Battlestar Suburbia Read online

  Battlestar Suburbia

  Battlestar Suburbia, Volume One

  Chris McCrudden

  Dedication

  For my Mam. I wish you could have read it.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Note from the Publisher

  Preview

  About Chris McCrudden

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  If you took the wrong turning off the A32222 Earth–Mars highway (via Dewsbury) you ended up among the Dolestars.

  The Dolestars, or ‘council planets’, were what happened when you fired a housing estate into space. They followed a low orbit between the Earth and the Moon, bobbing through the waters of inner space like a flotilla of knobbly turds in a toilet bowl. Once upon a time they might have been nice places to live – the sub-orban ideal – just far enough outside the atmosphere to have your own pollution, but still commutable. Thanks to the network of Star Buses that zipped up and down the elevator cables strung between the Earth and its belt of Dolestars, a human could go from home to mopping floors in less than an hour.

  Well, most humans maybe. The few that couldn’t stomach the smell of light bleach worked by the side of the Earth–Mars highway, hawking spare leads and battery packs. They sat by signs offering ‘Hi-NRG Pitstops’ and watched machines whizz by on their way from comfortable homes on Earth to a quiet weekend by the Sea of Tranquillity. And they almost always went ignored. Unless they were gasping for a few extra volts, most machines would rip out their own diodes before talking to a human. To them, humans were just fleshy shapes wreathed in a fug of dirty water vapour, with two arms, two legs and all the information-processing power of a torch bulb.

  The machines had been in control of the Solar System for so long that there were whole elements of robot society who couldn’t believe humans had ever been a dominant species. The nearest thing the Earth had to an official record of the time before the toasters had vomited their last pop tarts was the Internet. But that, they argued, was hardly a reliable source. Even if it weren’t treason to access it in the first place, who could trust a repository of linked information that rewrote itself, and set so much store by talking cats?

  In fact, the only convincing proof that humans had once occupied any position of power in the universe was their existence. How else would such messy organisms get beyond prototype, much less into mass production? Yet here they were, sticking to the lower rungs of the economy like grease clings to the bottom of a cooker. Or at least how it would if cookers cooked any more. After thousands of years of overexposure to frying, baking and grilling, the species preferred ready meals, so tended to shack up with microwaves.

  To their robot overlords, humans might just be clumps of inefficient matter, but they still had names among themselves. Take Darren, for example. At first glance he was the living embodiment of what was often called the ‘human stain’ condition. He was short, his nose ran more efficiently than he did, and he made his living selling battery top-ups by the side of the road.

  Or he did until one afternoon a Sports-Utility-Vehicle undertook a washing machine on the hard shoulder, dinging his charge-cart off the embankment of the Earth–Mars highway and into orbit. And he watched, hyperventilating into his oxygen cap, as his livelihood drifted off into space.

  ‘Wankers,’ he yelled, forgetting that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum and that sentient beings who drive all-terrain vehicles in the sub-orbs are incapable of remorse. ‘Wankers.’

  That charge-cart was his ticket off the Dolestar and, while he never earned much, it gave him eight hours of independence a day. If he lost it, there was only one place to go. He would end up straight back in a job queue that ended with a mop and bucket.

  Even the thought was enough to make him feel sick. It meant going back to a life spent smelling like artificial pine, of damp overalls, crammed Star Buses and the acid disdain of the foremachine as it ran a black light over the windows to check for smears.

  He just couldn’t do it. So he fired up the lifesaving boosters that humanity kept in the soles of its shoes now that they lived in orbit and jumped. The traffic blurred in front of him; his charge-cart wheeled in the darkness. He stretched until the bones in his fingers ached. But it was drifting too far and too fast, with a momentum stronger than any shoe-booster. It would need a tow.

  Only when Darren bumped back on to the roadside did his other loss hit him. His charge-cart didn’t just contain his job and self-respect. It had his wallet too.

  Darren pulled the visor of his oxygen cap down to hide tears of frustration and blinked them away. It was no good moping. If he had any hope of getting his charge-cart back, he needed money. And he could only find that across the thin causeway that bridged the highway embankment with his home, the Dolestar Discovery.

  Darren knew that his Dolestar had been something more important than an orbiting sink estate once, from the optimism of the name ‘Discovery’, which hung over the Job Temple in the town centre. Other Dolestars had names that evoked suburbia rather than interplanetary exploration, with names like ‘Municipal Parking’ or ‘Swindon’. But apart from its name, all that remained of the original Discovery was its shape, a long, tapering cylinder. It might have been aerodynamic once, or even elegant, but now it was just narrow. Discovery’s surface was barnacled over with terraces of shanty houses beaten out of old satellite dishes and rocket casings. Nothing on that space station looked built so much as knocked together in an ill-lit potting shed. The Job Temple was the one exception. This soaring spike of metal bristled with security cameras and, as the centrepiece of every Dolestar, was topped with a fifty-metre-high ‘Don’t Touch’ sign that was the symbol of the Machine Republic.

  This was Darren’s last chance. A human being without a job was economically unproductive, and unproductivity was a crime. Until today, he’d been one of the few humans who made their own productivity, but now that was beyond his grasp because one selfish robot wanted to shave a few seconds off their journey time. He would have to take any job the machines at the Job Temple gave him.

  He saw what that meant as he trudged on to the main road running through Discovery. It was the end of work time and humans were on their way home from the bus station. They clomped along the gloomy streets with their oxygen caps and scarves pulled down to compensate for the poor Dolestar atmosphere. Everywhere they went, there followed a miserable calypso of mops clanking off buckets. The same scene would be repeated right around the Earth, as billions returned from a hard day of scrubbing for their robot overlords there. It was partly a practical thing. Despite millennia of machine evolution, their engin
eers had never quite cracked the water-resistant opposable thumb. But it was mostly political. Now that they were the dominant lifetypes, it had been a long time since a machine saved labour when it could create some instead.

  Darren drew suspicious glances as he pushed through the crowd. Where was he going? It was nearly teatime and night shifts had been forbidden ever since some joker had got the death penalty for resetting a family of alarm clocks. Their curiousness turned to scorn, however, when he crossed the road and approached the Job Temple.

  A woman with a duster tied over her head poked her son in the shoulder. ‘See what happens when you don’t keep in with your supervisor, Mickey?’ she scolded. ‘You end up in the dole queue.’

  Everyone in earshot looked the other way. In an era where unemployment was unthinkable, being without a job could only mean one thing: Darren must have been sacked. The crowd stood aside, avoiding the pariah. Darren bowed his head and mounted the steps up to the Job Temple. It was impossible now, he thought, for today to get any worse.

  ‘Not much of an employment record here,’ whined the machine behind the ‘Emergency Cases’ desk inside the Job Temple. Its voice echoed around the main hall, a cavernous space dominated by a neon sign spelling out ‘You Betta Werk’, the motto of the Human Employment Services. They were alone. Even the clock had knocked off for the evening, tapping its own face reproachfully at Darren as it left with a dust sheet over one arm.

  This machine must, Darren decided, when it had stopped scolding him, be descended from a hairdryer. That explained the noise and hot air.

  ‘Look, I don’t mean to be a bother,’ said Darren, ‘I just need to earn a bit of money quickly. To get me back on my feet.’

  The hairdryer let out an exasperated buzz. ‘Well, I don’t see what I can do for you,’ it said. ‘You’ve got very little useful experience and your qualifications…’

  It tapped the copy of Darren’s permanent record that lay squirming with embarrassment on the desk. The grades read like a nightmare hand at Scrabble.

  ‘I wasn’t very academic,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll say. Your polishing tutor added a postscript to your final mark saying that anyone who let you near glass deserved reprogramming.’

  Darren’s mind wheeled back to school. Even thinking of the office cleaning simulator made him nauseous. He’d been hopeless, mixing up his cleaning cloths with his dusters. And then there were the chemicals. How could he know which did what if they all smelt the same sickly lemony-pine-ish smell?

  ‘I prefer being outdoors,’ he said.

  ‘And what possible good is that?’ The hairdryer revved its motor a few times, trying to gather patience. ‘I’ve got a few openings here but they all want something—’

  ‘Someone.’

  ‘One, thing: what’s the difference? They all want a cleaner they can trust with equipment. If you can’t keep your own charge-cart safe, how do I know you won’t put a hole in the bucket on the first day?’

  Darren flushed. ‘It wasn’t my fault. Some machine—’

  ‘You should have been more careful.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I just need a job – anything – for a bit so I can earn enough money to get my charge-cart back. Don’t you have anything?’

  ‘Impossible,’ snapped the hairdryer. ‘It’s expressly forbidden for a vagrant human to take any contract shorter than six months. That’s the law.’

  Darren imagined his beloved charge-cart drifting further out of reach as he moved the dust around in some faceless office down on Earth. The anger spread to his cheeks. ‘Well, that’s stupid.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s stupid,’ said the hairdryer, turning its hot air setting up to Sahara levels. ‘A human who, according to his school report, can’t even remember the three foolproof methods of dusting a keyboard.’

  Darren kicked the underside of the desk. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I should have used a fucking vacuum cleaner.’

  ‘How dare you insult your—’

  But before the hairdryer could get the word ‘betters’ past its airblades, Darren had pulled its plug out and was running as fast as his stubby legs would carry him.

  As he ran, Darren tried to quell the rising panic – had he really just run out of the Job Temple? – by thinking of something practical. Money. How could he get some? All he needed was enough for a tow, and life could continue as normal. He could be back at his post selling boost-ups tomorrow with so little productivity lost he could make it up by working through a few lunch breaks.

  But where could he find that kind of money quickly? Tonight, even. A job was out of the question. Even if they did give him something temporary, that meant travelling down to the Big Planet every day. His stomach lurched at the thought. Down there, where the buildings were so high they made your ears pop in sympathy. Where every home, office and shop was full of machines who kept one sensor on you all the time so you didn’t mark the paintwork. He couldn’t do it. There had to be another way.

  Eventually Darren found a suitably dark alley and ducked into it, fighting for breath. He was in an unfamiliar sector of the Dolestar. His own home sector was full of lovingly polished shanty terraces. Their owners could recall the story behind every meteorite dent on their roofs with pride. Here, however, the terraces looked dissolute. They were rusty heaps of metal that housed repair shops for the few machines unlucky enough to spend time on the Dolestars. They had names like ‘No Mikey We Likey’ and ‘Loose Connections’ and outside them, each outlined perfectly by a separate street lamp, stood a personal cleaner.

  Personal cleaners were the dirty little secret of human–machine relations. They provided machines with the little attentions and extras it wouldn’t be proper to ask your servants to do. They were the deft little fingers who teased the grime out of recessed buttons and greased aching moving parts. Machines loved their dexterity and hated that being handled by human fingers felt so damn good. Other, decent humans shunned them for breaking what they knew was the natural order of society. They were outcasts.

  But so was Darren now.

  He studied the personal cleaners as they twitched and strutted under the lamplights, forming an idea. There were two types of personal cleaners. The first worked inside repair shops, or ‘fondle parlours’ as they were commonly known, in relative comfort. The second type worked on the streets. They siphoned the tasks too menial or demeaning for the repair shops, eking out a living at the bottom of the human–machine hierarchy.

  One cleaner, standing outside a shop that called itself ‘Massive Spanners’, caught Darren’s attention. He was an emaciated man wearing a boiler suit cut off at the thigh and a sailor cap. His mouth was livid with lipstick and he was so cold his legs quivered like a guitar string playing the long note at the end of a syrupy ballad. All the while his eyes kept darting around the road, wishing for some passing trade to materialise.

  After a while the Massive Spanners’ door opened and out stepped a young woman, carrying a socket wrench in one hand and a steaming mug in the other. Unlike her painfully thin companion, she was statuesque, and had a firmer sense of her own glamour. She wore a fibre-optic-fur coat, improbably high booster heels and dark oxygen glasses. She smiled and handed the mug to the emaciated man – Darren was too far away to hear anything – when her gaze darted over to the alleyway. Darren’s eyes met hers.

  He took another deep breath and closed his eyes. He’d seen enough to know how this worked, he decided. Compared to this lot, he was young, he was healthy and he had nothing to lose. He unzipped his hoodie and solemnly rolled his T-shirt up a few times to expose a few inches of flesh. It puckered into chicken skin at the touch of the cold. He tried a pout.

  Who wouldn’t stoop to touching a few touchscreens when they’d run out of other choices?

  And he stepped out into the road.

  Above him a street lamp winked into life. The shock turned Darren’s pout into a grimace. ‘Name?’ it said, tipping its neck down so that its bulb drew level with Da
rren’s face. ‘Purpose?’

  Shit, thought Darren. He’d heard rumours that a new generation of spybot, distantly related to the anglepoise lamp, was doing undercover work on the council planets. This must be one of them. The question was, however, was it here to arrest him or employ his services?

  ‘Name and purpose,’ repeated the lamp.

  Darren said nothing as a drop of sweat collected in the small of his back and ran for the protection of his underpants.

  ‘Name and purpose!’ repeated the lamp, turning up the wattage on him. ‘Explain why you are roaming this area after work hours.’

  ‘He’s with me, dimbulb,’ came a woman’s voice. Darren was astonished. He’d never heard a fleshie speak to a machine that way.

  The lamp snapped away from Darren towards the woman. Its beam narrowed. ‘And you are?’ it said.

  Darren looked sideways. It was the woman from Massive Spanners. Her voice was as eccentric as her appearance, hard as an interstellar viaduct.

  ‘That’s my trainee,’ she said, removing her oxygen glasses to reveal an attractive, large-featured face, punctuated with a slash of orange lipstick. ‘And he’s got a very important client in half an hour, so do you mind?’

  The lamp’s beam thinned to a laser flash across the woman’s face. Unflapped, she put her glasses back on. ‘And who are you, human?’

  ‘Just an honest businesswoman trying to get by,’ she replied, walking until she was close enough to touch his control panel. ‘Ugh,’ she said, pointing at the film of grime that coated it. ‘When was the last time you got this cleaned?’

  Darren didn’t know whether to hug her or run.

  ‘Get your hands off me, you brothel-keeper,’ snapped the lamp.

  The woman was undeterred. She produced a latex glove from her fibre-optic fur and snapped open the control panel. Then she motioned Darren over. Her expression was unmistakable. It said: ‘play along with this, my sweet, or we are both toast.’

  ‘See there, kiddo,’ she said, pointing at the innards of the lamp post’s control panel. ‘That’s what we in the trade call a dust bunny. A whole warren of them actually. You haven’t had a service in months, have you?’