Battlestar Suburbia

by Chris McCrudden

  ‘Yeah,’ admitted Kelly, ‘but it’s hardly low-key, is it? The point was that this should help us get by the police. No one’s not going to notice this.’

  Darren found the solution to their problem under the workbench. Among the discarded scraps of lint-free cloth and lubricant, there were some cans of spray paint. He reached for the largest, its label marked with a vivid red.

  He owed this sudden flash of insight to Janice’s wig and tights. After a morning as Sister Dix, Darren felt like he knew something about the art of disguise. Sometimes blending in involved standing out for the wrong reasons.

  He squirted the machine a shade of red that was so intense that it didn’t so much shout as brag. It was perfect: the colour of priceless racing cars, or the manicure of a femme fatale. Kelly looked on, and her look of horror turned to admiration.

  With a paint job like that there was no way a policeman could mistake her creation for a petty criminal, or a down-and-out. When she was finished, and her chrome had been polished, she could only be one thing: a rich bytch, and no one in their right mind would mess with her.

  Chapter 17

  ‘So they set me up. They’re looking for you.’

  Janice didn’t know whether it was Pam’s story or the Nicotea, but she was shaking by the time it was finished. Alma, Ada and Ida shared her feelings, their screens blank with shock.

  Ada broke the silence. ‘Now don’t get me wrong,’ she said, ‘it sounds like you’ve had a terrible time, but I don’t see what they can want with us.’

  ‘Our bodies!’ said Alma. ‘Didn’t you listen?’

  ‘Yes, but I haven’t stood on my own two feet in a thousand years. I can’t move, and I’ve got a knackered old screen where my eyes should be. We couldn’t be much fun to squat in, eh Pam?’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ replied Pam, ‘even in a body like…’

  ‘Freda’s. That’s our friend Freda you’re borrowing.’

  ‘Freda’s, well, the sensations are overwhelming. It’s like nothing I’ve experienced. Even if it could only move a single finger I can imagine this… well, I can imagine it becoming addictive.’

  Pam paused, testing the rightness of the word. ‘Yes, that’s it. Addictive. It’s like feeling connected and disconnected at the same time.’

  The experience was like living a microsecond behind one’s self, Pam thought. The sensations were sharper, colours more intense. But above all, there were no extraneous data feeds to filter out, no buzzing alerts to dampen down. Humans must have them – no organism could survive without some mechanism for checking whether their heart was still beating – but that was done somewhere beyond an individual’s consciousness. Being freed of all that was intense, but, for a machine engineered to pay attention to everything, also blissful. Were she a terminally hyperactive machine – like a high-powered smartphone, for instance – she would pay a lot of money for this kind of relaxation.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said after a while, feeling bits of incoherent and incomplete data come together in what she guessed was her first human intuition. ‘I think I know what they’re going to do.’

  ‘At last,’ said Ida, with a }:-/, ‘something useful. Come on, then.’

  ‘You remember I told you about my boss?’

  ‘The one who’d been touched on the touchscreen a few too many times?’ asked Alma. ‘You know I never could get on with my smartphone. Even back in the days before they had minds of their own, it was like they ran your lives for you.’

  ‘He was desperate to know what it felt like to be inside a human. But it wasn’t curiosity. It was more like I’d taken the car he wanted to own out for a test drive. He wants you as a prototype.’

  Janice checked the security cameras one more time. They were all dark. The search would have been called off for the evening, but it would continue tomorrow. On the Dolestars their options were limited: a compliant population and nothing to steal kept crime low, so the enforcement equipment to hand was basic. On Earth, however, they had all manner of ingeniously nasty machines to hunt out rogue humans. She imagined the army of drones that even now would be crossing the blackness of space. Light, mobile and deadly in a detached way that made them all the more terrifying, they would comb every square centimetre of Discovery for their target.

  ‘They’re going to take my ladies to bits and turn them into a schematic,’ said Janice.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Pam.

  ‘They’re not going to find us, are they, though?’ asked Ada with a quiet :-/. ‘We’ve been safe here all this time.’

  ‘We were until I was daft enough to take their bait.’ Janice sat down heavily on the edge of a salon chair. Protecting the shop was all she had ever done, and soon it would be destroyed. ‘I’m sorry, ladies, but if they want to find us and they know we’re here it’s only a matter of time. We can’t keep running forever.’

  ‘Janice Braithewaite,’ said Ida, flashing a fearsome <|oo|>, ‘you cannot seriously be saying we should sit here and wait for those bug-eyed monsters to come and get us.’

  Janice, however, could only think of Kelly. Somewhere down there on an enemy planet: on the run, with nowhere to go and nowhere to come back to. Failure flooded over her and she began to cry. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, ‘but I don’t know what to do.’

  After a few awkward seconds, a rickety-looking mechanical grip squeaked out of the side of Alma’s dryer and gave Janice a few comforting pats on the shoulder.

  ‘You know what, ladies,’ said Alma, ‘I think we haven’t been giving our wonderful friend enough help and support lately. You can see she’s been under all kinds of pressure, and what have we been doing? Sitting here with bags of Nicotea pontificating. It’s time we did something to help.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Ida.

  ‘You know,’ replied Alma with a <|oo| nudge. ‘It’s been a while, but…’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Ida. ‘Not that. You know I get travel sick, and I can’t suck barley sugars since my tongue disintegrated.’

  ‘This isn’t about you though, is it, Ida,’ Alma replied with an unusual degree of firmness. ‘And besides, would you rather be a bit queasy or torn to bits to make a blueprint?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘So that’s settled then,’ said Alma. She threw the room a bright :-). ‘Are we ready, ladies?’

  ‘As I’ll ever be,’ replied Ida.

  Alma, Ida and Ada’s dryer screens blanked out with a loud pop, their emojis replaced with a countdown. ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…’

  Janice watched through a film of tears, scarcely believing what she saw. Her whole life the ladies had been chatty, friendly, interfering and often infuriating, but they had never once actually done anything. They were as immovable and as passive as pieces of heavy antique furniture.

  ‘Three, two, one… zero!’

  The building lurched and creaked as one side then the other of the salon pitched upward so sharply it threw furniture across the room. The ladies, bolted to their dryers at the back of the room, clutched their armrests and gave a collective :-[:] grimace.

  The salon convulsed again. Empty mugs and heated rollers clattered around Janice like the ball bearings in a puzzle. She scrambled away from the mirrors, fearing one would fall on her as the room quaked. Then it stopped. Or at least it eased, and she felt another kind of motion in the room.

  They were moving forwards.

  Janice pushed her hair, which had fallen over her eyes for about the eightieth time in the past twenty-four hours – she really must think about a more practical style – and stood up. She staggered to the door and opened it.

  ‘Careful!’ warned Alma.

  And Janice looked down to see the salon was now several metres above floor level, while a clank-clanking soon explained why this was possible. Every second or so, a four-toed metal foot struck the ground underneath the salon. It took the weight of the building for a moment as it lurched forward and was steadied a second later by another foot landing on the othe
r side. Legs. The whole building was moving forwards on – she peered down for a better look – what looked like a pair of metal chicken legs.

  ‘You know,’ said Alma to the other ladies, ‘I can’t remember the last time we took the Baba Yaga 4000 out for a spin.’

  ‘It must have been a good three or four hundred years ago,’ mused Ada. ‘Have we really been put down at that spot for so long?’

  ‘Time flies, eh?’ replied Alma. Catching Janice standing stunned by the door, she added, ‘This is how we moved the salon about in the old days. The cyborg hunters were more active then, so we were quite the wanderers, weren’t we? Saw all over the sewers.’

  ‘I told your Gran4 I didn’t like it,’ Ida told Janice. ‘Didn’t hold with caravanning when I was alive, and I was damned if that was going to change.’

  ‘She was overruled,’ said Alma. ‘Bless your Gran4. She was a clever lady with a toolkit. Made most of the Baba Yaga out of an old crane. I see a lot of her in Kelly.’

  At the mention of Kelly, Janice looked back out into the darkness and wondered where she could be. Had she found somewhere to hide or was she in a police cell watching a printer spit out a charge list? The not-knowing needled her, yet she prayed for it to continue. Better that than the sight of Kelly’s captured face on a news report.

  ‘Can we run forever?’ she murmured.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Alma, ‘but we can try. Now be a good girl and turn the radio on. I like a bit of light entertainment while I’m driving.’

  Janice staggered over to a neutered radio twitching on a nearby shelf. Kelly had long since ripped out its transmitter and speech centres but had never quite got round to lobotomising it, so it snarled whenever Janice picked it up. She chastised it with a sharp snap across the volume buttons and turned the dial. The salon filled with light music, over which sang a machine with the quarter-tone flat trill that marked her out as a karaoke machine:

  My soap flakes bring all the boys to the yard

  I’m like, they’re better than…

  Janice pushed another button with an instinctive ‘Ugh’. She hated Cleaners’ Playtime. The news was starting on the other side. She couldn’t stop herself from turning it on. She had to know.

  The sound that greeted her was an unintelligible crowd. It sounded like thousands of people. They were shouting something together. What was it? Janice pushed the ‘fifteen seconds back’ button and listened again. The first word was something like ‘freedom’. Yes, that was it. ‘Freedom…’ ‘Freedom for Fleshies’.

  She dropped the radio, which let out an ouch of static. The hum of protest faded, and the voice of a correspondent filled the room.

  ‘Special forces are being called out to an unnamed Dolestar, where a spate of vandalism following the destruction of a surveillance robot has sparked scenes of unrest.’

  Janice found the TV remote and switched it on. She saw blurred drone footage of a crowd surging through Discovery’s streets. The ident ‘Live from the Dolestars – Human Order Crisis’ vouched for its currency. A few blue-lighted police bots hovered here and there, but they kept their distance. She soon saw why, as a young man broke from the main body of the mob and lobbed a stone at a street lamp. It guttered, and the camera panned out to reveal darkness: street lamps were out right across the space station.

  The crowd pressed on. Some more enterprising souls had compensated for the lack of light by taking a match to their mops. They blazed in the night-time with lemon- and pine-scented flames.

  ‘Crikey,’ said Janice to the ladies. ‘Well, it looks like the diversion worked.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Ida, ‘but I think that depends on how determined our pursuers are, eh Pam? Pam?’

  But there was no answer, because Pam was gone.

  Chapter 18

  At first, Pam was too busy driving Freda’s body to realise she had one of her own to go to. She felt it as a dull throb in her primary diagnostic system, and that was almost overwhelmed by the crash of ‘WTF’ sensations that crackled through her programming as it got to grips with a world where nerve fibres replaced wires and a tiny electric impulse could accomplish a great deal.

  But the feeling grew when the remaining cyborgs activated the Baba Yaga 4000. As the salon stood up, Pam also felt the space in which her consciousness squatted constricting. Freda’s mind seemed smaller and the presence of her sister cyborgs closer, like she’d suddenly traded down from a detached house to a terrace. The space contracted again as Kurl Up and Dye began its journey through the Discovery’s sewers, and Pam then saw what was up. This was mind-sharing. The four ladies under the hairdryers had learned to co-operate as an improvised network. More impressive still, they had worked out a way to partition their consciousnesses so they could control other machines at will. Like the Baba Yaga 4000 underneath the salon, which as a machine was as bird-brained as its inspiration. Yet with Ida, Ada, Alma and Freda controlling it, the Baba Yaga could take Kurl Up and Dye anywhere.

  Thinking that this nagging sensation must be an error, Pam hunted for the relevant fragment in her programming. If it was corrupt she’d just delete it; it wasn’t like she needed it any more. She sent a search and replace through her whole codebase, but it bounced. The feeling intensified. A gentle pull turned to a yank. Pam lost her grip and, sensing an opening, Freda’s displaced consciousness snuck back in. Freda might be old and weak in body, but her mind had roamed free over the Internet without losing any of its integrity for half an eternity. She fought dirty, clouding Pam’s vision with an injection of junk data.

  Fearful of infection, Pam backed away and Freda’s mind gushed back into the vacated space, while the pull at the other end of Pam’s programming grew irresistible. For an agonised moment, Pam felt like she would be torn apart, and then the stomp-stomp-stomp of the Baba Yaga 4000 underneath gave way to the acid-flux tang of solder.

  And a feeling of… mass.

  Her suspicion that she was back in a body grew as feedback systems, which had spent the past few hours flailing around the Internet like seaweed in a storm, stiffened and felt purposeful again. Their feeds started up again: those blasted things that reported every piece of sensory data back to her CPU with relentless accuracy and still didn’t add up to a damn thing.

  As her operating system booted, tantalising hints as to what this new body was like filtered through. Her dough-paddle programme stretched out and wandered through the new and unfamiliar home of a much more powerful electric motor, while the firmware for her heating element replaced itself with the equivalent for a combustion engine. Pam was suffused with a new feeling, or rather the possibility of a feeling: speed.

  Finding her new hands for the first time, she gave an experimental grip, and a throttle went off in her thorax. What had happened?

  Pam’s visual systems were last to boot up. She opened her eyes and saw the dusty ceiling of the room she was in. Right in the centre of her field of vision were two pools of light, which a new feed of lumens data told her were her eyes. Lamp-eyes.

  ‘I think she’s coming round,’ crackled a nearby voice. Her hearing systems still hadn’t quite settled, so it was fuzzy around the edges. It was soft and human. Female?

  Pam sat up. The first thing that struck her was how quickly she could do this. Kitchen appliances like breadmakers weren’t built for speed: their ancestors had sat on shelves, or more often in cupboards or utility rooms waiting to be used. This body, however, was fast: instructions and counter-instructions shot across her circuitry so quickly that just sitting up was enough to make her feel giddy.

  ‘My head,’ she said, feeling an unfamiliar purr at the bottom of her vocal range. Then her vision cleared and she took in the sight around her. She was sitting up on a workbench in a workshop. It was windowless and small, which constituted a fire hazard, with doors on opposite walls.

  As the nearby voice had indicated, she wasn’t alone. Beside her was a pair of humans in overalls: a man and a woman. The man was looking at Pam with that look of lu
st that young men throughout the universe devote to premium-priced consumer goods. He must also have had a run-in with a make-up counter, as his face was smeared with the ghost of inexpertly removed lipstick. The woman, standing with her arms folded, appraised her with an engineer’s pride. She knew this face. It was Kelly: which meant the young man must be Darren.

  ‘You,’ she said. And then, because new body or no body she was still a mother, ‘You do know your poor mum’s worried sick about you.’

  Darren dropped a screwdriver and hopped around the workshop clutching his foot. Kelly caught it on the rebound and held the flat-blade to the weak spot where Pam’s new thigh and thorax joined, covered in a thin layer of silicone.

  ‘What have you done with my mum?’ said Kelly.

  Pam tested her new reflexes by swiping the screwdriver out of Kelly’s hand. It landed in a still-molten glob of epoxy resin. She laughed, and heard that throttle again. It was a motorcycle engine. They’d brought her back as a motorbike? How scandalous.

  ‘Maybe I should be asking you what you’ve done with my motherboard?’

  ‘We brought it back from the dead.’

  At this, the subroutine-consciousnesses in Pam’s mind replayed her death. The pain, the spark, the panic as her software downloaded Pam’s core programming through the stump of her modem. For the first time since the event, she wondered what had made it through. The real Pam, or merely a copy. And whether that mattered.

  ‘But why did you do that?’ she asked.

  Darren hopped over on one foot and dropped a BlockPaper on the workbench. It was still recovering from incineration, but there it was on the cover: her name.

  ‘Even if we’re not on the same side,’ said Darren, ‘it looks like we’ve got the same enemies.’

  Pam narrowed the beam of her lamp-eyes over Darren. He was a curious amalgam of characteristics. There were the short, bandy legs typical of a human brought up in the low-Vitamin-D environment of the Dolestars, and a face straight out of a knockabout comedy. But there was something about his expression that told her it was unwise to dismiss him as a clown – even if his face was still caked in glittery make-up.