Battlestar Suburbia Read online

  This time Pam wasn’t going to leave a paper trail. Mouthing an apology to the blameless machine, Pam ripped out the file’s core processor and stuck it to the underside of a bookshelf. Only then could she be confident of opening the file without triggering an alarm or adding a read receipt.

  Without the Internet, which had the nasty habit of rewriting the past to suit the present anyway, the machines needed a trustworthy method of record-keeping. They ironically found it in a physical version of the Internet’s sketchiest technology, the Blockchain, which they called BlockPaper. It was a tissue-thin conductive plastic that had many advantages over the wood pulp on which humans had written their histories and wiped their bottoms. BlockPaper was rot-proof, inedible and almost indestructible. Any amendment to a text written on BlockPaper showed up as a black mark: the rule being that you could cross something out but never rub it out. BlockPaper also had other unnerving fail-safes. Shredded or burned texts could knit themselves back together, while frequently consulted files cloned word-perfect copies of themselves to save labour.

  BlockPaper’s biggest fault, however, was that these bureaucratic safeguards made it a sod to read. Its fidelity to the facts transformed even the dullest record into a palimpsest full of crossings-out and footnotes.

  Listening for footsteps in the corridor, Pam thumbed through the file with her speed-read setting on. It was her permanent record. How had Sonny got this out of Central Filing? She skimmed her ancestors’ model numbers and firmware updates, noting with growing alarm that someone had been taking an active interest in her movements for some time. Stuck in the margins were records of every time she had gone online, along with notes of how long she had stayed there, and where she had visited. And two pages from the end there was a risk assessment setting out in detail the pros and cons of ‘expending the subject in a risky cyberspace mission when her close family ties make her difficult to eliminate discreetly’. It was signed by none other than the Secretary of State for Internal Affairs, Sonny Erikzon.

  He’d set her up with a risk assessment! The indignity of being graded a health-and-safety risk stung Pam who, the civil servant to her CPU, understood the levels applied to security risks. You had top secret, classified, military, criminal, civil and then – right at the bottom – there was health and safety. Those machines were here to kill her, and it was all in the same spirit that you’d send someone in with the paper towels to deal with a wet floor.

  An almighty crash outside told Pam they’d broken through. She popped the file into her flour bin and considered her next move. There were three of them and one of her. They were armed, professional and well equipped, whereas she had nothing more than her wits and a superior knowledge of the office floor layout.

  What else did she know about the assassins? They were arrogant. Why else would they arrive by the front door? Any machine who had credited her with a scrap of artificial intelligence would have caught her unawares on the way home. They thought she was just a kitchen gadget. So how could she turn that to her advantage?

  Pam looked at the LED nail job she’d been so worried about this morning. It was a mess, the pattern already splitting into red, green and blue. It was a rip-off, but it also gave her an idea. She pulled her right hand loose and placed it underneath Sonny’s desk. It took a while to get the angle right. There had to be just enough showing for it to look like an accident. Then, after allowing herself a moment of satisfaction at her own handiwork, she swept Sonny’s desk-tidy off the desk and on to the floor.

  Pam hid behind the door as pens and paperclips rattled against the lino. In the corridor outside the office, footsteps. She had their attention.

  From the hollow, plasticky sound her assailant’s feet made as they hit the floor, Pam knew she had the tazer. That was good. Tazers were vicious little things, but little nevertheless, moulded from the same brittle polymers as disposable razors.

  She sensed him hovering in the doorway. Imagined the sneer on his face as he glimpsed the splitting LED nail job on the floor, the toppled desk-tidy squirming to right itself. Such an easy job.

  Pam struck as he stepped into the room, hurling the door round with the forearm force of a master baker. There was a satisfying crunch of cheap plastic and the tazer fell to its knees. Even as he fell, however, electricity began to crackle in the charge points around his mouth. He was preparing to strike.

  Pam unclipped her dough hook from her interior and swung it down on the tazer’s thorax. White fracture-lines marbled the plastic, and the bubble of electricity forming around his mouth winked out. He was neutralised.

  She picked up the tazer. Generations of incremental change may have bulked them out, but as machines they still hadn’t thrown off their light and portable heritage. For a hefty machine like Pam, it felt like something she’d find in a Christmas cracker. So it was no effort at all to cross the room with the tazer in one hand and drop it out of the window.

  The tazer regained consciousness on its way down. Flailing, it shot out a last desperate charge that fell far short of Pam, who watched its body hit the ground and shatter, egging the pavement with circuit-board and battery fluid. Pam paused, not knowing whether she should admire her handiwork or beg for forgiveness. How could a machine that had, until today, only ever made things, be so satisfied with destroying something – someone – else?

  ‘Bravo,’ said a voice behind her.

  Pam turned and saw Sonny silhouetted in the doorway. Despite the hour and the circumstances, he still managed to fill the room with touchy-feely patrician grace. He had his bright touchscreen and the background hum of power. Yet Pam saw it was a sham. Robots weren’t given to compare themselves physiologically; it was a trait many considered gauche. But when Pam stepped towards Sonny she saw that technological sophistication had made him friable, physically as well as mentally. He had needed her to do some of his dirty work, and he outsourced the cleaning-up to other machines.

  She was a big, strong girl. She had just seen off a deadly machine on her wits and with one hand. Why couldn’t she do the same for Sonny.

  Her dough hook slid back out of its moorings.

  Sonny replied by splashing a grinning emoji across his touchscreen and stepping out of the way. Hidden behind him was the revolver, its barrel trained on Pam.

  ‘You’ve done terribly well, Pam,’ said Sonny. ‘I’m impressed. But you’ll need to come with us. Now.’

  Chapter 8

  ‘I still don’t see why I can’t just hide out down below.’

  ‘Shut your trap, would you, love?’ Janice stopped the wheelchair to wave at a police drone patrolling the entrance to the Dolestar bus station. ‘Good morning, officer,’ she said, ‘lovely morning for a work fitness-test meeting.’

  The police drone lowered its laser sight over the figure slumped in the wheelchair.

  ‘He’ll be 113 in August and he won’t miss his Job Club,’ Janice added. ‘I keep saying to him, wouldn’t you prefer a crossword, but he loves the psychometric tests. Is there a problem, officer?’

  The light on the police drone’s head unit flashed from red to green.

  ‘Thank you very much, officer. You’ve made an old man very happy.’

  The moment they were beyond the police drone’s sightlines Janice gave the wheelchair a sharp shove. ‘What did I say about keeping shtum, Kelly? If you’d done that a second later we’d both be butcher’s scraps by now.’

  Kelly wriggled underneath her tartan blanket. ‘It’s this beard, Mum. It’s itchy.’

  ‘Moan at someone who cares,’ hissed Janice, ‘and pull your cap down or folk’ll be able to see your eyes.’

  The Discovery bus station was a greying edifice of dirty glass and galvanised zinc at the edge of town. Here the fleet of Star Buses docked each morning, ready to take the council planet’s inhabitants down to Earth for their cleaning shifts. Thus, like commuter stations everywhere, it had the charm and the colour scheme of an emptied Hoover bag. What windows weren’t broken were repaired with pl
astic sheeting, the floor was crazy-paved with ham-fisted repairs and somehow, even though frying had been banned for centuries, it still smelled faintly of chips.

  Janice and Kelly wove in and out of long lines of uniformed workers. Some chatted, others took greedy sips of Nicotea from squeezecups. The more conscientious polished their cleaning equipment in the bus queue, drawing satisfied beeps from passing machines, and baleful gazes from their co-workers.

  Above them flashed the massive LED screen that was the official representative of machine rule on each Dolestar. It interrupted its loop through the government’s new ‘Lint Kills’ campaign with a nauseating jingle.

  ‘This is a colleague announcement.’

  Several thousand pairs of human eyes paid instant attention. It was dangerous not to. These screens were bright and sharp enough to detect inattentive humans from up to 300 metres. They hadn’t earned the nickname ‘Eyes of Samzung’ for nothing.

  Janice dragged the wheelchair round and nudged the brim of Kelly’s cap down a little further. ‘Keep facing the front,’ she hissed. ‘And whatever you see try not to react.’

  On screen, an official government spokesperson was booting up. For centuries machines from the government-technology caste had performed this role. That meant long, statistic-heavy statements from scientific calculators and answering machines. Thanks to an equal-opportunities drive for machines from other castes, this was changing. The policy yielded mixed results that morning, however, as not even a collectively cowed populace can take a terrorist warning seriously when it comes from a machine descended from a talking teddy bear.

  The SpeaknHugz bear on screen had all the augmentations normal among executive machines – shoulder implants, integrated missile launcher – but unfortunately retained the sing-song, story-tape voice of its antecedents.

  ‘Guys,’ it began breathlessly, ‘two dangerous humans have committed an act of terrorism against our beloved state.’

  The word Boo, with both o’s replaced with heart-eyed emojis, appeared at the bottom of the screen. The crowd took the prompt and booed obediently, at which the spokesperson beamed: ‘I love you guys! But seriously, these super-bad people are still out there on the run and we have to do something.’

  Photographs of Kelly and Darren appeared on the screen, Darren’s unsmiling effigy lifted straight from his employment iPaper, Kelly’s – pouting and suggestively wielding a pink soldering iron – cut from an old personal services advert. Up there they made an incongruous couple: a Bonnie and Clod.

  ‘So if you see either of these douches, guys, you know what to do!’

  All around the bus station a light show of laser sights trained themselves on the crowd. The humans took their cue. ‘Report them,’ they said.

  The robot bear’s smile shifted into a new manic gear. ‘I can’t hear you…’

  Again, louder. ‘Report them!’

  ‘Yay, I knew you’d do the right thing. Love you guys. Toodles!’

  Janice wheeled Kelly into the holding pen for Senior Jobseekers at the head of the bus queue. They were a frail collection of figures in wheelchairs, the one exception tottering behind a walking frame to which someone had attached a floorwaxer. Blocking the seniors’ way on to the Star Bus were two women in identical white nurse’s uniforms.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before,’ said the mousy nurse on the left. She was quite a contrast to her companion, whose blonde hair and ever-so-slightly-too-short skirt exerted a magnetic pull over the elderly men at the front of the queue.

  ‘No,’ said the blonde nurse, flashing a ‘Now-now lads’ smile at her audience, ‘I usually cover the late shift. Set of nice-looking boys you’ve got here.’

  The heart monitor of one of her charges rang out in alarm.

  ‘Alfred, did you remember to take your pills?’ barked the mousy nurse. ‘Sister…?’

  ‘Dix,’ beamed the blonde.

  ‘Sister Dix doesn’t have time for your carry-on. Because she’s very kindly offered to take you down to Job Club today seeing as Nurse Smethwick is off colour. So I want you to behave for her. Can you all do that for me?’

  The aged workers nodded, as the Work Siren sounded and the doors of each bus hissed open. And with the silent obedience that betrayed lifetimes of servitude, the hunched masses began to board.

  The mousy nurse gave Sister Dix a grateful pat on the arm and pulled her own oxygen cap down. ‘Thanks again,’ she said, ‘I owe you one.’

  ‘Any time,’ replied the blonde. She waved goodbye with one hand while the other gripped a groper’s wrist. ‘Try that again, sunshine,’ she said, this time in a much deeper voice, Darren’s voice, ‘and I’ll break your arm.’

  As she and Kelly moved up the queue, Janice marvelled at the change in Darren since he put on a skirt. Like many shy men, Darren’s reticence was more to do with his status than his character. A change in persona was enough to change his personality. Only in Darren’s case all the transformation needed was Janice’s second-best wig, some fake tan and half a roll of kitchen towels. He wasn’t a beautiful imitation of a woman, but he was vivacious and he had good legs. And that, Janice reflected ruefully, can get you quite a way in life.

  ‘Good morning, madam,’ said Darren, as they reached the door, ‘is this young man alright today?’

  This was the script they’d agreed for the all clear. Good. ‘He was feeling under the weather earlier in the week, weren’t you, Dad? But he’s much better today.’

  ‘I am glad. I’ll take it from here, love. You get yourself off to work.’

  Janice let Darren take the handles of the wheelchair, not daring to look directly at him in case a camera caught a flash of recognition. This was it: the moment she’d always dreaded. When she handed her only daughter over to the care of a man. The fact they were both wanted terrorists, and the man was wearing sheer black tights and a ‘Hi, I’m Julie’ name badge, didn’t deaden Janice’s loss, but it made it more difficult to express.

  Instead, Janice did what mothers have been doing since the first protozoon split in two. She bunched her feelings up into a little, tissue-shaped ball and shoved them up her jumper cuff.

  ‘You behave for the nice lady,’ she said, and backed away to watch Darren wiggle pneumatically into the Star Bus. A crowd of people swelled around her as commuters filed on, and Janice allowed herself a moment of melancholy. A pang of longing for the easy life that she and Kelly had been denied by an accident of birth, where there was no danger but dust build-up, and mothers and daughters rode the Star Bus down to Earth every day to work, quarrel and swap mopping techniques.

  But the thought of mopping was enough to bring Janice out of her funk. She slipped back into the crowd and shed her coat, depositing it in a neighbour’s mop bucket, before tying a scarf swiped from the top of another commuter’s handbag around her head. Out of her pocket came the handkerchief she’d spotted with fake blood before leaving the house.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, pressing the handkerchief to her nose. The crowds fell away from her at the sight of blood and cleared a way right to the station toilets. There, theatrically wringing out the handkerchief at the sink, she could plot out her next move. Not that she could afford to relax. The machine world had robbed even the joy of privacy you got from a good public loo, as sentient condom and tampon machines stood guard over the sexual health and hygiene of visitors.

  There was one vending machine by the washbasins, housing a strange admixture of breath mints and fast-acting antibiotics. It hummed advertising jingles at Janice and, as she tidied herself up, struck up its pitch. ‘Face wash, lady?’ it said. ‘Half price today.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ replied Janice. ‘I’d better be getting home. Not feeling well today.’

  ‘Then you’ll be wanting some of these.’ A mechanical claw of the type fairground machines used to paw at cuddly toys appeared, holding a packet of lime-and-lemon flavoured antibiotics. ‘Cures 99.9 per cent of all known infections.’

  ‘No, than
ks. I’d better get off.’

  The claw prodded her in the chest. ‘Come on, lady. Help a poor machine out, won’t you? Some of us have sales targets to make.’

  Janice paused. She hadn’t bargained on this. The plan was a trip to the toilet before a nice, easy amble out of the building and back into the sewers, not a slanging match with a pushy vending machine. She should just buy the antibiotics. But then it came to her: a double bluff.

  ‘You know what?’ she said, letting pent-up anger wash over her like a hot flush, ‘why don’t you just bugger off. I don’t want your poxy products and I don’t like your attitude.’

  The vending machine chuckled. ‘Spoiling for a night in the cells, are you, love?’

  ‘I’m spoiling for something,’ she said, grabbing the metal claw. The arm popped out of the side of the vending machine in a mess of sparking cables as its owner shrieked in pain. Over the squeals Janice heard a dialling tone. It was calling for help.

  She had a minute – two at the most – before the place swarmed with security, and Janice was determined to use each second well. Jamming the severed mechanical arm into the crack between the mutilated vending machine and the wall, she levered the whole thing off to let spill spare change and sundries.

  Janice took the lipstick out of her handbag and completed an immensely satisfying deception that she hoped would divert the authorities away from Darren and Kelly.

  ‘You haven’t seen the last of us,’ she scrawled across the toilet mirror in frosted, cherry-red lipstick. She paused. If she was going to keep this going it needed a name. Something for the machines to hate and to which humans would rally. She thought for a few seconds and added ‘Freedom for Fleshies’. Good, but it wasn’t enough. The message also needed an attitude: the kind of swagger you’d expect from an insurgency run by the tart and thug the machines had reduced Kelly and Darren to. Leaning over the washbasins, Janice punctuated her threat with a big sloppy kiss. Then, after pausing to readjust her hair under the headscarf, she climbed out of the toilet window with such agility that when they played the CCTV tapes back later, the police bots mistook Janice for a woman thirty years her junior. And thus, almost by accident, a tiny act of resistance to machine rule on one Dolestar became a movement.