Twisted Metal (26 page)

The stairwell, the broken body of another child, in a tangled metal heap at the foot of the steps.

Two Artemisian robots, stripping the decorative copper foil from the pillars outside the apartment block, rolling it up into bales ready for transportation back to Artemis City.

The dark streets, the bright stars above, the sounds of gunfire, the spark of cutting tools, the rolling of wheels. Dark shapes of Artemisians moving through the night, tearing the city apart.

And there, in the middle of the street, a terrible sight. It was enough to make even the young infantryrobot who pushed Karel along pause for a moment.

A City Guard lay dead on the hard-packed gangue of the road. His body was crushed and dented, exposing deep golden electromuscle of an impossibly fine weave. One of his legs was cut off below the knee, his head almost flattened. Yet he lay with his rifle in his hands, still aiming at some target down the road. A deep feeling of respectful awe crept over Karel. This robot, at least, had fought to the very end.

From somewhere to the west he heard a rending, tearing noise. The sky there lit up in brilliant whiteness, so bright it threatened to overload Karel’s eyes. A low vibration shook the metal of his body; it rumbled up through his feet, it throbbed in his electromuscles.

‘What is it?’ asked the young guard.

By way of answer the brilliant white light shorted out, leaving the night suddenly so dark by comparison. And then there was an explosion that shook the very earth, and red flames leaped up into the night.

Karel looked over to the west. He knew what it was. He knew what lay in that direction.

The fort of the City Guard had been breached. Turing City had fallen.

Maoco O

The ending had come so quickly. One minute he had been there in the darkness before the fort, the brilliant white bolts from the Tesla towers arcing down over him to strike the Artemisian forces that were massed just out of rifle range. He had been moving to the dance of battle, weaving through the night, forming patterns with Maoco L and Maoco P and Maoco S. Seeking out the few black-painted Storm Troopers that crept forward through the night, their bodies loaded with explosive, despatching them with a shot to the metal of their minds.

And then, the next moment, the Tesla towers seemed to be feeding back on themselves, the great white electrical bolts arcing down towards the earth and then jumping back to the towers. The current was building in intensity, the flow making the very ground vibrate.

Maoco L was suddenly there at his side. ‘They’ve laid a grid on the ground,’ she was saying. ‘They’ve crisscrossed the land with iron and they’re reflecting the current back to us. We have to disable it!’

But it was too late. There was a shriek and the current shorted out, the light died.

A horrible low grinding noise, the creaking and shifting of stone that had lain undisturbed for years. The fort itself was collapsing. Artemis was attacking.

Maoco O was calm. He felt a quiet sense of pleasure. This was what he had been built for.

Grey robots and black robots and silver robots came rushing towards him. He fought with his rifle, with shuriken and knife and awl and hands and feet.

The outer wall of the fort had fallen. Artemisian troops rushed for the breach and Maoco O went to slow them, but there were too many robots around him now. He fought on, kicking and slicing and chopping, all the time trying to move towards the fort.

The Artemisians had almost made the wall now, but they were . . . they were falling! Cut down by a hail of bullets and thrown stars. Maoco O was confused. There weren’t that many robots left in the fort, surely? And then he understood.

Emerging from the breach in the wall were tall golden robots. Their hands and arms were long and flexible, their legs smooth and unarmoured. Yet they carried guns and rifles and they wielded them with deadly accuracy.

The Mothers of the Fort, the robots that had woven the minds of the City Guard, now fought their last stand.

Karel

Another Turing City robot and its guard joined them, and then another, and Karel found himself part of a growing procession of the defeated, winding through the city towards the wreck of the railway station. The yellow light of the false dawn bloomed above it.

Karel felt so vulnerable, his thin, brightly coloured panelling was scratched and dented. It seemed pathetic when compared to the utilitarian grey of the infantry that surrounded him and the other prisoners.

Their city was being stripped apart. In the half-light, grey infantryrobots could be seen, tearing foil and leaf from the façades of buildings. Blue engineers with heavy-duty cutters followed them, cutting away iron pillars and supports, piling up sheets of steel on the ground, ready for processing. The decorated windows of buildings were smashed with hammers, so that Karel found himself crunching through diamond and ruby and amber and jade fragments of broken glass. Walking down a wide boulevard, he and the other Turing Citizens saw the tin beading being pulled from the windows of a meeting house so that, one by one, the curved plate-glass panes toppled forward into the road, their shattered glass skittering along behind him.

The Artemisians worked so quickly. That’s what really amazed Karel. Bare hours had passed, and, as they approached the centre of the city, already some of the buildings were stripped down to skeletons.

They had machines there. Digging machines, long cylinders with spiral noses.

‘We need a mind,’ called out one of the blue-painted engineers. ‘He’ll do.’

The engineer was pointing directly at Karel.

‘No, he’s not to be touched,’ said Keogh, Karel’s guard.

‘Take this one,’ offered another guard.

A Turing Citizen was pushed forward.

‘No!’ he cried in terror, but the engineers seized him, popped open his skull and pulled out his mind, carefully detaching the coil. The mind was placed into one of the digging machines.

‘Keep going down,’ they said to the ear, built into the rear of the machine. ‘We need to get at the foundations of the building.’

‘I don’t know if these Turing City minds have enough power to run these machines,’ said one of the engineers. But then the screw at the front of the machine began to turn.

‘Looks like they can,’ said another engineer. ‘Okay, we need four more robots.’

Four more Turing Citizens were pulled from the crowd, and then the procession moved on. They heard the pleading shouts of the chosen abruptly cut off as their minds were detached.

They reached the railway station just as dawn was breaking. The reflected light from Zuse threatened to outshine the pale yellow sunlight that picked out the stripped carcases of the city buildings, the long shadows of which extended across the marble square in front of the station. Only a few hours earlier Karel had been standing there with Susan.

Susan. What had happened to her?

The square was full of Artemisians, so many of them now. New soldiers were pouring into the city on trains, Karel could see them freshly disembarked and already marching in lines into the stricken city. Along with them came engineers and surveyors and reclamation robots. Now the city had fallen Artemisian workers were pouring into Turing City to claim the spoils.

And there went the prizes of conquest. A steady stream of metal was being marched and rolled and trundled and carried back into the station. Girders and steel plate, bundles of foil and reels of wire, all being fed onto the waiting trains to be whisked away, back to the factories of Artemis.

Karel had a thought that disgusted him: the process was like organic life. It was as if the city was eating itself: the railway station was a mouth that was now sucking the rest of the body into itself, sucking up all that metal to leave nothing of Turing City but the empty spaces in the long-depleted mines.

Karel’s procession was now all the way through the square. He was made to join a growing crowd of other male prisoners. He looked around and wondered what had happened to the women. Most importantly, where was Susan?

And then he remembered the little body of Axel, lying broken on the ground.

Everything was gone.

Spoole

The marble flagstones of the parade ground were becoming abraded at the edges, stained and eroded by the acid rain. The thought gave Spoole pleasure: it was a sign that Artemis was a healthy, growing place. Even now, the three tall brick chimneys of the infantry factory belched smoke into the pale dawn, and a thin, cold breeze braided little curls of it across the clear morning sky. A team of robots scaling the chimneys, already two hundred feet up, were heading to repaint the white collars that encircled the tops.

Two newly manufactured battalions of infantryrobots formed squares on the parade ground. The doors of the factory had been flung wide open, and a company of Scouts were marching out, silver skins flashing in the pale light.

Gearheart leaned close to him. ‘Just think what I could do to one of their bodies,’ she murmured. ‘Just imagine the mind I could twist from their wire.’

‘Not another word.’

Gearheart annoyed him. Not her words so much, rather the fact that she tried to goad him. Everything about her seemed gauged to irritate him. She was wearing so little panelling today that the beautifully knitted electromuscles in her arms and legs were clearly visible, and Spoole realized how the soldiers, both male and female, would be looking at her.

‘My appearance is symbolic,’ she had claimed, ‘it’s an indication of your power, Spoole. A robot doesn’t need protecting in this state that you have built.’

‘You were woven to be attracted to me,’ Spoole had replied, just before they had come out here that morning. ‘It’s like you feel you have to annoy me, just to prove that you have some control over your life. Don’t think that I don’t know that you‘re playing games with me, Gearheart.’

Gearheart had just altered her pose, showing off even more of her body.

‘Playing games? I’m not the only one, Spoole. Look at Kavan. Where will he turn his attention next, now that he has taken Turing City?’

‘I will deal with Kavan just as I will deal with you if you ever cross the line with me.’

‘Oh, Spoole,’ she had said, reaching to touch his leg, so that he felt the wire stirring within him, ‘don’t be like that.’

Spoole focused his attention on the here and now. He counted two thousand and fifteen robots standing to attention before him, both polished silver Scouts and matt-grey infantry. Behind them soared the red-brick façade of the factory with its tall windows. Through the open doors he could see the glow of the forges, and he felt a glow of pride himself at what had been wrought.

‘Soldiers of Artemis,’ he called out, his amplified voice rolling over the parade ground.

‘Three weeks ago you entered the factory. Not as soldiers, but as robots of Bethe and Segre, of Stark and Born and Raman. Even of Artemis. And in the factory you stripped away your own metal and put aside your old form. Short or tall, wide or narrow, you have all built your new bodies to the same plan, and in this you are now all equal. You have each taken metal and beaten it to the same length, you have knitted electromuscle and threaded it into each other’s arms. You have assembled your own and each other’s bodies.’

He paused. The assembled robots stamped their feet, once, twice. Two thunderous cracks echoed across the parade ground.

‘You have placed the ultimate trust in your fellow robots, allowing them to remove your mind from its old body and to place it in the new. For, as we all know, Artemis is not about individuals, it is about Artemis.’

Stamp, stamp.

Spoole looked down at the marble chips broken from the flagstones by the continued stamping of metal feet. Such power. It was good.

Now he lowered his voice. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he continued. ‘You will have heard the rumours that Turing City has fallen. Well, let me tell you . . . those rumours are true!’

Stamp, Stamp.

‘. . . already metal from Turing City is being sent here! Already robots from Turing City are riding towards us, carried here on Artemisian trains! Soon they will march through this city to the factory, and those of you who are still here will look upon them and you will notice they already wear grey infantry bodies. For those who chose to join Artemis have already been presented with an Artemisian body. And yet, on entering the factory, that body will be taken from them! Those of you still serving in the factory may become teachers in order to show these new robots what you have already learned – how to strip apart their grey infantry bodies and rebuild them anew, exactly the same as they were.’

He lowered his voice. ‘And you might wonder why this should be.’

‘You’re boring them,’ murmured Gearheart.

Spoole felt a stab of anger at her remark.

‘You might wonder why this should be,’ he repeated, ‘and yet, think for a moment. Think about how it would be if you too were presented with a body, ready made. Imagine if you were asked to wear a body over which you felt no real sense of ownership. You would no longer be an Artemisian soldier in the true sense of the word. You would be something apart: a mind with no feeling for its own body. You would think of the mind as something separate, something that did not truly belong to this state.’