The mixer gave a strangled cry and ran off down the street, spattering the pavement with creamed butter and sugar.
‘Hey,’ the fax machine called after her, ‘sweet thing. What are you so worried about?’
‘From the way she was acting just now,’ said Pam, ‘I’d put my last cc of fuel on her husband being a police officer. You’ve probably frightened her enough to curdle that cake mix.’
The fax machine struck her a sideways glance. She could tell it was lost for words by the way it was spooling blank paper. ‘So what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ he finally said.
‘I tell you what,’ she replied, tearing off the blank paper and screwing it up into a ball she could stuff down the barrel of the gun at her feet. ‘I’ll pretend you haven’t used a line that’s even older than you, and you can show me around.’
‘Well, if you’re looking for a good time.’
‘I’m not. I’m looking for someone who knows this place well enough to tell me where the joes like you aren’t allowed.’
‘What’s in it for me?’ he said.
Pam squirted a fine mist of petrol over the fax machine’s paper roll. ‘I don’t light a match,’ she said.
‘Third floor,’ he replied. ‘And it’s better you take the stairs.’
She got to the third floor just in time for the all-clear. As bodies rushed back into the building, she hitched a ride at the back of a group of machines with the expensive finishes and lack of social niceties that marked them out as high-ranking civil servants. They were the perfect cover for Pam: glossy enough for her to blend in and too self-involved to notice she was there. There was one machine among them Pam particularly disliked. It was a keyboard with such a profound sense of self-importance it transcribed its own words as it spoke them. Pam wondered where it saved them all.
This part of the building felt clinical for a place otherwise given over to pleasure. She’d assumed fondle parlours were all ruffles and commodious plug sockets, but this floor was all surgical steel and locked doors. There were no humans about either. Until the door in front of her opened and a group of five humans carrying plastic helmets filed out, followed by a cardiogram.
She watched from a distance as the five humans all entered the same room, then followed the cardiogram into the canteen, where she found it sucking power straight from the walls with a greed she hadn’t seen since her student days. This machine was burning the battery at both ends. It greeted her with a ___/___ of surprise.
It took Pam, who was used to passing unnoticed, a moment to remember that she was now doomed to look out of place anywhere that wasn’t the deck of a superyacht.
‘You’re early,’ it said.
‘Am I?’
‘Orientation isn’t due to start for another hour. How did you get up here?’
‘You know,’ she said, turning the leopard print on her LED nail job up to ‘11’, ‘I must have got the time wrong. Some kind cleaner,’ she fluttered a wing mirror in the direction of the lifts, ‘held the door open for me. When did you say the…?’
‘Programme,’ said the cardiogram. ‘Though you’ll have been briefed to call it a training course. And we’d prefer it if you did.’ It checked its battery level again. ‘Damn!’
‘What’s wrong?’
The cardiogram, whose name tag announced him as Beattie, reached for another power lead and plugged it into a secondary port. ‘I can’t keep on like this. I’m a specialist, I’m made to sit and do one thing. I haven’t been home in three days, you know. All leave cancelled and the humans…’ He checked himself with a _______.
This was interesting. He was under pressure and couldn’t resist talking. She fell back on the dumb paint-job act and a little mew of the engine that meant ‘ew’. ‘Humans,’ she said, ‘who cares? When are we getting started?’
‘I wasn’t designed for more than one patient at a time. I’ve got twelve of them up there and your group to get started. It’s a complicated process.’
‘Isn’t it terrible to be the appliance in demand?’ said Pam. And because she couldn’t resist it, ‘And is it just you?’
‘“We need to keep the team small,” they said. “Think of the prestige,” they said. “Triumph of organic and inorganic science” my footrest. I’m sorry, hang on a minute.’ He checked his power level for the third time and beeped in relief as it crept into the green zone. ‘I’ve been running on fumes since yesterday.’
His display went back up to full brightness and he squinted, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘You’re a bit glam for this assignment, aren’t you? Usually they send the salarymen.’
Pam filed away the mention of organic and inorganic away for later analysis and smiled. It was a complicated operation as a motorcycle, because it meant turning the handlehorns on her head inwards, making a sharp squeal. ‘Me?’ she said, shifting to an encrypted channel as if to say: If you’re going to spill, dear, at least do it where you can’t be heard. ‘You could say that I’m from a special unit.’
Beattie answered with a gulp […………] of silence. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, make yourself comfortable…’
He was interrupted by a loud ping from the doorway, where another piece of medical equipment stood. ‘Sorry for interrupting the date, but there’s a bit of a commotion going on down in your lab,’ it said.
‘Excuse me,’ said Beattie, scurrying as fast as his castors could carry him. Pam waited for the other machine to leave with another suggestive ‘ping’, before following Beattie. She could hear him tearing the casing off another machine way down the corridor, and when she turned the other way she saw Darren and Kelly running away from her, accompanied by an unfamiliar red-headed lady. Halfway down the corridor the redhead stopped and looked round, as though she was trying to catch some thing or someone’s eye. Pam disliked her on sight, but there was nothing she could do about it now without putting all three of them in more danger.
Instead she entered the lab and found Beattie pinning a keyboard to the wall. ‘This is a top-secret programme, you blockhead,’ he shrieked, pressing his ! key repeatedly to make his point. ‘You were told. No records.’
Four other machines clustered round the keyboard and cardiogram, making conciliatory noises, so didn’t notice when Pam crept in. She paid more attention, however, to the five humans on the other side of the glass wall. Two of them slumped like puppets during the Punch and Judy man’s tea break; two slept in improbable poses on the floor; one remained upright, in a posture so stiff that it looked like it was in great pain. But that couldn’t be. Pam’s spectrometer sniffed at air blunted by the traces of synthetic opiates.
The laptop spotted Pam and appealed for help. ‘Has someone put him on the wrong current?’
Beattie turned round. ‘You’re not meant to be in here either. Everyone out!’ he said. ‘I’m revoking your security clearance, all of you. This programme is finished.’
‘I beg to differ,’ interrupted a voice from the fifth berth at the far side of the room. Pam had lost the greater part of her voice-recognition banks in the body switch, but there was something about it that made her spokes jangle. She wondered why, given the commotion, this machine hadn’t moved itself from its flatbed.
‘Put Casey down, doctor,’ said the voice. ‘He’s an idiot, but he’s a keyboard-shaped idiot. And what I need most right now is someone who understands protective wrappings.’
Beattie snapped back into his everyday register. ‘Oh, sir,’ he said, ‘I forgot you were in on this session. If you don’t mind me saying, you’ve come on in leaps and bounds…’
‘Spare me the platitudes, doctor, and send Casey over. I need your praise less than I need to not spill what’s left of my screen over this filthy floor.’
They rushed over to the unlit portion of the room and carefully lifted a dust sheet. Casey took a sheet of adhesive plastic from underneath the flatbed and placed it over what was, judging from their movements, another flat
surface.
‘There we go, sir,’ said the keyboard Casey, keeping his hands by his sides in a conscious effort not to type this part of proceedings. ‘Good as new.’
‘Fuck off, would you?’ the voice replied. It extended a spindly arm to Beattie, who helped it up into an upright position. Something so slim and arrogant could only be a smartphone. Sonny.
Pam almost revved her engine – she had to get away right now. He mustn’t see her. But when Sonny didn’t react to his better view of the room with a cry of ‘Seize her!’, she remembered that he couldn’t see her. The Pam he knew was a battered breadmaker, not this creature she had become.
As Beattie helped him into the light, Pam reflected that however much of a state he’d left her in, Sonny had come off worse. The slick silicone casing was scorched and his screen was revolting. Over half of the LEDs were missing, and his battery was haemorrhaging green fluid. What few LEDs still worked glowered at the room like the eyes of malevolent cartoon creatures.
‘Sorry I look like shit, my dear,’ he said to Pam, ‘but it’s been a trying day.’ Then, turning to Beattie, he said: ‘Doctor, I thought I told you there were to be no nurses. I want the barest minimum of exposure to the programme.’
‘She isn’t a nurse, sir,’ he replied. ‘She’s one of yours.’
Sonny inched towards Pam. ‘Is she?’ he said. ‘I think I’d remember signing off on something like this.’
‘Late substitution, sir,’ said Pam. Different body or not, she still knew how to speak like a civil servant. ‘The under-secretary thought you wouldn’t mind.’
Sonny’s LEDs glowed a deeper shade of red. ‘Did he?’ he said.
‘A BlockPaper went round this morning saying you were indisposed. The under-secretary has already got new clearance codes. Said you wouldn’t be back for a while.’
Pam felt the atmosphere in the room change. All five executive machines edged towards the door away from Sonny. Just like mandarins, they end up tipping the balance of power merely by running in the other direction.
‘How dare he,’ replied Sonny. ‘Casey. Take a memo.’
The craven Casey was already outside. ‘I… I just need to clear some memory space, sir,’ he said.
‘Get back in here at once!’
‘I just need to check something with the Ministry first?’
Sonny shrieked feedback from his loudspeaker. ‘Get back in here. You all do what I say or none of you get to learn to drive a human. And you,’ he said, drawing so close to Pam that she could see his dying LEDs squirm against their plastic prison. ‘Who are you?’
Pam checked the doorway in her wing mirror and slid into first gear. The keyboard Casey would be halfway down the corridor by now, so there were only three machines blocking her exit. Of the three, the laptop could be her biggest obstacle, but it wouldn’t fight. Its screen was a specially modded sapphire crystal number; it would commit treason before paying out for a replacement. The other two were tiny: an old Dictaphone and a Bluetooth headset. Provided she could get to the stairs in time, her plan might work.
Sonny was close enough for her to hear his battery wheezing. ‘Who are you?’
Pam retracted her kickstands and gave Sonny the full beam of her headlights. ‘Pam,’ she said. ‘But you can call me Pam van Damme.’
She turned round and fell forward into her speeding position. Her rear wheel connected with what remained of Sonny’s touchscreen with a crash. Battery fluid spurted everywhere, shorting more LEDs. Rather than try to stop her, the laptop, headset and Dictaphone fell away, and she tore out of the room, catching the edge of Casey as she passed him down the corridor. He span across the corridor and fell against the wall. The impact dislodged his ? key, which plinked across the floor, and his memory chip, which Pam picked up and stowed in her stereo system. She would listen to it later.
She rounded the corner that led to the staircase. The door was open, but the gun she’d outmanoeuvred downstairs was on its way up, and traces of paper round its nose told her it had cleared its barrel. Pam was strong, and she was fast, but there was no way she could take a hit from a bullet at this range. It was time to take a real risk.
She pulled up just short of the doorway and rolled back to the far end of the corridor. The gun was dangerous, but it was also heavy. Even then, she had at most three seconds before it could get a good shot at her.
She looked back down the corridor. It was clear apart from the prone shape of the keyboard propped against the wall, either too dazed or scared to get up. Three seconds were just enough. She tore off in fifth gear.
When her front wheel hit Casey, he started spraying keys everywhere, but she was travelling so fast that, instead of stopping dead on impact, the edge of the wheel rolled straight over him. Casey became an improvised ramp that she used to mount the wall and speed along at ninety degrees to the floor.
She passed over the gun on its left-hand side while it was still struggling to find its aim. It turned round to fire, but the surprise manoeuvre had bought Pam just enough time to reach the fire exit. She was out.
She dimmed her headlights and cruised deeper into Gamergate in search of somewhere to hole up and listen to Casey’s clandestine notes on the Human Driving programme.
Chapter 24
‘What do you mean no one’s following us?’
Darren couldn’t believe it. They had run to the cleaning cupboards expecting the place to be crawling with machines. But there was nothing. After a few unbearable minutes Kelly produced her powder compact and a mirrored brush and improvised a periscope.
‘See,’ she said, nodding towards an empty corridor. ‘Nothing.’
Paula sounded less surprised than relieved. ‘I’d better get back to work then.’
Kelly stopped her. ‘Oh no, you don’t. We go together or not at all.’
‘The lift’s just there,’ said Paula. ‘We get it down to the ground floor. Casual. We walk slowly and calmly back to the dressing room. You sneak out the way you got in, I go back to my schedule and get on with my life. How does that sound for a plan?’
‘Too simple,’ said Darren. ‘We walked into something big there. They won’t want to let us go like that.’
‘Looked like a few robots playing silly buggers with virtual-reality helmets to me,’ replied Paula, ‘which is perfectly normal around here. Is he always such a mitherer, Kelly? He reminds me of your bloody mum.’
‘I don’t like it either, Paula,’ said Kelly. She still hadn’t taken her eyes off the mirror. ‘Shit. One of them’s leaving.’
All three craned their necks to see the reflection of the keyboard leave the lab but hover in the doorway, listening. Wordless shouting percolated down the corridor.
‘They’re still at it,’ said Darren.
The keyboard broke away from the door and headed, to everyone’s great relief, in the direction of the stairs. A few seconds afterwards came Pam’s stunt ride to freedom, which impressed even the jaded Paula.
‘What the hell was that?’ she asked, struggling to get a view of the skid marks all the way up the walls.
‘Just something I threw together,’ said Kelly. ‘She was a breadmaker this morning.’
Pam’s exit prompted the three executive machines to spill into the corridor. Two of them picked up the keyboard and the other his keys, and together they followed Pam’s lead, exiting the third floor by the stairs.
‘Right then,’ said Paula. ‘Lifts.’
Darren barged past in the wrong direction as they went out into the corridor, heading back to the lab.
‘What are you doing?’ said Paula.
‘There’s humans in there being mistreated,’ he replied. ‘I’m going to go and let them out.’
‘So we can all run away together like one big happy family?’ Paula was incredulous. ‘If we’re quick, I can just about save your skins. We don’t have time to take five more on board. This was never part of the deal, Kelly.’
Kelly snapped her compact shut and put it awa
y. ‘I think you’ve been living around machines too long, Paula. You never used to be this hard-faced.’
‘If I am,’ said Paula, ‘it’s because that’s what Janice made me.’ She raised her voice. ‘The lifts are right here!’
The lift doors opened. Inside, a pair of tazers flanked another machine. It was blank-faced apart from a pair of blinking L-Eye-Ds and most of its body was taken up by a voltmeter, with its arms ending not with hands but flat metallic pads. Kelly shuddered. Before the Schism, defibrillators like this had saved lives. Afterwards they specialised in ending them, creatively.
‘You snake,’ said Kelly. ‘I’ll kill you.’ But before she could land a punch on Paula, the defibrillator whipped out an electric current that knocked Kelly out cold, while the tazers immobilised Darren.
‘Downstairs?’ said one of the tazers to Paula. The soundwaves coming out of its mouthpiece did odd things to the electrical current, making it ripple and ooze.
‘No, back into the laboratory,’ she said, ‘the Minister wants to see them first.’
* * *
When they woke, Darren and Kelly were strapped to the flatbeds that had formerly held the sleeping machines, but with one spatial difference. Something had ripped them off their pedestals and stood them up against the wall. The five sleeping humans were nowhere to be seen, but Paula was there, talking to a smartphone that looked like it had been run over by a burning truck.
‘I’m pleased you came to me with this,’ it said to Paula.
‘You know how much I value our relationship, Minister,’ said Paula. ‘When did you say the police were arriving?’
‘Police?’ said Sonny. ‘This isn’t a police matter. It’s political.’
Paula looked puzzled. ‘You mean they haven’t done anything illegal?’
Sonny sighed the sigh of a terminal mansplainer. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Let me explain it like this. What we have, together. It’s not strictly legal, is it? It’s more of an understanding. We’ve learned a lot from each other. In fact, I rather remember you promising to lead me to where this young lady’s mother keeps her… well, shall we call them her “heirlooms”?’
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