Battlestar Suburbia

by Chris McCrudden

  ‘No one likes a moaner,’ said Darren. ‘Now lie still. I’ve almost got it.’

  He dug his fingernails in behind the ventilation grille and pulled it out of the wall. It left a small hole – about sixty centimetres each way, but enough for a skinny thing like Darren to get through if he wiggled. Thankfully, between the high heels and the platforms he’d had plenty of practice at wiggling that day.

  He stripped down to his pants, leaving the kimono, but posting his shirt and trousers through the hole. He’d need them later.

  The drone followed him into the service shaft. That only left Beattie, prone on the floor, his waveform now round with horror.

  ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll never fit through there. You’ll have to leave me here. I promise I won’t tell.’

  Darren shook his head and started to unscrew Beattie from his wheelbase. Like most clinical equipment, Beattie’s ancestors had been designed to take a thorough cleaning. As such, every part of his body was easy to dismantle.

  ‘Put me back together this instant,’ he said. ‘This is assault.’

  ‘I don’t remember giving you any choice,’ replied Darren, as he lifted Beattie’s body out of his wheelbase and pulled him through the ventilation grille.

  As Darren suspected, the service tunnel ran the length of the building. It was narrow – less than a metre across – but it ran floor to ceiling so at least he didn’t have to crouch. The back of the internal wall was criss-crossed with an untidy embroidery of wires and cables, but there was no need to worry about electrocution. The charge he’d just delivered to the wiring should have been enough to short the whole corridor.

  Darren turned and pointed down the tunnel. The drone skipped off ahead into the darkness while he struggled back into his shirt and tied his trousers round the middle instead of putting them on. Holding the legless Beattie up in front of him like a standard, he began to walk.

  They travelled in silence until Beattie’s wavelight began to twitch. At first Darren worried that the cardiogram must be running out of power, but when he started to speak it was plain he was suffering from anxiety rather than a low battery. A machine designed to monitor, but also to reassure, Darren realised, would be very uncomfortable with silence.

  ‘That camera we saw just now,’ he said. ‘I think I know what it was doing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sonny said he was going to make a statement. They’ll be filming it.’

  ‘But how can he?’ said Darren. ‘He’s walking around in my friend’s body. And that body’s wanted for treason.’

  ‘We made a decoy,’ replied Beattie. ‘A big ugly smartphone costume for him to hide in. The official story will be that we restored him from backup after you exploded a bomb inside this building.’

  Darren gave Beattie a shake. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I bet you’ve got some stylus with a special security clearance Photoshopping my head into the CCTV footage right now.’

  ‘No need,’ said Beattie. ‘Sonny made sure the whole situation has escalated beyond the point of needing proof.’

  ‘In English, please? For the dumb fleshie.’

  ‘He’s calling for a pre-emptive strike against the Dolestars. In a couple of hours there’ll be nothing on the downloads but pictures of the council planets getting blown to bits.’

  Darren dropped Beattie. His hands felt like balls of electrical interference stuck on the end of his arms. His mind freewheeled with images from ancient video entertainments: mushroom clouds, buildings blown to dust, burns. A nuclear bomb. They had been the planet’s biggest bogey machine for an aeon, although none of them were machines in the truest sense. Not even the most rabid pro-artificial lifer would put a sentient microchip inside a multimegaton bomb.

  Nevertheless, they had always been there. As time went by, machines took over from humans, then the machines split themselves in two over the right to live in a physical body. And in all that time, by some miracle of civilisation, the only atomic bombs ever to be dropped in anger were the two primitive examples that humans had dropped on themselves just after inventing them.

  Now that was about to change. They would take the bombs out of their bunkers, fire them, and millions would die. All because one mad smartphone wanted to wear a pair of human tits like they were a slipcase.

  ‘Where is he?’ he said. ‘I’ll kill him.’

  Beattie, who had fallen face down into a wad of cables and dust gave a muffled, but audibly grumpy reply. Darren bent down and flipped him over.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said fat chance. He’s covered on all sides by those ruffian guards of his. Besides, it’s too late. They’ll have activated the launch codes now.’

  Darren felt sweat running down his back, gumming the dust from the explosion earlier all over his body into a grimy clay. Drawing on this recent experience, he imagined everything he knew blown to powder. There would be a flash, a scream and the Earth would wear a new grey ring of ground-up concrete and human remains. They would be stardust. And then there would be him, hiding in a space between rooms.

  ‘I have to do something,’ he said. ‘I have to try.’

  ‘Impossible,’ replied Beattie. ‘Unless you can get physical access to the missiles and switch them off.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never had the clearance.’ Beattie paused. His waveform flatlined and then rebounded into life. The first sign of an idea. ‘There is someone who might know. But she won’t talk willingly.’

  Darren held the tazer skull in front of Beattie’s waveform, which gave a startled blip. ‘Third room down there on the left. There’ll be a guard, so you’ll have to keep that thing handy.’

  As Darren hoisted Beattie back on to his shoulder to press on down the corridor, he knocked the cardiogram’s head against the wall. ‘And would you be careful, please?’ he admonished. ‘I’m not a portable, you know. Shocks can kill.’

  * * *

  The room Beattie led Darren to was an infirmary. Another square room like all of the others on the floor, but furnished with a row of lifecycle support beds. These were part workbench, part incubator, with each bed surrounded by an ionised field designed to keep critically injured machines in a state of stasis. The field repelled water and slowed battery leakage. Only one of the beds was occupied, however. On it lay a spindly-bodied machine with an oversized head, covered in something that resembled iron filings which coursed over the prone body like termites at a picnic. They were nanobots, tiny machines that were barely conscious at an individual level, but which possessed complex hive minds. They were a contradiction in robot society; undoubtedly sophisticated in comparison to a sentient waffle iron, but mistrusted because of their taxonomic vagueness. Nanobots were a copy of an organic being, a physical machine and a virtual meme, all at once. And as a bit of everything they were considered not very much. So they lived on the fringes of robot society, multiplying in cracks in the pavements and eking out a living by digesting the bodies of dead drones and pocket calculators. But they also had their uses. They were, for example, the ideal means by which to remove water from inside the casing of a more sophisticated machine or solder shut the scars caused by extreme electric shock.

  A wave of nanobots parted on the crown of the inorganism’s head and scurried inside to mend some invisible breakage. It was Volta, the defibrillator: a machine too important to destroy, but not so important that she couldn’t be broken as an example never to question Sonny. Even peering at her through the mesh of a ventilator grille, Darren saw she was a very sick machine.

  Darren shifted around to look at the guard posted in this room. In a welcome change from the ubiquitous guns and tazers, this one was a water cannon. If there’d been room in the service shaft to do so, he’d have danced. This was perfect.

  He groped along the wall to find the spot where the electrical cables entered the power socket inside the infirmary. Wrapping his hands inside his T-shirt, he tugged the cables hard e
nough to expose a flash of bare copper. To this he put the mouthpiece of the tazer skull.

  He banged on the wall next to the power socket with his other hand and waited for the water cannon to investigate. The machine took the bait and, as it tapped the wall in reply, Darren pulled the trigger. Thousands of volts coursed through bare copper and into the hunk of wet metal on the other side of the wall. It made a sound like a boiling kettle being thrown down the stairs.

  Darren smashed his way through the ventilator grille with the stainless-steel back of Beattie’s skull and crawled into the infirmary. The water cannon had been blown to pipes by the blast. The nanobots, sensing danger they wanted no part of, retreated back into their hive-station in the corner of the room. Darren picked the water cannon’s core processor out of the wreckage and posted it into the hive, prompting an indignant squeak from the drone scuttling in behind him. He glared a ‘not now’ at the drone. He needed something to keep the nanobots busy.

  Next, he dragged the dazed Beattie through the ventilator and propped him up against the next bed along from Volta. Without his wheels, Beattie kept slipping along the floor, so Darren steadied him by shoving his central pole through the strainer of a handy mop bucket. Practically and poetically, it felt like a satisfying solution.

  Throughout all this Volta lay passive on her test-bed. Yet her power light glowed, and when Darren pressed his ear to her chest cavity he heard the faint whir of her core functions.

  ‘Can she talk?’ he asked Beattie.

  Beattie’s waveform shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The speech centres might have been destroyed. But then she was never that talkative.’

  ‘Can you make her talk?’

  ‘I can’t make her do anything,’ replied Beattie. ‘You also seem to be forgetting I’m not on your side. All I want to get out of this is alive.’ His waveform darted down to peer in the direction of his missing feet. ‘And in one piece.’

  A sound from the direction of the flatbed interrupted them. It was faint and wheezy, like the sound of someone running a vacuum cleaner two rooms away.

  ‘Where… is… the… girl…?’

  Darren scurried over to Volta. ‘You mean Kelly, don’t you? Sonny took her. He’s inside her now. He’s wearing her like a bloody dress.’

  ‘It… worked.’

  ‘No errors or malfunctions,’ said Beattie. ‘I was with Sonny less than an hour ago. He’s making marvellous progress.’ Beattie gritted out the last words, tiny modulations in his waveform suggesting that he was biting back more than he was saying. ‘You should be very proud.’

  Volta let out a satisfied whine and turned her attention back to Darren. ‘You… should be… dead.’

  ‘I got over that. You know what Sonny’s doing, don’t you?’

  ‘Never liked… the Dolestars… much. Messy.’ A stray flicker of current coursed across her chest and melted a patch of casing. Without the nanobots her body was attacking itself.

  ‘If I don’t let those things back inside you, you’ll die.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to until you tell me where the missiles are. I’ll stand here and watch you go.’

  ‘Don’t… care.’

  ‘Of course you care.’

  One of Volta’s pad-hands slipped away from the side of her body and brushed Darren. Her L-Eye-Ds changed colour: descending from red to a dull purple. ‘Don’t… want to… live like this… any more…’

  ‘Well it won’t make any difference to you then. Tell me where they are.’

  The L-Eye-Ds winked off. Darren shook her and heard the rattle of loose components.

  Beattie’s waveform peaked. ‘I think she might be beyond repair. If we want to get anything out of her, we might need to transfer her into a new body. What did you do with that drone?’

  They both heard a squeak and a rattle from behind the wall cavity as the drone scampered away down the service shaft.

  ‘No… more… machine body,’ said Volta. The pulse of her power light was erratic. Even Darren knew that this meant they didn’t have long before she end-of-lifed. And still this was taking too long.

  ‘What do you want then?’ he said, giving Volta a thump.

  Volta paused. Whether it was for effect, or just because the effort of speech was growing too much, Darren couldn’t tell. ‘Want. Flesh. Body,’ she said.

  Darren felt her pad-hand brush his own. He shivered.

  ‘You. Don’t. Think. I. Did. It. For. Him?’ She let out a strangled beep that Darren supposed must be a laugh. ‘I. Did. It. For. Me.’

  ‘And then he took it away, didn’t he?’ said Darren. Then, in a whisper, ‘I’m going to kill him.’

  ‘Not. If. I. Get. There. First.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

  Darren flipped round at the voice behind him. The infirmary door was open and there was Paula, backlit from the light in the corridor so that her split ends showed up like the halo on an angel who’d hit the bottle one too many times. Beside her was a gun.

  He looked back at Volta, whose LEDs dimmed in what he assumed was disappointment. If he left this room as a prisoner – or worse – it would be her last chance of snatching herself a flesh-suit gone.

  Except, of course, he wasn’t the only flesh-suit in the room. Not any more. He knew then what he had to do.

  By now Darren was so used to being threatened by deadly weapons that his brain was bored of his past life flashing in front of his eyes, so he examined Paula instead. She looked awful. Her hair was tangled and her make-up was streaked, but her loss of composure had the worst effect. For a person of a certain age to pass unnoticed among the younger generation they need equanimity. And Paula must have used her lifetime’s supply of that up in the last few hours. Her eyes had the dazed ‘can we go back and do it again?’ cast of a woman who, when faced with an important choice, had picked the wrong option.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘Pull any funny stuff and my friend here will pump you full of metal.’

  ‘Will that be before or after it shoots you?’ replied Darren.

  She gestured for the gun to sidle into the room and shut the door. ‘You’re playing a dangerous game.’

  ‘So are you. Have you seen your daughter since you let your boyfriend play dress-up with her body?’

  She reacted like Darren’s words were a slap. ‘That wasn’t the plan,’ she spat. ‘It should have been you. That was the deal.’

  ‘Like they care if any of us live or die,’ said Darren.

  ‘This isn’t about “us” living or dying though, is it?’ said Paula. ‘It’s about me. Now come on, I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘You know what he’s going to do,’ said Darren.

  Paula averted her eyes.

  ‘The bombs. You know, don’t you?’

  Paula blinked very hard and screwed her hands into fists.

  ‘Millions of people are going to die. And it’ll be your fault.’

  Paula’s eyes shot open again, defiant. ‘Fuck you,’ she said.

  He nudged his body ever so slightly backward so that it hit the soft edge of the test-bed. Behind he felt the give in the cheap plastic of the tazer helmet. It was still there, out of Paula’s sightline, and he was touching a nerve. That was good.

  Beattie took the momentary silence as a cue to air his credentials as an unwilling bystander. ‘You took your time,’ he said to the gun. ‘Now, I know what this looks like, but he was armed. I didn’t have a choice.’

  The gun flicked its trigger in irritation a couple of times at Paula. As non-verbal machine communications went, it rang clearer than a swear word in church. Hurry up, it said.

  ‘What makes you sure Sonny will still want you now he’s got his own body?’ said Darren.

  ‘I told you,’ she gritted. ‘We have an arrangement.’

  ‘But he’s literally traded you in for a younger model.’

  A tear rolled down Paula’s cheek, taking another crumb of mascara for a walk with it.
‘Fuck you,’ she said.

  ‘He won’t any more, though, will he?’ said Darren. ‘You’ve had one person killed today already and you look like shit. What are you going to look like after a few million?’

  Paula snarled and cupped Darren’s face in her hand. ‘It’s game over,’ she said.

  They were interrupted by an ear-splitting whine of feedback from the test-bed. Every single LED in Volta’s body lit up at once at full intensity. The room leaned in to listen.

  ‘Will you… fuck off… and let… me… die… in… peace.’

  Paula looked down at the decaying form of the defibrillator on the bed and recoiled.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, and grabbed Darren’s arm.

  Darren spotted that the drone had crept back into the room. It was ignoring the scene by the test-bed with the monomania of a true thief and was perched on the edge of the nanobots’ hive, staring covetously at the half-digested processor inside.

  That moment was as good as any.

  ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ he said to Paula, and kicked the bucket.

  Kicked Beattie’s mop bucket, to be exact, so that the cardiogram overbalanced, then fell face-first, peppering the floor with shattered glass. This distracted the gun’s attention for just as long as Darren needed to give the drone a nod. And the drone twitched its mandibles, releasing the hatch on the hive, which boiled over, spraying gouts of over-energised nanobots at the gun. They streamed over the gun’s body with their tiny mouths open, boring thousands of tiny holes in its barrel.

  Paula, meanwhile, screeched and dug her fingernails into Darren’s flesh. She was furious, but she was also tired and in shock, and Darren still had enough strength to smack her hand down on Volta’s dying carapace.

  ‘You’ve got nowhere left to run,’ she hissed. She cupped her free hand around Darren’s face and groped for his eye socket.

  ‘Same as you then,’ he replied. And swallowing up every last morsel of pity he had left for Paula, and everyone like her, he pressed the lips of the tazer skull against her knuckle and squeezed.

  The shock reduced the world to the size of a dot in the middle of a dying TV screen and then expanded it to a blinding flash. The kickback of the push saved him, flinging him clear of the electrical field that engulfed Paula and Volta in the same embrace as Sonny and Kelly a few hours before. Sparks skittered across the floor. The shapes of Paula and Volta shook, smearing their features like a greasy fingerprint across a touchscreen.