Battlestar Suburbia

by Chris McCrudden

  ‘I have reason to believe that this attack was masterminded by the same terrorist cell of humans that has been massacring robots on the Dolestar Discovery.’

  Sonny paused and said to Glok: ‘Splice in the mugshots of that pair of fleshies here,’ he said. Then, addressing the wreckage that had been Casey up until a few seconds ago: ‘Understand the need for discretion now, numbskull? I’ve got the face of a terrorist now.’

  Inside the camera, Pam was vibrating so hard with fury her command line shook.

  >JUST STAY WHERE YOU ARE, said Freda. >THERE’S NOTHING WE CAN DO FOR HER RIGHT NOW.

  >THIS THING HAS GOT A PUNCHY LITTLE BATTERY. I COULD DO SOME DAMAGE WITH IT.

  >NO! WHAT IF YOU DAMAGE KELLY’S BODY? IF I HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT, WE’LL NEED IT BACK.

  ‘Right, next shot,’ said Sonny. He changed his emoji to something graver and more statesmanlike: ‘It therefore falls to me as Secretary of State for Internal Affairs in a discredited government to say that our policy of toleration towards humans has failed. It’s time for a new regime with the will to fight back against the organisms who endanger our way of life.’

  Glok panned the camera back in. Sonny dialled his seriousness up to maximum. A pixelated tear appeared at the edge of his grave, patrician eyes.

  ‘As a victim myself,’ he said, his words slowed down with ersatz feeling, ‘I will settle for nothing less than a pre-emptive strike.’

  >PAM, said Freda. >I THINK WE’RE GOING TO NEED A BIT OF MUSCLE HERE. WHERE HAVE YOU STASHED YOUR BODY?

  Chapter 31

  Sonny’s broadcast was a masterful piece of propaganda, in that it gave already paranoid machines the excuse to treat their prejudices like they were facts. ‘Now don’t get me wrong,’ rang the conversation in billions of homes, offices and public charging points, ‘I like humans. The lady who cleans our house is a sweetheart. But these people are different. And he’s right. We have to do something.’

  So when Sonny released footage of his wrecked body alongside a statement that used the word ‘genocidal’, no one argued when he called for a referendum.

  Robot society wasn’t especially democratic. It was a caste-based civilisation where some groups mattered more than others. What it had perfected, however, was a mechanism for ensuring total participation in public votes. Whenever a referendum was called – which they were frequently, because even logical beings are capable of irrational behaviour – machines made for the nearest charging point and registered their serial number. If they kept the charging point in an off position it was a ‘no’, but if they turned it on, it counted as a ‘yes’.

  All across the Earth, which was a grey planet now that the oceans had been concreted over, robots rushed to their positions. Cars and motorcycles swerved to the hard shoulder; coffee machines walked, boggle-eyed from overcaffeination, to their sockets; smartphones everywhere sighed, unplugged their charging packs and plugged into the mains.

  The world held its breath. Even if the only part of the world that breathed any more lived there only on weekdays and spent most of that time wringing out a damp rag.

  Billions of machines flicked a switch. And billions of humans wondered whether they would have a place to sleep that night.

  It was a yes. Of course it was a yes. As the newly installed Prime Minister Sonny Erikzon said it, those terrorists were a threat to the Pax Machina. And if any humans died in the attack it was their own fault anyway.

  Sonny’s next gift to the rolling news downloads was what everything addicted to ill-informed, minute-by-minute commentary adored. A countdown. And some actual news.

  In sixty minutes, the countdown said, the Prime Minister was going to nuke the Dolestar Discovery.

  Chapter 32

  Janice counted forty-seven people into Kurl Up and Dy(e) from the surrounding terraces. As rebel forces went, they weren’t an edifying sight. Those that weren’t in shock were wounded. A hair salon couldn’t offer much in the way of first aid, but the peroxide in the dying kits made a decent disinfectant. And there was tea. If there was one thing she could offer in abundance it was hot, sweet tea. Several IV bags of it were doing the rounds.

  The salon was back deep inside Discovery’s sewer system now. Her ladies’ A-to-Z of the Dolestar’s bowels was ancient, but it was better than anything the machines possessed. Beyond installing a Job Temple and a network of spy cameras, they tended to dismiss the Dolestars as drab little places. That, Janice thought, gave them the opportunity to hide and regroup.

  The Baba Yaga halted and Janice popped her head outside the skylight. The damp funk of the sewers was gone, replaced by something drier, older. Pitching up to her tiptoes she felt her fingertips brush cold metal.

  ‘Can I have some light?’ she shouted, and Ada turned the light in the Kurl Up and Dy(e) sign up to the level of a shocking-pink searchlight. They were at the end of a vast empty metal tube that seemed to stretch for miles.

  She dropped back into the salon. ‘Where are we?’ she asked Ada. ‘This isn’t on any of the maps.’

  ‘This bit was meant to be sealed off when they turned this place into an orbiting estate, but they had to build the sewers and then never got round to it,’ said Ada. ‘They weren’t called Dolestars in those days. We called them Municipal Space Stations.’

  ‘Do you remember the adverts?’ said Alma, her emoji screen misting over with the condensation of nostalgia. ‘I was that proud to get my little space palace. You wouldn’t have believed the overcrowding there was down on Earth then. Especially when people’s domestic appliances started getting custody of the houses.’

  ‘They built the space stations around existing orbiters,’ said Alma. ‘We’re inside the original Discovery right now.’

  ‘It wasn’t built as an orbiter, was it,’ added Ida. ‘Discovery was an exploration vessel. Meant to do all that “new life and new civilisations” hogwash. But events overtook.’

  ‘This was the last big thing that humans ever built,’ said Ada. ‘Launched the day before the Great Awakening. They never turned it on. They were terrified about there being a huge, self-aware spaceship fifteen miles above the Earth’s surface having an identity crisis. So they just sort of left it there.’

  ‘Until they turned it into flats on the surface above,’ said Ida.

  ‘You know,’ added Alma, ‘the older I get, the more I think it’s not war or politics or all that stuff that makes history what it is. From what I can see, it’s all about house prices.’

  ‘Are you sure we’re safe here?’ asked Janice.

  Ada grimaced :-[:] and pointed a wasted finger outside. The other ladies sighed :-o and the Baba Yaga took a few steps before hitting the walls of the metal cylinder with a dull clang.

  ‘That,’ said Alma, ‘is the sound of the finest radiation shielding of its time. If you’re going to shove something in the road of cosmic rays you need safety measures. It’s radar-proof, X-ray-proof, nosey-bloody-parker-proof.’

  ‘And as far as our robot overlords are concerned,’ said Ada, ‘all this is just a piece of scaffolding.’

  As the ladies steered the Baba Yaga into an arthritic sitting position, Janice scanned the room. She took in the head wounds, the hollow eyes, the trauma and realised that if she was going to turn these broken people into a fighting force something had to change. They needed purpose to knock them out of themselves.

  She nudged a woman perched on an upturned mop bucket. The streaks of mascara on either side of her face told Janice she’d been crying, but since then her expression had settled into something stony.

  ‘Can I have that bucket, love?’ she said.

  The woman stood up and mutely handed the bucket over.

  ‘Thank you.’ Next, Janice grabbed a nearby mop and, mop and bucket in hand, walked to the salon washbasins and ran the hot tap.

  All around her, people leaned in. It had been a crazy, unimaginable day, but this they could understand. The rhythm of picking up a mop and filling a bucket was imprinted in t
hem. They were humans, this had always been their function.

  When the water ran warm, Janice half-filled the bucket and added a squeeze of detergent. Then she handed it to the nearest person: a man in early middle-age, bald, paunchy, volatile-looking. Janice suddenly wondered if these people were real rebels or just people who started fights in pubs.

  ‘Hold this for me, would you, love?’ she said.

  He held it at arm’s length, like it smelled of something ranker than light bleach. Which it was, she supposed, for someone who had grown up to see anything with a brush attachment as a tool of oppression.

  Janice walked out of the salon, gesturing for the man to follow her. He did, along with an audience of a few other men. The women, who either sensed trouble or were just happy for the rest, stayed put. The men stood in the pink light cast by the salon and fidgeted. The bald man – was he some sort of leader? – put the bucket down in front of Janice and joined the other men. He watched with his arms folded, as Janice fought the urge to empty the bucket over him.

  She dipped and squeezed the mop, triggering a scent of artificial lemon that made her audience flinch instinctively. She ignored it. If this was going to work, she only had days, hours maybe, to cut through the grime of their learned responses.

  She pushed the mop across the metal, picking up a thin layer of grime. Iron filings, grit, but nothing organic. None of the soft, soapy skin-dust of human inhabitation. It would be a doddle to clean, provided she had some help.

  ‘Right,’ she said, handing the bald man the mop, ‘I’ve made a start. Carry on while I get the brushes out, will you?’

  He let the mop slide out between his fingers and clatter to the floor. The noise brought a few women from inside the salon to the door.

  ‘No,’ he said. Even from the one syllable Janice could place this kind of man. He was a little like her, she supposed. Someone who must also have paddled in the shallow end of criminality. But while Janice did it to survive, he did it because he was allergic to hard work. He was the type who sold dusters door-to-door then stole your purse from the hall table. And if he was ever going to be useful to her, she must never give him the upper hand.

  She smiled and bent down to pick up the mop. As she did so, she saw him grin at his friends. ‘I don’t clean for anyone,’ he said. ‘Hear me?’

  ‘Well, that’s okay,’ replied Janice, as she took the handle of the mop and drove it straight into his groin. He doubled over, lost in a world where there was nothing apart from him and his agonised testicles, while Pam fended off his friends by slapping them in the faces with the wet end of the mop.

  Behind them the women were also doubled over – with laughter. It rang out through the vast metal tube like a cockcrow at the end of a fairy tale. Something sinister passed out of the situation.

  Janice found her first-aid box in the salon and returned with a can of aerolgesic, which she sprayed into the man’s crotch. She was a ruthless woman but that didn’t mean she was cruel.

  ‘I don’t want you to clean for me,’ she said, ‘I want you to do it for yourself.’ She addressed the rest of the group. ‘Did you hear that? Just because you’re free now doesn’t mean you don’t have responsibilities. If we’re going to stay here, this place needs tidying up. It’s a state.’

  ‘We’re staying here?’ said a woman by the door. She had dark hair and a brighter look about her than most of the other rebels. Must have been some sort of supervisor, Pam decided. Someone used to asking questions.

  ‘Why not?’ said Janice. ‘We’re safe down here. It’s warm, it’s dry, it’s not on the map. All it needs is a bit of a clean.’

  ‘But we have to go back,’ replied the woman. ‘We’ve got families up there. I’m not leaving them.’

  A clamour rose up among them at the mention of the word ‘family’. Lights went on behind previously blank expressions as their owners searched for the memories of the spouses and children they’d left to buy themselves a little safety. Janice knew that if she wasn’t careful she’d lose them.

  ‘Who said you weren’t going to see them again?’ she said. ‘But even if we went back up to the surface right now, do you think it’d all go back to normal? You were the people throwing lit gas canisters at your masters. They’ve got you on their CC pigging TVs. One snap of a cameraphone and they’ll have a heat-seeking missile aimed at the warm patch where you’ve pissed yourselves.’

  She looked at the group. Ill-sorted individuals with a collective level of education that put them at a millennia-long disadvantage to the machines. But if they’d made it this far they must have cunning and that counted for more than learning. It took real wit to throw an improvised weapon at military-grade weaponry and not come out of the encounter wearing your intestines as a chain belt. She homed back in on the woman with the dark hair.

  ‘There’s no place left for you up there any more. What did you say your name was again, love?’

  ‘Rita,’ she said. Her eyes were glassy with tears.

  ‘So, if we can’t have a life up there, Rita, we’ll make one down here.’

  She squinted into the darkness. ‘But there’s nothing here.’

  Janice shouted back into the salon. ‘Ladies. Will you turn it up in here a bit?’

  At this the ‘K’ in Kurl Up and Dy(e) shot out of its mooring and into the blackness overhead. It hit the distant ceiling and exploded. Janice and the rest of the group covered their eyes against the flash, but when they took their hands away they saw that instead of dissipating, the light was hanging around. Literally. Wherever they looked they saw motes of pink luminescence floating in the air.

  Janice grinned and waved her hand in front of her face, leaving a trail of phosphorent light. Millions of generations of concentrated photoplankton had kept the sign of (K)url Up and Dy(e) burning right through the centuries, living, reproducing and dying inside their glass habitat. Now they were free and cast a soft glow over the cathedral-sized space inside the former Starship. They revealed that the huge cylinder of steel was divided into sections by low walls riveted into the floor. These divided the space into plots around the same size as a comfortably sized house and garden, between which ran a network of wide paths.

  Something about the proportion of each of these spaces made Janice want to sigh with contentment. They were built to human dimensions.

  Looking up, she saw the same landscape repeated topsy-turvily on the ceiling, and realised that Discovery was meant to revolve its way through space, its motion generating a weak kind of gravity. She did some quick calculations. If they could get it spinning again, the inner cylinder of Discovery was large enough to hold hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe millions if they were prepared to live at a similar density to how they did above.

  She narrowed her eyes and dreamed of a future where every one of these steel compartments held a house or apartment block, where the bare floors were swept or carpeted with night-grasses. And where there were no cameras.

  Janice looked back at the Baba Yaga 4000, which was sprawled across the floor of Discovery like a hiker resting after a long walk. It would be busy in the days and weeks to come, and so would she. If she was lucky. She sighed and walked back to her mop bucket.

  ‘So come on then,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t want to bring your nearest and dearest back to a pigsty.’

  The first person to swing into action was the bald man, who went to find a sweeping brush. They had work to do.

  Chapter 33

  Beattie was just about to lead Darren down the main corridor when they saw a camera stagger past. Darren recognised those retro lens caps from earlier in the day. He couldn’t let that little pervert see him again, so he pointed the drone at the nearest lock and pulled all three of them after him.

  ‘We have to lay low,’ hissed Darren at Beattie.

  ‘I thought you wanted me to take you to my leader?’

  ‘Yes, but discreetly.’

  Beattie scanned him up and down, taking in the platform sandals, mak
e-up and kimono. ‘That may present a few difficulties,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t there a back way?’

  ‘Why, of course.’ Beattie’s waveform contorted itself in sarcasm. ‘Just hang on while I consult the blueprints for this top-secret research facility that I just happen to carry around with me. I don’t know!’

  ‘Well,’ said Darren, ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get.’

  They fell quiet and looked around. The room they had blundered into was fitted out as an office but unused. It was windowless, the walls clad in surgical steel and bare apart from a single desk and an empty shelf for storing and charging BlockPapers.

  This gave Darren an idea. He pulled the BlockPaper shelf away from the wall.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Beattie.

  ‘This thing has a plug, doesn’t it? To keep the BlockPapers charged. So it needs a socket.’

  ‘Yes, but why do you need a socket?’

  Darren ignored him and got down on his hands and knees to examine the plug socket. It looked like standard issue. It had been installed in the wall opposite the door, and the room’s only ventilation grille was placed a couple of metres to its left. That meant there had to be a service shaft running parallel to the corridor.

  He fired his tazer at the ventilator grille, pitching the room into darkness.

  ‘Oh, VERY well done,’ said Beattie, turning up the brightness on his waveform to maximum. ‘So we’ll just sit in the dark here and wait for someone to come along and shoot us, shall we?’

  Instead of answering, Darren picked up Beattie by his central bodyshaft and laid him flat on the floor so that the light from his waveform pointed at the ventilation grille.

  ‘Put me upright this instant. This is humiliating. I’m an advanced medical device, not a flashlight.’

  The drone, who had been watching silent in the corner, flashed its own torchlight irritably.