Battlestar Suburbia Read online

  Pam threw both hands in the air and spotted her new LED nail job. The leopard print was a lovely touch. ‘So it seems,’ she said to Darren. And then to Kelly, ‘You’ve done a nice job, by the way. I feel like a new machine.’

  Kelly shrugged and leaned against the wall. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘But it is,’ said Pam. She tested her reactions again by throwing a leg out and felt dizzy from the kickback. ‘You didn’t need to do this. Any kind of body would have done if all you wanted was answers. You could have put my motherboard in a drone if you’d wanted.’

  Kelly shrugged again. For a moment Pam wondered whether her own daughter would grow up to be this irritating, and if so would her replacement have the patience not to lock her out with the recycling when she reached those tricky adolescent years in her life cycle.

  ‘If something’s worth doing,’ said Kelly at last, ‘it’s worth doing well.’

  Pam appraised Kelly again, noticing how her jaw locked when she tried to swallow an emotion. ‘You’re very like your mum.’

  Kelly ignored the comment. ‘Why did they send you after me?’

  ‘It was never about you,’ said Pam. ‘You were just the traceable one. After that, erm, incident with the street lamp.’

  For about the millionth time that day, Darren wished he’d worn a plastic ring. Something out of a cracker would never cause so much trouble.

  ‘So what were they looking for?’ he said.

  ‘They know about your mother’s ladies,’ said Pam. ‘It’s them they want. All you ever were was a way to find them.’

  Kelly put her spanner down and stared into space. Meanwhile, Darren readjusted his worldview. Even for someone like him, who was so low down the food chain that even plankton left him off their Christmas card list, it was still disconcerting to be reminded that you weren’t the centre of events.

  ‘But they’re harmless,’ said Darren. ‘None of them have done anything more dangerous in the past aeon than dunk a biscuit.’

  ‘And Mum has to do that for them,’ murmured Kelly.

  ‘It’s not that they want to kill them exactly,’ said Pam. ‘More like take them for a joyride. And then take them apart for the parts.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the mess a custard cream leaves on the inside of an IV bag,’ said Kelly. ‘Sometimes they have to go through the steam cleaner three times.’

  ‘Is she okay?’ Pam asked Darren.

  ‘It’s been a funny day,’ he replied.

  Kelly stood up again. ‘I have to go,’ she said.

  ‘But…’ started Darren.

  ‘Mum needs me,’ snapped Kelly. ‘We’ve been down here playing bloody dress-up and my mum’s in danger. I need to get back…’

  Pam got up and blocked Kelly’s exit. As she did, the light played about her, glinting in ways that it hadn’t since she was a baby machine. She was a creature of different alloys now: lighter, stronger, a better shock absorber. Yet as she revved her new engine she found herself missing her old oven. Where would she keep odds and ends now that her flour bin was gone. Motorcycles were zippy, but they had so little storage.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kelly,’ she said, ‘but I think it’s too late for that.’ She switched her speech generator over to double time and told her story for the second time that evening. She got as far as explaining how Janice’s false trail had put the cyborgs at risk before Kelly started fidgeting again.

  ‘She’s trapped,’ she said. ‘It’s all my fault. Well,’ she narrowed her eyes at Darren, ‘not Mum’s fault at least.’

  ‘And you did the right thing by getting away,’ Pam reassured her. ‘We just have to find a way of helping her from here. Your mother’s an intelligent woman and I think the ladies will be more help than they look.’

  ‘She’s right, Kelly,’ added Darren. ‘Whatever these machines have in mind, it’ll be getting planned from down here. We got here under the nose of I don’t know how much surveillance. How hard can it be to break into the government?’ He pointed at Pam’s luscious new paintwork and continued: ‘No one’s going to be looking at us. We make for the High-Power Streets. Pam, you play the rich bytch out shopping with her servants, we carry the bags.’

  ‘And then what?’ said Pam.

  ‘We – er – hadn’t got that far ahead,’ said Darren.

  ‘I thought we could lie low here,’ said Kelly, ‘but this place is hot now. There’ll be investigators crawling all over it soon. Besides, if we need to know what the Big Machines are up to, I’ve got friends in the fondle parlours. We can try there.’

  Darren opened the door leading to the back stairs, which yawned as dark and uncertain as their futures.

  ‘But first,’ said Kelly, taking up her spanner again, ‘we need to do something to take the heat off Mum. Is that clear?’

  Chapter 19

  When it first emerged as the capital of machine civilisation, the city of Singulopolis had been as intricate and organised as a newly designed chipset. Its golden roads traced complex patterns between buildings which soared so high that penthouse owners qualified for orbital tax exemption. They were church spires in a world where gods had batteries. It wasn’t a city on a hill so much as the city that demolished the hill, processed the rubble into a carbon–silicon polymer and extruded it into a two-mile-high model of the architect’s crisis of masculinity. It was the city of the future.

  And like all visions of the future, it was obsolete the moment it was finished.

  Now, thousands of years later, the congestion in Singulopolis was so bad that several major suburbs were actually traffic jams that got tired of waiting and settled down to start families.

  The circuit motorways were meant to take each inorganism through the city on a pre-ordained path like an electron moving through the wires of a circuit. And yes, that was a lovely metaphor, but it conveniently forgot that, unlike a 200-kg washing machine, electrons had next to no mass, could move at the speed of light and could at a pinch be in two places at the same time.

  Above ground level it was even worse, because this was where the architects’ original vision developed cataracts. Those high, slick-sided buildings, built out of silicon polymers because there had been no concrete left after the robots had paved over the oceans, offered next to no wind resistance. Hence a constant hurricane whipped through the higher reaches of the city. The air here was a mass of rubbish, atomised plastic and the mashed remains of drones bold or desperate enough to stray too far out of their safe zone.

  And it was the drones that Darren noticed first, when he, Kelly and Pam snuck out of BodyBeau2iful’s concealed fire exit. The ground level of these dizzyingly high towers housed two things that didn’t officially exist: grey-market body shops and drone shanties.

  Because they lacked even the most basic product roadmaps, drones fell outside of the machine caste system. Most were just assembled out of whatever was to protuberance at the time. Consequently, your average drone looked like a broken hairdryer with wings and occupied a niche in inorganic ecology equivalent to a street pigeon.

  They were every bit as feral, swooping over Darren’s head as they fought over the scraps of wire or plastic thrown out by the body shops below and the rubbish hurricane above. The air buzzed with the sound of overtaxed motors, and the cheep-cheep of low-battery warnings from nests full of their rickety-looking children.

  They hadn’t gone more than a couple of blocks when Darren spotted one of these urchins on the pavement. It must have fallen out of the nest before finishing its first flight plan, its wings torn and its peculiar cylindrical body dented by a fall. Darren looked around expecting a parent to swoop in, but instead spotted a nest gaping open like a burst carrier bag. Beside the nest was a clot of spare parts and bust LEDs that could only be a recently end-of-lifed machine. The poor thing’s parent, he thought.

  The drone-baby followed Darren’s eyeline and bleeped at an emotional pitch strong enough to cross the lifeform barrier. Darren bent down and, checking Kelly and Pam were fa
r enough in the distance not to see him doing it, picked the drone up. It fluttered in his hand, less than an ounce of machinery that, if left alone, would be picked to parts in a few seconds. He’d seen too much destruction in the last couple of days to add to it, so, tucking in the urchin’s damaged wings as best he could, he put it into his pocket and followed his fellow fugitives.

  This was new territory to Darren. Until today, his Earth-knowledge had been confined to his routes to and from short-lived cleaning jobs. But even he knew that heading downhill from the area around the bus station was a shortcut into Ama-Zone Prime, Singulopolis’s most desirable shopping district.

  The first sign they were going upmarket was the electric net that hung vertically between the buildings just above head height. It was so fine as to be almost invisible, but the odd spark and zip, occasioned when one of Earth’s increasingly endangered flies collided with it and got a bit rarer in the process, told Darren this must be a drone-free area. As machines, drones were technically superior to humans, but that still didn’t mean most respectable robots wanted to mix with them. And that, Darren reflected as he passed under the netting and spotted another pinprick of light, probably made humans the flies.

  The other side of the net was a different world. Or at least one with a higher credit limit, even though the narrow street was still jammed between buildings that were so high that they bent perspective into something that would have made M. C. Escher take two ibuprofen and have a lie down. Everything was showroom bright, exposing shops that were tasteful, discreet and devoid of much to buy. Darren gulped and vowed not to step into any of them. Just one breakage would be enough to devastate the economy of two Dolestars.

  Darren’s anxiety moved into a higher gear still when he looked up and spotted the source of the bright light. It came from huge, floating street lamps that doubled as security from the tazer attachments they sported around the nose area. He picked up the pace.

  Then he discovered the other major difference between the rest of the city and the Ama Zone. The pavement here was antique, made of the silicon polymer of Ancient Singulopolis. It was a deep, circuit-board green and polished to a finish that was a dream if you had castors, and a major trip hazard for humans. Darren was already feeling unsteady on his feet when Kelly, who was a couple of steps ahead of him, stumbled. She righted herself and stole a look back at Darren. What was that for? Was she trying to tell him something? Darren lost his concentration and his footing. As his left leg slid away from him along the pavement he reached out in a panic for something to steady himself. It turned out to be the spout of an electric kettle, whose L-Eye-Ds blazed indignantly as Darren levered himself back into a standing position with her nose.

  ‘And what,’ squealed the kettle, ‘do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Darren. ‘I…’ His eyes darted between the kettle and Kelly, who was melting back into the crowd.

  Above him he could feel the street lamps starting to take an interest. He hated street lamps, but he feared their tazer attachments more.

  Meanwhile the kettle, who wanted more of an apology than a hurried ‘sorry’, shrieked like she had been on the boil for at least five minutes: ‘Would the owner of this… fleshie… please make itself known.’

  Pam’s handlebars, which were attracting widespread attention from sales assistants, snapped around. Even in the kilowatt brightness of the Ama Zone her headlamps blazed. She turned their full dazzle on the kettle.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said, in a tone that suggested she wanted nothing of the sort.

  The kettle took one look at Pam’s new paint job and clicked its switch with disapproval. ‘I was just saying,’ she continued, ‘that it’s a great shame to see a machine who can’t keep its staff under control.’

  Darren held his breath and waited for Pam’s apology. She was a reasonable machine, and there was no sense letting this escalate when it was all his fault. None came. Instead Pam narrowed the beam of her headlamps over the kettle.

  ‘I don’t see what the fuss is about,’ she said. ‘What are a few more fingerprints to you?’ She pointed to discolourations across the kettle’s carapace. ‘This isn’t a chrome finish. It’s a disgrace.’

  The cash registers and card machines that worked in this part of town glided in to listen on silent, discreet castors. Hidden antennae twitched and broadcast the drama across half of the Ama Zone. The catfights fought among the ladies who launched in the Ama Zone were the highest-rated light entertainment in the Solar System.

  Darren quailed and wondered if Pam was getting a bit too comfortable in her new, spoiled, rich body.

  ‘How dare you,’ rumbled the kettle, a wisp of steam appearing from her spout. ‘A lady of quality would never stoop to personal insults.’

  ‘A lady of quality would never come shopping looking like she’s boiled tea for half the neighbourhood.’

  At this a nearby cash register let out an involuntary ching. In the lexicon of inorganic manners, there were few insults graver than accusing another machine of letting itself be used by humans. Another register gaped and elbowed the nearest card machine, which scribbled ‘MEOW’ in loopy letters on its signature pad.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the kettle, her even tones belied by the column of steam rattling her lid. ‘Did you just call me a… samovar… you… you ho-ped.’

  Pam folded her arms and, very, very slowly, came forwards. Only afterwards did Darren realise she was putting herself between him and the kettle. And where was Kelly? She was standing at the edge of the group of machines clustered around the fight, retouching her lipstick. How, he wondered, could both of them be so cool?

  Pam followed the insult with a grin. It was an expression that made the grips on her handlebars bang together like the sound of someone closing the door of a sports car. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said, ‘it was rude and inaccurate of me to suggest you’re indiscriminate with your tea-making.’

  The street let out a collective exhaust blast of relief.

  Pam pressed on. ‘When it’s clear from the marks all down your sides that you prefer doling out the Cup-a-Soup.’

  The kettle screamed like she was about to boil dry. She threw herself at Pam, steam pouring out of every orifice. Darren turned to flee, noticing as he did so that the street lamps overhead were beginning to fire up their electric charges. His hair stood to attention as current built up in the atmosphere.

  Pam, meanwhile, looked on, the same picture of unconcern as Kelly, while the berserk kettle barrelled towards her. Except, what was that? He saw Pam turn her head ever so slightly in the direction of Kelly and dip the beam in one headlight.

  ‘Freedom for Fleshies!’

  The slogan rang out through the Ama Zone like a fart at a funeral. Darren watched, aghast and amazed as Kelly shouted the battle cry through perfectly painted lips in the middle of Singulopolis’s most exclusive shopping precinct. Nor was he the only being there immobilised by Kelly’s brazenness. The machines, to whom insurrection had been nothing more than a streakily mopped floor for millennia, stood there unable to process what they were seeing.

  Time took on the consistency of jelly.

  Kelly produced a grenade from her brassiere and lobbed it at the kettle. The spell broke. The charges in at least a dozen tazers fizzled, and the machines blew their savage spitbubbles. But gravity was, on this occasion, the faster force.

  The grenade hit its target on the spout and the kettle exploded. Shards of stainless steel shattered windows and gouged chunks of silicone out of the pavement. Its lid, still miraculously intact, frisbee’d across the road to land at an uncomfortable angle on the head of a very chic and affronted travel iron, like a fascinator on the mother of the bride. Proof that, even if the underlying forces that govern three-dimensional space lack subtlety, they still like a joke.

  Yet it wasn’t the rain of hot metal that did the most damage, but the cloud of scalding steam that followed. Darren, shielded by Pam’s body, escaped all but
a few stinging drops, but the robots were nowhere near as lucky. The cloud of water vapour formed a circuit between the live tazers in the air and the machines on the ground. Millions of volts ran through the district. Shoppers toppled, card readers rang up transactions thousands of digits long, and those ominous street lamps in the sky lost control of their superconductor drives and crashed to the ground. Only Pam, whose full-body laminate waterproofing Darren had picked out of the oddments bin a few hours before, stayed standing.

  For a second, then two, then three, the Ama Zone froze. And Darren hesitated, waiting for some thing somewhere to press the refresh button.

  ‘Yes!’ yelled Kelly. She ran the half block between her and Darren and Pam at full pelt and hugged them. ‘We did it. You beauty.’

  Fury started to displace some of the bowel-loosening fear in Darren’s body chemistry.

  ‘I’m still not sure this is going to work,’ said Pam. ‘It’s very high risk.’

  ‘Course it is,’ said Kelly, ‘it’s terrorism. If it isn’t high risk, then it’s just disobedience.’ She unrolled her lipstick as far as it would go and daubed an ‘F’ in garish letters on the side of a street lamp.

  Darren found his voice. ‘What the hell are you playing at? We’re meant to be hiding.’

  ‘Do you think I should spell the fleshies with a “z”?’ asked Kelly. ‘Maybe that will make us look more dangerous.’

  ‘It would make us look even more stupid than we already are.’

  Kelly frowned. ‘Yes, that’s the idea. We want them to underestimate us.’

  ‘You used me as bait,’ said Darren. ‘You planned this.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I’m picking up radio signals,’ interrupted Pam. She swung her head from side to side taking in the destruction. ‘We need to hurry.’

  ‘Why? Why did you do it?’

  Kelly pointed her lipstick at the sky. Her expression changed, worry edging in around the determination. ‘I needed to do something for my mum,’ she said.