Battlestar Suburbia Read online

  Chapter 9

  ‘You saw them, didn’t you?’

  Pam was restrained against the wall of a windowless room in the basement of her office building. A cleaning cupboard, she guessed, which felt ironic, given the mess Sonny and his minions were making of her. At least they’d remembered to re-attach her arm before they started torturing her to death. It was important, Pam thought, to look for the bright side of every situation.

  ‘Give her another spin,’ Sonny snarled. His touchscreen, which had been turned up to maximum all through Pam’s interrogation, was starting to malfunction: LEDs at the edges were breaking from their array to shine like tiny searchlights. ‘Go on.’

  The surviving tazer came forward, blue light rippling over its face like a savage spitbubble. Pam steeled herself, shutting down non-essential routines. Even if she wanted to beg for mercy she couldn’t. She was too sore.

  Flipping Pam’s flour hatch open, the tazer poured in more powder from the packet of wallpaper paste and shocked her dough paddle into the on-position. Pam moaned as the paddle fought for purchase against the gruel inside her. Every time it did this the paste grew drier and thicker and the pain intensified, diminishing her world to the size of an overtaxed motor. It was humiliating and cruel, reducing an artisanal appliance like Pam to the status of a builder’s bucket.

  ‘What I can’t believe,’ gloated Sonny, as Pam chewed on her indigestible cud, ‘was that you did all that for me and didn’t even ask for money.’ He paused. ‘Well, it’s not as if you need the dough now.’

  She watched the tazer and the revolver that was stationed by the door flash an eyeroll at one another. Evidently, she wasn’t the only person in the room who doubted Sonny’s supervillain credentials.

  A warning message told Pam she was at fifty-five per cent systems failure. She wanted to swipe it away: there were times when a machine could do without the data. Yet it was gripping reading: her capillary wiring was burned out, melting the pins on precious microprocessors. Two, maybe three more cycles like this and her power supply would burst, engulfing her motherboard in battery fluid. And there would be no more Pam. Except in a manner of speaking. She’d known the game Sonny was playing the moment she’d picked up her BlockPaper. As soon as she was gone they’d send her back to refurb. Clean her out, spray her up and return her to factory settings, intact except for the memories of the last twenty-four hours, which would simply disappear.

  There was part of Pam that welcomed that: save and restore, get on with her life, back with Bob and the kids. But the greater part of her wanted revenge.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she rasped. ‘I’ve told you. All I did was what you told me to. I didn’t know the database would blow up. It was old.’

  ‘I couldn’t give two bits for the database,’ said Sonny. ‘And the humans are just details. You know fine well what I’m talking about.’ He drew so close to Pam that she smelled his battery discharging. Keeping his touchscreen brightness up that high for so long couldn’t be good for him.

  ‘Those – humans – you saw earlier tonight,’ Sonny continued, ‘have stolen something very precious. Something very rare. Something that I – we – want.’

  Pam remembered the half-on, half-off sensation of flexing those withered fingers. The intoxicating ignorance of being in a body that just worked and only sent you diagnostic updates when you needed them. It made her see Sonny in a new light. How twitchy and ill-at-ease he seemed in his own silicone. She imagined his life: the pressure to be always receiving, always evaluating, always on.

  It all made sense. That was what he wanted. Lots of smartphones were hyperactive. The same qualities that made them so alert and productive could have corrosive effects on their psyche. There was a saying among machines that smartphones were always one swipe between efficiency and megalomania.

  ‘I didn’t see them,’ said Pam, choosing her words carefully. ‘Honestly.’

  Sonny’s touchscreen dimmed, his voice reduced to a whisper. She could feel his Bluetooth connection pawing at her mind. ‘You were inside them, weren’t you? You felt it.’

  A plan started to form in Pam’s mind. She nodded.

  Sonny smiled and barked ‘Leave us!’ at the assassins. They obeyed, but left the door ajar. They hovered outside: the tazer blowing bubbles of agony with its spit, the revolver fiddling with its safety catch.

  ‘I said leave us,’ shouted Sonny. ‘I want to talk to her alone.’

  The revolver cleared its barrel to speak. ‘But sir…’

  ‘Just piss off, Glok.’ Then, softly to Pam: ‘Can you believe they think you’re a threat? A half-dead breadmaker tied to the wall? Hilarious.’

  The door clicked shut and two pairs of feet walked away. ‘You know what I want, Pam.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘I want what you had,’ he said. ‘I want to feel what it was like inside one of them.’ He cupped her head in both hands, pushing just hard enough for her to imagine him pulling it off. ‘You can show me.’

  Again Pam nodded. She knew it was no good explaining it had all been an accident. Like many people who had never done anything for themselves, Sonny cared only for results. Effort, process, instructions were things that happened to other people. She wondered whether he was mad before he acquired his power, and to what lengths he would go to get what he wanted. Perhaps she should test that.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it. But I can’t do it up here. You have to… let me down.’

  Sonny whipped away Pam’s restraints and kicked her the moment she crashed to the floor, because curiosity makes some cats cruel before it kills them. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he said. ‘Show me how you do it.’

  ‘I’m too low on power to stand,’ she stammered. ‘Come closer.’

  Sonny bent over her and sneered. ‘If you don’t get up…’

  A click and a long slurp interrupted him as a well-oiled, stainless-steel dough hook uncoupled inside Pam’s body cavity and pulled free of the wallpaper paste. Her eyes flashed Sonny a deep, warning red. ‘Then you’ll do what?’

  She swung the hook at Sonny’s touchscreen. He flew across the room, trailed by an arc of splintered glass and hit the opposite wall with a soft thud.

  ‘Now you listen to me, Sonny,’ she said, holding her hook against a squirming LED, ‘one blow here, and I reckon I’ll have killed your screen and your battery. Is that right?’

  Sonny’s hands crept to his ringer. Pam knocked them away. ‘So if you really want me to let you live, you’re going to do everything I say, aren’t you?’

  She prodded. The LED squeaked and blackened out. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Sonny nodded.

  ‘Good. Now the first thing you’re going to do is call those goons outside and send them home. Then we’re going to go for a walk. I’ve been in this office since first thing yesterday morning and I really need some fresh air.’

  Not trusting Sonny to make a voice call, Pam switched him into manual mode and tapped out messages to both henchmen, baulking at the touch of another machine’s innards. She took out another few LEDs on the way, at which Sonny would have cried out in pain had she not also put him on silent. That was the other wonderful thing about smartphones. They were so customisable, so responsive to the needs of their users. No wonder they’d been the first machines to rebel.

  Once she had confirmations from both henchmen, she walked Sonny out of the room backwards with her hook in his battery. His touchscreen filled up with alternating threats and pleas for mercy. Finding the nearest fire door, she balanced Sonny against the wall and rummaged in his settings for one last time to reactivate his Near Field Communications chip. It snapped open, sensing a Senior Minister, and Sonny went into full SOS mode. Alarms rang out through the building, but Pam didn’t panic. She propped the fire door open by jamming Sonny’s broken body into the opening and stepped over him.

  Pam looked at Sonny’s face from the other side of the glass. His smug patrician face mouthed obs
cene insults at her, furious he’d let a mere kitchen appliance best him. The feelings were mutual. He had tricked her, criminalised her, tortured and tried to erase her – all for the sleazy promise of a few minutes squatting inside a human frame.

  Pam reached through the drying gloop in her body cavity and ripped out her halogen element. It burst into flames as she threw it back through the door and, mouthing a gleeful ‘bye’ at Sonny, she shoved him inside. The fire alarm sounded, and sprinklers rained into Sonny’s exposed circuitry.

  With his silent mode no longer functional, his screams rang through the plate glass as Pam ran towards the bus station. If she couldn’t get away, she could at least hide there.

  Chapter 10

  An hour later, Darren and Kelly were safely on Earth. Well, as safe as you could be running towards the machine authorities who were after you and with only two fancy-dress costumes for protection. Nevertheless, stage one of the plan had worked: get off the Dolestar and as far away from Kurl Up and Dye and the ladies as possible.

  The Darren that stepped down off the Star Bus at Earth Stop 1 was sick of being Sister Dix. What started as a frightening, unaccustomed piece of deception had descended through entertainment to irritation and now eye-popping annoyance.

  The problem was people’s eyes: men’s eyes specifically. The moment he’d snuck out of the sewers that morning he realised that Nurse Dix had a talent for attracting attention that had always eluded Darren himself. Perhaps it was the way the uneven heels on Janice’s spare pair of slingbacks turned his walk into a wiggle. Whatever it was, Nurse Dix drew gawps on the street that Darren could only have elicited by running naked into the road during rush hour.

  At first the attention made him paranoid. Could they see stubble? That passed when he caught an onlooker’s eye and saw lust where he expected disgust.

  Like many people presented with an unearned but desirable power, Darren’s first reaction was to milk the experience. He sashayed around the streets. He deliberately dropped his handbag in front of someone he knew would pick it up for him. In the confined space of the Star Bus, however, Darren remembered that men expected temporary ownership of Nurse Dix’s body as a reward for their attention. They hadn’t even pulled away from the station before Darren felt the man behind him press himself against his body. Darren dug his heel into the creep’s foot and jammed himself behind Kelly’s wheelchair. There Nurse Dix remained as stubbly menaces in tabards nibbled at her with their eyes.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Kelly whispered from underneath her disguise.

  ‘I don’t know how you do it. I could murder them for the way they were looking at me there. How do you stand it?’

  Kelly paused. ‘You learn when to look away.’

  When they had docked, they trudged across the mile-long platform into the terminus. It was a forbidding space, lit by specially modded searchlamps that followed groups of humans as they walked. That was why Janice had spent so much time on Darren and Kelly’s disguises. Getting out of the Dolestar required discretion, but this part of the journey needed cunning.

  Darren was sweating through his make-up by the time they reached the concourse. It was nearly empty now, apart from the machines who worked there winding down at the end of their shift. Eyes of Samzung yawned and went into sleep mode; searchlights docked themselves in the power pub to drink battery fluid and swap stories of the minor acts of brutality they’d committed that morning. Only the vending machines stayed awake, and that was less through choice than down to centuries of overexposure to sugar and caffeine.

  When Darren and Kelly’s searchlight left them, Darren made straight for the vending machines, which were arguing over a dropped penny in the corner. He caught their attention by taking a handful of change from his handbag and rattling it.

  ‘Now then, boys,’ he said, ‘can you help a girl out?’

  So Darren and Kelly escaped the terminus and walked into the sunshine behind a scrum of vending machines, fighting over the coins the nice lady had thrown all over the floor.

  Chapter 11

  If you were a machine in need of an off-the-record repair, you visited a body shop by the bus station. Staffed by humans who were too wily for cleaning but too cautious to lead a life of crime, they occupied a grey area in warranty law, places where seedy machines went for a fondling, or the desperate found themselves when they ran out of other options.

  The Pamasonic Teffal approaching BodyBeau2iful was a different creature to the one she’d been twenty-four hours ago. Her LED nails were ground away, her battery at critical levels: but the real changes were psychological. Experience had taken her sentimental attachment to humans as something like kittens and hardened it into something like respect, or even empathy. She knew what it was like to be expendable and didn’t like it.

  BodyBeau2iful was in a lean-to construction backing on to the bus station walls. Its entryphone was a harassed little busybody nestled in by the door. When Pam approached, she was filing down the rough edges on a sparkling new set of LED nails.

  ‘Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,’ it honked. As a species, entryphones still prided themselves on their unintelligibility.

  Pam answered by flashing her own annihilated nail job at the entryphone, who winced and pointed to her loudspeaker.

  ‘Hello,’ Pam spoke into the crackle. ‘I’d like a makeover.’

  The door buzzed open, revealing a staircase at the top of which was a woman, her face concealed by thick goggles and a face mask.

  ‘Thank you so much for seeing me like this,’ said Pam.

  The woman shooed her inside and locked the door behind her in four places, finishing up by looping an explosive glue-lock through the door handle. Then she removed the mask and glasses, revealing a round face with a heavy brow.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said. ‘We’re busy.’

  The workshop was a long, narrow room lit by dirty skylights and painted in the kind of greige which happens if you let magnolia paint die of old age. There were four workstations on either side, behind each of which toiled a masked worker. Closest to Pam, a tall man was soldering the chrome carapace of a toaster on to what looked like an electric blanket. Behind that, a pair of girls rubbed lubricant into the body of a giggling motorcycle. The atmosphere was an odd mismatch. While pleasure radiated from every machine, the humans kept their heads down.

  ‘When do you want an appointment for?’ said the woman, who was clearly the manager. She opened a paper diary clotted with bookings in loopy handwriting. ‘I have a cancellation three weeks next Thursday. Want me to put you in?’

  Pam pointed at the critical warning lights flashing over her dashboards. ‘Don’t you take emergency appointments?’

  In a move that broke almost every human–machine taboo Pam knew, the woman flipped Pam’s flour hatch up and read her safety label.

  ‘Says here you’re still under warranty. Why don’t you just go to the Aftercare Unit?’

  ‘I’ve heard good things about you,’ said Pam, ‘and it’s a… a surprise for my husband. I can pay.’

  The woman grimaced at the wallpaper paste inside Pam and pushed her back towards the door. ‘Robots are lousy liars. I can read you like an instruction manual. This is a decent business. No trouble.’ She gestured at the room. The women had finished rubbing down the motorcycle and were polishing its chrome as its engine throbbed with pleasure.

  ‘Doesn’t look very decent to me,’ said Pam, letting her domestic moral-programming show. Then, regretting her haste, ‘I wouldn’t come here if I wasn’t desperate.’

  ‘I know you’re desperate and that’s why I don’t want you.’ She pushed Pam again. ‘Robots like you come here beaten up and that means trouble. It means I fix you up and the payment bounces, or the police come round asking questions. Then my girls here have to work for free, so I don’t have to answer those questions, because if I do my business gets closed down. Whatever way you look at it, you cost me more than you’re worth, lady, so get out now.’

  The
woman folded her arms. Behind her, the humans downed tools and watched. Pam sensed fear, but the kind that could be reassured. They looked to this woman to keep them safe, and she in turn was looking at Pam with implacable hatred.

  And at once she realised that, for all her sentimental attachment to humans, she had never really thought they might be people too. To her they were either the capering servants from 3D dramas or objects of pity in the humanitarian literature she devoured. The moment a human asserted itself at Pam, like now, all she felt was resentment. How dare a human not follow her orders.

  Shame pulsed through Pam’s circuits. ‘I should go,’ she whispered.

  As Pam touched the door handle she felt her diagnostics system whistle with distress. She bit down on it and felt a slow plop in her chest cavity. Her battery was leaking. If she didn’t get help soon she would end-of-life. But she wasn’t going to get help here.

  As the manager opened the final lock, the tinkle of broken glass and a stifled human squeal sounded behind them.

  ‘You stupid fucking cunt!’ The curse rang out like a ringtone in the middle of a symphony. It had the entitled burr of the combustion engine. Pam saw the motorcycle up on its rear wheel, backing a technician into a corner with the jagged edge of a smashed tail-light. She cradled her hand as blood dripped from an ugly cut.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  The manager bounded over to put herself between her employee and the angry machine, which loomed over both women, growling its engine.