Battlestar Suburbia

by Chris McCrudden

  The nanobots paused, sensing a more nutritious meal than they would find in what was left of the gun. Their mass of bodies formed a kind of question mark in the air as they computed their next move, and then thrummed across the floor to climb on to the test-bed.

  The nanobots made a sound like firecrackers when they crossed into the energy field. It took Darren back, in his semi-concussed state, to the celebrations they’d enjoyed on the Dolestar to celebrate Servitude Day. For an instant he was no longer trapped somewhere in a secret government facility, but seven years old. It was cold – it was always cold in space – and his new oxygen-balaclava itched. He wanted to be inside but today they celebrated machines taking the initiative back from messy humans like him. Each firework they launched into the void trailed a balloon of air that ensured they exploded with the right sort of bang in the vacuum of space. Pop. Pop. Pop.

  What was that popping? Darren roused himself to see Paula and Volta disappear behind a hail of hot white sparks. There were no more nanobots, just the pinpricks of light they left on his retina, and the mess of three different types of being coagulating in the middle of the room. He scrambled to his feet. If he could get past them back to the ventilator shaft he might just be able to escape. But even if he could, it wouldn’t make any difference. He couldn’t leave without knowing where to find those bombs. And the only clue he had left was locked in the middle of a tri-species French kiss. He had to wait this out.

  The sparks died away as quickly. They left a ring of soot behind, in the middle of which was Paula’s body, looking like a statue of The Mother Goddess of all Bad Days. Her hair had vaporised, like Kelly’s, but the heat had also melted the carbon and silicon in the nanobots’ bodies into her skin. She – or it, or they? – glistened black with an undertone of blood red and opened her eyes. Darren fought the urge to be sick. Instead of Kelly’s pure white eyes, he saw eyes the colour of clotted blood with pulsing black irises. Her glassy skin goosebumped and a stream of bubbles coursed up her arm across her chest, only to disappear into her body. That was what had happened to the nanobots, Darren concluded. With Kelly, the reaction had turned the blood to powder in her veins, but this time it had replaced each cell with a tiny robot – or whatever happens to a nanobot after it dies. The reaction had emptied Paula out and filled her with machines.

  Darren watched as whatever was animating Paula’s body pumped a stream of dead nanobots through her jugular to the head. It rolled the head around, like it was easing out a stiff joint and stretched. Then it brought the blackened hand up close to those pulsing eyes.

  ‘Sonny wasn’t exaggerating,’ it said, to itself rather than to Darren. ‘Fascinating. But damaged. This won’t do.’

  It snapped the hand back down and sat up. The creature’s skin pimpled, then burst: carbonised nanobots crawled out from under its skin, which disappeared in a foam of blood and bone fragments.

  Darren vomited a clod of orangey-brown mush over the floor. It was disgusting, but a pool of sick was a relief compared to watching a creature whip its own skin into mousse. He crouched on his hands and knees, breathing himself back to equilibrium, until a trail of blood bulked out with atomised muscle fibres trickled into his sightline and started the process again. Darren wiped his mouth and stood up. He had to get out of there before it was too late. And before another one of Sonny’s cronies arrived and turned this puddle of bodily fluids into a new lifeform.

  When Darren looked up, the nanobots were almost gone, disappearing back into the creature’s body via its mouth. And what a body. Paula had been well-preserved, but this was a face rejuvenated. It – or she, or they – looked even younger than Kelly. It was also as naked as the day Paula was born. Or reborn. Darren looked it straight in the eyes – he didn’t dare speculate what it might do if it caught him looking at its breasts. The eyes, at least, had stayed the same: the bloody sclera set with a throbbing iris of nanobots.

  It swallowed the last nanobots and clicked its jaw back into place. Then, as if noticing Darren for the first time, said, ‘What are you still doing here?’

  Darren gaped. He supposed he should be grateful it hadn’t killed him on the spot. Yet if there was a single reason that it was standing there at all it was because of him. He was this thing’s creator.

  ‘We… we had a deal,’ he said.

  The pupils narrowed to a cat’s-eye slit. ‘Did we?’

  ‘Why bother killing me?’ said Darren. ‘I got you what you wanted. It’s Sonny you want.’

  The creature pinned Darren to the wall with one hand. Whether it was the rejuvenation process, the defibrillator’s machine intelligence or the strength-in-numbers effect of the nanobots, Paula’s body was freakishly strong now. It could probably, he thought, have held him there all day without a grumble.

  ‘Where is he?’ it hissed. ‘He’s mine.’

  ‘He’s along the corridor holding a bloody press conference, you numbskull,’ moaned a voice from the floor. It was Beattie, lying prone and forgotten, his screen shattered into a spider’s web. ‘Just follow the camera flashes.’

  The creature snarled and let Darren drop. It turned and pointed a finger at Beattie. A telltale stream of bubbles coursed down its inner arm and a fingertip burst open, spraying a jet of nanobots at the poor cardiogram. Beattie’s screen flatlined, then disintegrated, as the bots liquefied and digested him.

  It turned back to Darren and pointed the jet at the floor, boring a metre-wide hole, then at the door, reducing its armour to tissue paper before kicking what was left into the corridor.

  ‘This was a most ingenious idea, fleshie,’ it said, watching a cluster of nanobots repair the hole they had just ripped at the end of its own finger. ‘Even if it was just an accident. For this, you have my thanks. But don’t push your luck. You leave Sonny to me.’

  Darren nodded. Whatever this creature was, it was even angrier at Sonny than he was, and far more powerful. But a deal was a deal. ‘You said you’d tell me where the bombs were,’ he said.

  ‘I did.’ It gestured at the hole in the floor. ‘Two storeys down. I’d tell you not to get yourself killed, but I’ve just run the numbers and that’s a statistical impossibility.’

  It turned and walked towards the door. Darren, overcome with curiosity, called out, ‘So who are you now, then?’

  It paused. A trail of nanobots crawled up the small of its back, making for their hive, which seethed inside a human body now. ‘Trinity,’ it said. ‘Call me Trinity.’

  Thankful that Trinity seemed to be on no side but its own, Darren took a deep breath and climbed through the hole in the floor. He felt something tap him on the shoulder. It was the drone. Whether it was doing this out of loyalty or just for the spoils he didn’t know. But it felt good to have a companion who could walk straight into a bank vault.

  Darren smiled and braced himself for the drop.

  Chapter 34

  Pam had never tried splitting herself in two before, but today was a day of many firsts. The trick, Freda assured her, was easier if you had children. If you could keep one eye on the kids and the other on whatever else you were doing, you could almost certainly break through the fabric of the Internet while piloting the body of a racing motorcycle through the backstreets of Singulopolis.

  This was what Pam chose to believe as she struggled with being in two places at once. Half her mind was back with Freda, burning through that disgusting camera’s processor to find a way to hack the government’s mainframe. She had decided to call that her life of the mind. The other half, however, was having a far more physical time. It had rushed back to her body behind the dumb-sters when Freda had asked for help, and was speeding towards the fondle parlour.

  She rounded the corner and saw the blue and red flashing lights of the security services crowding the narrow alleyways. This wasn’t unexpected – the Prime Minister was inside – but it was ironic. Normally all those police cars, water cannon and VHF radios would be inside availing themselves of the facilities. Between the s
ecurity forces and the parlour was a crowd of miserable, underdressed humans with their hands in the air. She scanned their faces for signs of Darren, but he wasn’t there. She shuddered to think that the next time she saw Darren, his body could be housing one of Sonny’s flunkies, or lying cold and broken on a floor. That was the problem with organic engineering. End of life for a machine was an inconvenience, but death for a human was final.

  She was closing in on the parlour. At her current speed she would hit an obese panda car in 0.7 seconds. Her impact sensor flashed up a warning that a collision at this speed would cause irreparable damage. She swatted it aside. Why did ancillary systems always assume their owners were stupid? She wasn’t. Well, not that kind of stupid.

  Pam bore down on the car, daring it to swerve first. It did, mounting the kerb with a siren-squeal. These soft, privileged home-planet machines were all the same. Face them with an opponent more robust than a fleshie and they went to pieces so quickly you had to duck the shrapnel. This gave Pam a perfect line-of-sight to her real target, the water cannon aimed at humans. Her aim was perfect. She clipped its on-switch with her wing mirror as she sped past.

  Her momentum turned the cannon into a high-speed water sprinkler. Jets of water sprayed in every direction. Gun barrels blocked, navigational computers shut down and touchscreens faded to black. By the time Pam was at the other end of the alleyway the only things left standing were the road vehicles – and Pam already had a plan for those. She signalled to the other half of herself inside the building.

  >ROGER, said Freda, patching into Pam’s comms equipment. >LOVELY AIM THAT WAS. I BET YOU’RE A DAB HAND AT PING PONG.

  >WE DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME, Pam scolded.

  >OH, DON’T BE SUCH AN OLD WOMAN. BELIEVE ME, THERE ARE MORE FUN THINGS TO BE.

  There was a high-pitched squeak of a kind that hadn’t been heard on Earth in millennia and every vehicle surrounding the fondle parlour powered down.

  >PHEW, said Pam.

  >I TOLD YOU THEY’D ALL STILL HAVE IMMOBILISERS, replied Freda. >OLD SUSPICIONS DIE HARD. NOW GET YOUR CHASSIS IN HERE.

  She found the security guard under its desk, with its ice-cream-maker dome quaking like it was trying to make a sorbet from hot tea. ‘You,’ she said, reaching underneath the desk to remove his ammunition clip, ‘are my silent friend. You see nothing. Is that clear?’

  It nodded. While it was as far from the top percentile of machine minds as an amoeba was from an astrophysicist, its microprocessor knew enough about Pam to associate her with big trouble.

  ‘The press conference,’ said Pam. ‘Where is it?’

  The gun stayed mute.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ she said, rapping his dome hard enough for it to ring out like a dinner gong, ‘I meant you’re not supposed to talk to anyone else. You can talk to me.’

  ‘Please don’t hurt me. I’ve got kids at home. Their motherboard would kill me if anything happened.’

  Pam felt a sudden pang for her own children. Beings she’d created with components from her own body. Things she’d programmed lovingly at the end of every working day, looking forward to her propagation leave when she would be able to switch her offspring on. The days and long sleepless nights of charging them every hour and cleaning up the bugs in their software. Of course, all that was gone now. A few chips apart, she was a different machine now. Not that they would miss her. Their mother – or at least a Stepford Toaster version of her – would have appeared on the doorstep that very morning. A Pam that was perfectly her, and yet nothing to do with her. And if Bob ever did notice his wife’s scratch-free casing, all she had to do was wave a new LED manicure at him and mention the free respray work had given her as a reward for pulling an all-nighter.

  She thought of Sonny upstairs in Kelly’s body. It was alright for Pam and for Sonny. Distressing as it was, machines could pick up bodies and set them aside again. Yes, machines were attached to their physical selves – Pam still found herself reaching for her flour bin at odd moments – but the body was a social thing for machines. It gave you a place in a roadmap, a niche in society, ancestors, and, depending on how far back you traced your history, a price tag. There was a lot of pride and shame attached to a body. Yet if you were snatched away from yours the blood didn’t dry to powder in your veins.

  When Sonny’s consciousness had forced its way into Kelly’s brain, had that crushed everything she had been to bits, or just pushed her aside? Was there a section somewhere inside that head where Kelly watched everything and despaired of taking control of herself again? The thought of that powerlessness was horrifying, but Pam preferred to think that Kelly was still there somehow.

  She fell into silence as she computed Kelly’s chances of survival. The noughts behind the decimal point multiplied.

  And the batteries powering the gun’s scant stores of bravery ran out.

  ‘Next floor up,’ it said. ‘But don’t tell anyone I told you. They’ll have my badge.’

  Pam flashed her warning lights and rolled through. On her way she swerved to avoid a large hole cut into the floor and saw Darren fall past her, followed by the plummeting body of a scrappy-looking drone. She pulled up and aimed her fog light into the gloom of an unlit cellar below.

  ‘Darren,’ she said, ‘what are you doing?’

  ‘Pam!’ Darren squinted up at her. His face was streaked with dirt and make-up, and he wore the expression of someone who had been shocked one too many times in a twenty-four-hour period to behave rationally any more. ‘Where did you get to?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to find you,’ said Pam.

  ‘Kelly’s gone, you know,’ said Darren. His voice was breaking up at the edges like a shortwave radio signal. ‘I couldn’t do anything. Sonny took her.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And now there’s this bomb. It’s going to destroy everything. Pam, we have to do something.’

  ‘I know.’

  Darren’s voice regained something of its composure. ‘Well, maybe you do know. But what are you going to do about it?’

  Her engine growled. ‘I’ve got business with Sonny.’

  ‘Not you as well?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Pretty much everyone I’ve met today wants to beat Sonny to death with his own SIM card. It’ll be a long queue.’

  ‘That son of a bytch end-of-lifed me.’

  ‘Oh, brilliant. You get to play smashie-smashie with the machine that put a few dints in your bread bin. But it’s okay if several million people DIE. Well, I’ll just be going.’

  He scurried away into the darkness. As he went, the drone activated a tiny LED screen in its chest and signalled [¬_¬].

  Pam was furious. Side-eye from a thing so far down the supply chain it was practically scrap metal. But it was also a reproof. Wasn’t she meant to be pro-human?

  ‘I need to help Freda,’ she called after Darren. ‘I promised. I’ll come back.’

  The reply echoed through the cellar. ‘No, you won’t.’

  Pam groped for the other part of herself – the part currently with Freda. She was difficult to access. Splitting her consciousness involved tricking her mind into thinking it was operating in two different time-shifted states. The other her – [Pam] – was a fraction in the future, existing as something that would become a separate self-contained Pam unless she reunited her minds.

  The two Pams sat side-by-side in the limbo of cyberspace. Pam fought the urge to reach out and correct a small error in her other self’s reckoning.

  >THIS IS MADDENING, she said to Freda. >HOW DO YOU COPE?

  >IF YOU CAN SURVIVE A FAMILY CHRISTMAS, said Freda, >YOU CAN COPE WITH A LITTLE TWO-MINDEDNESS. NOW WHAT’S THE HOLD-UP?

  >DARREN. HE’S DOWNSTAIRS AND NEEDS HELP. I THINK HE’S FOUND A WAY DOWN TO THE MISSILE SILO.

  >CLEVER BOY, said Freda. >WELL THAT’S SIMPLE ENOUGH. IF THERE’S TWO OF YOU THERE MIGHT AS WELL BE THREE.

  >OH NO, replied Pam. She watched her other self screw up anothe
r important calculation. They would never break through at this rate. >I DON’T THINK I’VE GOT THE CAPACITY FOR IT.

  >NONSENSE, said Freda.

  Freda poked inside Pam’s mind. It was one of the rudest things a machine could do to another, but Freda wasn’t a machine. She found Pam’s central processor and reset the clock on a cluster of its cores.

  A third [[Pam]] sprang into existence. She bristled with confusion and questionable binary. Pam wondered whether her other selves were deliberately spiting her, or she was just bad at the basic maths of being a computer.

  >YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO, said Freda to the new Pam, which vanished.

  Pam rejoined her physical body. She was standing in the corridor of the fondle parlour, listening to Darren below.

  [She was also with Freda, plotting the attack against Sonny.]

  [[And she was also down there in the cellar itself. She’d hitched a ride in that little drone’s body a few steps behind Darren. She probed its specifications. Spidery, vulnerable limbs, cameras for eyes, cheap but with night vision. The only thing of any value was a lock disruptor module that was too new and sophisticated to be anything but stolen. Darren stopped and peered back into the darkness. ‘Are you there?’ he said. The third [[Pam]] scurried after him.]]

  The first Pam vaulted the stairs up to the first floor. The whole floor hummed like an overtaxed cooling fan. Machines rushed in and out of rooms. Most of them were black-clad government units; a few were guns or tazers left there as a security detail, clustered around a blocky machine that looked like a police radio and was letting out a puzzled waveform.

  ‘What do you mean you can’t raise them?’ said a gun to the radio. ‘Half the capital’s security is out there on the road. They can’t all have disappeared.’