The Age Atomic

TWENTY-EIGHT

The night in Harlem was cold, the world frosted with ice, the air heavy with freezing mist.

The streets were empty, the buildings too: empty shells staring with empty black eyes out onto deserted streets. It seemed the very fabric of the place was rotting away, brick crumbling, concrete fracturing like wet chalk. If the Empire State was an imperfect copy of Manhattan island, then the Pocket universe’s Harlem was where the data degradation was worst. The cold wasn’t helping, nor the tremors. The whole world shook as it fell apart; here in Harlem, the quakes loosened mortar and pushed stones, making cracks, weakening everything.

The people stayed inside, huddled in small communities that gathered around fires to keep the dark away, to keep the creeping cold out. Some areas were better than others; here people could move around, try to continue some semblance of normal life, with shops and bars and businesses struggling onwards as the endless night drew on and the temperature dropped, and dropped again.

The area around 125th Street was not one of the good places. Here the night was stained a violent green when the lamp atop the tower at the back of the King’s theater was lit. Other times the shadows were deep, the darkness a perfect place to hide. Nobody walked these streets, not anymore, because the King had gathered his faithful from all over the city to this one spot, and here he kept them in darkness until they were needed.

So they waited, in small groups and sometimes ones larger. Their numbers fluctuated as the King took them inside his operating theater, where they were saved.

He was a great man, they said. A great man, blessed with miraculous skills. He would save them all, return them to their old lives, the ones they had before they marched willingly into the robot yards downtown, before answering their conscription papers, or, for some, before they were snatched in the dead of night and woke to find themselves in the middle of a slaughterhouse, waiting their turn for their limbs to be separated from their bodies and their hearts removed and replaced with rubber pumps to push machine oil around their internal mechanisms.

Tonight, the green lantern flicked on, bathing 125th Street and the surrounds of the theater in a deep, sickly haze.

It was necessary. The King said so himself. The green light kept enemies away, kept them safe. And it would not be long now; the King had said so, many times. When the green light came on, when the pain started and the robots scurried to the shadows to escape its hellish glare, the King and his servant would appear, on the veranda that jutted out from the front of the theater, out over the main entrance. They would stand on this platform, this stage, and the King would tell them that everything would be fine, that everything was going to plan, that soon they would be saved, all of them, from their torment. Just a little while longer, just a little more time, and then they would be ready.

Because, he said each and every time, the city owed them. The Empire State had taken their lives away, stolen them. It had treated them like machines, like just more tiny cogs in great wheels, sending them off into the fog, never to return. Feeding them to the Enemy, to keep it complacent, satiated.

And when the time was right, when the work was complete, the King would lead them back downtown, where they would liberate the Empire State from itself, and take back what the Empire State had stolen from them.

Then, after he had spoken, the green light would turn red, and the relief would be a blessing. The robots could come out and bathe in the light, the light that healed, energized, the light that gave pleasure, not pain. And then the King would be on the street, within reach of the pawing hands and claws and clamp and servo units. And with the help of his servant, he would administer the nourishment, the magical green elixir that kept them alive while they waited to be called into the theater.

But tonight was different. The green light had come on, but there was no appearance, no speech. Robbie and the others hid in the shadow of a stairwell close to the entrance; it was a good spot, and his group had fought hard to claim it, and every night defended it as best they could. It was difficult, dangerous, and soon Robbie’s gang had been reduced to the strongest — Robbie, with his telescopic arms and domed head filled with stained glass; Ratings 112363 and 112463, two soldiers nearly intact; and a small man who refused to give his name, who appeared to be more human than robot but when he moved — and move he did, so very quickly — there were flashes of silver beneath the ragged blankets he wrapped himself in.

The green light had come on, and they’d waited, but there was nothing. Robbie sat with his back against the stairs, facing away from the theater. He waited, ignoring the rambling conversation of the two Ratings, each repeating the words of the other, not quite in time, over and over until it became too much for Robbie’s ambient microphone to bear and he turned the input volume down. With his telescopic arms wrapped around his legs, he sat and rocked his curved carapace against the cement of the stair block.

He needed it. Oh boy, did he need it. He could feel it, that aching deep within his alternator, a sensation, a tension, creeping out across his hydraulic system, a chill that cooled his valves until he thought their glass would crack. He licked the roof of his mouth — he still had a tongue, although his upper palate was a plate of copper, unfinished and corroding, like most of his torso. He rocked against the stairwell, leaving verdigris stain on the bricks.

The green light suddenly went off, and there it was — the red. He could feel the relief coursing through his circuits, even from here, hidden in the shadow. He looked ahead to the street, the icy ground bleached pink-red.

Oh man, all he had to do was stand up and walk out into the light, and he’d get the first part of the hit. He almost couldn’t stand it, it was like the control gyros where his stomach used to be were shorting out, going haywire, creating a pins and needles sensation that swept across his framework, like being tickled with a feather back when he had skin. Perhaps that’s all it was; maybe his motivation dampener was too cold and was accessing the memories of the man he used to be, memories that were supposed to be locked away, suppressed forever.

Robbie didn’t like it. The King hadn’t spoken, and while the green light had gone off and the red one had come on, something was up. If he stepped out into the red, and the King wasn’t there to dispense the green, the hit, then the pain that followed would be too much to bear. It was better to stay here, unmoving, corroding into the brick and concrete than to suffer that pain. The relief of the red was intense, but temporary — to get the hit, you had to have the green too, not the light but the elixir, and that was dispensed by the King and the King alone.

“My brothers!”

Robbie’s head rotated almost automatically at the sound, as the directional microphones mounted next to the primary optical unit behind the angled stained glass filters in his head kicked in. There was movement near the theater, near the main doors, not on the balcony. Something wasn’t right, but the voice was crosschecked and identified: it was the Corsair, the King’s servant.

“My brothers,” came the voice again, “the King has sent me to bring the green. Come and receive the green from your King, and rejoice in his majesty.”

Ratings 112363 and 112464 chattered excitedly, their shared words piling over each other and vanishing into a rush of static. Robbie could understand the feeling, the want, the need to get the hit, to get the green.

Robbie retracted his arms and stood, his body rotating towards the theater. His optics adjusted to the red light and he saw the Corsair standing in the doorway of the castle, holding out one hand. Robbie zoomed in, and saw the small rectangle of something dark on the Corsair’s upturned palm. Nearly a whole ounce of green. On the ground next to the King’s servant was an open metal box, and within, stacked in neat piles, more wrapped hits, one for each robot, except the larger ones that needed two.

The absence of the King himself was unusual, but it didn’t matter — his servant had brought the green instead. Already there was movement across the street as robots pulled themselves out of shadows and out of alleyways, from behind stairwells, up from basement entrances. The street was soon filled with moving machines, although perhaps fewer than the night before. More had succumbed to the cold, the low temperature sucking the life from their batteries. The green fixed that, or at least it made it feel like it did.

The nameless robot in the blanket behind Robbie didn’t move. Another one gone.

The robots moved across the street, but Robbie was closest — that was why his group defended the stairwell with such desperation, because it was closest to the theater, which meant Robbie was first in line for the hit.

The Corsair turned towards him as Robbie approached. Robbie’s rubber skirt slid on the ice, making it look like he was gliding if it wasn’t for the slight bobbing up and down of his short steps. The Corsair held out his hand; Robbie paused, the red light flooding his sensors, the knowledge that the hit was just seconds away almost too much for his logic gates to handle. He heard them clicking inside his carapace, and gears moved inside his head as the optics zoomed in on the Corsair’s gloved hand and the prize it held.

The other robots, knowing the hierarchy, fearing the might of Robbie and his Rating companions, fell into line behind him in silence. While most were happy to fight out territory elsewhere, there would be no skirmish here, not in the red light, in the presence of, if not their King, then his royal servant.

Robbie bowed his head, and gears whirred inside his head as his voice box came to life.

“GREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENN.”

The Corsair nodded in return; his black metal face was expressionless, but switching spectra to penetrate the opaque glass of the Corsair’s goggles, Robbie could see the eyes behind the mask. He wondered what kind of a man he had been, to be so strong to have resisted and overcome conversion in the Naval robot yards and to have sworn to help those less fortunate than he on their journey back to humanity.

“WHENWILLITBETIIIIIIIIIIIME?”

The Corsair chuckled behind his mask, and when he spoke it was a sibilant whisper.

“Soon, my brother, soon. Soon we will be ready to go downtown, and claim that which is rightfully ours.”

The Corsair’s black fur coat moved in the wind as he began dispensing the green to the King’s loyal subjects.