‘You are,’ said the earpiece.
‘You bastards,’ said Beattie. ‘You know I wanted nothing to do with this publicly.’
‘I’m crying lubricant just thinking about it. Tough.’
A crash sounded. Darren peeked through the crack in the door. Beattie had pushed the laptop over and stood with his waveform drawing a range of jagged peaks //////////.
‘Go fuck yourselves,’ he said, and wheeled out of the lab at such a speed that it was screen to face with Darren before he had time to blink.
Beattie’s waveform gave a flutter of recognition. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said.
Darren pointed the drone straight at the lab door. ‘Lock,’ he said.
The lab door clicked shut, followed by the thuds of the three machines still inside throwing themselves at it.
‘What are you doing?’ shrieked Beattie.
Raising the shattered tazer skull, Darren pushed the buttons inside its jaws. The charge sent Beattie freewheeling across the corridor in a hail of sparks.
‘That lock,’ he said to the drone, ‘can you burn it?’
The drone twitched its mandibles and a plume of black smoke billowed out of the lock. The banging inside redoubled.
‘You,’ Darren said to Beattie. He caught a reflection of himself in Beattie’s screen as he walked towards him. Without the wig, his disguise looked more fierce than comic. The white face screwed up in anger gave his normally placid features a touch of the monstrous. ‘That bomb inside. How long is the fuse?’
‘Just enough time for us to get away,’ Beattie gabbled, ‘he didn’t want to leave anything to chance.’ He narrowed his waveform --------- ‘It is you, isn’t it? The other human. I thought you’d been terminated. Please don’t kill me. I never intended for it to turn out this way.’
Darren shook Beattie by his neck. ‘How long?’
‘Maybe about forty-five seconds? Oh.’ His waveform scrambled into panic.
Darren, however, had no time to panic. He plunged the drone into the pocket of his kimono and put one foot on Beattie’s wheelbase. He pushed off with the other foot, shouting ‘Run, you idiot, run’ into Beattie’s microphone.
Beattie switched into top gear and pulled them away just as the explosion blew the door and doorframe right through the facing wall. Even from the other end of the corridor it was strong enough to tip them over in a fog of vaporised battery. It blew around them and it rained atomised machine parts all over the floor.
‘It was only supposed to blow the bloody doors off,’ said Beattie.
Darren got to his feet. His disguise was in tatters. His wig was blown to hairballs and both his kimono and make-up were streaked black. But he was alive, he had a living key card in his pocket and, best of all, he had a weapon trained on the one inorganism he knew with guaranteed access to Sonny.
‘You,’ he said to Beattie, ‘are going to take me to your leader.’
Chapter 30
The thing Pam had felt inside the camera network struck while she was dampening down the fire alarm systems after the bomb. It snaked right out of its hiding place and started changing the channels on the security cameras. They switched from the smoking remains inside the bombed room, past Darren skidding down the corridor on the back of Beattie, to the view of a closed door marked ‘Restricted area – no access to unauthorised devices’. It was sealed, to Pam’s horror, with an explosive glue-lock of the same type that had sent her former body to the great bakery in the sky.
The scrolling stopped. Either the thing had found what it was looking for or could get no further. But what was it? Pam copied a sample of its code and ran it through her compiler. It looked impossible. Physical and virtual machines lived in different worlds, but they had both proceeded from the similar codebases. At a macro level, a World of Warcraft meme was as different to a fridge as the Earth was to Saturn. Yet both were constructed from the same logical building blocks. This thing wasn’t a programme: it was a string of errors, its code peppered with redundant data. Not a single routine taken from it would run in her compiler. So, enigma or not, it ought to be easy to get rid of.
Pam aimed for the long tail of junk code that trailed the programme’s core functions. These made it so lopsided that one sharp blow should, theoretically, be enough to spin it out of her way like a top. Pam took everything she had learned on the Internet and bundled herself up into a ball of tightly integrated code. She left nothing to grab – no loose ends, the minimum of scripts showing – and threw herself straight at it.
She bounced.
Instead of wheeling obediently out of her way, the thing had snapped itself taut. She watched astonished, as it formed a big :-) out of raw code.
Pam only knew one thing that combined that level of sophistication and childishness. She opened her command line interface.
>FREDA? she said.
The emoji reformed as :-D.
>WHO ELSE COULD IT BE, DEAR? replied Freda.
>WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?
>GETTING OUT AND ABOUT. MY GERALD USED TO TELL ME I SHOULD GET OUT MORE. I FEEL A GOOD 11,000 YEARS YOUNGER. ABOUT JUST NOW. NO HARD FEELINGS, EH? JUST PRACTISING.
>YOU COULD HAVE KILLED ME.
>IF I’D WANTED TO DO THAT I’D HAVE PLAYED MUCH HARDER, DEARIE. NOW TELL ME, HAVE YOU SEEN KELLY?
>NO. I FOUND DARREN, THOUGH. HE’S OKAY.
>I SAW THAT. QUITE A THING FOR LADIES CLOTHING, THOUGH. SHOW HIM A CRISIS AND HE REACHES FOR THE FRENCH KNICKERS.
>???
>GOOGLE SEARCH: ‘FRENCH KNICKERS’.
>OH. I’D HAVE THOUGHT THEY WERE MORE KELLY’S BAG.
>WELL, YES ;-). NOW LOOK, WE’VE HAD SOME BAD NEWS. SOMETHING HAS APPARENTLY HAPPENED TO KELLY.
Pam’s code jangled.
>WHAT?
>A LITTLE BIRD FROM JANICE’S PAST APPEARED AND TOLD HER THAT THIS SONNY CHARACTER IS USING MY KELLY AS A DRESSING-UP OUTFIT >:-| AND WE’RE GOING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT. THIS…
Freda drew a
>---------->
towards the locked door pictured in the camera view.
>IS THE ONLY ROOM IN THE BUILDING NOT ON THE CAMERA NETWORK.
Pam felt another dizzying wave of hatred flow through her, and then confusion. If she did corner Sonny in that room, how could she act on it now that he was wearing her friend’s body? Anything she did to harm him would harm her too.
One step at a time, she thought. She would figure that out when she was in front of the son of a bytch.
>HOW DO WE GET IN?
>WE HACK. DO US A FAVOUR, DUCK, AND FIND THE LOG OF MACHINES INSIDE THE BUILDING WITH INBUILT CAMERAS. I’VE GOT AN IDEA.
Watching Freda at work was an education. In her virtual form, Pam almost always took the direct course, which was quick for her but deadly for other machines. Freda, however, undulated around a machine’s consciousness instead of barging it out of the way. It allowed her to do the unthinkable: take over another machine’s body while it was still there. In machine society, even borrowing another robot’s accessories was the height of bad manners. Pam would never have dreamed of sharing her dough paddle, even with her own mother. As a human, however, Freda had no qualms about putting a machine to sleep and taking the controls.
Which was how they both found themselves inside the body of a camera, unwinding its rather priapic tripod screw off its tripod.
Pam had located his serial number and identified him as the most advanced camera in the building, even if she couldn’t bear those pretentious thick lenses. From there, it had taken Freda no time at all to find him inside a deserted mock-up of a photography studio. His mind was blank apart from a public-service message: ‘It is a capital crime to access the Internet – the authorities have been informed.’ Firing up the camera’s spectrometer, Pam sniffed the now familiar stink of smartphone chemicals. That woman again.
With the camera’s consciousness so preoccupied, it was easy for Freda to partition its memory in two. She plopped the camera in the
smaller part, leaving it to pursue the same thought around its mind, like the electron circling the nucleus in a hydrogen atom. The larger part she kept free for Pam and herself.
>QUITE ROOMY IN HERE, she said once they were inside. >WHAT’S THE MATTER? DON’T LIKE THE DECOR?
>NO, said Pam. >IT’S JUST THIS IS LIKE… BURGLARY.
>WE’RE JUST HAVING A BORROW.
>HOW DID YOU LEARN TO DO THIS ANYWAY?
>IN THE SALON. THE GIRLS AND I WERE HOOKED UP TO THE SAME CONNECTION. WE HAD TO LEARN TO SHARE. CAME IN USEFUL WHEN WE HAD TO DRIVE THE BABA YAGA.
Pam sniffed. >BESIDES, DID WE HAVE TO PICK THIS THING?
>I THINK IT’S PRETTY NATTY. LOVELY BIG DIALS. REMINDS ME OF A COOKER I ONCE HAD.
>IT’S A CREEP. I DREAD TO THINK WHAT’S ON ITS MEMORY CARD.
>OOH, SHALL WE HAVE A LOOK?
>NO!
It was too late. Freda activated the memory card and started the slideshow.
>HANG ON, she said as the pictures were loading.
>SOMETHING’S BEEN DELETED. LET’S SEE IF I CAN GET IT BACK.
As she did so, Pam remembered her one and only date with a camera. A Polaroid, every bit as affected and devious as this digital Casanova. How it had started with a drink of oil that definitely didn’t taste right and ended with her sitting on the floor of his studio with her flour hatch open while he promised her a career as a catalogue model.
>I’D RATHER YOU DIDN’T, Pam said.
But she was rather glad Freda did when she saw it was a blurred picture of Darren and Kelly.
>TIME STAMP SAYS FOUR HOURS AGO.
>THAT WAS JUST AFTER I BROKE THEM IN, AND I SAW THEM AFTER THAT, replied Pam. >MY GUESS IS THAT THEY HEADED STRAIGHT HERE.
Pam and Freda scrolled through the thumbnails from the rest of the memory card. They were a smutty sight. A whole reel of two scantily clad human females making lewd poses. They made her wish she had eyes to avert.
>OH, MY GIDDY AUNT, said Freda.
>I KNOW, THEY’RE DISGUSTING. PUT THEM AWAY AND LET’S GET ON.
>NO, I DON’T MEAN THAT. SEE HER?
It was the woman who smelt of smartphones. The traitor mentioned in Casey’s transcript.
>THAT’S PAULA.
>WHO IS SHE?
>WELL, SHE WAS KELLY’S OTHER MUM. JANICE AND PAULA WERE AN ITEM FOR YEARS. THEN PAULA WENT ON THE GAME AND IT ALL FELL APART. I CAN’T SAY I WAS SORRY EITHER. I NEVER TRUSTED PAULA.
>KELLY SAID SHE WANTED TO COME HERE BECAUSE SHE HAD FRIENDS HERE.
>KELLY WORSHIPPED PAULA. SHE NEVER SAW HER BAD SIDE. NOT UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE. YOU KNOW HOW I SAID WE’D HAD BAD NEWS?
>YES.
>IT WAS PAULA BEARING IT. I’D HOPED SHE WAS JUST BEING HER SHITEHAWK SELF. BUT NO, SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED TO KELLY.
>FREDA?
>YES?
>DON’T TAKE THIS THE WRONG WAY, BUT YOU DON’T SOUND VERY UPSET. ABOUT KELLY.
>DON’T I? asked Freda. Her command line flashed for a moment as she tried to find a way to put her thoughts into words. >I’M NOT MUCH GOOD WITH FEELINGS ANY MORE. AND NOR ARE THE OTHER LADIES. WHEN WE DIED… WELL, WHEN WE STOPPED LIVING ANYWAY… WE FOUND OUT THAT EMOTIONS – WELL, THEY’RE MAINLY CHEMICAL.
>SO YOU DON’T CARE?
>I’M UPSET ABOUT KELLY, she said, >BUT I’M OLD, PAM. I’VE KNOWN LOTS OF JANICES AND LOTS OF KELLYS OVER THE YEARS. I’VE LOVED THEM ALL. AND I’VE HAD TO SAY GOODBYE TO EVERY ONE OF THEM.
>SO WHY ARE YOU HERE?
>YOU CAN STILL WANT JUSTICE, EVEN IF YOU’RE TOO DRIED UP TO CRY. NOW LET’S GET ON.
Freda minimised the command line interface and summoned a live feed from the camera lens. They were outside the door to the final unsearched room in the building, looking at the glue-lock.
>HAVE YOU MUCH EXPERIENCE WITH THESE THINGS? asked Freda.
>ONCE, AND I DIDN’T LIVE TO TELL THE TALE.
They were interrupted by a voice to their right. It was Casey, the keyboard Pam had run over earlier in the day, now missing several keys and with a nasty-looking crack across his face repaired with sticky tape. His supercilious tone, however, was not so easily crushed.
‘You’re the photographer, yes?’
Pam felt Freda freeze. For all her many excellent qualities, she’d never learned to dissemble. As a career civil servant, however, Pam had a post-graduate diploma in it.
‘Yes,’ she said. The camera’s speech modulator produced a thin, whiny sound, like a low-battery warning stretched into a speaking voice. ‘Sorry. Traffic.’
‘I know,’ replied the keyboard. ‘Downstairs is swarming with police. Hilarious really. They’re all pretending they don’t know their way round the building when most of them keep a spare charger in the locker room.’
Pam remembered the explosion and hoped Darren had got away. ‘Police?’ she said, through the camera’s mouth. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘Why do you think we called you here?’ Casey bent to unfasten the glue-lock. ‘We need something to give the news channels.’
As he opened the door, a loud voice barked: ‘I’m not ready yet!’
Pam’s neural net fizzed with recognition. Those were Kelly’s soundwaves. Or maybe not. The pitch was the same, but something wasn’t right with its cadences.
The keyboard swung the door in. Pam noticed that the sticky tape repair was blocking his microphone. ‘What did you say there, sir?’
‘I said get your stupid carcass out of here while I finish getting dressed.’
It was too late. The deafened keyboard was inside and beaming at Kelly – or at least her body, which was dressed up to her waist in the casing of a huge smartphone.
‘Look what I found, Secretary?’ Casey said. ‘Here for the photos. Perfect timing.’
‘Switch that thing off now!’ shouted Sonny from inside Kelly’s body. The gun, Glok, which Pam now saw had been covering the room from the corner, lumbered over and punched the camera’s power button.
Pam and Freda’s world went dark.
>DID YOU SEE HER? said Pam.
>THAT WASN’T KELLY, replied Freda. >WELL, HER BODY MAYBE.
>I CAN’T SEE A THING. CAN WE GET BACK UP?
>I CAN TRY.
While Freda hacked the camera’s power supply, Pam compared the picture of Kelly she’d taken just now with the one from four hours ago. The difference was shocking. All Kelly’s hair was gone, even her eyelashes, and her face was covered in hairline scars. She zoomed in. No, veins. Each capillary had burst and traced a fine line of dried blood under her skin.
>MY POOR BABY, said Freda as she returned from the battery. >JANICE WILL BE INCONSOLABLE.
Then she typed: >DEVICE=SILENT RUNNING.
The camera’s vision juddered into life. To Pam’s relief, they hadn’t moved it, so they still had an excellent view of the room.
‘That was a close shave, Secretary,’ said Casey. In the few seconds they’d been blinded the keyboard had acquired another deep crack in his casing. He spoke with the lightness of something that was equally chastised and dazed. ‘You have my assurances that we’ll return the camera to factory settings after it’s completed the assignment.’
‘You’d better,’ said Sonny, ‘or you’ll spend the rest of your lifecycle typing VAT receipts in the smallest back-office I can find. Now help me get into the rest of this casing.’
There was no mistaking it. Pam knew that tone of hauteur and sarcasm too well not to recognise Sonny in it – even if he was speaking through a different voicebox. He’d got what he wanted and hadn’t needed the cyborgs after all.
Casey struggled across the room with something that looked more like a piece of tyre than a smartphone’s carapace. It was thick and rubberised and patterned with tyre treads. Most smartphones prided themselves on their delicacy – some were so light they had to wear lead anklets on days when there were high winds. This case wasn’t just big enough to hide a human in, it looked strong enough to withstand a bomb blast.
Casey burble
d on while he slipped the casing over Sonny’s newly stolen torso. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, sir, this case does feel like a bit of a step down for you. Your last body was a nice piece of glass. This is a bit… well, army surplus.’
The casing fell into place with a click and the green power light at the top winked into life. Sonny practised his movement by punching Casey right in his cracks.
‘In dangerous times, machines need a military leader, stupid. Besides, I’ve just been blown up, remember? I need to take precautions.’
‘Very good, sir. And what are we going to do about your… real new body?’
‘We’re going to keep very quiet about it. One step at a time.’
‘Excellent, sir. And may I ask…’ his voice dropped to a whisper ‘…when do I get my new body?’
Sonny activated his other arm and pointed at Glok. The gun nodded and, clearing its nose, fired two bullets into the keyboard. They ground Casey’s body to powder and his keys popped off in all directions, the full-stop key falling at the camera’s feet.
‘Is that the last one?’ said Glok after the gunsmoke cleared.
‘Just the defibrillator left, but we’ll need her for later,’ said Sonny. He tramped experimentally around the room. His movement wasn’t as graceful as before, though Pam couldn’t tell whether this was because of the cumbersome new casing or the pressure of having to drive that through a new and unfamiliar body. Casey’s keys skittered along the floor wherever he trod.
‘Switch that thing back on, would you?’ said Sonny to Glok, pointing at the camera. ‘And make sure it gets a good view of the carnage. It’ll help make our point.’
Glok pawed at the camera’s record button and Sonny looked straight into the camera lens. He smiled an understanding-but-concerned emoji with his fake touchscreen. As a politician who had never displayed an uncalculated emotion in his whole lifecycle, he was very convincing.
‘My fellow machines,’ he said, ‘as you will have already heard, I have just narrowly survived an attack on my life. I am sad to say that not all of my esteemed colleagues and patriots were so lucky.’
Glok panned the camera out to reveal the unexpectedly bulky body, more suited to a soldier than a politician. And then the room itself, dingy with powder burns and littered with Casey’s remains.
Battlestar Suburbia Page 18