Battlestar Suburbia Read online

  ‘It was an accident, sir,’ said the manager. ‘Tricia didn’t do it on purpose. Now why don’t you sit down? We’ll get you fixed up.’

  ‘I come here for a rub down and your stupid fucking staff fuck it up.’

  Pam pointed her spectrometer at the motorcycle and sniffed petrol. Too little for a human nose to detect, but enough to tell her the motorcycle was high. That wasn’t a surprise; combustion-powered machines loved inhaling their own fumes; they could hardly avoid it. But doing it around humans made them dangerous.

  The manager gestured for Tricia to back off. ‘Now that’s enough, sir. If you’re going to talk to me and my staff like this, I’ll ask you to leave.’ She laid a hand lightly on its arm. ‘Do you…?’

  ‘Fuck off!’ yelled the motorcycle. It lashed out, and the manager fell backwards as workers shrieked and scrambled away. The other machines froze, putting themselves in sleep mode, either from embarrassment or so they could plead the Hibernation Defence if the police got involved.

  The manager looked up at the motorcycle and winced. Her leg splayed out at an odd angle. She must have broken something, thought Pam, remembering her own hurt and how difficult humans were to repair. That wasn’t right. Regardless of how rude she’d been to Pam she should do something.

  Pam’s hand brushed the glue-lock by the door. A lot of semi-legal repair shops kept them as a precaution against raids. If you activated it, a small explosive charge would melt a door shut. That meant this was the only way in and out of the workshop.

  Her civil servant’s programming noted that this constituted a major fire hazard, but also that if the motorcycle wanted to leave, it would have to get past her. She pulled the explosive charge away from the lock and stepped forward.

  The motorcycle had its kickstart pedal in the stricken manager’s face. Pam still didn’t feel herself, but she was down to twenty-five-per-cent functionality in a body shop holding a small bomb, so this was hardly surprising. She had just enough function, however, to put her own foot into the motorcycle’s kickstand and send it crashing to the floor.

  The workers started screaming again but, seeing a way out, made for the door. The other machines woke from sleep mode and bounded out as fast as they could. The manager was last to leave, shuffling along on her bottom and snarling with pain.

  According to Pam’s calculations, the humans would be clear in thirty seconds, and the motorcycle was already righting itself. The smell of petrol intensified. Either it was taking another hit or had a leak. Pam scanned its body frantically for its petrol tank, hidden somewhere underneath a confusion of body modifications.

  It lashed out before she could find it, sweeping her legs out from under her with a swing of its handlebars. Pam hit the floor in a hail of critical error messages. Her left hand cut out completely and dropped the explosive charge.

  With the motorcycle distracted, the last two fleeing workers seized their opportunity and hurried back to drag the manager out of the room by the armpits. As they did so, the manager had just enough movement in her good leg to knock the explosive charge out of the motorcycle’s way. Pam’s vision was failing fast, but she thought she saw her mouth a ‘thank you’.

  The three humans disappeared just as Pam’s battery was voiding its last percentage point of power. She had no movement now, only her thoughts and pixelated vision that made her wonder whether she was back where she had started last night, paralysed inside that cyborg. The motorcycle was almost at the charge now. It didn’t matter. The humans were out, and Pam was done for anyway. She would end-of-life here, forgotten, alone and denied the satisfaction of taking that motorcycle with her.

  Pam felt a pop in her casing and saw battery fluid gush out across the floor. Just seconds left now as her fluid flowed and mingled with the petrol leaking out of her adversary’s body.

  Ah, she suddenly thought. That was all she needed.

  Pam redirected the very, very last of her power to the broken stump of her heating element. It glowered, then sparked, igniting the stream of battery fluid. The flames etched a circuit of pain across the room, connecting Pam, the motorcycle and the explosive charge.

  In the microsecond of consciousness she had left before the flames ate through the charge, Pam wondered why – if there was no after-life care for machines like her – she had still always tried to do the right thing. What had it been worth in the end? She thought of Bob, and the kids who would grow up with a replacement mother now. Through the darkness that was closing in, she heard the faint chitter of a modem.

  And then there was nothing.

  Chapter 12

  Darren smelled the devastation before he saw it: a reek of burning paint and plastic that curdled the senses. Kelly, changed out of her old-man disguise and into the tabard dress of a domestic worker, gasped and ran ahead.

  He clattered after her. ‘What are you doing…?’ There had been no time for him to undress, so he was still in the unravelling disguise of Sister Dix. They rounded the corner and saw the smoke was coming from the door of a workshop with a blackened but still working sign: BodyBeau2iful. Close by was a group of workers, hacking through their face masks. They had huddled around a bare-faced woman with thick eyebrows who sat on the kerb clutching her leg.

  Kelly sprinted the last few metres to the injured woman. ‘Lily!’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

  Lily looked up and horror mingled with the pain in her expression. She pushed Kelly away. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ she said.

  ‘I need help, Lily. It’s… it’s complicated. But I wouldn’t come here unless I was desperate.’ She gripped at her tabard and dared a grin. ‘I’ve come in disguise.’

  A worker ripped off her mask and came forward to speak for Lily. Underneath was the face of a blonde woman with wide-set eyes and freckles. She had an ugly-looking cut across her arm. ‘You don’t need help, Kelly. You’re on the bloody run. I lost count of how many times I saw you on the Eyes of Samzung this morning.’

  ‘Well, thanks Tricia,’ snapped Kelly. ‘And here was I thinking I could turn to my friends in the grey market when I was in need.’

  ‘All the more reason for you to sling your hook,’ snipped Tricia.

  Kelly and Tricia squared up. On any normal day this wouldn’t have been a fair fight. Kelly had a good six inches over her opponent, but today Tricia possessed the scary intensity of a woman who had stared death in the face and found him a bit of a nuisance.

  ‘It’s not ten o’clock yet and already I’ve been sworn at, stabbed, had my life threatened and, for all I know, my job’s gone up in smoke, Kelly. So excuse me if I’m not thrilled at the prospect of doing a stretch for aiding and abetting a wanted criminal.’

  ‘I thought we were friends.’

  Tricia kneeled down to Lily’s eye level. ‘Tell her, Lily. We’ve got enough to lose as it is. They’ll be down any moment.’

  ‘I told her,’ said Lily, staring blankly out into the road. ‘I told her she was trouble.’

  ‘Who? Who’s she talking about, Tricia?’ asked Kelly.

  Tricia shrugged. ‘Buggered if I know.’

  ‘The machine who saved me,’ said Lily. ‘I told her to go away. She’s in pieces up there. I can bribe my way out of that. It was an accident.’ Lily looked up at Kelly for the first time since she’d arrived. ‘You I can’t do anything with. They see you and suddenly it’s deliberate. I’m sorry, but you have to go.’

  Kelly opened her mouth to argue but was interrupted by heavy machinery clanking down the stairs. She froze.

  This was it, thought Darren, she’d reached the end of her cunning. It was his turn to rescue them. Then he remembered he was dressed as a nurse at an accident scene. He bounced out of the shadows, hoping a little brisk cheeriness would conceal his complete lack of training. ‘Don’t you worry, dears,’ he said, smiling at the workers who were fluttering around like a flock of distressed chickens, ‘I’m Sister Dix and I’m here to help.’

  Tricia took in Darren’s Hal
lowe’en-costume approximation of a nurse and said, ‘You what?’

  ‘Madam!’ he said, pointing at Kelly, ‘can’t you see that this poor woman is suffering gravely from… smoke inhalation. I hope she’s not asthmatic.’

  Kelly took the hint and started coughing theatrically.

  ‘Oh dear. Tricia, isn’t it? I heard someone calling you Tricia. Would you please give her your face mask and lead her over there among those other people, where the air seems much clearer.’

  Tricia obeyed with the contrite look of someone found panicking in the presence of a clearer thinker. She popped her mask over Kelly’s face and then pushed Kelly into the midst of the still-masked workers.

  ‘And you lot,’ added Darren, ‘you’re all in danger of falling into shock. If I were you, I’d huddle together for warmth. With her in the middle.’

  Thus Kelly was hidden from view as the long, red body of a fire extinguisher appeared through the smoke. Darren waved it over.

  ‘I was just passing, officer. Is there anyone left up there?’

  The eyes atop the extinguisher’s nozzle glowed red. It was scanning the scene for danger points and suspects. ‘Two suspected casualties,’ it said, ‘both machine. No human matter detected. Workshop owner to come with us for questioning.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ said Darren. ‘This woman needs urgent medical attention for a broken leg and concussion. You won’t get a scrap of sense from her right now.’

  ‘We will accompany her to your hospital,’ snapped the fire extinguisher. ‘Take me to your doctor.’

  Recognising he had reached a danger point, Darren smiled at the fire extinguisher and bought some thinking time by pretending to check Lily’s pulse. The last time he’d tried to conciliate a robot, his signet ring had blown the thing up and his life off course. He couldn’t do that twice, not least for the reason that Kelly didn’t seem up to rescuing him today.

  Darren chose to hide behind something a public-service machine would understand: bureaucracy. ‘I’m not moving her without the proper equipment. Have you rung for an ambulance?’

  The fire extinguisher sounded a dialling tone, indicating that no, the medical welfare of affected humans had not been his top priority.

  Tricia stepped forward, catching Darren’s eye to say that he wasn’t the only one here with a gift for improvisation, adding, ‘I wouldn’t do that there, sir. Terrible signal blackspot here. You’ll have to walk out into the road.’

  The extinguisher gave a brief infrared flash of thanks and clomped away, creating just enough space for Kelly to sneak into the workshop, followed by Tricia.

  Chapter 13

  While BodyBeau2iful had improved many a machine’s looks, it had never been a place of light and beauty itself. Now it was a wreck of smoke damage and molten nylon. Even if the staff had been free to return to work, the workshop wouldn’t be open for new customers any time soon. Or ever again, once word crept out on the daily downloads that two machines had been killed in an incident at the unofficial body shop.

  Kelly started looking for somewhere to hide. Tricia was in no mood to mourn, however. She got down on her hands and knees with a dustpan and brush. ‘Well,’ she said to Kelly, ‘are you going to just stand there or will you give me a hand?’

  An invitation to clean was, as ever, quite enough to annoy Kelly and restore her spirit. ‘What for?’ she asked.

  ‘You see this?’ Tricia pointed at the two sets of electrical wreckage. ‘This is what’s left of our friends who blew a fuse up here. You heard what that extinguisher said out there. Two suspected deaths. One person – Lily – under suspicion.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Kelly, wondering for the second time that day what had got into the usually meek Tricia. ‘And?’

  Tricia sighed and swept a chunk of the wreckage on her right over to join what was left of the robot on her left. ‘Honestly, Kelly, I thought you were the one with the brains. Two scrapheaps suggest a crime, but one is an accident. There’s a brush over there.’

  ‘But there’s two different machines there,’ said Kelly, fetching the brush to poke it at scraps of half-melted steel plate. ‘Won’t they be able to tell?’

  ‘In a body shop? What do either of us do day after day but bolt bits from one robot on to another.’

  Kelly sent the remains of a motorcycle hubcap careering into a bent dough hook. ‘I know, but half-motorcycle, half-breadmaker. That’s a pretty odd combination.’

  ‘And who better to blow themselves up than an oddball?’ said Tricia. She picked up a few parts and strewed them around, trying to create the impression of an explosion. Then, taking a fistful of ashes from another part of the room, she sprinkled them over the brush marks on the floor.

  The two women were surveying their subterfuge when Darren appeared with his wig in one hand and shoes in the other. Smuts had settled over his maquillage, giving him the look of a drag queen who’d gone in too heavy with the beauty spots.

  ‘Blimey, that was a close one.’ He plonked himself on the edge of a blackened workbench and massaged his feet. ‘Fair play to you. I don’t know how you can wear these things day after day.’

  ‘Tricia, this is Darren,’ said Kelly. ‘I think you owe him a thank you.’

  ‘I owe you both a slap for turning up like this. I take it – this – is your partner in crime.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ insisted Darren, who looked around the room with the prurient curiosity of someone who’d only ever seen a repair shop from the outside. ‘So, this is one of those knocking-up shops for robots then? I imagined something a bit different.’

  ‘Excuse Darren, will you, Trish? He’s not been off the council planets much.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Darren. ‘I used to get down every now and again for dinner and a shoeshine.’

  Like most people who suffered from congenital overconfidence, Kelly didn’t admire the trait in others. She scowled. ‘Don’t you get cocky on me. You were just lucky this morning down there. Actually, how come you’re up here? Shouldn’t you be downstairs with the ambulance?’

  ‘Been and gone,’ replied Darren, luxuriating in his new-found talent for invention. ‘I told them I had to get off to my shift.’

  ‘And did they take Lily?’ asked Tricia.

  ‘Her with the broken leg? Yes, the extinguisher went with her. Doubt it’ll get much sense out of her. Kept babbling on about how a breadmaker saved her life.’

  ‘We’d better get out of here then,’ said Tricia, grabbing Kelly by the wrist. ‘There’ll be some thing here any minute to secure the scene.’

  ‘That’d be me,’ Darren said, producing a roll of hazard tape from his false bosom. ‘It’s amazing where a calm manner and an official-looking uniform will get you. The extinguisher needed to accompany the witness to the hospital, so I,’ said Darren, fiddling with the end of the hazard tape, which was made from a cheap BlockPaper, ‘have to secure the scene.’

  Tricia snatched the tape, which would start recording all movements in and out of the crime scene the moment it was activated, from Darren. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘is why that breadmaker did anything at all for Lily. She’d just sent her packing when this motorbike I was working on got nasty. The breadmaker could have just walked out, but then… I suppose it did save her life. It killed that motorcycle. I’ve never seen a robot do anything for a human apart from hand it a brush.’

  ‘Must have been something funny in the programming,’ said Darren. ‘Imagine that, though. A machine that protected humans.’

  At this Kelly gave a cry and made straight for a few shreds of white that had appeared in the middle of the combined wreckage. ‘Trish,’ she said, watching a BlockPaper file reconstitute itself in her hand like a time-lapse film of an opening flower, ‘have you seen this?’

  ‘I spent ages doctoring that incident scene, you know,’ snapped Tricia. ‘We’ll have to do it all over again now.’

  ‘Look at it, though. It’s a permanent r
ecord.’

  ‘I can see. Now throw it away quickly. It’ll only cause us trouble.’

  ‘Tricia,’ said Kelly, ‘I’m already that deep in the shit it’s dyed my hair this attractive shade of brown. A quick shufty can’t possibly make things any worse.’ She peered at the lettering on the front page, which was fading up through the greyscales into black. ‘Pamasonic Teffal,’ she read. ‘That sounds like a breadmaker’s name, doesn’t it? This must be our human-friendly robot.’

  She thumbed through the rest of the file with raised eyebrows. ‘There’s something not right here,’ she said. ‘Government employee… exemplary record… apart from some episode where she stapled some percolator’s coffee filters to its own forehead. Husband, two kids…’ She paused to survey the wreckage and pick a smouldering motherboard with a Teffal serial number out of the pile. ‘Poor things. And then look at this. Our devoted wife and mother had a double life as some sort of spy who looked for old information on the Internet.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ said Tricia.

  ‘It’s not,’ replied Darren. ‘What else does it say?’

  ‘It’s got a list here of every time she went online in the past seven years. Then someone’s scribbled in an appendix just yesterday. A new order.’ She turned the page and her face went as white as the paper.

  ‘Darren,’ she said, ‘that’s my face, from when I was talking to the lamp post. They sent her after me.’

  ‘That’s it!’ shouted Tricia. She jumped up and grabbed Kelly by the elbow. ‘You’re getting out of here right now. The police could be back any minute. I’m not going to prison for anyone, let alone you and… whatever he is.’

  Darren uncrossed his legs theatrically and winced as a static shock spoiled the gesture. ‘You, Tricia, can call me Madam.’ Then to Kelly, ‘She’s right, though. We’d better scarper.’

  Kelly thought differently. ‘No,’ she said, waving the motherboard, ‘I want answers.’

  ‘And how do you think you’re going to get them?’ replied Darren.