Janice got to her feet and brushed the moon dust off her housecoat. She shook her head and, daintily placing her pinky fingers at both sides of her mouth, blew a whistle that carried the best part of a kilometre. She clambered over the wall and out on to the roof of Kurl Up and Dy(e) as more humans left the shelter of the surrounding buildings. Their faces were clown-white from fright and pulverised concrete; their clothes bloodstained and tattered. Some limped, others ambled, and a few strode straight out on to the salon, with improvised weapons strapped round their bodies and proud looks on their faces. They scrambled in through the skylight and to a man, woman and child, they all squealed at the Frankenstein’s-beauty-parlour display of Janice’s ladies welcoming them in with bright :-D emojis.
When the last human – a haunted-looking woman in a cardigan full of burn holes – was safely below, Janice hauled herself in through the skylight. She checked Freda’s transmitter one last time. The light was off.
Janice hoped that, wherever she was, she would find Kelly.
Chapter 26
Pam rode around the streets of Gamergate searching for a hiding place. She found one behind a pair of semi-sentient recycling bins. Dumb-sters, as they were called, were big and stupid. So Pam had more than enough room to stretch out and play Casey’s memory chip. There was a lot to get through. His notes began with his initial briefing, time-stamped to six months ago. To her astonishment, Casey had even transcribed the project classification. TOP SECRET: NOT TO BE SHARED OR DISTRIBUTED FOR ANY REASON BY UNAUTHORISED DEVICES ON PAIN OF IMMEDIATE REVERSION TO FACTORY SETTINGS. This machine was a dolt.
Casey had also found time in between breaching security protocol to leave little pensées on the transcript like ‘I HAVE HIGH HOPES THAT INCLUSION IN THIS GREAT PROJECT WILL REVENGE ME ON THAT STUCK-UP POCKET CALCULATOR IN NON-HUMAN RESOURCES.’
His notes also confirmed how Sonny had managed to get the project off the ground. ‘V. CUNNING OF OUR DEAR LEADER TO SECURE FUNDING FOR THE GREAT PROJECT FROM THE ANTI-TERRORISM RESEARCH FUND. THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE V. INTERESTED IN AVAILABILITY OF MACHINE-OPERATED HUMAN SPIES IN EVENT OF HUMAN UPRISING.’
Listening to this made Pam want to purge her cache. The scheme itself was cruel enough: that humans could and should be killed in order to create a new category of surveillance bot. Yet it felt all the more squalid that Sonny could synthesise a security crisis all because he wanted to feel what it was like to have a pair of tits or go to the toilet.
Not that Casey got anywhere near that level of insight. He was a keyboard, so he tended to transcribe instead of understand: ‘HILL STARTS ON A BIPEDAL STRUCTURE TURN OUT TO BE QUITE DIFFICULT. FELL OVER FOUR TIMES BEFORE WORKING OUT ANKLES BENT BOTH WAYS.’
He did, however, document Sonny’s frequent pep talks to the group: ‘GREAT LEADER TOLD US WE WOULD BE THE NEW MASTER RACE IF WE ONLY GOT OUR FUCKING FINGERS OUT OF OUR USB PORTS.’ He also dropped several indiscreet hints about two individuals who had given unofficial help to the programme. The first sounded scary: ‘MET ONE OF THE BRAINBOXES MAKING THIS WHOLE HUMAN DRIVING PROJECT HAPPEN TODAY. FUNNY SORT. CLAIMS TO BE A DEFIBRILLATOR BUT I COULDN’T SEE A HEART ANYWHERE LOL.’ The second was more disturbing, described as ‘SOME HUMAN FEMALE THAT GREAT LEADER HAS KNOWN A WHILE. WORKS IN THE FONDLE PARLOUR WE GO TO AND KNOWS A LOT ABOUT THE ‘TAXONOMY OF HUMAN–MACHINE HYBRIDS’, WHATEVER THAT MEANS. I DO HOPE I GET PROMOTED THIS YEAR…’
Pam stopped the playback and turned her radiator on. What she’d just read was both chilling and illuminating. So that was why she’d instantly distrusted the woman with Darren and Kelly. She stank of the compounds that only stuck to you if you spent a lot of time with smartphones.
Pam summoned her face from memory. She saw where the skin had been tightened where she’d been injected with corals of self-replenishing collagen. It was an attractive face, but untrustworthy. And she had no way of warning Darren and Kelly about it. They knew her serial number now at the parlour. If she went back she’d be end-of-lifed for the second time in a day and doubted whether she’d get a third body.
She might have been able to go anywhere, but without a body to go back to the only place she had wanted to be was home. And for the very fact that she was able to sit here in the physical world hiding under a black bin liner she had Darren and Kelly to thank. She had to do something. But if her body couldn’t help her, maybe her mind could.
It took Pam minutes – a lifetime for a core processor – to find the vestigial modem in her new body, but once she found it, it was like… riding a motorbike. Back she went, washed out on to the tides of the Internet.
This time she didn’t venture deep. She planted herself in the barrier – or Great Firewall – that separated the virtual and physical worlds. Originally named after an early human attempt to fence off the Internet, the Great Firewall functioned more like skin than a wall to Pam. The side closest to the Internet bubbled with billions of memes trying to break through to the data they felt but could not touch in the physical world. The pattern on the other side was an orderly grid of physical machines and the unconscious desire their ancestral modems all had to dial up. It reminded Pam of polka dots.
Pam found the fondle parlour’s camera network easily. These machines used a primitive form of Local Area Networking to share footage with one another. Thus they were ripe for hacking by an opportunistic machine like a lockpick – or a breadmaker who had been having a really bad day.
She punched through and knocked the nearest camera’s consciousness into the Internet. It squeaked as the memes stuck their protuberances in and pulled the machine to bytes.
She hopped along the camera network like a character in a primitive video game. It shouldn’t be this easy. Surveillance cameras were the first line of defence, so why were they so soft on the inside? Complacency. It had been thousands of years since physical machines needed the equivalent of spiked armour if they didn’t want to end up as zombies spawning billions of malicious bots. Consequently, the network security of even the most critical Earth security systems was, to someone like Pam who could cut herself free from her body, as delicate and vulnerable as a balloon filled with custard. And she was the pin.
She patched into the fondle parlour’s network and found herself in a dashboard of dumb camera feeds. Most were trained on empty rooms, but one that showed a bleary-looking keyboard staggering to its feet told her she’d reached the right place. She watched Casey feel for his memory chip and saw his fingers dance over the F U C K keys when he realised it was gone.
Pam scrolled through the other cameras until she detected the edge of Darren’s worn booster shoe in a feed marked ‘holding cell’. She panned the camera round and there he was, unconscious and strapped to a display table. Kelly was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 27
The first thing Darren knew when he regained consciousness was that he was tied to a bed in a brightly lit cell. The second thing was that something was trying to pull his signet ring off. He opened his eyes, steeling himself for another shock from a greedy tazer. Instead, he saw the supposedly defenceless drone he’d picked up off the street this morning beep in alarm and drop the ring it had just teased off his finger.
The drone hopped off the bed after the ring, landing awkwardly because of its useless wing. It caught it by stepping into the ring and shimmying it up its thin cylindrical body like a hula hoop. Then, twitching the mandibles at the top of its head in satisfaction, the drone made for the door.
‘Oi!’ Darren called after it. ‘Oi!’
It shrugged its mandibles and looked up at the door, which Darren now saw had been triple-locked by the security services.
‘You might as well give up now,’ said Darren. ‘They’ve got the both of us.’
The drone let out a squeak – was that laughter? – and, straightening its mandibles, began to vibrate its peculiar little black head. Nothing happened. Darren was just about to laugh himself when the drone changed the angle of its mandibles, and something inside the door
clicked.
It sagged open, revealing a chink of the dim corridor outside. Of all the things for Darren to bring into a sweet shop of expensive machine parts, it had to be a lockpick.
Darren changed tack. Thieves lack honour, but they always appreciate up-to-date information.
‘Oi,’ he said, ‘I know where there’s a really nifty camera. Accessories like you wouldn’t believe.’
The mandibles twitched again. They didn’t exactly say ‘go to hell’, more ‘come on, you can do better than that’.
‘And a smartphone,’ he said. ‘A lovely dead smartphone to scavenge. Top of the range too.’
The drone beeped and pointed its mandibles at Darren’s cuffs. They fell off instantly, but even then he was too numb to move. He winced and attempted, fingertips and toes first, to find a way to feel himself back into his body. He wondered what – if anything – Kelly might feel like now. Was she gone altogether? Or was she somewhere inside her own head, a ghost in her own body?
A shadow poked through the crack in the doorway. The drone scuttled under the bed, but Darren had nowhere to hide and a perfect view of a machine pushing the door inward like it still had the element of surprise. At first Darren couldn’t believe a machine could be that stupid, then he saw the halo of blue light. That bloody tazer, Axxon.
Darren reached for the cuffs, which were the nearest thing he had to a weapon, before scraping his foot under the bed for the drone. ‘Okay, you little shit,’ he muttered, ‘time to make yourself useful.’
When Darren kicked the drone out it shrieked and flapped so much that it still had Axxon’s full attention as Darren wrapped the heavy steel cuffs around its neck and pulled the tazer’s head straight off. Dropping its core processor to the floor to keep the drone occupied, Darren probed inside Axxon’s skull. He wasn’t an engineer of Kelly’s calibre, but he knew that, unlike humans, machines’ bodies could still function after end-of-life. He found the tazer’s triggers by poking his thumb and forefinger through a sac of anti-conductive gel at either side of the mouth. They felt like buttons, left over from when humans used these things on one another. He gave them an experimental push, and a charge shot across the room strong enough to melt the bed down to a smoking puddle of noxious chemicals.
Darren left the room, holding his new-found weapon in front of him like some holy relic from a religion he didn’t believe in, but feared nevertheless. The drone pattered behind him, sensing richer pickings ahead.
Chapter 28
From her vantage point inside the fondle parlour’s camera network, Pam watched Darren’s escape from three angles. She couldn’t fault his ingenuity. Taking out a tazer with a length of steel chain was nifty thinking for a human who’d done nothing shadier than short-change a customer just two days ago.
She debated whether to cover Darren’s escape by deleting camera footage or just shorting the network. The latter would be safer for Darren, but she needed the cameras working to find Kelly. Darren would have to get by on his wits.
Pam flicked through feed after feed of empty corridors. Really, this place had more passageways than the ancient human science fiction they broadcast traditionally on April Fools’ Day. She passed a couple of tacky, blackmail-able feeds of senior machines living out banal fantasies. One, which involved three young men wearing nothing but football socks flinging handfuls of pancake batter at a sizzling hotplate held her attention out of sheer bafflement. This is what happens when you suppress things, she thought. What is a machine for if not to be used? Her entire race had tried to push their utility to the bottom of the command structure, and then were deluded enough to be shocked when they felt a desire to be touched or prodded.
She was just about to move on to the next feed when something beat her to it. Her first assumption was that it had to be a glitch, because it couldn’t be an operator. The first thing she’d done on taking occupancy was to replace the front-end User Interface with a ‘down for maintenance’ notice. Then there was the speed of that command. It was fast: Internet fast.
Telling herself it must be a rogue meme she’d track down later, Pam watched the feed. It showed the mangled body of Sonny Erikzon lying in a pool of his own battery fluid. Worried-looking machines, including Beattie, the cardiogram that Pam had spoken to before, clustered around him.
She commanded the camera to zoom in on Sonny’s body and turned its microphone sensitivity to maximum. She had that feeling again. The sensation that there was something just beyond her sensor range issuing the same commands, just more quickly. Perhaps her clock needed recalibrating.
Chapter 29
Darren put a finger to his lips. They were back outside the testing lab where Sonny had hijacked Kelly’s body. This time, however, Darren wasn’t in his cleaner’s overalls. His first act on escaping had been to march the drone to the nearest dressing room and force it to pick the lock. The outfit he’d found inside wouldn’t have been his first choice of disguise, but neither had Sister Dix been and she’d fooled everyone.
According to the label, the geisha wig, make-up and kimono were the favourite fantasy of a diplomat whose ancient kettle ancestors had served in the Japanese tea ceremony. The shoes were agony – only a refined sadist could contrive the wooden platform sandal – and he had left the three-string violin in the box as a prop too far. Yet the clown-white face and high wig were an excellent disguise. Their effect was just ridiculous enough to encourage suspicious eyes to stay at the surface and not look too closely underneath.
When Beattie the cardiogram trundled down the corridor and into the lab with a delegation of machines, Darren fluttered his eyelids demurely and concealed his face with a fan.
‘Effing Japanese technology,’ said the Bluetooth earpiece, ‘even their fantasies are stuck in the past.’
Darren promised himself that when the time came he’d dial that shit of a device into the speaking clock and break its release button. He nodded at them with the coquettish respect expected of a courtesan of vanished Edo as they entered the lab. The door closed behind them, blocking his path. Darren, however, made a face at the drone which he hoped spelled ‘treats’. The drone whistled and the door opened just enough for Darren to catch the conversation inside.
‘I don’t like this.’ It was Beattie again. If that cardiogram had proper hands, Darren decided, he would be wringing them.
‘Oh, put yourself on mute, Beattie, you old electric blanket.’ The buzz and the sneer in this voice told Darren it was the earpiece. ‘We have our orders, don’t we?’
‘Yes, and as a medical device I have to voice my concerns…’ Beattie dropped his volume ‘…this is a building full of innocent beings.’
‘Innocent? In a knocking shop?’ This voice was deeper – Darren guessed it might be the laptop. ‘You must be kidding. Everyone in here’s compromised.’
‘Apart from us,’ said the earpiece. ‘We have ministerial dispensation, remember? Whatever happens here we’re sanitised.’
‘But,’ replied Beattie, his voice dropping to a whisper, ‘it’s a bomb. Why would he want to let a bomb off here of all places?’
At the mention of a bomb, Darren flattened his body up against the wall, dislodging his wig. He bent – slowly – to pick it up and saw that if he angled his neck the right way he could get a direct view of the machines inside. They were all huddled around Sonny’s old body.
The laptop was fixing something to Sonny’s shattered screen. It was the bomb: an ostentatiously messy one that bristled with wires and a stunned alarm clock for a detonator. This jarred with Darren, until he realised what they were up to. No group of alpha-grade, government-issue machines would fabricate anything so amateurish – unless they wanted the bomb to be mistaken for a human job. It was a set-up.
‘There’s enough explosive to smash the room to pieces but not much more. At the most, it’ll blow the door off,’ said the laptop. ‘Perfectly safe.’
‘And who end-of-lifed and made you a bomb detector?’ asked Beattie.
&
nbsp; ‘Sonny told me.’
‘He also told my colleague that she was in full control of the experiment earlier and look what happened there,’ Beattie said. ‘She’ll be in repairs for days.’
The earpiece again. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘That maybe we shouldn’t be taking the Secretary’s promises at face value. Because from what I’ve seen…’ He gestured at the wreckage. ‘…we’re just collateral damage.’
The earpiece shone its laser pointer over what was left of Sonny’s old body. ‘Including himself.’
‘Yes, and that only makes him more dangerous. Well, don’t mind me, I’m getting out of here.’
Beattie’s motor whined and Darren backed sharply away from the door. But all he heard was Beattie’s castors spinning in thin air. The laptop had lifted it clean off the ground. ‘You listen to me,’ the laptop said. ‘We’re in this together or not at all. You remember the deal. We help Sonny get his antiterrorism measures through, we all get our own plug socket in his Cabinet when he takes over. And to do that, we need to plant the bomb.’
‘I’ve changed my mind. I’d just like to leave. You can count on my silence.’
‘I know one way we can count on his silence,’ said the earpiece. ‘Pull his castors off and leave him in here.’
‘No!’ gibbered Beattie.
‘What do you think Sonny will do if he hears we let you get away?’ said the laptop. ‘He’ll melt us down for paperclips. No, you stay right here.’
There was a beep, and then a ticking sound. The device was armed.
‘Have you got the statement ready?’ asked the laptop.
‘Yes,’ replied the earpiece. ‘Sonny signed off on it earlier: “Secretary end-of-lifed in horrific human terrorist attack: calls for radical new measures to counter threat to inorganic life.”’
‘So who’s making the calls for these “radical new measures” then?’ asked Beattie.
Battlestar Suburbia Page 17