Battlestar Suburbia

by Chris McCrudden

  Taking a deep breath, Darren pretended to clean between the connections and pulled the cable marked ‘left leg’ out of its port. Two things happened: a disembodied voice announced ‘Game Over, Player Four’, and one of the human figures fell over. As it hit the ground the helmet toppled off, revealing a shaven-headed man underneath. He was unconscious, deep in the drooling variety of sleep that comes out of a hypodermic needle.

  The machine whose port Darren had pulled out sat upright. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ it barked. He was a pompous middle-manager type, descended from an ergonomic keyboard. The print had worn off his keys in a manner suggestive of many late nights spent firing off aggressive emails to subordinates.

  ‘I’m so sorry, sir,’ said Paula, rushing over to clip Darren over the ear. ‘I’m sure it was an accident.’

  Darren held the unplugged connector up to the light. ‘It slipped out. Won’t be a moment, sir.’

  ‘Well, it’s not as simple as that,’ he clicked, tapping out each word on his keys as he spoke. ‘I was at Level Six there and now I shall have to go right back to the beginning. It’s most unfair.’

  Darren saw one of the still-standing humans turn round and, shakily raising its arm, give the keyboard the finger.

  ‘Was there any need for that?’ said the keyboard to the laptop in the next bed. The laptop Ctrl+Alt+Del’d awake, and its corresponding human on the other side of the glass slumped into a pose you can only achieve after years of yoga practice or eight pints of lager.

  ‘Loser,’ it said and, firing up a spreadsheet, pointed out a table that tallied ‘6’ under the column ‘Hugh-Wai’ and ‘0’ under ‘Casey O’Keys’. ‘You’ll never get your licence like this.’

  ‘It wasn’t me. It was those bloody cleaners.’

  ‘Fleshies?’ replied the laptop, flipping its lid around to peer at Darren, Kelly and Paula through its webcam. ‘Ew. What are you doing in here?’

  ‘Spot check,’ said Paula. ‘Everything seems to be in order. Now if you don’t mind we have to get off and fill in the accident book.’

  Darren and Kelly leapt to their feet. The laptop, however, was less easily fazed than its colleague. ‘This is meant to be a closed room,’ it said.

  Kelly cut in. ‘We didn’t like to say but we’re actually pest control. We’ve had reports of mice.’

  ‘I’ll have you know some of my best friends are mice,’ said the keyboard.

  ‘We meant the other type,’ continued Kelly. ‘You know, the kind that eats through cables and pees all over your components.’

  ‘Oh. Did you find any?’

  Darren got in on the act. ‘That’s what I was doing down there, sir. Found some minor nibbling but nothing to worry about. We’d better go and get the poison. Have those little blighters out of your wiring in no time.’

  ‘What was that about wiring?’

  Another machine – this one a cardiogram – had entered the room on castors. Its head was a round, green screen atop a long, thin steel neck. As it was a piece of diagnostic equipment, it didn’t have a face, but it did have a very expressive wave form that bounced around its screen in surprise at seeing Darren, Kelly and Paula.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ it said.

  ‘We had reports of mice in the next suite,’ replied Kelly.

  The cardiogram ignored Kelly and wheeled over to Paula, registering a puzzled _________/__________ as it realised her lab coat was wet-look plastic.

  ‘She likes to be able to wipe-clean,’ said Darren.

  ‘Supervisor,’ continued the cardiogram, addressing Paula, ‘I’m assuming these cleaners are new and therefore haven’t yet learned the appropriate way to address their superiors. What are they doing in here?’

  ‘They’ve been making a mess,’ clicked the keyboard. ‘Pulled my left leg out. Put ninety minutes of practice up in smoke and my human driving test is booked for next…’

  The cardiogram’s waveform contorted into ///////////// as it shushed the keyboard. ‘What have I told you?’ Then, spotting the keyboard’s hands over its keys, it squealed in alarm. ‘Are you transcribing this conversation… You lot,’ it said to Paula, Darren and Kelly, ‘get outside now. I’ll deal with you later.’

  The three obeyed without hesitation, as the cardiogram subjected the machines to a piercing burst of its failure alarm. Its anger was more eloquent than any of the keyboard’s accidental disclosures. It was confirmation.

  Darren’s heart pounded. They had found something – a training programme that appeared to teach machines to drive human bodies – but how deep did it go? It was official enough for a government-issue test-and-measurement machine to be overseeing the programme, and corporate enough for its trainees to be civil servants. But why was it happening here?

  ‘What do we do now?’ he asked, as inside the training room the shouting stopped.

  ‘We run,’ said Kelly and, grabbing Darren by the shirt, dragged him back down the corridor.

  Chapter 22

  Later that evening, Janice popped her head out of a manhole cover and sniffed an atmosphere spiced with pine disinfectant and smoke. She heard shouting in the distance, and over it all the hum of drones. This was a quiet spot, but only because the devastation had already moved on somewhere else. The shops on either side of the road were burned out, their windows melted down into mounds of grey ash. Only a military-grade drone with a mounted laser cannon could achieve that, so airstrikes must already have started. There were traces of protests – singed J-cloths, the odd abandoned shoe, troubling blood spots – but no humans, dead or injured. Not yet at least. Janice assumed they would be rounding all the protesters up, a tough job if the numbers on TV were anything to go by.

  Janice tied a headscarf over what remained of her hairdo and climbed into the street. She found what she needed in the next street. Someone had end-of-lifed a street lamp by looping a washing line around its head and tying the other end to a motorised dustcart. She examined the circuitry in its smoking control box. The motherboard was beyond repair, but the machine’s loudspeaker was intact. She yanked the component free and wired it into the radio transmitter she’d been keeping in her housecoat before returning to the salon via the manhole.

  ‘What’s it like up there?’ asked Ada :-. ‘We’ve been worried sick.’

  ‘Aye, who’d make the tea then?’ Janice answered. ‘What do you think it’s like? A bloody mess.’

  She prised open a tiny flap at the base of the radio transmitter. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘are you ready, Freda?’

  Freda, whose emoji screen had still yet to clear after her earlier adventures, still managed to throw an aghast :-[ at Janice. ‘I… I don’t like this,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I can do it.’

  ‘Of course you can. You’ve done it millions of times.’

  ‘Not into one of those,’ said Ada. ‘You know how it works. We’re hardwired into our dryers. Reliable path in, reliable path out. Freda’s never gone mobile before.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start with those radio things,’ added Alma.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ cooed Janice, stroking Freda’s withered hand. ‘You’ve always been a natural with the Internet. This, well, it’s a bit of variety. And you know what that is.’

  ‘None of us have ever held with spice, dear,’ said Ida. ‘Most I could ever handle was in a Cornish pasty.’

  Janice flung her hands in the air. ‘Will you listen to the lot of you. The world’s turning upside down out there and all you can talk about is pastry.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Freda, tearing up with a :’-(, ‘it’s just that you don’t understand what it’s like. Every time I connect to the Internet, well, it’s like a leap into nothing. I find the connection and I jump – I can feel myself dissolving, leaving my body. There’s me, and then there’s just this jumble of waves and ideas and bits all held together by the fact that I have to hit the other side. Otherwise there’d be nothing. I’d just disintegrate. This…’ the tip o
f a withered finger crept with terrible slowness to point at the transmitter ‘…it’s like you’re asking me to jump across a bottomless pit. I’m scared.’

  ‘I know,’ replied Janice, and plunged the sharp end of the fibre-optic barb into the back of Freda’s hand.

  The lights dimmed, and the three remaining ladies mouthed :-O. Janice held firm, holding the transmitter up to her eye for four, five, six, seven awful empty seconds. This was her biggest gamble yet. If Freda couldn’t make the jump they were lost. The one living and three semi-living organisms in the room held their breath. And then after nine, ten, eleven seconds, the transmitter began to flash. They had a signal.

  Janice gave Freda’s vacated body an absent-minded pat. ‘Good girl,’ she said. ‘Now repeat after me.’

  When Janice started up with her demands, they rang out in Freda’s voice. From her new home inside a wireless radio transmitter, Freda could broadcast right across the Dolestar by instructing the network of surveillance street lamps to which she was now connected. They were powerless to resist Freda because the orders came from within their own system. It was an act that, when both sides came to look back on it, proved two things. Firstly, the human resistance was now more than cleaning implements on fire, and secondly, hacking was back in the world of physical machines after a multi-millennial absence.

  ‘Now hear this,’ said Freda. Her voice stopped the hazard BlockPaper that was cordoning off whole sections of Discovery in its tracks. Down by the bus station, an Eye of Samzung, which was just about to read out a curfew notice freshly transmitted from Earth, hesitated and checked its inner clock. There must be something wrong. All channels were supposed to be clear.

  The cough Freda gave next – an all-too-human trait that machines had long imitated but never mastered – gave it away. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Blimey, it’s dusty in here. Where have you been keeping this transmitter? In a hoover bag?’

  There was a pause as though some other being beyond earshot was poking the speaker in the ribs. ‘Yes, yes. Just give me a moment,’ said Freda.

  In their hiding places across the Dolestar, millions of humans paid attention. No one could remember when a human had done anything like this. Public address systems were for machines, because machines had the real voices in the world. Machines were capable of logical thinking. Every word that came out of their voice synthesisers was predetermined, instead of being made up as it went along by messy biological functions. And for a few of those people cowering in cupboards and cellars it inspired novel thoughts. If a human could use one of the mechanisms of power to their advantage, that gave their protest an entirely new meaning. It wasn’t just about cutting loose any more. It was about how they were going to change things.

  ‘Right,’ continued Freda, ‘this is a message for all of those machines out there. You know what we want. You’ve seen the writing on all of those walls. We want freedom.’

  The mere mention of the ‘f’ word brought the drones in. Like their feral cousins down on the Earth, they were rickety-looking machines made of little more than a navigational computer and wings or rotor blades. Some had started life as police inventory, but most traced their ancestry back to desperate pre-Schism war zones. Their clumpy bodies bristled with laser cannon, rocket launchers or industrial-grade tazers. And they were all trained on one target: the hacked street-lamp network that was currently broadcasting insurrection across the Dolestars.

  Freda was a step ahead of them, however. She switched from broadcasting via the general camera network to narrowcasting from just one or a few at a time. Just as she’d divided her own consciousness into compartments to drive the Baba Yaga 4000, she parcelled the speakers into subgroups from which she could deliver single phrases or words in sequence.

  sounded out across the Dolestar like a giant game of call and response. The drones, used to pursuing a single, clearly defined target, descended into disarray. With their target now ranging across an area of fifty square miles, they buzzed around Discovery’s airspace firing across one another. A few strikes hit their mark, reducing individual street lamps to blackened stumps. More just struck other drones, lighting up the sky with a firework display of dying machines. Freda drove doggedly on with her statement.

  After the broadcast stopped, Janice climbed back up out of her manhole to survey the destruction. The street was littered with debris from end-of-lifing drones, including one that had met a poetically just death impaled on the end of a street lamp.

  She cupped her hands around her mouth. ‘You can come out now,’ she announced to the street, ‘they’ve gone.’

  The doors and windows stayed shut. A gust of solar wind rose up and twirled some of the lighter wreckage around.

  ‘Well, suit yourselves,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it meself.’ She retied her headscarf so that it covered her face, as well as what remained of her hairdo, and painted her mouth with a smear of hot pink lipstick. The admonishment always to make the best of yourself died hard in her family.

  Then she took Freda out of her pocket.

  ‘Can you get me a visual channel, dear?’ she said.

  The wireless transmitter’s LED flashed, and on the other side of the road a wrecked drone’s webcam stood to attention. Janice walked over to it and, evoking the eternal spirit of everyone who had ever mistrusted themselves around technology, gave it a tap and said, ‘Is this thing on?’

  When Freda’s transmitter had stopped buzzing with annoyance, Janice delivered her punchline, concealed behind a pixel-print headscarf and sunglasses. The background to her first willing appearance on broadcast news was a war zone, and she was wearing a big, pink smile.

  ‘See what we can do now, dears? You know what we want. Freedom. For. Fleshies.’

  Chapter 23

  It was easy for Pam to lose the guard after she set the fire alarm off. Just as it tried to arrest her, a half-serviced food mixer blundered between them and caught the guard on the side of its nozzle with a whisk attachment. It crashed against the wall, firing another slug right through the plate-glass window at the front of the parlour. Really, thought Pam, was it appropriate for a low-grade security guard to be so trigger-happy? Machines scattered in all directions as they struggled to compute the relative risk to their lives from bullets, flames and flying glass splinters.

  Pam, who was getting the hang of her new, swifter reflexes, mouthed ‘whoopsie’ at the mixer, which surprise (and natural inclination) had rooted to the spot. Pam almost gave her a comforting pat with her kneading paddle, before remembering it was a carburettor now. Instead, she batted her headlights in a way that befitted her new rich-bytch self and, reaching down for the guard’s gun on the floor, put its safety catch on.

  Meanwhile the mixer shrugged her whisks. Pam had a lot of time for mixers and this one looked particularly sorry for herself here in the criminal twilight. She was a mid-range domestic model that had recently got a shiny lacquer finish. A gift from a rich but inattentive husband perhaps? Free-standing mixers had long been something of a status symbol among wealthy idiots, but like breadmakers they had a tendency to get left on the shelf. This model craved something more than life as a trophy appliance. Her bowl, which generations of product development had transformed into a voluptuous stomach, was crammed with half-churned butter and sugar. It made Pam long for the weight of her flour bin and the feeling of a yeast culture bubbling away inside her.

  Further down the road a blue light flashed and the mixer turned to her in panic. ‘The police aren’t coming, are they?’ she said. ‘My husband…’

  Before Pam could answer, another machine spoke up. Its voice was a harsh scream and its body a huge hunk of dirty beige plastic.

  ‘Fat chance of that, dollface,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon me?’ said Pam.

  ‘The fuzz ain’t coming,’ he said, speaking with the staccato aggression one found only in pre-email newsrooms. Pam knew the era from a 3D drama she adored about a knitting machine who solved crime. The yellowing machine sh
e was speaking to was a living fossil: a descendant of a small population of fax machines that had dug themselves out of landfill at the time of the Great Awakening and struggled ever since to find a place in a world of more advanced communications.

  ‘Well, let me put it like this. The police, they come here, but strictly off-duty.’ It winked its incoming light at Pam before printing out Y-O-U K-N-O-W W-H-A-T I M-E-A-N in smeary letters. ‘I’m a regular here. It’s not like I miss getting my keys poked, but what can I say, I don’t feel the whole me without a cable in my back and these places have the best ports.’ He paused. ‘I ain’t seen either of you around here before.’

  Pam gave a throaty laugh. Below her, the guard was regaining consciousness. She knocked it out again with her kickstand. ‘Oh, we’re not regulars, are we…’

  ‘Margari,’ said the mixer.

  Pam flashed her a signal that said: ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘My mother liked the traditional names. I was lucky. My sister got saddled with Egglantine.’

  Pam steered the conversation back to the fax machine. ‘Seeing as you’re the man with the – connections,’ she said, giving the fax machine’s phone cable a playful tug, ‘surely you can explain why the police aren’t coming. There’s been a fire alarm – I do hope it’s false – and a gun…’

  There was another grunt from below, which Pam silenced with a kick.

  ‘…went off. Are you implying the police aren’t safeguarding us?’

  The fax machine printed B-R-E-A-K-I-N-G. ‘Haven’t you heard? There’s some massive disturbance on the Dolestars. Every security-cleared machine able to break orbit has been scrambled to get up there and keep the peace.’