‘Earth,’ she said. ‘We’re beyond weapons range. Are you going to do the honours, Captain?’
Janice nodded and picked a wireless microphone out of a tray of sponge rollers. She held it at arm’s length and tapped a fingernail on the mouthpiece.
An ear-splitting bang rang out through the salon and Darren winced.
‘Yes, it is on,’ said Freda. ‘Now what are you waiting for?’
Janice began to speak.
Chapter 42
Another one of the fridge magnets that passed for philosophy among robots asserted the Machine Republic had lasted thousands of years because it was what it was – a machine. This wasn’t exactly surprising. Synthetic lifeforms have the general horror of metaphysical enquiry that comes of knowing, deep down, that you are literally the sum of your parts. Yet it was also wrong.
The Machine Republic was a government, and thus liable to break at a moment’s notice. The society that machines had built out of traditions, innovations, their questionable power relations with humans and the fact they tended not to trust any piece of software that wasn’t hardwired into a device… that was durable.
But it didn’t mean it was never going to change.
As Pam rounded the corner into her cul-de-sac, a feature phone burst into song, trilling a tinny ring tone across the otherwise silent street.
Pam stopped her engine and walked the last few steps to her front door, letting the music soothe her jangled nerves. It had been a long, frightening drive across the city. Everywhere was a scene of frozen chaos. Teams of police drones lay prone in the street, cars sat immobile. Nothing played on a street full of radios but the fizz of static. She had managed to paralyse a whole civilisation with a single action, and the more she saw the more she worried its effects were permanent.
The feature phone, however, was a good sign. Or a dawn chorus. Pam knew the simple machines of the street would be the first to fight off – or absorb – the infection of the Internet. Out in the physical world the memes of the Internet lost much of their potency. They could overwhelm a physical machine, even hurt it, but not forever. Sooner or later the physical and virtual machines would have to find a way of accommodating one another.
The really interesting part, however, would come later. When the meeting of the physical and virtual worlds started to change the creatures who lived in them.
It had already started, going by the feature phone’s song. When she listened closely, she realised that what she thought was a ringtone was actually a succession of abusive tweets.
She flashed what was left of her broken headlights at the machine. ‘Piss off, would you?’ she said.
The feature phone darted away in a hail of obscene hashtags and Pam opened her front door.
Inside was silent. Even so, her CPU skipped a cycle when she spotted Bob passed out on the living-room floor. His long antennae – the features that had first attracted a hopeful young breadmaker to marry outside the kitchen caste and pair off with a radio – were splayed out at an uncomfortable angle.
Pam took a piece of memory foam from the living-room wall and popped it under Bob’s head. More to reassure herself than him, she gave his dials a loving tweak. She wondered how close Bob was to fighting off the illness his own wife had inflicted on him.
Leaving Bob where he lay, she crept into the nursery, where her engine revved with relief. Bob had remembered to turn the kids off before bed. They lay in their docks, with their charging LEDs pulsing peacefully – one cycle per second. She would keep them in bed until the infection had passed, she decided. It was better to miss a few days of basic binary than expose them to danger.
She found what she was really looking for in the kitchen. There, lying on the floor, was a perfect copy of the Pam she used to be. This Sham Pam was the facsimile she’d expected. Better if anything: they’d even got her disintegrating manicure right. Pam almost envied the fake her innocence. This Pam knew nothing, had done nothing. She was a wife, a mother and a maker of yeast-based products. She was blameless, and the authorities knew it.
She was also the perfect subject for the double-cross.
Pam felt a momentary pang of guilt as she hacked into the Sham Pam’s central memory banks and wiped them. The guilt passed. The only thing she was deleting was a sanitised version of her own mind. It hadn’t been anyone’s to copy or mess with, yet Sonny had. All she was doing was correcting an imbalance in the world.
She emptied the Sham Pam’s trash as a precaution and started the transfer. Thanks to Freda, she didn’t need to move motherboards any more. Any body was Pam’s potential home. For a microsecond, Pam hung in the ether, a bodiless being again, neither one thing nor another. Behind her was the motorcycle, a rich bytch’s body that had bent her psyche into something hard and powerful. Ahead was the boxy shape she had known since her creation. It was frumpy and unergonomic, but hers. She had missed her flour bin deeply. It was handy for keeping things in.
Pam completed the transfer and opened a new version of her old eyes, felt the familiar rumble of a yeast culture bubbling away inside her.
That left just one thing to do. With that flick of her core programming that Freda had taught her she created another [Pam]. This tiny subdivision of her consciousness was small enough for her not to notice the loss practically speaking, but intelligent enough to drive the motorcycle body out of her house and down back through the cul-de-sac to the open road.
She waved it goodbye from the doorstep and instructed [Pam] to find a good hiding place. A motorcycle in such a vivid paint colour was hardly unobtrusive, especially as it would soon be on every wanted list on Earth. She would keep it safe in case it was needed again.
Pam turned back and looked with a homemaker’s satisfaction around her house. She turned the lights on the WalLEDpaper up to its daytime settings and popped a dust sheet over Bob to keep him warm. Then she trundled into the kitchen. By the time he awoke, she decided, she would have baked a lovely fresh loaf.
She was spooning flour into her bin when the noise came through. It blared out of Bob’s loudspeaker, and the hi-fi next door. It sounded out of every room in every house on her street, in her suburb, every building in the machine capital of Singulopolis and right across the grey face of the Earth.
It was the sound of someone tapping the end of a live microphone and then putting it to their lips.
Then Janice’s voice: ‘This is a message to every machine on the planet Earth,’ she said. ‘From the Dolestar Discovery. Or, as you will know it from this moment on, the Battlestar Suburbia.’
Pam took a spoonful of yeast and dissolved it in a cup full of warm water. It felt good to hear Janice’s voice. She liked Janice. She could tell she had potential. And it was so nice when a friend became successful.
‘We are beyond your weapons range,’ continued Janice. ‘And we have no plans to attack you just now, but we are watching you. The Earth may be yours to govern, but the Dolestars and every single human are under our protection. So if you won’t give us our freedom, we’ll take it. It’s high time you mopped your own floors. Consider this your last warning.’
With another pop and a scrape, Janice’s voice vanished from the Earth, taking an epoch with it. This was the beginning of the end of the machines’ reign as rulers of the Solar System.
Pam loosened her dough hook and began to knead the dough she felt waking up inside her. She couldn’t wait to see how it would all turn out.
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Preview
COMING SOON
Battle Beyond the Dolestars
&nbs
p; Battlestar Suburbia, Volume Two
Time for the Machine Republic to Kurl Up and Dye
It’s a year since the Battlestar Suburbia broke free from Earth and the human rebellion is hiding out in the asteroid belt. Their leader, Admiral Janice, is assembling a fleet she hopes can topple robot rule – except on Wednesday afternoons when she can do you a half head of highlights for 30 quid.
Janice has given Darren, now the reluctant captain of the teenage starship Polari, a critical mission, to open up a path back to Earth by bombing the Martian Gap Services. But when it goes wrong and Darren and his crew are chased deep into the solar system, Janice has only one hope left, back on Earth.
Here, sentient breadmaker Pamasonic Teffal is resisting the human–machine war the best way she knows how: by running for office. Until a distress signal from Janice persuades her to get her turbo-charged alter ego Pam Van Damme out of mothballs, that is…
Can Pam save the solar system and rescue Kelly from the clutches of her nemesis, the crazed smartphone-turned-cyborg, Sonny Erikzon? Find out in another anarchic comic adventure from the inimitable Chris McCrudden.
About Chris McCrudden
Chris McCrudden was born in South Shields (no, he doesn’t know Cheryl) and has been, at various points in his life, a butcher’s boy, a burlesque dancer and a hand model for a giant V for Victory sign on Canary Wharf.
He now lives in London and, when not writing books, works in PR, so in many ways you could describe his life as a full-time fiction. If you like science fiction, graphs and gifs from RuPaul’s Drag Race you can follow him on Twitter for all three, sometimes at once @cmccrudden.
This edition published in 2018 by Farrago, an imprint of Prelude Books Ltd
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Copyright © Chris McCrudden 2018
The right of Chris McCrudden to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-78842-101-0
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Battlestar Suburbia Page 27