Twisted Metal

Tony Ballantyne

The Stark robots were better engineered, faster, stronger, sleeker – but they were being overwhelmed by the sheer number of the enemy.

The grey Artemisian infantry marched out of the darkness of the plain, following the segmented pipes that snaked from the wells to the oil refinery.

The Stark robots fell back before them in good order. They dropped flat magnetic mines and kicked sand over them. The hidden traps stuck to the iron feet of the advancing troops, discharging a shock that contracted the electromuscles of the body, pulling it into a tight, agonizing ball before shorting the life from the victim in one convulsive burst.

Everything about the Stark robots suggested better materials and better minds. Each shot from their high-velocity rifles shattered an Artemisian head, blowing a mind apart in an explosion of blue wire.

But still the grey forces came on, marching ever forward in a seemingly unending stream, underpowered rifles pumping forth ineffectual lead slugs that spread across the steel plate of the defenders, slowing them down, reducing each movement to a painful struggle.

Inevitably, the grey robots fell upon the defenders. They pulled out knives and awls and began to beat at the Stark bodies, denting them, worrying at them, seeking a point of entry. The defenders struggled on under the unceasing attack, but eventually their armour was punctured. Awls and blades worked at the bodies, peeling back the plating, piercing through to the electromuscle beneath. The Stark robots died in an agony of cuts and feedback, while all around them the Artemisian forces marched on, eyes fixed on the refinery and its precious oil.

Other creatures joined the battlefield. The soldiers’ feet slipped and skidded on the metal shells of beetles that dug their way up from their burrows to steal the shards and swarf that dropped from the bodies of the downed.

A chatter of metal, the sound of a toothed blade tearing itself apart on a tungsten block, and a line of holes appeared in the grey metal bodies of the Artemisian infantry, running up and down the ranks. A Stark machine gun was firing upon them from a mile off. Falling bodies followed the line of holes, and the scavenger beetles swarmed over the newly dead. Still the Artemisian advance pressed on.

A hiss, and the air filled with a thin mist of water; it drifted through the grey ranks, a minor annoyance. Circuits felt mushy and sparky in the moist conditions.

Unnoticed at their feet, the soil churned as the beetles burrowed their way back beneath the ground.

The Artemis robots stumbled on, feet tripping on the potholed earth, metal bodies misting with water, droplets running down their arms and fingers, electromuscle singing with power, the sight of the refinery, empty and undefended, spurring them on.

And then they felt it, the sense of building power ahead; an enormous potential forming, it resonated in their bodies, set their electromuscle singing. The advance faltered, the robots behind still pushing into those in front. The leaders paused to gaze at the line of metal spikes thrust in the ground before them, each spike humming with ominous intent.

Something was coming. The grey bodies at the front held for a moment in desperate equilibrium, ready to retreat, knowing it was too late…

The power discharged. A near-solid bar of electricity hit the metal shell of a leading Artemisian soldier. Her mind exploded; the power within it was added to the lightning bolt that now spread crackling across the field of battle. Metal screamed and shuddered, twisted metal expanded and melted. A magnetic pulse spread out from the battlefield, across the continent of Shull; it rose up into the night and bounced off the ionosphere.

An army was wiped out, just like that.

Silence settled over the battlefield, nothing was heard but the ping and crack of cooling metal. So many bodies, so many minds, so much twisted metal. All dead.

The soil began to stir again.

The beetles were returning.

Far away, halfway around the world, a robot monitoring the radio frequencies in distant Yukawa heard a crackle, a blast of white noise. It was the sound of so many souls departing the world, not that he recognized it as such.

He scored his stylus across the metal, drawing the pictograms that represented an electrical storm somewhere over the western sea.

Two robots were making love in the middle of an electrical storm.

Crouching in an old shell hole, searing white lightning arcing above them as the charged night sought release, Liza paused in the act of twisting wire and gazed up at her husband.

‘Is everything all right?’ Kurtz asked. The sky flared, and gravel tipped from the rim and rolled to the base of their shelter. It was a night of changes: far across the dark plain, Artemis was on the march; attacking the distant city state of Stark.

‘Are you worried by the fighting?’ pressed Kurtz. ‘Shall we go back to Turing City?’

‘No,’ she smiled at him. ‘Stark is a long way from here. What sort of a child would we make if we were to run at the slightest disturbance?’

His eyes glowed soft yellow, a gentle contrast to the raw power tearing the night apart above them.

As she spoke again, her voice crackled with the static of the storm. ‘I have reached the point. Have you decided?’

‘Yes,’ whispered Kurtz. ‘A boy.’

Liza nodded and returned to her work, her hands moving in the feminine manner as she wove a mind from the twisted wire that Kurtz made for her.

‘Thank you,’ said Kurtz, watching her movements with fascination.

‘Thank you for what?’

‘For giving me the choice.’

‘It’s tradition,’ Liza replied simply, her hands ever moving. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured.

‘For what?’

‘For trusting me. For not asking if I am really weaving what you asked for.’

‘It’s tradition,’ said Kurtz.

There was a sizzling crash, and several lightning bolts arced down, earthing themselves through crude plugs of raw iron that had thrust themselves up from the stone plain. Glowing plasma formed an arch in the sky, burning its way into the electrocells of Kurtz’s and Liza’s eyes.

‘That came from Stark,’ observed Kurtz, the purple lines of lightning slowly fading from their vision. ‘Their Tesla towers are too powerful. Artemis won’t defeat them tonight.’

‘Good,’ murmured Liza, still weaving busily. ‘Good.’

‘It only means that they’ll attack again,’ said Kurtz despondently. ‘And they’ll keep attacking until they have defeated Stark, and then Segre, and then Bethe. And then it will be our turn.’

‘Shhh…’ said Liza. ‘Not tonight. Let them sort out their own problems. Just concentrate on us…’

‘Yes,’ said Kurtz, and he relaxed, allowed his electromuscles to discharge a little.

Liza worked carefully on, twisting Kurtz’s wire into a mind. The little body that would house that mind lay at their feet. A smart little body, lovingly built by Kurtz out of steel and brass, the whole then painted in black and gold stripes by Liza. A beautiful little body, its skull gaping open, ready for the mind she was twisting to be inserted. It already had a name: Liza and Kurtz’s little boy would be called Karel. Karel. A lovely name for a lovely child, due to be born in the midst of less than lovely times.

Liza and Kurtz crouched together in an old shell hole, the remnant of a long-spent war, making their own little expression of peace while electric bolts fanned across the sky, painting themselves on the canvas provided by Zuse, the night moon. Meanwhile, a low rumbling spread across the stone plain. Artemis machinery being destroyed: they had attacked Stark too soon.

The rhythm of Liza’s movements had changed.

‘What are you weaving now?’ asked Kurtz.

‘His sense of self,’ said Liza. ‘His sense of otherness. Isn’t it obvious?’

‘No, I see your hands move and all I see is twisting. It has no order or meaning to me.’

Liza smiled. ‘Now I am giving him your stubbornness.’ Her hands danced lightly, tweaking, turning, teasing.

‘I’m not stubborn,’ he protested.

‘You’ll stand your ground, even when you suspect you’re wrong. You’d rather see a bad argument through to the end than change your opinion. It’s not your most attractive characteristic, but,’ she shrugged, ‘there are worse things to be ashamed of.’

‘But I don’t want my child to be stubborn. Take it out!’

‘The weave must balance.’

Kurtz said nothing, and Liza knew he understood. He would have seen children who walked and talked and performed simple tasks and nothing more, seen the way other mothers would look at them with sympathy or disapproval. The mother tried too hard, they would say. The weave doesn’t balance.

The electrical storm was rising in intensity: an incredible tearing sound ripping across the world. White light poured down from the sky to the east, a waterfall of light increasing in flux. A curtain of electricity was fast being drawn across the horizon, a flood of light that blasted the plain; the squat iron plugs firing ultra-black shadows westwards. The reddish stones kicked across the plain by the metal feet of so many robots drew long lines of darkness towards Turing City itself.

‘What is going on out there?’ wondered Kurtz aloud. ‘Is that the battle or the elements?’

‘Shhh,’ said Liza. ‘Let the rest of the world take care of itself. We have our own child to attend to.’

‘Artemis,’ reflected Kurtz. ‘If we were Artemisians, we would be making this child very differently…’

‘Do you want that?’ teased Liza. ‘I could make Karel think only of the glory of the Artemisian state. Is that really what you want?’

To her surprise, Kurtz did not answer straight away.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, slowly. ‘There’s no denying how successful Artemis is. Their forges grow larger every month.’ He lowered his voice.

‘Is that what you really want?’ asked Liza, soft yellow eyes glowing, hands never ceasing their manipulation of the warm, pliable metal. ‘Tell me now, Kurtz. We are of Turing City State. We can make our child share its values, respect itself and others as individuals, or we can make our child strong and empty, just like an Artemisian. What do you really believe in?’

‘Liza, I don’t know. I know we agreed, but are we sure we are right to do this? Turing City will only succeed if all the children really believe in what we stand for. If just a few of them turn and run, the rest of us will fall. All it takes is a few children. Do we want to condemn our own child to be the one remaining while others are running?’

‘But if we all stand together we will have a better life. After all, we want what’s best for our boy.’

‘But which is the best?’

Liza couldn’t stop moving her hands: she couldn’t allow the pliable wire to set.

‘You choose,’ urged Kurtz.

‘No. You choose.’

‘But it’s such a huge responsibility. Choices like this could change the world.’

‘Never mind the rest of the world,’ said Liza. ‘This is just about us. Come on, individual or drone, which is it to be? Turing City or Artemis?’

The world seemed to pause. The wall of lightning held its breath, just hanging in the air in a blaze of white. The rumble of explosions to the east ceased. In that moment of stillness, Kurtz told her, and she nodded, and began the final part of the weave.

‘Almost done,’ she said.

The tearing noise stopped abruptly. The storm died, the wash of light fading, the stones and iron plugs of the plain inhaling their long shadows.

And the world changed.

Kurtz groaned, and Liza looked up, saw the green glow fading from his eyes.

‘Kurtz?’ she said. Slowly his body rocked forward and fell to the ground, just a collection of jointed metal.

‘Kurtz!’ called Liza. ‘Oh Zuse, no.’ She stood up, the blue wire trailing from her hands to where it emerged from Kurtz’s body. She looked around, barely comprehending what had happened. Had it been the lightning, she wondered; had it hit her husband? But the sky was now so still and dark.

Then she heard the sound of metal on bare rock. Footsteps?

Someone loomed out of the darkness. A metal body, dented and scarred. Red eyes glowing in infrared, iron hands gripping a projectile weapon. The dull grey paint-work of an Artemisian soldier. He walked easily towards her, rifle pointing loosely in her direction.

‘You killed him,’ said Liza.

‘I killed him.’ The soldier looked down at the warm wire, still being twisted in Liza’s hands.

‘You can let go now,’ he said. ‘There isn’t enough metal left there to complete your child.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Liza. ‘What would any man know about that?’

The soldier ignored her question. ‘I heard you both talking,’ he said. ‘Even through the storm.’ He tapped one of the overlarge directional microphones on the side of his head. Then he pointed at poor Kurtz’s dead body. ‘Do you really think he made the right choice?’

‘Of course I do.’ she said quietly. She was looking at the remaining length of wire, calculating.

The Artemisian robot shrugged. ‘You would say that, I suppose.’

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Liza. ‘Why are Artemis trespassing into Turing City State?’

‘Haven’t you heard? Bethe has just fallen. Artemis is the largest forge on this plain now.’

‘Bethe?’ said Liza. ‘I thought you were attacking Stark!’

‘Stark?’ laughed the robot. ‘Not likely. Not with their Tesla towers to defend them. No, that was just a little misdirection. Bethe first, then Segre. Then we’ll be right on Stark’s doorstep. And then we’ll see.’

Liza wasn’t listening. Kurtz lay dead at her feet, his wire still twisted around her hands, cooling, dying. She felt as if something was dying within herself too, leaving nothing but a cold emptiness inside her metal shell.

‘Kurtz,’ she whispered. ‘Kurtz, what am I to do?’

There was no reply. She was on her own now. A cold determination began to rise up within her. ‘Kurtz made his choice,’ she murmured to herself. ‘Kurtz was right.’

She had forgotten about those overlarge ears on the Artemisian robot. He picked up what she had muttered. He laughed.

‘That’s easy for you to say now,’ he said, ‘not that you will ever know. I saved you the choice. There is not enough wire for the child to be born.’

Again, Liza looked at the wire that trailed from her hands, recalculating.

‘There is just enough,’ she decided.

The dull grey robot’s hands tightened around his rifle. ‘I should dash that wire from your hands now; make you lose your place.’

Liza’s voice trembled. ‘But you haven’t.’ She clutched the wire tighter.

‘Go on,’ said the soldier. ‘Finish the mind. Finish it the way he said.’

Liza did nothing. With a low whirr, the soldier brought his gun to bear on her.

‘Do it, or, so help me, I will shoot you too. I have one charge left.’ He laughed. ‘Hey, you can be just like Nyro. You’ve heard of Nyro, haven’t you?’

The lightning flared again, and, just for a moment, Liza could have sworn that the robot flinched and looked up to the sky.

‘Yes, I’ve heard of Nyro,’ she said.

Liza began to twist wire once more. She rolled her eyes up to meet those of the soldier, her metal face taking on an odd expression.

‘You’re doing it,’ said the soldier, in surprise. ‘Or are you? I find it hard to believe you’re really making that child his way. Not after I killed him. Not with me standing here with a gun like this, raping you. You don’t really believe that he made the right choice, do you? I can’t believe you would really do what he said.’

Liza continued weaving. She was almost done.

‘Well?’ said the soldier.

‘I’m not telling you,’ said Liza. ‘You’ll never know.’

It was so quiet on the plain now, so quiet and dark. The climax of the battle had passed, and Bethe had fallen. Even now Artemisian soldiers would be penetrating its streets, ripping it apart, remaking it in the image of Artemis itself.

And look what’s happening here, thought Liza, staring at the red eyes of the man opposite, the dark aperture of his rifle’s muzzle fixed upon her head.

She concentrated again on the wire. There was life in that forming mind already. She could feel it begin to pulse. All that remained was to tie it off and bring the mind into existence. She made to start the knot, and hesitated, remembering what her mother had told her: it wasn’t until this point that you truly understood what life was about.

Liza had never really understood until now, but here it was, staring her in the face. Should Liza now tie the knot as a seal and wake a simple, mechanical mind that would live indefinitely? Or should she tie it the other way, in the fuse, to create a living, thinking being, and, in doing so, condemn it to death in thirty or forty years’ time?

In the end she did as her mother had done, and her mother before her. She tied the fuse.

Something came to life.

‘Hello Karel,’ she murmured. She looked over at the dead body of her husband. ‘Here he is, Kurtz. We did it. Here’s our little boy.’

Carefully she placed the mind into the tiny body and snicked the skull shut.

‘All finished,’ she said to the soldier.

The soldier looked from her to the child. ‘Did you really do it?’ he asked.

‘I’m not telling you,’ replied Liza.

‘Then I shall say goodbye, Tokvah.’

He raised his rifle once more, pointing it at her head. Her gyros were wobbling, but she held herself steady.

‘Then shoot me,’ she said. ‘But you’ll never know.’

The robot stared at her, his red eyes glowing. Liza held his gaze, determined not to flinch, even here at the end. She was ready to die.

And then the robot lowered his gun.

‘There is a way to find out…’ he said.

Karel’s body wasn’t designed for this sea wind. It got under the thin metal panels that plated his torso, it whistled through the cylindrical sheaths that encased his thighs and shins. The people who worked out here on the coast wore flexible plastic gaiters on their arm and leg joints to keep out the salt water, their body work was thick with weatherproof paint. Now, as he left the marble promenade that ran along the cliff top and strode down the stone steps cut into the cliff face, Karel’s stylish city body felt weak and ineffectual against the elements. The lace-lined waves that crashed and drained from the grey rocks below seemed so much more vital than the pastel paisley pattern his wife had used to decorate his chest plate.

The Immigration Station was a rusted box built on metal stilts that raised it just above the surge of the waves. A retractable metal walkway led from some steps at the base of the cliffs out across the swirling water to the office itself. As Karel looked down through the gaps in the walkway grille towards the blue waves swirling below, he felt his gyros shudder. Living as he did in the city, he had never seen the need to fully waterproof his interior circuitry. Fall down there and he would probably short himself out.

But then Karel felt as if he had lived his whole life in fear of falling: falling from the state of grace in which he now found himself in the city, with a wife and a child and a good job: pulled down by the suspicion of his fellow citizens who never quite trusted what was woven into his mind.

But this was not something to think on today. Buffeted by the wind, he staggered on across the walkway and pulled open the heavy sea door leading to the Immigration Station.

Gates sat in reception, one of his legs on the desk as he made minor repairs to himself.

‘Close the door!’ he called, without looking up. Karel dutifully pushed the heavy metal door into its plastic seal, shutting out the wind. Still the rolling of the waves could be heard, crashing against the metal stilts below, echoing hollowly through the metal building.

‘It’s getting rough out there,’ said Karel.

‘Rough!’ laughed Gates, still fiddling with his leg. ‘This is just an autumn swell. You want to come here in winter when the storms really get up. The waves go right over the building!’

Karel knew he wasn’t exaggerating. Immigration was a different job here on the south coast, and Gates and his team were scornful of Karel and the team operating in Turing City, perceiving them to have an easy life.

They were wrong, of course.

Karel studied Gates, noting his battered body and chipped paintwork. When a robot started to neglect his appearance, especially in a place like this, it was not a good sign.

‘Well, I’m here now,’ said Karel, coolly, ‘and I would appreciate a little courtesy on my arrival. Is this how you greet all your visitors?’ He stared hard at Gates, who paused in the act of adjusting the tension in the calf ligaments of his left leg. Gates held his stare for a moment and then pushed the leg back into place. It locked into position with a click. He stood up and flexed it.

‘All sorted, sir,’ he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he felt for his new balance. ‘Would you like to come straight through and see the case in question, sir?’

‘Don’t get sarcastic with me, Gates,’ warned Karel.

‘I wasn’t being sarcastic.’

Karel tried a different tack.

‘Listen, Gates, let’s not do this. I’ve got enough going on back in the city without having to come down here. I’m sure you’re gritted up with work too. So just tell me, why am I here?’

Gates held Karel’s gaze for a moment longer, and then he too relaxed.

‘Yeah, you’re right. Sorry, Karel. Come on through, it would be better if I showed you. We have a client held in isolation that I want you to see. I asked for you specifically because this one is… odd. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’

Gates picked up a heavy iron key and placed it in the lock of the door that led through to the holding area. He banged twice on its metal surface and called out: ‘Hey, Cabeza! I’m coming through with Karel.’

There was a bang in return and the sound of Cabeza’s muffled reply. Two keys were turned at the same time, and the heavy door swung open.

‘After you,’ said Gates, and Karel stepped through into the holding area.

The isolation area lay at the far side of the station, past the rows of iron-barred holding cells where the immigrants and refugees waited to be processed. Gates led Karel down the central walkway.

The cells in the main area were nearly full, but that was no surprise to Karel. All throughout Turing City State, the holding cells were filling up fast. Stir the political waters and all sorts of things come to the surface, and the political waters of Shull had been stirred plenty of late by the expansion of Artemis. Turing City State was a kitten compared to the lion of the Artemisian Empire, but it was a kitten with adamantium claws, with Stark electromuscle, and with a mind twisted by Oneill herself. Turing City could defend itself, and every displaced robot on the continent of Shull seemed to be making his or her way here in search of shelter.

Karel might have expected this many clients, but he was still a little surprised at the startling variety of the station’s occupants. Gates’s team’s normal clientele tended to be the Spontaneous, those robots who had been formed somewhere out in the southern ocean and then walked here along the sea bed. Indeed, Karel could see plenty of examples of these now, sitting or standing or lying about in the various cells. They tended to have heavy iron bodies, simple facial features, their eyes usually recessed behind thick glass. A few of them were humanoid in appearance; most of them were crab-like. They were kept in specially constructed cells, the floors of which were lowered to allow pools filled with salt water. One that Karel spotted was little more than a dark shape in the water: gunmetal grey, biological life clinging to its body – barnacles and limpets – and with green algae staining its underside. Raising its eyes, set below the rim of its shell, it glanced for a moment at Karel and then returned to contemplating the dark patterns below it in the rippling water. Unfused, unsentient, this was just the sort of thing that Karel expected to find here on the south coast.

Karel resumed his progress along the walkway, still surprised by the number of the Made that had turned up here. Such robots had had their minds twisted by their mothers from wire spooled from their father. But the Made were usually seen on the northern borders of Turing City State, as refugees from Bethe and Wien. How had they made it all the way down here, to the southern coast? And there were so many of them…

He saw elegantly engineered robots from Stark, their shiny smooth casings humming with quiet power as they patrolled the confined space of their holding areas with proud dignity. There were short, unassuming robots from Bethe and Segre, sitting in groups, staring out through the bars. And even the peculiar builds of robots from distant Raman and Born could be seen, with their magnetized bodies and overlarge feet and hands.

Most surprisingly, there were the Artemisians. The city state of Artemis was not supposed to recognize any difference between normal metal and the carefully twisted metal of the mind. Robots born into a low rank were held to be expendable in the Artemisian State. Karel guessed that their mothers would have twisted their minds towards thoughts of escape as a more likely means of survival than service at the bottom end of Artemisian society.

Suddenly the sheer number of people in the large room made Karel feel giddy, as if his gyros were spinning too fast. Metal hands, metal feet; metal floors, metal bars. Grilles and wire and water splashing inside and booming beneath his feet and, meanwhile, all that other motion around him. It seemed as if the entire world was pressing in on Turing City. Newly constructed Artemis railway lines were spreading across the land. They brought metal to the Artemis forges that made new robots daily, even hourly, robots that poured in metal waves across the southern part of the continent of Shull. Could little Turing City’s walls really hold up against that encroaching tide? Who knew? If the rumours were true, even mighty Wien looked to be on its last legs, ready to fall at any time.

‘What are you looking at?’

The words jolted Karel from his reverie. The speaker was an Artemisian war robot. A Scout. Her body was made of katana metal, silver grey and hard. Her hands and feet were lean and sharp, mirror-bright blades almost totally retracted, only the very tips emerging to scratch curls of swarf from the metal floor as she advanced. She brought her head right up to the bars, stooped a little so that it was level with Karel’s face. He could see how her eyes were recessed behind their narrow slits, withdrawn beyond the reach of any blade. Now she allowed them to protrude ever so slightly, signalling her contempt.

‘How much longer are you going to keep me in here, Tokvah?’ she whispered.

With a speed that surprised everyone present, Karel slammed a hand into her face, sending her reeling back across the cell, a grinding noise from his arm signifying a stripped gear. All of a sudden everyone else in the holding cells was very, very quiet, all of them staring at Karel, now flexing his hand, flexing his supple, city hand made of light metal, finely engraved with swirling patterns barely seen in the light, then continuing to walk the gangway towards the rear of the vast room. He seemed oblivious to the way the other immigrants drew back in their cells as he walked by.

Gates followed just behind him. ‘Zuse, Karel,’ he swore. ‘I just don’t understand you, I really don’t.’

‘Not in front of the clients,’ muttered Karel, but Gates didn’t seem to hear.

‘I just don’t get the way you’re made. Most of the time you act like a classic Turing City robot: behaving as an individual, but still capable of cooperating for the good of all, and then you turn around and pull a stunt like that.’

‘I don’t see why hitting that Tokvah stops me being a cooperator,’ said Karel.

‘Maybe. I don’t know. Hey, I’m not judging! But there’s just something about the way you’re made. People talk, you know.’

‘Let them,’ said Karel.

They had stopped at the very rear of the holding pens, just before the door that led to the isolation area where Gates and his team kept the special cases.

‘So,’ said Karel. ‘Is there anything I should know about this character you’re holding in here?’

‘There’s nothing really to tell,’ said Gates, still eyeing Karel with a thoughtful expression. ‘I’ve never known a robot like this one

… I think you’d better speak to him yourself.’

Karel folded his hands together, feeling how the right hand was slightly bent out of true from where he had hit the Artemisian. That could be repaired later. For the moment he felt apprehensive, more so than he would have expected. He wondered what lay behind this door that necessitated him being dragged all the way here, away from his work, away from his wife, Susan. Especially when she had been acting so oddly lately, suddenly so emotional. Karel tried to dismiss the thought. She had been like that the last time they were planning a child, he told himself.

‘Very well,’ said Karel. ‘Let me through.’

Gates opened the door.

‘Cell number two,’ he said.

‘What’s the matter, Susan? You look like Oneill herself has just spoken to you.’

Deya’s face was filled with concern. Why can’t we make a face that fully masks our emotions? wondered Susan. We can build blank masks or we can build faces. Why can’t we build a buffer between our feelings and our expressions?

‘Susan, speak to me,’ Deya insisted. ‘Is it Karel? Are you worried about him? I heard he was out at the coast today.’

Deya has such a pretty face. I could never build anything so delicate, or so well formed. The curve of the brows over her eyes, the line of her cheek. When she speaks it’s like a breeze blowing on flutes. No matter how I tune my electromuscle, I can never pull a smile like hers…

‘Susan, stop staring at me like that!’

‘Sorry, Deya. I’m okay. Just a little, I don’t know… angry I suppose. And shocked.’

Deya turned this way and that, looking around the metal and glass arches of the railway terminus, trying to determine what had upset her friend.

‘Susan, is it this?’ She pointed to the letters, engraved on the sheet of steel at the top of the notice board.

Susan nodded.

‘Oh, Deya, I know I’m being silly. I shouldn’t let it affect me like this.’

‘It annoys me too, Susan, but I don’t let it spoil my day.’ She smiled. ‘But then again, I’m not making plans at the moment.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Susan, it’s so obvious. For weeks now you’ve been walking around storing up bits of conversations and mimicking character traits and observing other people’s interactions. You and Karel are going to have another child.’

‘We’re thinking of a little girl,’ Susan admitted.

‘You’re the chief statistician of this state,’ said Deya. ‘If anyone is going to build a successful child, it’s you.’

‘Deya, you’re just like Karel. You make it sound so easy.’

‘It is easy, Susan. Robots have been doing it since Oneill showed them how.’

‘You don’t really believe in Oneill!’

‘No! A figure of speech! But Susan, I believe in you, and you should know better than anyone what makes a successful robot. You have all the necessary figures delivered to you on metal film.’

‘I know what makes a successful robot in Turing City,’ conceded Susan. ‘But is that the right way? You can see what it says…’

She read the notice again: WOMEN OF TURING CITY RAMAN AND BORN. BETHE, SEGRE AND STARK. AND NOW WIEN.

The Artemisian model has again proven to be the superior philosophy for building robots. Do you want your line to continue? Do you want your children to build children of their own? Then consider Nyro’s design. Nyro’s children are successful. Nyro’s children now populate almost all the southern continent of Shull. By any measure, Nyro has woven the most flourishing pattern of any robot mind currently existing on Penrose.

Does your husband agree? Or does he still cling to the outdated practices of Turing City? It’s easy for men to talk about the nobility of a certain philosophy. All they do is produce the wire. But, come the night of the making of a mind, it is you that hold in your hands your child’s future well-being. Are you going to throw it away on some arbitrary belief, some vagary of fashion, or are you going to make a mind that really works?

Think about it, Mother. You owe it to your child.

‘I didn’t know they had taken Wien!’ said Susan.

Deya laughed dismissively. ‘Don’t believe everything you read, dear.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Susan weakly. ‘It makes a good point.’

A diesel engine revved once, twice, somewhere behind them.

‘I can’t believe you’re talking like this,’ said Deya. ‘How many robots are there in Turing City at the moment?’

‘In the city itself, or the state as a whole?’

‘The city.’

‘Thirty-three thousand, one hundred and nine.’

‘And how many of them are built according to Artemisian philosophy?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘Twenty-one! Hah! Well there you go.’

‘That we know of, anyway. But this time last year there were only four.’

‘So what? There’s no choice, Susan. Who is going to sacrifice their child to Artemis in this city? We have so much more going for us. Look!’

She pointed to the high-vaulted roof of the station, the way that the thin, white-painted metal joined in delicate curves, the way that patterns of sunlight coloured by the glass illuminated the scrollwork of the wrought iron.

‘I bet they don’t have that in Artemis,’ said Deya.

‘I bet they don’t. But I wonder if they were saying the same in Wien, just before the invasion.’

‘I told you, Wien has not been invaded. That notice is lying. Anyway, we’re stronger than Wien.’

‘But are we strong enough? It makes me wonder whether it’s worth even making a child any more…’

‘It’s never been a good time to make a child! But you know you’re going to, Susan. You have the capability. You’re not like Nicolas the Coward.’

‘Am I not, Deya? I really don’t know if that’s true any more.’

Susan stared out through the big empty end of the station, out across the wide valley, with its low railway bridges crisscrossing copper-green rivers, looked out at the deep blue sky that covered Shull, and she felt terrified. Some days she had felt as if the rails that emerged from this station were carrying Turing City’s philosophy out to an entire continent. Today she felt as if they were like an open door inviting in whatever darkness was now waiting beyond its borders.

Karel

Everything in the isolation area was painted white: new paint daubed on old, forming uneven patterns and waves on the metal of the floor and walls, white paint gathered on the bolts and rivets holding the building together. The sea could still be heard booming and crashing outside, but now the sound seemed more distant, muffled.

There was a click as Gates locked him in. Now Karel was alone. There were three cells in here, each sealed with a heavy metal door, a tiny porthole placed in its centre. There was a sudden bang, and a rapid staccato hammering started to his right, like a blunt drill skidding across steel. Something was trying to get out, trying to attack. Karel ignored it.

Cell number two was right in front of him. Karel peered through the porthole.

The man inside there was big: a body built for ore mining, with wide shoulders and great shovel-shaped hands. This was a robot that could have formed spontaneously beneath the earth and then dug his way free. His body was red iron, rusty and scarred, but with great long streaks of shiny metal showing where the corrosion had been scraped from his body in his climb to the surface. His eyes were tiny and recessed below a circular brim that ran around the top of the head. His legs were short and squat, ideal for pushing and scrambling through tunnels.

Everything about the man suggested strength and power, and Karel now needed to step inside that cell in his delicate city body. No wonder Gates had told him so little about this client. This was his way of getting his own back, the tough south coast folk teaching the city slicker a thing or two. Gates and Cabeza and the rest would be laughing at the thought of Karel stepping in to meet this giant.

Well, let them, thought Karel. He grasped the handle and pulled open the cell door. The handle only appeared on the outside of the door, and the isolation room was rigged so that only one cell could open at a time.

The man inside remained standing in the middle of his cell as the door opened. Only his eyes moved.

‘Would you like to come out here for a moment?’ asked Karel. ‘Stretch your legs?’

Silence. At first Karel wondered if the man in there couldn’t speak, but then:

‘I am happy to remain here while we talk.’

‘Fine, fine.’ Karel moved forward into the cell. The stranger looked even bigger inside it. His shoulders were almost as wide as the cell itself, so that he would have to take care when turning around. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Karel, son of Kurtz and Liza. I am a Disputant for the Turing City Immigration Office. Do you understand what that means?’

Again silence. Karel wondered if maybe being so big meant that it took longer for words to reach his mind.

‘They said that you were coming,’ said the other robot, eventually. ‘But I still don’t understand your role.’

Karel had been expecting this. He clasped his hands together, then let go as he felt the deformity in his right hand from where he had hit the Artemisian. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘my job is to speak to robots such as yourself and determine whether or not you are intelligent.’

‘Surely that is a job for a woman? Couldn’t you just get a woman to look at a mind and see if it was fused or not?’

Karel smiled. ‘Usually, yes. But sometimes, even though minds are woven and fused, they just don’t work properly. I’m here to decide if you are a potential Turing Citizen.’

‘Well I can save you the trouble. I’m not.’

Karel smiled again.

‘I wouldn’t be so hasty in claiming that. This is Turing City, you know. There’s no need for lies here.’

‘I’m not lying. Why would I wish to do that?’

‘Some people do. They don’t understand that Turing City is a cooperating city. Any robot able to think is welcome here. Don’t you realize that if you had emerged in Artemis we wouldn’t even be having this conversation? You would already be owned by the state! Every item there, every rock, every scrap of metal, every robot is considered nothing but property.’

‘That would seem proper.’

‘Proper? Really? Take a look at my body. Do you like the paint-work there?’

The stranger’s little eyes peered down at Karel’s chest. He took in the curves of the metal there, the pastel traceries of the paint-work.

‘It is an elegant example of metalwork,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ said Karel. ‘I bought the original panels from a shop in Turing City and bent them into shape myself. They are of an alloy originally devised by the robots of Stark, but improved upon by the artisans of Turing City. The paintwork was done by my wife. It took her many nights of work.’ He flicked his chest with a finger and it made a ringing sound. ‘Beautiful! But a lot of effort just to make this body. It begs the question: what is so special about me that all this effort, all this material can be applied to what is really nothing more than an affectation?’

‘I don’t know the answer to that.’

‘But I do!’ said Karel. ‘It’s because I think! That is the difference between owners and property! Here in Turing City State we recognize sentience. All it takes to join our state is that you prove your intelligence!’

‘But I am not intelligent.’

Karel felt a twinge of anger at the robot’s stubbornness. He repressed it. ‘Don’t you realize what will happen to you if you maintain this ridiculous pretence? You’ll be taken from here and shipped inland and put to work down a mine. Working at the top of a magma chamber, or set wandering through a pegmatite forest. You’ll be treated as nothing more than a shovel or a pick.’

‘Mining is what I do.’

‘Yes, but mining as a free robot! It’s your purpose, it’s your life, it’s what makes you happy. But as a possession they will just keep you digging and digging and digging. You’ll never come to the surface! If your body breaks down they will patch it up with whatever comes to hand and then just set you off digging again, and they’ll keep doing that until you’re completely past repair. Nothing more than a selection of patches and spares. And after they’ve stripped what they can use from you, they’ll just push you into an unused tunnel and leave you there. Is that what you want?’

‘I don’t care. Why should I?’

Karel was momentarily lost for words. Gates had said that this client was different, and he hadn’t been exaggerating. Karel had never encountered anything like this before. He tried another tack.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s be honest with each other. I don’t understand what game you’re playing, I don’t know what you hope to achieve. Tell me something about yourself. How did you get here?’

At this the big man became animated for the first time. A low grinding noise sounded, deep in his body, and then his arms swung out. The big shovel hands knocked against the wall of the cell, scraped it so that white paint now marked the edges of the blades. The squat legs began to march in time to some unheard beat. Karel found himself backing out from the cell.

‘I was born in darkness,’ said the stranger, ‘held in the earth. I saw nothing, heard nothing. I felt gravity, and I knew I had to dig my way in the opposite direction. I knew my name.’

‘You have a name?’ said Karel in surprise. He had assumed the stranger was nameless. ‘What is it?’

‘My name is Banjo Macrodocious. I was told: Banjo Macrodocious, dig your way upwards until you break free through the surface.’

Karel didn’t ask Banjo who had told him to dig. Banjo wouldn’t answer because he wouldn’t even understand the question. This was part of birth, the weaving of the mind. This was the way with the spontaneously formed. If Karel was to trace back his own lineage, through his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents for however many generations, this would be the story of his origins too.

‘I began to dig,’ continued Banjo. ‘I swam through the earth, I drilled and I chipped my way through the batholith. I pressed myself into cracks and fractures. I tugged aside small rocks and pushed them down with my feet, I made my way around larger obstacles. I learned the feel of my body in the darkness, the stretch of my arms, the strength in my shoulders. I felt the stones scraping down my sides; I heard the slow sounds of the underworld. And all the time I rose higher and higher. I wondered more and more what it would be like to finally break free of the rock and to walk on the roof of the world. I continued to dig. And as I did so I felt the earth changing. Higher and higher. Until that day…’

‘Did you emerge in the sea?’ asked Karel.

‘Yes, in the sea. The debris on the seabed, the softness of it, how easy it was to dig through. The water all around me. The cold. And then I began to walk. Following the direction in my head.’

‘Who found you?’

‘I don’t know their names. They found me trying to scale the cliffs. They brought me here.’

Karel was unconsciously unscrewing his right hand. He wanted to begin work on straightening it. He forced himself to stop.

‘Okay, Banjo, I have heard your story.’

Karel stood formally to attention.

‘As Disputant for Turing City State, I am prepared to announce my decision on your status, Banjo Macrodocious. You have a name, you take part in reasoned conversation. I believe that you are intelligent. I believe that you could be an asset to Turing City State. I would therefore like to invite you to join us. Would you like that?’

‘I don’t think I would like or dislike it. I have no feelings.’

‘I don’t believe that is true, Banjo Macrodocious. This is my job; I know what I am doing. You are intelligent. I am inviting you to join our state. All you have to do is declare your willingness.’

‘I have no preference as to whether I join your state or not.’

‘How can you say that? Don’t you realize that most of the people waiting out there in the cages beyond this door are desperate for me to invite them to join Turing City? They live in fear of being sent back to their broken countries, of being enslaved by Artemis. Don’t you see what you’re giving up? Do you really just want to be adopted as a tool, to be worked till you drop and are eventually abandoned in a mine underground?’

‘I have no preference.’

Karel’s anger was such that he wanted to smash the big robot in the face, just as he had done the Artemisian soldier. Wisely, he restrained himself.

‘I don’t think you mean that. You know what I think you are? I think you’re a coward. I’ve met people like you before: robots who don’t have the courage to accept the faculties they have been given. You have a mind and a well-designed body and you refuse to take responsibility for them. You know what they call robots like you? They call them Nicolas the Coward. Call them Nicolas the Shirker. That’s what they’ll call you.’

Banjo Macrodocious looked puzzled. ‘Why should I care?’

‘You pretend not to understand, Nicolas the Coward.’

‘Call me what you will.’

‘Nicolas the Shirker.’

‘I don’t even know who you are talking about.’

‘Don’t know Nicolas the Coward? Nicolas who was blessed by water and refused all that he was offered? Nicolas who ran away from his gifts rather than accept responsibility?’

‘No.’

‘Then I shall tell you the story. Sit down, Banjo Macrodocious.’

‘I can’t sit down. This body is not built that way.’

‘Well stand there and listen…’

The Story of Nicolas the Coward

Nicolas was an Artemisian soldier.

Long ago, before Nyro’s philosophy had completely enfolded their minds, when Artemis’s eye was still drawn down into the earth in search of ore, rather than out across the continent of Shull desirous of power, the rulers came to wonder at their origins.

The Raman mountains were long known as a source of the Spontaneous, and it was decided to send an expedition there to search for the origins of these robots, and thus the source of robot-kind.

Nicolas was part of that expedition. His body was made of steel, of hammered beaten steel. His electromuscles were tuned and harmonized to his body, every last screw was tightened, every last joint was greased. His troop moved through the caves that they had found deep in the Raman range with practised grace and maximum efficiency. Twenty-four robots, their bodies engineered and modified to be identical, interchangeable.

They moved swiftly through the caves like sunlight that flickers from a falling blade.

They moved silently through the caves like shadows in the darkness.

Down through tunnels, passing the silent machines that still made their slow climb from the depths and up to the sun, their minds as yet unwoken. The passageways through which Nicolas moved became softer and more polished by the tread of ancient feet.

There was the sound of water, the playing of a stream mixing with the rolling crash of a waterfall. Nicolas and his troop sensed a deep pool somewhere near. They heard the echoes of a huge space; they felt the ionization in the air increasing.

In those days the Raman state counted the caves as their own. They sent men and women out from their mountain-top cities to patrol the twisting passes and slate-covered slopes that led to the caves. Though Nicolas and his squad had moved so carefully, they had been observed and followed down into the earth by Raman soldiers.

The Raman feared those caves and the passageways that led back through time all the way to Oneill, yet their anger at the intrusion by Artemis was even greater.

The Raman carried steel discs, magnetic chaff and awls.

The Artemisians carried blades and guns, for the Artemisians were not used to fighting in the Raman mountains.

The Raman came close in the darkness, moving silently on plastic-soled feet, crawling silently on plastic-bound hands. They attacked.

A steel disc spun through the darkness, its polished surface reflecting nothing but the night, its razor edge silent as it cut the air.

Nicolas and his squad had paused near the stream. They were adjusting joints and calibrating senses, rubbing in grease and cleaning away grit. Nicolas was watching Kathy as she rubbed the casing of her thighs with emery cloth, as she used a fingertip to tease out swarf from the seams. Nicolas saw her head smashed to one side, saw her fall to the ground, arms and legs twitching, the top of her head half sliced open by the black disc that had lodged there.

Nicolas stifled the cry that arose in his throat, and rose to fighting stance, his troop smoothly echoing his action. Twenty-three robots turning to cover all directions, the gentle hum of electromuscles charging with energy, ready to move with explosive force. Eye shields slid into place, rifles were cocked, ears were turned up to detect any sound, and then turned straight back down again as the noise of the waterfall and the splashing stream overwhelmed them. This was a good spot for an ambush.

And then the air was full of the harsh percussive beat of steel discs, ricocheting from the stone walls. Two more robots were decapitated.

‘Up there!’ called someone, and twenty-one rifles swung and fired simultaneously. Three bodies fell, splashing into the pool.

‘Raman,’ said someone. ‘Look at the build on those bodies.’

But now it was getting harder to see and to move. Nicolas’s ears were cutting out, silences punctuating the noise of the battle all around. His vision flashed with white noise and he felt his electromuscles twitching.

‘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.’