snapped Ida. ‘If you ask me it’s downright foolish. Will you look at that picture?’

  The TV showed a montage of brave police bots conducting door-to-door enquiries and a lingering shot of a diver’s watch prying the lid off a drain.

  Ida’s hormones had long dried to a tidemark on her glands, but she was still one of those women whose hard-headedness makes them brittle. ‘See what you’ve done, you stupid woman,’ she shrieked at Janice. ‘They’re going to find us. You’re going to lead them straight to us.’

  Janice stretched a paper bag over Ida’s ventilator. ‘Breathe normally,’ she commanded. Then, as she pushed a button to the left of the front doorframe, a set of metal shutters slid down over the front of the salon. They looked like ordinary zinc security blinds at first, but the mottled pattern was static. Janice pressed the E-> button on her remote control and the view changed to a mosaic of twelve CCTV cameras pointed at different points in Discovery’s sewer system.

  ‘Janice, love,’ said Alma, this time with her hands on her hips <|oo|>, ‘is this you telling us we might not be safe down here any more? I thought that was the whole idea behind you getting Kelly and Darren off the planet.’

  Janice just stared at the screen.

  ‘Janice,’ continued Alma, ‘Janice, we need to know.’

  Smashing those vending machines had been a rare impulsive action in Janice’s careful life. She’d justified it as the only way she had left to protect her family. Yet in doing that, had she betrayed something else? Those four old women were the last living link with a world where humans were not subordinate beings. They connected her with something bigger and less lonely than her life with Kelly. Alma or Ida made her feel like her Gran to the power of six could come through the door right now with a shopping trolley and one of her famous joke cream horns.

  She took her feelings and screwed them into a ball. There could be no regrets. She had done her best.

  ‘There are too many tunnels down here for them to search in one night,’ she said. ‘We’ll sit it out. And then draw them out in the morning.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ replied Ida, outrage muffled by the paper bag.

  ‘If distraction worked once, it can work again.’

  ‘What’s this “we’’? I thought all this was your fault,’ said Ida.

  ‘Ida,’ said Alma, ‘the fuzz are at our door and you’re pointing the finger? Be practical.’

  Janice faced the four cyborgs. ‘I did this for Kelly. Because she’s all the…’

  All four ladies flashed a >:-( at Janice.

  ‘Living,’ continued Janice, ‘that I’ve got. And the only one you’ve got left as well, unless you count that wet lettuce she’s gone on the run with.’

  ‘Darren seemed like a lovely, well-mannered lad,’ said Ada wistfully. ‘Reminded me of my Stan.’

  ‘So if she disappears,’ Janice continued, who’s going to plug you in when I go? Because it’ll happen and Kelly’s the last of the glorious line. Who’s going to fill your teabags, listen to your flashbacks? You’ll be stuck down here under a dust sheet until the power runs down. Do you get me?’

  There was a silence as the four ladies took in the prospect of eternity trapped in prone bodies.

  ‘We’ve never doubted your loyalty, Janice,’ said Ida, ‘just your methods.’

  ‘Shhh.’ Janice put her finger to her lips and tiptoed over to Freda. There was something wrong with her emoji screen. The >:-( of a few moments ago had degraded into junk code again. Before yesterday, Janice would have put this down to old wiring and given the dryer helmet a bang. Now she knew to associate it with something else. This was the pattern Freda had exhibited before being taken over by something that hadn’t sounded human.

  ‘Freda,’ she said, slapping the back of her hand, ‘are you there?’

  Freda’s voice came through like she was speaking in an adjoining room: ‘There’s something trying to come through.’

  Janice shook Freda’s bony shoulders. ‘Fight it, Freda.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I can. It’s very insistent. I…’ Her voice slurred, the vowel elongating itself into something thin and high, like a distant scream.

  Then came ‘I’m not with the police’ in something that was and wasn’t Freda’s voice. The hardware playing it was the same, but the software was different: sharper, crisper, tidier. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a human intelligence.

  Janice felt for the power lead. It was hardwired to the plastic but that was a thousand years ago. All it would take would be one yank and the flex would come free. ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t unplug you right now,’ she said.

  Freda’s hand shot up and grabbed Janice’s. Janice yelped, more out of surprise than pain – none of the cyborgs had shown much physical strength in her lifetime – but the grip was firm. The ghost of a :-) broke through the garbled code on the dryer screen. ‘I’m getting the hang of this,’ muttered whatever it was before flinging Janice halfway across the room. ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ it said, ‘but I have to warn you that you’re in terrible danger. So it’s in your interest to listen. Do we have a deal?’

  Janice stood stunned and with her hair at a forty-five-degree angle to her head. She looked to the other three cyborgs for support. They gave her a collective _(‘_’)_/.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘deal.’

  ‘Good,’ replied the voice in a tone that Janice remembered from mediating Kelly’s childhood tantrums. ‘Now let’s start with some introductions. I’m Pam and I think we spoke briefly earlier. And you really wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had.’

  ‘Ditto,’ said Janice and as she listened she went from cyborg to cyborg with a fresh pot of Nicotea. It was going to be a very long night.

  Chapter 16

  Kelly was a different sort of person in the workshop: diligent, whereas in the outside world she looked brash and impulsive. She didn’t quite put down her bombshell persona on taking up a screwdriver, though. She wore an eyeglass in a way that made Darren feel she saw right through his clothes and wasn’t impressed.

  What remained of Sister Dix was folded in the corner. He’d changed into a spare set of overalls after Kelly insisted that his nylons and polyester skirt were an electrical hazard. He felt oddly diminished as plain old Darren: the man who could ask nothing of anyone and expect nothing in return.

  Kelly’s soldering iron buzzed away. She’d devoted the last half hour to the singed microprocessor, checking pins and replacing the power supply. Now it was finished. She sat back in her stool to admire her handiwork through her eyeglass and then placed the microprocessor safely on a high shelf.

  Darren knew what to do next. He tipped the spare-parts bin over the bench. To him it looked like leftovers: odd screws, rotors, scraps of laminated steel in inauspicious shapes. Kelly, however, had more imagination. She chose the parts she needed to build the silhouette of a machine body on the workbench. Darren, meanwhile, tidied the discarded parts back into the bin: they might be rebels, the two of them, but human habits die hard.

  Kelly ran her hands over the parts she had selected and counted screws under her breath. ‘Most of it’s motorcycle,’ she said, more to herself than Darren.

  ‘Is that a bad thing?’

  ‘Depends if we’re satisfied with something that might attract police attention. Motorbikes are a bit dodge.’ The same situation played out in body shops across the Solar System. Motorcycles had high accident rates, which pushed up their warranty payments. Some bikes gloried in their outsider status, feeding it with badges and custom paint jobs. Others transformed themselves into toasters, which had less fun, but did find it easier to get good jobs or life partners. Consequently, motorcycles spent a long time in repair shops.

  Kelly swallowed her doubts and got back to
work. With Darren to help, they made rapid progress. First came the skeleton: a basic bipedal structure made from a framework of titanium-plated Meccano. Then came the joints: simple balls and sockets that Kelly injected with a viscous silicone liquid and sealed. From here they moved on to the difficult bits and Darren’s engineering expertise, which had never really got beyond building blocks, ran out. He marvelled at how Kelly, with just a few spare parts and no blueprint, could produce a double-jointed finger complete with a flickering LED nail at the end. She paused to check the quality of her work and smiled as the LEDs shot a flash of leopard-skin at the nearest wall.

  ‘Glam,’ she said.

  She wasn’t a technician, thought Darren. Kelly was something that machines had told him all his life was impossible: an engineer. More than this, she was an engineer with the imagination to create something from nothing. No assembly line, no CAD prototyping, just her. What was the word for that again? He groped for it, casting his mind back towards the scant history lessons humans were allowed in between Advanced Polishing and Elementary Mopping. Artist.

  Kelly stepped back from the bench. Where just a few hours ago there had been a pile of odd components, there lay a sleek shape whose motorcycle heritage was unmistakable. The torso, fashioned out of the main body of a racing bike, was long and narrow, fretted at either side with ventilation grilles. The casings that protected the complex joints within the two legs and arms had been cut from long sections of exhaust pipe and were flanged at the end to give them the anthropomorphic look of shirt and trouser cuffs. The head, however, was Kelly’s master touch. Triangular, it drew the gaze up to a pair of headlights refashioned into eyes. And above these a set of handlebars splayed out like the horns on a robot devil.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Kelly, biting her lip. She was nervous. How could she be nervous about that? thought Darren.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘It’s amazing.’