Twisted Metal (5 page)

‘Chaff!’ he called, wiping the back of one hand over his eyes. It came away covered with charged black iron filings. Somewhere off to his side there was a loud buzzing as someone began setting up a magnetic perimeter, drawing the chaff away from his troop. The air was becoming clearer already.

Now Nicolas had time to think. He counted seventeen robots still standing.

‘Report!’ he called. ‘Where are they?’

Calmly, the robots relayed the information back to him. There was a group up in the roof, a second blocking the passageway by which they had entered this cave.

‘Take out the ones above first,’ called Nicolas. ‘Then we can mount an assault on the ones behind us.’

Seventeen rifles swung back upwards. They began to fire infrequently, but with thoughtful precision.

‘Not so well trained,’ said the man to Nicolas’s right. ‘Soon be out of here.’

Nicolas felt uneasy. He knew the Raman lived in the mountains. He knew they were expert at this sort of fighting. Nicolas thought about this, Nicolas dredged his memory.

‘Anyone here got a nose?’ he asked.

‘I have,’ said a woman nearby, still gazing at the ceiling along the length of her rifle.

‘What can you smell?’

The woman paused, sniffing.

‘Organics. A lot of them. Petrol.’

‘
Zuse!
’ swore Nicolas.

‘Hey, they’re retreating!’

‘Of course they are. It’s a . . .’

The world exploded. The petroleum vapour with which the Raman had been flooding the cavern ignited and sucked up all the oxygen. Nicolas was left standing in a near-vacuum.

His electromuscles were weak and shrivelled.

His brain hurt.

He was deaf; the delicate connections in his ears had burned away.

His casing was so hot that it glowed blue-white.

The Raman were charging now. Only a dozen of them, but more than enough to defeat his weakened, crippled squad.

The Raman had long bodies plated in chrome. They carried short, sharp awls in their fists, held low, ready to punch up beneath a robot’s chin, right up into the brain.

‘Stand firm,’ said Nicolas.

Fourteen robots formed up in line. They dropped their rifles, barrels breached after the ammunition had exploded in the blast, they drew out their knives, held them in hands over which plastic had melted and dripped away. Held them weakly in their glowing hands. Still the Raman came, metal feet pounding on the stone floor. But now the Raman paused and put away their awls. They turned, looked back, fear crossing their faces.

‘What is it?’ asked someone.

‘I don’t know,’ said Nicolas. And then they, too, felt it and heard it. A trickle of water. A stream. A torrent of water released from somewhere, bearing down upon them. Flashing white foam on dark water, set free in the petroleum explosion, released from some other cave by the cracking of the walls.

It engulfed the Raman, swept them before it. And then it engulfed Nicolas and his squad, still glowing blue-white hot from the burning petrol.

The pain was like a shaft of lightning.

The pain was almost beyond endurance.

Hot metal steamed and then cooled too quickly. It snapped tight around robot bodies, it crystallized, hard and brittle. The world was full of the crash of water, and Nicolas’s squad was sent tumbling down through the earth, pushed deeper and deeper down caves and passageways, all spinning and crashing as they went. They bashed against rocks, and metal that had been heated and cooled too quickly shattered. Brain casing splintered and twisted wire unravelled and sent minds spilling and then untangling into nothing more than so much metal.

Bashing and crashing, tumbling and swirling. Dizzy and hurting. Gradually the motion slowed down, and the percussion of the unheard noise died away, and Nicolas was left beached on cold stone, his body dented and aching.

Other men and women lay around him, along with broken and shattered parts from dead robots. Water dripped from metal onto stone.

People began to stir. Nicolas looked around in anguish. There were no other Artemisians there present, only Raman.

Nicolas rose unsteadily to his feet. His balance felt off. He needed to strip apart his body and get a close look at the gyroscopes, but he didn’t have time. The Raman soldiers had noticed him. They were already pointing in his direction.

‘Hey,’ said Nicolas. ‘I surrender.’

They were looking at him oddly. Pointing to the dented casing around his body. Nicolas looked down and saw why.

He had changed. In the light from his own eyes, his body shone with a dull grey lustre.

Nicolas began to twist this way and that, examining himself.

The few Raman who had managed to hold onto them drew out their awls, short and wickedly cruel. They began to advance on Nicolas. Poor, weakened Nicolas, his electromuscles shrivelled by the heat.

Three, no, four Raman soldiers, all badly dented by their passage through the water.

Four awls were raised. Four awls were brought down on Nicolas’s body. Nicolas flinched as the blades struck home; he felt the pain as they cut into the circuitry beneath, felt . . .

He felt nothing. The blades had bounced clear. The Raman looked puzzled. They struck once more. Again Nicolas flinched and again the blades were deflected, leaving not even a scratch on his body.

Heated by the explosion of the petrol bomb and then explosively cooled by water, Nicolas’s body had been at the sweet point. He had hardened like the blade of a katana.

Now he was indestructible.

Again and again the Raman struck. Eventually they tired, their electromuscles drained of energy. The five robots stared at each other.

‘Why can’t we kill you?’ one of them asked Nicolas.

Nicolas raised one weak arm and reached out for an awl and took it from the unresisting hand of the Raman woman who had asked the question. He reversed the awl, weighed it in his hand. Then he reached forward and drove it up into the skull of the woman opposite him. She gave off an electronic scream that made the other soldiers back away.

Nicolas stabbed again. There was a nick at the end of the awl, a barb. This time, when he withdrew the point, twisted wire trailed from it. The woman screamed louder.

Nicolas stabbed again and again. He pulled at the twisted wire and unwound the woman’s mind. She died.

The other Raman soldiers had frozen in silent, helpless contemplation of this horror. They watched as the body of their companion slumped lifelessly to the wet ground: they watched as Nicolas, his arm tangled in the twisted wire of her mind, began to cut himself free of their dead companion. Then, finally, as Nicolas stepped weakly towards them, they turned and ran, fleeing up the long passageways to the surface.

Nicolas stripped the body of the woman. He pulled out her overlong electromuscles and cut them shorter to fit into his own limbs. Awkwardly, one-handedly, he took apart her hands and replaced the muscles in his own with hers. He studied the circuitry of her ears and found it inferior to his own burned-out sense, but at least her ears still worked. He took them and he could hear again. Raman State occupied the mountains and the coast. They built their eyes to see long distances. Nicolas was impressed by their design, and he incorporated it into his own body.

It took him several hours, but finally Nicolas rose again. The Raman had destroyed his entire squad. Now he would have his revenge.

Nicolas rose from the depths, clad in his dull grey shell and carrying a Raman awl. One by one he caught up with the fleeing soldiers and stabbed the awl up into their chin before winding out the twisted wire of their minds, their hands scrabbling all the while at his indestructible body.

It took him days, weeks, wandering in the dark, water-formed passageways, but there at last came a time when he rose from the ground among the moonlit peaks of the Raman mountains.

Behind him, sealed in the earth, were the bodies of his troop.

Behind him, dead in the darkness, were the disassembled minds of his enemies.

Now Nicolas had returned to life, to Artemis, to his destiny.

Nicolas was a new man. A robot in an indestructible body. A robot destined for great things. All would fear him. All would envy him.

And there, in the night, in the starlit, moonlit peaks of the Raman mountains, Nicolas came upon a still pool of water and looked into it and beheld himself. And his fate descended upon him, and Nicolas saw himself for what he was.

A coward.

For now all robots would desire his body. All would try to take it from him. He would never be able to rest, never be able to drop his guard for fear that someone would strip his mind from its indestructible shell, just as he had taken the parts from the Raman woman, deep beneath the ground.

Nicolas did not want his wonderful body. He did not feel strong enough to be the one to own it.

And so he lay in wait by the caves from which the Spontaneous emerged. The same caves he and his squad had entered just a few weeks before.

He waited by the entrance as day followed night. Waited there for seven days. And on the seventh day a robot emerged.

A man, dark in metal and slender in build. Black rock still clung to him from his emergence from the ground.

Nicolas came upon the man and killed him. Unwound the man’s mind from his body and placed his own there instead.

He left the indestructible body there at the mouth of the caves, its skull cracked open for any robot to take.

And then he walked down from the mountains.

Karel

‘What happened to him?’ asked Banjo Macrodocious. ‘No one knows,’ said Karel. ‘He just vanished.’ ‘What happened to the body?’

‘It vanished too. Some say that somewhere a robot still wears it, but painted, disguised.’

‘
Your
body is painted,’ observed Banjo Macrodocious.

Karel tapped at his chest plate. ‘This is not so hard.’

‘I can hear that. So what is the point of your story?’

‘That Nicolas was given a great gift and yet refused to use it. Your intelligence is the same.’

‘I am not intelligent,’ said Banjo Macrodocious. ‘I would not want to do as Nicolas did, to kill in that fashion.’

‘No robot should. That is an intelligent thing to say. Listen, Banjo Macrodocious, don’t deny your gift. Would you be Nicolas the Coward?’

‘I have no preference.’

Karel clenched his fist, wanting to smack the door beside him in frustration. The pain in his bent right hand caused him to pause just in time.

Gates was waiting right outside the door to the isolation area.

‘So, what’s the verdict?’

‘He’s intelligent all right,’ said Karel.

‘Thought as much,’ said Gates.

‘. . . but I can’t formally declare him so. He refuses to pass any of the tests. I’ve warned him and warned him, but he refuses to listen. He doesn’t seem to care.
It
doesn’t seem to care. I can’t call it
him
, as it’s not a robot. It’s technically a possession. It shouldn’t be that way, it’s not right, but that’s what the rules say. The stupid
Tokvah
is so stubborn.’

Gates frowned. ‘Hmm. Do you think it’s being threatened? Or playing a game, or something?’

‘No. I honestly believe that it thinks it’s unintelligent. Hah, that’s an oxymoron isn’t it?’

‘I think it’s a trick. Artemisians are cunning. It’s the sort of stunt that they would pull.’

‘Yes, but why? What could they hope to gain?’

They began to make their way back along the walkway, back out of the holding area. The chatter and clanking of the immigrants fell silent as they walked by.

‘They all know what’s in there,’ said Gates. ‘They are all wondering what it is. They’re wondering what you’ve decided.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Karel.

‘Well, make a decision fast, Karel. I need it out of here. I need the space. Just look around you.’

Karel shook his head. ‘I’ve no choice. It refuses to accept citizenship. Mark it as unintelligent.’

‘Fine,’ said Gates. ‘It makes no difference to me.’

‘Well, it should do,’ said Karel. ‘You sound like an Artemisian.’