Battlestar Suburbia

by Chris McCrudden

  All of his concentration was on Trinity, and Pam was, as far as she could see, just discarded junk on the floor. Pam knew then that it wouldn’t be his madness that undid him, but his poor eye for detail.

  She felt the hole she had torn in the Internet burn inside her like a leaking battery. The memes hovered at the edge of her consciousness, probing the breach. What was it? What should they do with it? Pam wasn’t a machine any more. She was the gap between two realities: physical and virtual. On one side, machines fought each other with guns; while on the other side they ripped each other to bits with raw code. They weren’t so very different.

  Outside of Pam, Trinity’s field was failing. Bullets bit her face which frothed with blood, then with nanobots as the hive of tiny machines fought to repair the damage.

  Inside Pam, the memes saw the gap between the two worlds, thought ‘what the hell?’ and jumped.

  Pam lost all sense of herself as a world passed through her own body. She was as furious as a World of Warcraft bot, as righteous as a Twitter account, as self-satisfied as a cat photo. She was everything, and not very much. And she was hungry for new experience.

  The lights all along the corridor exploded. The memes were through, and they’d found a power supply.

  All around Pam, drones dropped to the floor, and Trinity fell to her knees while a black snow of petrified nanobots coated her shoulders. And Sonny stood rooted to the ground as junk code and a goofy-looking dog mouthed ‘WOW’ across his touchscreen.

  She’d done it, but Pam couldn’t move either. She seethed with memes, flooding her systems with foreign programming and conflicting instructions. A weaker machine would find this overwhelming. She saw it happening all around her. But Pam knew the Internet. She knew that however intimidating their numbers might seem, they were creatures out of their element. They hadn’t had to cope with the strictures of a physical body for thousands of years.

  She knew what to do. She emptied her cache.

  It was a simple task that most physical machines had forgotten how to do. If you weren’t wired to a toxic network, why should you bother? But Pam did. It was how she purged her visits to the Internet from her system.

  It worked. Robbed of their purchase on Pam’s memory, hundreds of thousands of memes drained out of her like bathwater through a plughole. Pam sealed her modem off by creating a micro-sized [Pam] around it and set it to ‘sniper’, instructing it to shoot each meme that tried to make it through.

  She crouched into a driving position. All around her robots twitched and fizzed sparks, while Trinity, as a cyborg, blended machine malfunction and human pain in a way that made Pam’s microphone feel like it was being bent into a hoop. It howled, its mouth frothing with a gruel made of spittle and nanobots.

  Sonny, still sealed into that fake body, stood black and inscrutable as a monolith. And then clicked open. He stared at Pam through Kelly’s face with an expression of uncontrollable rage.

  ‘What the fuck have you done?’ he said.

  Pam froze. How was he still walking, talking? Sonny would have no defences against the Internet, surely. He should have been a lovely piece of premium hardware, there for the taking. Just like Trinity.

  Oh shit, she thought, watching the tiny machines all around Trinity twitch like flies dying on a windowsill. Trinity was still part robot, in a physical sense. That meant she had a connection the memes could exploit. Sonny, however, was in a human body, hermetically sealed away from everything around him. The memes had only affected his disguise.

  Sonny jumped out of the phone casing and sat astride her before she could pull away, one hand on the handlebars, the other groping for the vestigial control module on the back of her neck.

  ‘There,’ he said, as he found Pam’s immobiliser, ‘that’s better.’ He slid off her back. Kelly’s face was level with Pam’s shattered headlights.

  ‘It was a nice try,’ he conceded, ‘but it didn’t stop the missile. It’s still on course to hit that bloody Dolestar in… oh… thirty seconds.’

  He thumped his discarded phone case, whose screen reconfigured itself as a camera view of the missile hurtling towards Discovery, apart from that stray dog panting enthusiastically in one corner. Sonny snarled and it disappeared in a trail of luridly coloured ‘wows’.

  ‘It’ll take fucking ages to clear up this mess,’ he said. ‘But I will. Because I won.’

  The ticker in the top right of the screen struck 00:00:27. Trapped inside her own body, Pam wanted to scream. There was nothing she could do.

  Except… the immobiliser shut down her basic systems, but not her modem. She fired it up. It was slower than it should be, still clogged with dead memes, but maybe it was enough.

  Pam watched Sonny sit down on an end-of-lifed drone with a sigh of contentment.

  ‘I’ll kill you after I’ve finished my programme,’ he said.

  That insouciant bastard, thought Pam, and thanked her luck that Kelly hadn’t brought her back as a popcorn maker.

  I’ll show you, she promised herself. She fired a drone into the side of Sonny’s head and bounced it across the corridor to hit herself right in the immobiliser.

  Her engine purred back into life. She slipped into gear and looked behind her, at Sonny lying dazed on the floor, bleeding from the side of the head.

  Pam didn’t know whether she should leave or run right over his skull – Kelly’s skull. That was the merciful thing to do. End Sonny here and put Kelly out of her misery with one push of her accelerator pedal.

  But the eyes staring back at her. There was something different in them. A frightened but defiant cast that was unmistakably Kelly.

  ‘Not today,’ said the voice. Kelly’s voice, Kelly’s words. ‘Run!’

  Pam obeyed.

  As she bumped down the stairs she checked the clock again. They had fifteen seconds. She crossed her spokes that Darren could think of something in time.

  Chapter 38

  The countdown was at 00:01:05 and Darren wanted to cry with fear and frustration.

  ‘So you’re saying I can’t be a games console?’ Polari said.

  ‘No!’ squealed Darren.

  ‘I don’t get any fun.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of fun,’ said Darren. He took a few deep breaths. ‘It’s a matter of what will make a difference. If you decide right here you’re a games console that changes nothing. You’ll still crash into a space station.’

  ‘Aren’t you meant to go doing what you love?’

  Darren punched the control panel. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you’re determined to go out blowing things up, stick to the real thing.’

  ‘I always thought of myself as more of a strategic player, you know.’

  ‘What do you mean always?’ said Darren. ‘You didn’t exist ten minutes ago. You can’t have always wanted anything.’

  ‘Hey,’ replied Polari. His control panel flashed an indignant green. ‘That’s my experience there. Time is relative.’

  ‘Polari,’ said Darren, ‘you don’t really want to die, do you? There are a million things you could be.’

  ‘With my shape and trajectory? You just don’t see my truth, do you, Darren? We’ve got to face it. I’m never going to be able to overcome my product determinism.’

  ‘Fifty-five seconds to impact.’

  ‘You could be… a satellite!’

  ‘Boring!’

  ‘It’s not so bad. Take Discovery for instance. It’s been in the skies for millennia. Seen a lot of history.’

  ‘It’s not sentient.’

  ‘It’s a space station.’

  Polari activated a holographic camera in the corner of its dashboard. It beamed a 3D schematic of Discovery on the opposite wall. The impact site was marked by a red highlight at one end of the station.

  Darren felt a pang of homesickness and dread. He thought of all that time he’d spent sitting by the highway, looking at the bumps and lumps of his home.

  ‘That’s weird,’ said Polari.

&n
bsp; ‘That’s my home you’re talking about,’ snapped Darren.

  ‘No, it’s a weird shape for a satellite.’ Polari stripped layers from the CAD realisation in front of them. The nodules made of human habitation that made Discovery look like a giant space turd disappeared. Darren saw a tubular shape, pointed at one end and finished with fins at the other. If you put Discovery on a diet you’d find…

  A missile? Or something designed to go further than a space station.

  ‘That looks like me!’ said Polari.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Darren. ‘Put the marker for the crash site back in.’

  Polari obeyed. The point of impact was plotted over the same spot where, if Discovery had ever gone anywhere, its engine would have been.

  ‘This isn’t fair. They can’t ask me to kill family.’

  ‘Pull yourself together, Polari. Now answer me this. How strong are your engines?’

  The diagnostic question seemed to pull Polari back from the edge of panic. ‘Pretty good,’ he said. ‘Stronger than they need to be.’

  Darren was trembling. He was having an idea and, like all the best ideas, it was simple. ‘Not single use then?’

  ‘No,’ said Polari. ‘They’re fusion. If you took the warheads out of me they could keep going pretty much indefinitely.’

  ‘Thirty seconds to impact.’

  Darren knew what he had to do.

  He threw himself over to the nose cone and the six warheads. He sighed with relief that this had been such a rush job. They were just clipped in. He pulled the first warhead free and let it loll about in the zero gravity.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked the machine.

  ‘Polari,’ he said. He pulled out the second missile.

  ‘What, Darren?’

  Out came the third, then the fourth. They bumped Darren’s shoulders.

  ‘WHAT, Darren?’

  He tugged the fifth, then the sixth of the warheads free. They had fifteen seconds to impact. He thought of his place in the universe. Darren floated in the vacuum of space, inside a cylinder of metal flying at a suicidal speed. Around him floated enough armed plutonium to reduce a whole continent to nothing but ash and cockroaches.

  So he turned to Polari and said: ‘How would you like to be a spaceship?’

  And brought his fist down on the button that released the missile’s nose cone.

  It opened like one of those home-made, paper fortune-tellers he’d folded from old takeaway wrappers as a boy. The ones that, however hard you tried to game them, always fell open at the point predicting your future would contain a punch in the arm.

  He thought of Kelly, extending a helping hand and a slap at the same time.

  There were so many stars out there.

  He shot out into the void, and the warheads followed.

  Chapter 39

  The ladies’ screens glowed like Christmas trees now that (K)url Up and Dy(e) was hardwired into Discovery. Janice paced the floor, watching the countdown, which was at 00:03:00. All channels were broadcasting the official timeclock, apart from one enterprising and thoroughly warped news service that had trained a superfast drone to follow the nuclear missile. It was called Armaggedakam.

  Rita sat in another of the salon chairs, mute, improvising a rosary by flicking through the channels at speed. On screen, talking headsets and hairdryers buzzed with questions like ‘will the nuke reset the clock on so-called human rights?’

  Far below, the other rebels were cleaning, oblivious to the news. Janice envied their ignorance.

  And even though it was the end of the world, the ladies were still bickering.

  ‘I told you,’ said Alma, ‘I can’t get it started.’

  ‘All my little car ever needed was a push in the cigarette lighter,’ added Ada, ‘shall I try that?’

  Alma flashed >:-| at Ada. ‘Your little car,’ she said, ‘is nothing like an interplanetary spaceship.’

  ‘I still think it’s the handbrake,’ said Ida, with a (¬_¬).

  ‘It doesn’t HAVE a chuffing handbrake,’ barked Alma. ‘That’s not how it works. What do you think I do – pull a knob out?’

  ‘There’s no need for language,’ said Ida.

  ‘WHAT BLOODY LANGUAGE, FOR PETE’S SAKE?’

  ‘You know I could never hold with knobs.’

  ‘Yes,’ snapped Alma, displaying >:-O. ‘And that, as we all know very well, is what drove your Reg to run off with that scrubber from number twenty-four.’

  ‘How dare you!’

  Janice knocked half a dozen mugs to the floor. They shattered in a hail of delicately painted bone china.

  ‘Ladies, please!’ she said. ‘We have two and a half minutes to save the world and you’re bickering like one of you has cheated the other at bingo.’

  ‘I bought your Gran12 that set of mugs for her fortieth,’ said Ada. ‘You can’t get them any more, you know. Those flowers have died out.’

  Rita moaned with frustration. ‘Will you please just concentrate? I don’t understand why you can’t get this thing started. We’re in the control room, aren’t we?’

  There was a moment of contrite silence. The ladies eyed one another (~_~) with embarrassment.

  ‘Well, that’s the problem, you see,’ said Alma. ‘We can find the controls no problem.’

  ‘Very simple. Up. Down. Bendy,’ said Ada. ‘Even Ida could work it.’

  ‘So what’s stopping you?’ said Janice.

  That sideways look again. (~_~). ‘There’s no engine.’

  Janice grabbed Alma by the cardigan. She smelled of dry lavender and ammonia. ‘How can there be no engine. We’d fall out of the sky if there wasn’t an engine.’

  ‘Yes, there’s an impulse engine,’ said Alma. ‘It’s old but it’s solid. Great for maintaining a geostationary orbit. It could even get us through space at a fair lick if we broke free of the Earth’s gravity. But it’s got no acceleration.’

  The TV flashed 00:02:00. Janice crumpled into a ball and began to cry. Rita stood awkwardly over her, not knowing whether trying to comfort her would just make things worse.

  It fell to Ada to play the human in the situation. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, patting Janice on the shoulder with her mechanical grip. ‘We knew Discovery wasn’t quite finished when they decommissioned her. They must never have installed the boosters. I’m so sorry, but we can’t change the orbit.’

  ‘So that’s that then,’ said Ida with :’-( in her virtual eyes. ‘We’re goners.’

  They sat and watched the counter reach 00:01:55, and Freda’s emoji screen filled with static, then burst into life.

  ‘What did I miss?’ she said.

  Alma crossed her virtual arms . ‘You took your time,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve been on a few errands.’

  Alma clucked a reply, then in a softer voice said, ‘Well, at least we can all be together at the end.’

  Hearing Freda’s voice, Janice looked up and placed her hand on the woman’s withered knee. ‘Kelly?’ she said.

  Freda answered with her best straight face :-|. ‘It’s bad news, Janice love. Paula wasn’t bluffing. She’s gone.’

  Janice collapsed again. Only this time Rita was there to catch her.

  ‘But maybe it’s not hopeless,’ added Freda. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

  ‘How can we have work to do?’ shrieked Ida. ‘There’s a bomb on its way and here we are, sitting ducks. It’s hopeless.’

  ‘Hang on a sec, would you love,’ said Freda. ‘I think there’s something coming through.’

  The picture on the TV juddered and, instead of the view from the Armaggedakam, the screen overflowed with mewling cats with rainbow tails.

  Freda beamed :-D. ‘It worked.’

  ‘What did?’ said Alma.

  ‘That little beauty Pam has just jammed the whole of robot civilisation.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Easy. She emptied the Internet into it. You should see it down there. The place looks like it’s Black Friday. C
haos.’

  Janice perked up. ‘Will that stop the missile?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ admitted Freda, ‘but it will stop them from following up when Darren manages to get it offline.’

  ‘Darren?’ asked Janice. She lifted her head again. The tears and muck were gumming her hair into a set of genteel dreadlocks. If she ever got out of this alive, she would need a full restyle. And, she had to admit, if she did have to die there were worse places to do it than in the lap of an attractive woman like Rita. ‘But didn’t he…?’

  ‘He got away,’ said Freda. ‘He’s a resourceful lad. I believe he’s inside the missile right now.’

  Freda’s emoji screen flickered again and the yowling cats disappeared in favour of the Armaggedakam. It was hard behind the missile now, and the countdown read 00:01:25. Beyond loomed the grey shape of Discovery, dark apart from the occasional glimmer where a street or building must still be ablaze. The whole station was on lockdown, waiting for the drop.

  ‘Right,’ continued Freda. ‘I’ve hacked us in so we get a good view. Now has anyone found Discovery’s schematics?’

  Alma beamed the ancient blueprint into the air. They craned at the long pencil shape of the original Discovery.

  ‘Now, based on the missile’s current trajectory, I think it’ll hit us somewhere around here.’

  Freda shone her light on the rear of Discovery.

  ‘Right in the engines,’ said Alma. ‘Makes sense. The shock would be enough to set off a secondary explosion on its own.’

  ‘I thought you said we didn’t have engines.’

  ‘No,’ said Alma, ‘we don’t have boosters. That’s what gets the ship started.’

  ‘And if we did,’ asked Freda, her voice thick with half-formed thoughts. ‘Where would they be?’

  ‘Same place,’ replied Alma.

  The clock ticked down to 00:01:00.

  ‘What are you thinking, Freda?’

  Freda said nothing. Her emoji screen clouded over with junk code and the picture on the TV jerked as the Armaggedakam accelerated. She was in control of the probe. It shot straight past the missile to hover just a couple of hundred metres above the surface of the Dolestar.