Its shoulders have a human enough articulation to give the semblance of a shrug.
‘Wait with us,’ it suggests. Its eyes brighten again. ‘We have food.’
The humanoid robots – remnants of a bad production decision, decades back – do indeed have food, stored in the sidings of the tunnel. Their purpose in accumulating these cans and jars is obscure, as indeed is their activity. They themselves extract their sustenance from an electricity supply-cable that passes through the tunnel. Dee suspects them of having developed what some humans had once considered a defining feature of humanity: a religion.
They believe, against all the evidence, that they were created by the first man, Adam, who was a smith. Their scriptures are children’s texts about the ancient glories of Earth, barely more accurate than the tales that Story feeds to Dee. They speak of a strange rapture, the Industrial Revolution, and they revere a mediator between man and machine, the robot who was and is a man, Jay-Dub.
As the humans accept their hospitality they listen to the robots expound their beliefs, and sing their songs. The songs are almost incomprehensible. Ax calls them old android spirituals, Wilde insists they’re ancient heavy-metal hits.
Dee is almost petrified at the thought that they’ll make the connection between Wilde and Jay-Dub, whom they evidently saw at various times over the years as both a robot and a televisual or holographic fetch. Fortunately, their pattern-recognition is poor. Their minds are genuine, if crude, artificial intelligences, and not (as hers is) a knock-off copy from a human template.
They are also unsophisticated at detecting human emotion, and show no sign of being affected by the humans’ constant edgy watchfulness and muttered consultations. They busy themselves with the last task which Jay-Dub set them: dragging out the dismembered components of humanoid robot shells and assembling them into imitation-robot suits for the humans to wear. They seem to enjoy the task, measuring up the humans and fitting the metal armour to their bodies. Dee daren’t ask if these carapaces are the remains of dead robots, or spare parts, or products of the robots’ own attempts to reproduce their kind. She concentrates on making sure the joints don’t catch her skin.
Wilde and Tamara and Ax laugh with her as they fit the armour on and practise walking about. It’s all a distraction, and they know it. They all know what they’re waiting for, and although it seems long to them, they have only a couple of hours to wait.
The explosion is a long way off, and small, as such explosions go, and still it fills the tunnel with white light. Soldier can’t tell if it was a tactical nuke aimed from outside the truck or a civil-engineering device detonated from within, to avoid capture. It was self-destruction, either way.
‘Oh, Jay-Dub,’ Dee says. ‘Oh, Meg. That was so brave.’
The rumble of the first shockwave passes. Parts of the tunnel roof fall in…
‘I could never have done that,’ Wilde says. His face shows more awe than grief. ‘Whatever was in that truck, it wasn’t me.’
18
The Malley Mile
There was no sense of time having passed. No white light, no Near Death Experience for me. One moment I was lying on my back, heat and blood from my body melting the cold snow, and the colours going. The next –
I was sitting bolt upright and stark naked on a bed, facing a wide window. The window was a rectangle of utter blackness divided horizontally by a white band, itself banded with black lines of varying thickness. I felt exactly as if I’d been wakened by an air-raid siren. And yet the room was silent, except for a distant susurrus that I took to be ventilation, but which might as well have been wind in trees. The air held no fading echoes, and no sound rang in my ears.
I no time to wonder where I was, because outside the window, heading straight towards it and me, was a rock. It was tumbling end over end with deceptive slowness and its apparent size against the black background and the white bands was increasing so fast that I knew it would smash through the window in seconds.
It was falling towards me between two huge jointed constructions – like arms made from girders – that extended outwards from positions to either side of the window. Between me and the window stood an empty mesh frame, in the outline form of a man with feet set apart and arms splayed out, like the imprint left by a cartoon character slamming into a chicken-wire fence and then falling back.
I knew what to do, and I didn’t wonder that I knew what to do. I leapt from the bed and threw myself into the frame. It pressed itself against my skin and across my eyes.
Everything changed. The window was all my sight, and the arms outside it were my arms. The rock seemed less than half a metre from my face, and now drifting, not hurtling, towards it. I brought my hands in and around it and caught it as easily as a beach-ball.
Except that I was now moving backwards.
I pushed it away, still holding it, and turned to look behind me. A wall, banded and whorled with red and orange, yellow and white, occupied the entire view, and between me and it was a swarm of black dots and one great webwork of black lines. At the same instant, the wall resolved itself into part of a spherical surface, curving away in all directions to a fuzzy edge against the black space, and I became aware that I was moving – falling – towards it.
I struggled to stop falling. There was a sensation of slipping and slithering and trying to find a foothold, and then of finding it, of the soles of my feet digging in. At the lower margin of my sight, a brief burst of light and a wisp of vapour appeared and vanished.
Then I was back in the room, standing in the mesh frame with my hands in front of my face. Outside the window, the greater arms still held the rock. I could see the light and shadow of its pitted surface, the black fingers like the limbs of insects.
I disengaged myself from the frame and stepped back and sat down on the bed. The frame stood like a wire sculpture. Slowly it spread its arms again. That was one hell of an advanced telepresence rig, I thought. While I was in it, it had felt as if the entire…spaceship?…I was in was my body. The detail about the rocket control being subjectively equivalent to my legs struck me as particularly neat. But I’d felt no acceleration when the rocket had fired. I pondered this anomaly as I looked around and tried to take stock of my situation.
First, my body. As far as I could make out it was just as I remembered it, scrawny and wrinkled and old but, as they say, well-preserved: rather like those Bronze Age corpses found in peat-bogs. Five knobs of scar-tissue made a diagonal across my chest. I fingered them thoughtfully.
The room was about four metres from the rear wall to the window, five metres on the other axis, the ceiling two and half metres up. The bed was a plain, king-size pine bed with cotton sheets and duvet. The window occupied the entirety of one wall. The other walls were matt white. The floor was covered with pale-brown carpet. To my right was a wooden chair and table with a screen and datapad. To my left, a tall cupboard.
And in the leftward wall, a door.
I stood up and walked around the bed and opened the cupboard. Jeans hung over a rail, neatly folded stacks of tee-shirts and underpants and socks were piled on shelves. Several identical pairs of trainers lay at the bottom.
I got dressed and, after a moment of hesitation, opened the door to find, banally enough, a bathroom: shower, lavatory, wash-stand. Through another door, a small kitchen, which in turn opened to a lounge about the same size as the first room. It had a sofa instead of a bed, a television screen in one corner. The wall facing the sofa was another window, and standing between the sofa and the window was another man-shaped wire-mesh mould. Presumably I could leap from the sofa and hurl myself into it if an approaching rock or other emergency was brought to my attention. I returned to the bedroom.