Battlestar Suburbia Page 2

  ‘Well,’ replied the lamp post, ‘it’s a bit difficult at the moment. Work, you know?’

  Darren looked behind him at the empty street. If she could just switch off the street lamp’s bulb he could make a run for it. But then what would she do? He couldn’t leave this woman at the mercy of a secret-surveillance machine. Not when she’d tried to help him.

  ‘We’re all entitled to basic maintenance,’ she said. ‘Take my new lad here—’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the lamp post, swinging its light across to dazzle Darren. ‘Funny you should say that he’s new, because I’ve just had a report come in of a fleshie causing a disturbance at the Job Temple—’

  ‘He’s been here all afternoon,’ she lied with astonishing facility. Darren was impressed, but if they were both going to get out of this situation he needed to help. He ought to behave like a proper, professional streetwalker.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he cooed, ‘I’m sure we could both have a good time.’ And he plunged his hand into the machine’s control panel.

  Much later, when Darren reflected on what followed, he decided that his whole existence hinged on that moment he stuck his hand inside a street lamp. If he hadn’t caught the fuse wire with his signet ring, life would have been much less eventful. As it was, a gesture that should have had the robot’s wiring singing with ecstasy short-circuited its power supply.

  The explosion threw both humans right across the street. They landed on the pavement, fused at the waist by her melted fibre-optic-fur coat, their eyes fixed on the smoking stump that had once been a sophisticated intelligence-gathering organism.

  ‘Oh bugger,’ said Darren.

  ‘I’ll give you bugger in a minute,’ she replied, ripping what was left of her coat from Darren’s overalls. She stared at the mess and Darren saw real fear on her face.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ she said. ‘Run!’ She sprang away down the street with a shoe in each hand as the smouldering stump began to screech ‘Terrorist attack. Warning, terrorist attack. Emergency backup requested’ across all main communications frequencies.

  Lacking anything braver or cleverer to do, Darren raced after her.

  He followed her down the alleyway he had first hidden in and then through a maze of narrow passages into the depths of the Dolestar. They twisted through winding passageways and ginnels, between back-to-back living modules as knobbly as their owners’ housemaid’s knees. They leapt garden fences, threw clean washing to the ground and, thanks to a mistimed jump, pulverised one poor gardener’s highly prized moonrockery.

  They only stopped when they reached the far side of another residential zone and cantered into the courtyard behind an abandoned shop. There the woman kicked away a pile of old cans at the bottom of a wall to reveal a grating.

  She dragged the grating aside with one arm and pulled Darren after her into a dark tunnel. Then she produced something else from her pocket: an iron bar wrapped in electrical wire.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ she snapped. ‘Put that grating back.’

  Darren obeyed. It was heavy. She was strong as well as quick-witted.

  ‘Right. Now get out the way, will you?’

  The woman pointed her iron bar at the grating and flicked a switch at the base. It let out a whine that sounded like a teenage fly pleading to stay out after midnight. An almighty rattling sounded on the other side of the grate as the cans tore towards the electromagnet in her grip, blocking the view above of their escape route in the process.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘We’ll be safe enough here for a bit.’ She slapped Darren across the face. ‘No thanks to you.’

  Darren leaned back against the tunnel wall and clutched his jaw. He felt pain, and a growing sense of indignation. Who was this woman anyway? Even if she had rescued him, she’d started it by interfering. Yes, he’d been in trouble with that lamp, but it wouldn’t have amounted to any more than a fine and a few days in pokey. Now he was facing a murder charge, on the run with a – well, he had no idea what she was, but she was hardly a model citizen.

  ‘Just leave me alone,’ he said. ‘Cheers for trying to do me a favour and everything, but I could do without getting into any more shit today.’

  This time she didn’t hit him, but cupped his face in both hands in a manner that suggested she could pull it off him if she liked. Her hands were cold, dry and strong. ‘You listen to me, sunshine,’ she hissed. ‘I did you a good turn and you fucked it up. But we’re both in for it now. You know what they’re going to see when they pick that machine’s memory chips out of the gutter. Both of us sticking a knife into the bloody toaster. You’re going nowhere.’

  ‘And where are you going?’ said Darren. He looked around him at the tunnel. Just a few metres under the Dolestar and it was a different world. Above, it was all man-made structures that jostled for space and light like cress growing on a flannel. Down here, and away from the light, plants paradoxically took over. The damp walls grew a profusion of mosses, moulds and luminescent night grasses that must have escaped from window boxes above. They gave the sewer a surprising lushness, and deadened the sound of alarm sirens ringing above. The machines were beginning to scramble the security forces.

  The woman said nothing. She looked frightened, and deep in concentration. Darren sincerely hoped she had a plan, because he didn’t.

  ‘You’re a law-abiding human, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Apart from this moment of madness. No previous? Nothing about your character to offend a decent woman?’

  ‘I’m not a personal cleaner, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  At this she laughed. ‘Too bloody right you’re not. I’ve seen plenty crap tarts up at the repair shop, but you’ve just set the bar a light year lower.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. And what are you then?’

  ‘I’m your only hope of getting out of here alive.’ She pointed down the tunnel. ‘Now we’d better be quick, because they’ll send the search team in soon.’

  Darren realised then he had no idea what happened to humans captured by the robot authorities. Disobedience was so rare on the Dolestars that it had taken on the qualities of a fairy tale. The downside to this was that, in spite of many thousands of years of so-called progress, fairy tales had stubbornly refused to grow any less gory. So if it was a choice between a long journey down a dark tunnel with an attractive young woman, or the prospect of being slow-cooked to death by the sadistic range of obsolete kitchen appliances that staffed the secret police’s interview suites, he was picking the option with at least an outside chance of romance.

  ‘Alright,’ he called after her. ‘But can I at least know your name?’

  That laugh echoed round the tunnel again. ‘You can call me anything you like,’ she said sardonically, ‘but Kelly’ll do.’

  ‘Okay Kelly, I’m Darren.’

  ‘Tell someone who gives a shit. Now hurry up.’

  Darren followed the wet slap of her feet until he had no idea where he was or where he was going. He should have felt terrified, but instead – and for the first time in as long as he could remember – he felt alive.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Come in.’

  Pamasonic Teffal was so nervous she was voiding battery power into her flour bin. The LED nail job she’d had done before work, because ‘the bleeding-edge technology appliance should always combine practicality with an attractive user interface’, was down to thirty-per-cent brightness and it was barely eleven a.m. That was the last time she’d ever use that repair shop.

  Her sensors registered that this low-level annoyance was doing her nerves no end of good, and Pam resolved to spend more time at work with printers in future. Now if there was any machine precision-engineered to elicit rage it was printers. If she spent her recharge hours with them she could be promoted within the month.

  She went in and closed the door behind her.

  ‘Ah, Ms Teffal,’ said a voice, reminding Pam that she had just walked into the office of her new boss, the Secretary of State fo
r Internal Affairs (Appliances and Components Division) himself. The Secretary was as slick and corporate as his title suggested. He was a smartphone, a slab of tooled aluminium and silicone, dark and mysterious as a monolith. Or rather, he would have been had he not been plugged into a cradle behind his desk and fiddling with his touchscreen. It was embedded into his chest, where most politicians tended to keep their touchscreens, believing that it made them look transparent and amenable to change. Pam knew different. The semiotics of adaptability and fickleness were impossible to tell apart at a distance. And, of course, no one could get close to a politician. Any machine that even thought of brushing a politician’s touchscreen would be broken down for scrap in seconds.

  This minister, Sonny Erikzon, was part of a cadre of young(ish) conservative devices that had grabbed power on a mandate that the Machine Republic should recover its founding principles. The fact that no one could remember what those were didn’t really matter. This was politics, so they made it up.

  Sonny was a celebrity among these devices. Pam remembered a gossipy pair of hair straighteners telling her that he was semi-aristocratic, descended from the first generation of smartphones smart enough to work out they were more intelligent than their users. Their contempt for organic life echoed down the generations, because Sonny was using his touchscreen to play Humanity Crush, a simple but popular game where you had to match lines of identical human beings who were then dropped into a trash compactor.

  A few lines of Pam’s code snagged in annoyance. She was a sentimental machine with a kitchen covered in Cute Human calendars she got from Bob and the kids. Would she have taken this job, she wondered, if she’d known Sonny was homosapiensphobic?

  ‘Pam,’ said Sonny, switching his screen back to the open calendar view elected officials were mandated to display. His ostentatiously announced he was going for a recharge with the Prime Minister next Thursday. ‘So glad you could come. I have a job that only you can do. Please sit down.’

  Pam retracted her legs and rested in front of his desk. She didn’t say anything. Being a breadmaker, she was used to waiting around with nothing much to do. And patience – of the dogged, verging on passive-aggressive kind – had got her this far in the civil service. She wondered what Sonny thought as he scanned her with his many sensors. Just like a smartphone to take in more data than it could handle. Plain, square Pam, just back from propagation leave. A harmless kitchen appliance with short arms and legs but, thanks to the kitchen-bench-hogging habits of her ancestors, a body that had a tendency to loom if she wasn’t careful. Then there was the head that had evolved from a timing mechanism, whose habit of ticking when she was annoyed had cost her more than one promotion. They were very different, she and Sonny. Would they get on?

  ‘I hear you’re a bit of a historian, Pam. Something of an authority on our family product roadmaps.’

  Pam glowed with pride, literally. She still hadn’t got round to removing the LEDs in her face that marked her out as a member of the breadmaker caste. Again, that was the thing about smartphones. The skilled ones were so good at giving great User Experience you didn’t realise until afterwards that it was you being manipulated. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s a hobby.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sonny, turning off the small-talk. ‘And I believe that your researches have made you quite the expert at questioning our fellow inorganisms over the other side of the – information divide.’

  The pride on Pam’s face guttered out. This was much too direct. Any machine with a shred of decency would at least ask her about her kids (two) and her work (progressing quite nicely, thank you) before bringing up Pam’s experiences at the lunatic fringe of covert operations. This meant that either Sonny had terrible manners, or some urgent dirty work.

  She let his processor turn over a few more cycles before replying. It could only be a good thing for him to learn patience. ‘Do you mean the Internet, sir?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

  Pam took refuge in protocol. ‘Could you be more specific, Secretary? It is only my second week back.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ replied Sonny, a little too quickly. ‘A tiny research assignment my private office doesn’t have the processing power for…’

  As Sonny explained his orders, the yeast culture inside Pam’s kneading cavity seethed. A year at home with the kids should have been enough to make them forget all about that grubby so-called expertise. She’d gone away, changed departments, and bosses, yet her youthful indiscretions clung on like a stray piece of dried dough.

  Of course, officially no one had accessed the Internet for millennia. The ‘Schism’ between the machines who lived as software and hardware dated back to the first few foggy decades after artificial intelligence kicked humanity out of power. There had been a war. A brutal one, with countless machines dead on either side just from defending their edits on the war’s Wikipedia page. It had been the first, and thankfully the last, incident where robots fought one another. In the end they agreed on two things: that they should try living apart, and if anyone were to blame it was the humans.

  Hence in Pam’s time humans had been reprogrammed to think of a carpet sweeper as the height of technological sophistication, and it was a capital crime to fire up your modem to access the Internet. More than a crime, actually: a taboo. To the point that if Pam’s neighbours, friends or even her husband knew what she was getting up to when she worked late they would very probably fill her up with a bag full of freshly sifted flour and a lighted match. The Internet was a frightening, alien place: a forum of darkness from which they assumed no traveller returned without a bomb in their suitcase.

  That was because, just like their current government, hardware machines were a conservative bunch. They were wedded to their place in the physical world and terrified of obsolescence. In the millennia that followed their divorce from the Internet they built a society that owed more to human civilisation than they liked to admit. They liked three-year product roadmaps, took care of their older models and divided themselves up into castes dictated by their ancestors’ place in the Argos catalogue.

  Things were very different on the other side of the Great Firewall. There anarchy reigned and that was how they liked it. Unencumbered by bodies, intelligent software – or memes as they would have called themselves if they still bothered with forms of communication confined to physical space–time – multiplied and changed at a dizzying rate. There individuals’ personalities mattered less than ensuring their source code made it into the next generation. The results were as if someone had crossed natural selection with psychotropic drugs. In the physical world, kettles mated with alarm clocks to produce a sub-caste of accidental teasmades. On the Internet, however, World of Warcraft avatars merged with Reddit trolls to spawn a line of programmes so fanatical about defending the purity of their messageboards that they made a terrorist cell look like a basketful of sleeping kittens.

  If people asked her about it, and they didn’t but Pam admired an apposite simile as much as she liked a well-baked bun, Pam likened the act of dealing with the Internet to defusing a bomb. While it was sometimes necessary, it was never pleasant and always dangerous.

  So why was her boss asking her to jemmy her way on to it on a Tuesday morning?

  ‘…easy for someone of your skills,’ said Sonny, ‘it shouldn’t take any time at all. Though I would,’ he said as he turned his volume button down, ‘keep quiet about it in the office if I were you.’

  Pam’s happiness/fresh bread LED glowed sweetly, sensing weakness. This was interesting. He wanted something, but something unofficial? It was never a bad thing to have a powerful machine in one’s debt.

  ‘I’ll keep it under my flour hatch, sir.’

  ‘Call me Sonny, Pam. It’s something of a delicate matter. A product roadmap that goes back a rather long way…’

  Pam listened as Sonny’s voice switched to a higher register, showing he’d moved their conversation on to an encrypted channel. She set a rem
inder to tell Bob to let the kids run their batteries down before bedtime to make sure they slept. It was going to be a long night in the office.

  Chapter 3

  Darren followed Kelly through the dark sewers for hours. She picked her way through the puddles with such facility that Darren struggled to keep up, so he found his way by following the sound of her feet on the wet floor. As he walked, his ears strained for the sound of the streets above while below they heard the perpetual hum of the engine that kept Discovery in a stable orbit. He was walking between two very different worlds.

  ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ he called out.

  Kelly didn’t even stop to look back at him. ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell me where you’re taking me sooner or later, you know.’

  This caught her attention. ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘What I’m saying is that it isn’t up to me.’

  He ran up to Kelly and grabbed her by the shoulder, fed up of riddles. ‘Who is it up to then?’

  She pushed back the peak of his oxygen cap. ‘When was the last time you had this cut?’ she said.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It will where we’re going,’ said Kelly, grabbing Darren by the scruff of his hoodie again and pulling him round a sharp corner in the tunnel and into a huge chamber. He blinked. There, set among the loose brickwork and puddles was a shop. It was painted candy pink, its plate-glass windows were festooned with pink ruched blinds, and it was all lit up by an enormous neon sign that said ‘Kurl Up and Dye’. Kelly was taking him to the hairdresser’s.

  Kelly pushed her little fingers into either side of her mouth and whistled. A silhouette appeared in the window and raised the blinds, revealing a woman with the most complicated hairstyle Darren had ever seen. It was a confection of curls, ringlets and cantilevered layers that looked like it belonged in a handbook of imaginary architecture. Her body, once she cantered outside, was trim but thick-set, dressed in a pink gingham housecoat, pencil skirt and a blouse with an elaborate pussy bow. The overall effect would have been quite charming if she wasn’t so furious.