As the twenty-seventh anniversary of Bubble Day approached, not a city in the world was entirely immune from the tension. Those who had imprisoned Duprey had been singled out for punishment, but in the past—and especially on November 15th—the Children had killed at random, and nobody believed that they’d abandoned that practice. Department stores X-rayed and strip-searched their customers (and home-shopping suddenly turned fashionable again). Train schedules fell apart under the burden of endless security checks (and telecommuting underwent a revival).
On November 9th, Duprey held a media conference in prison; he answered no questions, but read out a statement denouncing all acts of violence and calling on his followers to do the same. I took it for granted that he had been bribed or coerced somehow, and I doubted that anyone was in a position to know how many of the Children were likely to obey him—but the media pushed the line that the statement amounted to some kind of miraculous reprieve, and the public hysteria certainly diminished. I just hoped that Duprey’s followers were as easily manipulated as the rest of us.
Four days later, the story broke: Duprey’s words had not been his own; the whole thing had been staged with a puppet mod. Illegally: the US Supreme Court had reaffirmed, only months before, that the enforced application of a neural mod was unconstitutional, whatever the circumstances—and in any case, Maine had never even tried to pass a law allowing it. The prison governor resigned. The state’s most senior FBI bureaucrat blew his brains out. More to the point, it was hard to imagine anything which could have enraged the Children more.
It was just after two a.m. on November 15th, when Vincent Lo and I responded to an alarm from a dockside container warehouse. People later asked us how we could have been ‘foolhardy’ enough to walk ‘alone’ into such ‘obvious’ peril. What did they think? That the day’s eighty thousand burglaries, worldwide, could all be treated as potential terrorist atrocities, at a cost of about one-and-a-half million dollars each? Maine was on the other side of the planet. The Children had struck in Australia only once—in a bungled attempted bombing which had killed only the bomber himself. Of course we walked right in.
We accessed the warehouse security system first, though. The surveillance cameras showed nothing amiss, but something had tripped a motion detector. (A passing train? It wouldn’t have been the first time.) The containers were laid out in rows; I moved down one aisle, Vincent another, while P2 let us see, simultaneously, through our own eyes and any (or all) of the sixteen ceiling-mounted cameras. I set off a small pyrotechnic device which sent thin streams of coloured smoke wafting at random across our entire, expanded field of view—a trick which betrays even the most sophisticated data chameleon. The cameras were clean. We were alone in the building.
A few seconds later, we both felt the floor vibrating, very slightly. We shared sensory data to get a better parallax, and P2 pinned down the source of the vibrations to one container, in the second row from the left. I was about to switch the camera above to infrared—for what little that might have revealed—when suddenly there was no need: a pale, transparent-blue plasma jet punched through the steel of one of the walls of the container, close to an upper corner, and began smoothly slicing its way down.
Vincent queried the main warehouse system, and said, ‘One Hitachi MA52 mining robot, on its way to the goldfields.’
That’s when I felt about as much of a frisson as P3 permitted. The container was fifteen metres high. I’d seen the MA52s on HV: they looked like a cross between a tank and a bulldozer, scaled up considerably, sprouting a dozen steel appendages, each of which terminated in an assortment of wicked-looking tools. The things carried out self-maintenance, which explained the plasma torch. Needless to say, any mining robot was supposed to be shipped unpowered—and, powered or not, should not have been able to wake spontaneously in transit and decide to cut itself free. At the very least, it had been completely reprogrammed, and it had probably been tampered with mechanically as well. All rules governing the behaviour of the standard model could safely be considered void; there was no point tracking down the documentation for emergency de-activation codes.
We were armed, of course. Our weapons could have melted through the robot’s outer plate, in about a decade.
I notified the station of developments, and put in a call for reinforcements. The plasma jet reached the bottom of its path, and made a neat horizontal turn.
There were six massive cranes fitted to the warehouse ceiling, one for each row of containers. By the time I’d given them a second glance, Vincent already had them under his control. The one we needed, though, was parked at the end of the building furthest from where we needed it, and it crawled along its track with unbelievable lassitude. I invoked PS’s judgement of distances and velocities, then did the same for the plasma jet’s progress; the container would be open at least fifteen seconds before we could start to raise it. But it was one row in from the edge of the grid, and the aisles were barely three metres wide—the MA52 wouldn’t have room to charge right out; it would have to clear a path first. That would buy us far more than fifteen seconds.
The rectangle of steel came free—then skidded down the aisle with a deafening screech, still balanced on its edge until it hit the far wall. As the robot, propelled by banks of manoeuvrable treads, rolled out as far as it could, the container slipped a short distance in the opposite direction. Ten or twenty centimetres, no more.
Vincent cursed softly: ‘Suboptimal!’
The crane lowered its grappling claw on to the container’s misaligned roof. Locking pins—as thick as my arm—shot out in search of target holes, retracted in surprise, then cycled idiotically through the same action four more times, before giving up. A red light on the claw started flashing, an ear-splitting siren shrieked twice, then everything on the crane shut down.
We’d kept our distance; it took me twenty seconds to reach the action—on the robot’s blind side—by which time it had started ramming the container that blocked its path. Each time it backed away, its own container slid forward slightly; each time it advanced, the opposite happened—but the net motion was backwards. The robot was going to be hemmed in for several minutes, but any prospect of aligning the grappling claw was vanishing rapidly.
Each container had a ladder welded to its side; as it happened, that was the side that had been cut away and discarded, so I climbed the container across the aisle and jumped the gap. Starting the claw swinging was much harder than I’d expected; it hung from six cables, arranged as three pairs, and the pairing complicated and damped the motion. Gradually, I built up the oscillations, until the claw was sweeping far enough to compensate for the container’s displacement.
Now it was just a matter of timing.
There was no need for me to cue Vincent; the closest ceiling camera gave him a perfect view. P5 had no trouble extrapolating the motion of the swinging claw, but the lurching of the container was unpredictable. The crane’s firmware didn’t make things any easier—each time Vincent commanded it to try to grab the container, it went through a hard-wired cycle of five attempts, and then shut down; the only freedom he had was to choose the moment he started the sequence. Three times, the container shifted, throwing out all his calculations. The fourth time, I knew it was our last chance. I could make the claw swing further horizontally, but the arc of its motion would lift it too high for the locking pins to engage.