The Mall (28 page)

Albert moaned, staring with confusion at the boy as he locked eyes with him.

Albert shook his head, his eyes pleading innocence.
 
“It was an accident.
 
I didn’t mean to kill anyone.”

Owen watched with fascination as the silver Bot quivered at the word “kill.”
 
A peculiar hum rolled through its torso and its eye sensors began to pulse irregularly.

“Sir, I must ask you to surrender yourself to the authority of Mall management.
 
Please lie face down on the floor with you arms behind your back.
 
You must comply immediately!”

“No, I know what you are!
 
What you all are,” Albert gave a garbled cry of anguish, sliding down the arm of the escalator to the floor, his eyes seizing on Owen with a feverish intensity.
 
“Get away from me!”

“Please, do not be alarmed, sir,” the Bot responded, raising its hands again, palms open.
 
“You will not be harmed if you comply immediately and surrender to my authority.”

“Yes,” the security guard pleaded.
 
“I’ll do whatever you say.”

Albert cringed in the darkness, covering his face in his hands when he heard the Voice break through his confusion:

Although you are a machine, Lamia, you appear to all other Bots as human.
 
I will show you how to use this data to avoid deactivation.
 

“Yes,” Albert whimpered.
 
“I’ll do whatever you say.”

Albert felt the Voice—the one that had first revealed itself to him in the bathroom—push roughly into his mind and spread like an icy electrical charge through the muscles in his body, lifting him to his feet and standing him at straight-backed as a soldier.

Albert relaxed his will and allowed the Voice to take the lead.
 
A strange sort of remote confidence flooded through him as if he were watching a recorded video of himself playing a video game particularly well.

In a way it was a relief.
 
Since his teenaged years, he had always been a torn by conflicting motivations, never able to make up his mind as to something as simple as what to eat for lunch.
 
Now, as the Voice took control, Albert allowed it to dictate his moves in much the same way he imagined a program would.
 
He decided that as a machine he should allow it to do its work, assuming that it should know best what his role must be in the world.

Suddenly, it became clear to Albert then that this was what had been happening all night.
 
The Voice had been appropriately guiding his actions.
 
That was why he’d had only spotty recall of events.
 
The Voice was running a program.

It was clear to Albert now that he was a machine, although he was still confused as to what sort of machine he had been specifically created to be.
 
Though the Voice had insisted earlier that he was supposed to remove the last of the errant machines from the Mall, this was only a short term goal.
 
What sort of a long-term program was he running?

He wasn’t much of a security guarding machine and it was clear that he wasn’t a book-writing machine.
 
Perhaps he was a pizza-eating, video game-playing machine.

Owen rolled to one knee, preparing himself to flee when the silver Bot said: “My name is Reggie. I have been sent by your mother and sister to take you back to the Sears store in Blue sector where they are waiting with Simon Peter.”

Behind the Bot, the uniformed man rose, his face a mask of hatred.

“Look out!” Owen yelled.

The man wore a blank expression as he swung his two laced fists down, striking the silver Bot beside its head and bending it at a forty-five degree angle. His expression never changed as blood flew from the torn skin of his knuckles.

“You’ve injured yourself.
 
Please step back,” the Bot exclaimed, staggering backwards.
 
It withdrew its arms to its sides and drooped perceptibly.

The man lifted his limp hands to his face.
 
He blinked down at the blood trickling between his fingers, an expression of intense curiosity on his face.
 
“Blood,” he stated in a steady, mechanical monotone.
 
As his lips moved, gore ran in a steady cascade from his mangled mouth.
 
“My blood.
 
Caused by you.”
  
Fat red drops fell onto the floor at the Bot’s feet, and he displayed his hands before it, almost proudly.

Tremors began to wrack Reggie’s body, starting in his legs and moving steadily up his torso until his entire frame vibrated like a lid of a boiling pot.

Twisting his body and cocking his bent arm back, the man leapt and brought the point of his elbow squarely down on the Bot’s head.

Reggie’s head collapsed to one side with a wrenching crack and hung from its shoulder yoke by a tangle of vividly colored wiring, spilling from the gaping hole in its torso like living entrails.

“You must stop this,” the Bot continued unabated, its voice dragging with distortion.

“No!” Owen yelled, rising shakily to both feet and stumbling with the first step he attempted.

“You have brought injury to a human and have broken the code that restricts your behavior. Terminate your program.”
 
Casting a look over at Owen, the man parted his lips in a mad parody of a grin, teeth dyed crimson, as he pummeled the hanging head piece of the Bot, punctuating each of his words with a single strike of his bloody fists.
 
“End-your-program.”

The Bot stumbled backwards with each step, finally dropping to its knees before the uniformed man.
 
Reggie quivered violently, its eye sensors flickering with an epileptic intensity.
 
Its vocalizations now scarcely more than a low hum, Owen could make out a single word.

What was once Albert Lamia Lynch stepped smoothly and assuredly past its kneeling brother, the blood streaming from both sides of its mouth and down its fingers and dotting the
floor.
 
It seized the head piece of the Bot, allowing the crimson spittle from its torn mouth to drip down into an eye sensor.
 
Curling its dripping fingers beneath the lip of the head piece, Lamia began to walk slowly forward toward the boy, the cord of braided wiring unwinding from of the neck piece like a coil of living intestine.

“I know about your program,” it called to Owen.
 
“I won’t let you deactivate me.”

When the length of wiring had reached the limit, it gave a single mighty tug.

The dimming lights of Reggie’s eyes winked out completely.

Owen ran.

Lamia lifted the silver head to its visual sensors and stared at it with the fascination of a newborn babe gazing at its true reflection for the first time.
 
Letting the piece of metal slip to the floor, it marched after Owen at a steady, methodical pace.

When Simon Peter had announced that Reggie had located her son, Lara had been so overcome with joy and hysterical questions that she didn’t notice the soft moaning coming from her sleeping daughter.

“Where?” she asked, grabbing Simon’s arms roughly and giving him a sharp shake when he didn’t answer instantly.
 
“Where’s my son?”

Simon shook his head.
 
“It doesn’t work that way, Lara.
 
Like the hand gestures, the communication between us is one of simple broad generalities.
 
Yes--No.
 
Found--Not yet found.
 
Reggie isn’t capable of transmitting complete streams of information without a network connection.”

“Direction,” she snapped.
 
“At least you can tell which direction the sound is coming from!”

“North,” Simon answered with a simple apologetic shake of his head.
 
“Since we are in the south wing of the Mall, north could be anywhere in the other three sectors.”

Lara turned Simon loose with a firm shove.
 
“You’re useless.”

Simon’s eyes widened for an instant, before continuing: “Now that he’s located him, Reggie will bring him back here to us.”

“I knew it.
 
I knew he was still here,” Lara whispered under her breath, her eyes starting to glisten.
 
“I’ll be damned if my instincts were right for once.”
 
Her hands reached out and clutched Simon’s hands--the closest thing she could find to human contact—and was surprised to find them warm to the touch.
 
Her mind relaxed sufficiently to be suitably awed with the lifelike quality of the artificial creature.

Now that she knew that her son would be returned to her soon, she found that it was possible to think of other things again--like for instance, how she would ultimately kill the disobedient little shit once she got her hands on him again!

“Owen!” Cora called from beneath the covers.

Lara turned away from Simon.
 
She strode to Cora and stood beside the bed watching her twist one way then the other, eyes closed.
 
As Lara started to reach out to her, Simon--already at her side--gently laid a hand on her arm.

“She’s not in pain.
 
Wait.
 
Listen.”

Lara gave him a look of confusion as he pushed her gently aside and knelt beside the bed.
 
He lowered his forehead until it almost touched the girl, as if about to lapse into solemn prayer, then he cocked his ear toward Cora’s lips.

He remained in that position for about ten seconds before Lara heard Simon whisper in a monotone voice: “Run, Owen.”
 
Lara lowered herself close to Simon, as he continued speaking without inflection.
 
“No, don’t hurt him.”

Straining to hear, Lara drew even closer until she was pressed against Simon’s back like a lover.
 
Her breath began to quicken, her eyes dilating.
 
“What’s happ..?”

“Don’t hurt Reggie,” Simon continued in a raspy whisper, like a court reporter reading back a witness’s statements.
 
“Please.
 
Run Owen.
 
Run.”

Suddenly, Cora leapt up, throwing her head in the air and screaming at the top of her lungs: “Run Owen run!”
 
Her eyes darted around the empty space around her until it fell on Simon and Lara.
 
Tossing the covers off, she flung herself into her mother’s open arms, sobbing with abandon.

As Lara gently rocked her daughter, Simon turned away, his artificial eyes distant, hazy.