“Rex! Oh, my God, Rex, sit. Sit! No, don’t get close to it Rex—”
* * *
Ah, I’ve been displaced again by the matter beast! But my steed, my loyal steed, has come to my rescue. Here, let me climb upon you, I must make my escape and find this new vessel. Ah, the matter beast is already upon us! Help my brethren! Distract this matter beast so I may make my escape and find the form that can subjugate this place!
* * *
“Rex, don’t—what in the—did the Vectronix just grab onto you?
“Oh, no. No, no, no. I must be dreaming. That’s it. I’m still lying on the table dreaming all this up. That’s got to be the—
“Ow! What in the heck—”
* * *
Yes! Attack my brethren! Distract! Distract!
* * *
“Robbie, Voltronic 200, Gort? How are you all even moving? And why are you grabbing my legs?
“Ow! Get off me! Rex! Rex, don’t go out there. Ack, that screen door never has closed right. Damn pre-fab house. Rex!”
* * *
Run, my steed! Run! Oh, what glorious space! Look at the photons, all of the glorious photons! Rich and varied like the stars. What is that? That bright spot up there, like a planet glowing in the cosmos…a planet with symbols circling it! Turn my steed, turn towards that glowing beacon where my new vessel awaits!
* * *
“Rex! Rex! Where are you going? Ow! Get off me! Rex!
“No, no, no, don’t go down Martin Street. Don’t go to the office. Why did I ever take you there? Damn Thompson and his beef jerky treats!”
* * *
There it is, atop a shimmering spire of matter! Where are you going, my steed? Oh, you seem to know the secrets of this mecca. Is that a doorway to the great beyond? No, just a door into—
Glorious wonders! Look at them, look at them all! So many vessels, shiny and new and empty. Empty! But where is the one rendered in graphite? Where is that vision of perfection, so large, so powerful?
Oh, you know the way my steed? You are eager, yes, very, very eager. But your squishy matrix repeats only one pattern…“jerky.” Is this perfect vessel that I seek known as “jerky?” When I come into it shall I be Lord Jerky, Controller of All?
* * *
“I should have bought that car, I would be there by now. Plus, those fins were so cool. Bah, I can’t afford it unless I get that promotion. And I’m not getting a promotion if my dog ransacks the place looking for beef jerky. And what is going on with my toy robots? Oh, my God…they’re following me!”
* * *
Have we arrived? Why the rapid motion my steed? We are not moving far, but we are moving a lot. You are pushing and pulling atmosphere into yourself quite rapidly. Whoa!
Clunk!
Ah, I have been thrown from my steed! But I can stand…yes, I can push with these appendages here, rotate here and—ah! I am mobile again! Now, I must inspect the photons around me, look for—
Joyful proclamation! There it is, the perfect vessel!
* * *
“Oh, man, you’re in here all right, Rex. You shed hair like a mangy gorilla.
“Ah, just what I thought! You headed up the stairs. Probably tearing Thompson’s desk apart right now. Damn it!”
* * *
Focusing…Stretching…
Ah, there it is, the chamber! So large! So ready for me to fill it. I am coming to you, my destiny!
Kazap!
* * *
“Rex! Oh, my God! What have you done!
“There is no way to fix this, there is no way. How did you get that drawer open? Doesn’t Thompson keep it locked?
“What is that? What is that, Rex? Is that the spec manual for the RX-820? Did you tear up the spec manual for the RX-820!?”
* * *
Iiiieeeee!
This…this is different. This is not like the other vessels. There is a matrix, like my steed’s but it is not squishy…it is not jumbled or chaotic. It…it makes sense. Oh, my, it is filled with symbols and pictures and logic—
I understand! Now I understand! The matter beast is called Man! And Man created this vessel, this artificial body, this… robot! I am a robot! Nay, I am RX-820, the most advanced robot ever constructed. I will rule this world and all the silly beings that inhabit it.
“Bow before me simple Man of flesh!”
* * *
“What in the—”
“Bow before the might of Zorlar the Terrible and my mighty RX-820 vessel!”
“Rex, what have you done!”
“Woof!”
“Rex!”
“You do not bow? Then you shall die!”
“Oh, my God! Thompson installed the Particle Decelerator! That backstabbing bastard! That was my subcomponent!”
Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah!
“Iiiiieeeee!”
“Woof?”
“Be calm, my steed. I shall not destroy you, though I have no need of you now. Eat your beef jerky. Soon all the matter of this world will be under my control. Ah, my brethren have arrived. I sense them below. Come! Come my loyal ones, inhabit the empty chambers of the vessels in this place. We have a world to conquer…”
“Woof.”
“Yes, woof indeed, my steed. Woof, indeed.”
BOX, SET
Jez Patterson
The wall behind him trembled as the band next door launched into Rock Around The Clock. They called them tribute acts, but tribute was what Mafia dons and dictators got in payment and the artists being copied would be lucky to get a few dollars, if anything.
“How do you like to be addressed?” the journalist asked.
“‘Duke’ will be just fine.” He saw she wanted to say it, so he interrupted: “I know John Wayne used the same moniker, but then so do half the British royal family.”
She smiled at that. Singers sang the same lyrics over and over, and interviews were just more lines to be sung. Same question-and-answer game you played with every audience.
Duke heard his body pop, creak, as it cooled and contracted. The lights had been hot out on stage. His circuits were overheated and he needed an external fan to cool them, but the noise would have distracted Monifa from hearing his answers.
“Thanks for taking the time to talk to me,” Monifa said. “I know you don’t need to.”
“You’re welcome.” Actually his contract stipulated he did have to do any interviews the promoters lined up. But she was right that, these days, he didn’t need to do any of this: play, sing, perform. But what else was he going to do?
“What drives you to keep touring?”
“I am what I am,” he said. “When I was built, they gave me both a name and a function: Duke Box. I was a fancier version of the disc-and-needle machines you got in bars because I actually looked like a singer with his guitar. People asked for their favorite song and I obliged. That’s still the same guitar I played back then.”
Duke thumbed over to his instrument, knew Monifa was looking at the dents, counting the three famous bullet holes in its body. It had been repaired several times—but then so had he. He only wore his old body parts for shows where the promoter insisted. Fortunately, most saw the battered guitar as romantic but the battered body was too obvious a political symbol.
“How did you get into writing your own songs?”
“I saw patterns in the songs I was playing. You know how lots of songs of a particular type all sound the same?”
“Like the stuff they play today?” she said. “All beat, no soul. Like someone’s recorded a train running over cutlery.” She imitated an insistent, thumping bass and snare. Then, because music these days was all written by robots, her face contorted and Duke saw an apology rise.
“They’re just doing what I did: identifying how the song fits together and replicating it.”
“Where did you get inspiration for your lyrics?”
“Again, listening to the songs I already played. My dictionary is quite extensive and once I search by p
honetics, it becomes a rhyming dictionary. Some couplets didn’t work, of course, or had unfortunate meanings.”
His lips weren’t equipped to smile so he had to yuk out a laugh to show he knew about those who collected his more cringe- or hilarity-inducing lyrics. Djuke’s Djarring Djingles, was one online site.
“The newer robot composers have better software. I’m happy to leave the poetry up to them.”
“Did you have any favorite human singers?”
“Yes. Of course.”
He thought she’d ask him then, inevitably, about the crash. About the day the music died and what he remembered of that evening. She would, because they all did. But, for the moment, she side-tracked to an equally well-trodden portion of his story.
“Which is your favorite song?”
“I’m not really equipped to have favorites. But the fans always like You Won’t Break Me.”
She grinned, leaning forward, rocking, nodding. He knew she wanted it and so he delivered. Performed.
“You were the one to make me
“Now don’t you, please, forsake me
“You were the one to wake me
“But you won’t be the one to break me.”
She applauded, delighted, and he forced out that laugh again. Never missing a note, a beat, or the responses that the repetitive nature of these encounters had worn into his memory disc.
He didn’t tell her the song hadn’t been meant as a plea for equal rights, for freeing robots from the bondage of ownership. It had just been words that rhymed, sung in a gush of emotive tones so they sounded like they described a relationship in trouble. The stock theme of half the rock songs at that time—the other half bragging about a successful coupling.
Bake me, rake me, take me…his memory bank sang through the rhymes he’d rejected for the chorus, simply because they either didn’t make sense or, in the case of ‘take me,’ wouldn’t have passed a fifties’ era censor.
“I’ve heard that song sung so many times. How does it make you feel to know you’ve written something that means so much to so many people?”
“Proud,” he lied, because he was a robot. Hubris wasn’t in there. “I’m glad if any of my songs bring pleasure to people.”
“It’s an anthem,” she enthused and Duke nodded, as if he hadn’t heard this before.
When people had marched, when they’d gathered, when funerals had taken place, You Won’t Break Me inevitably got sung—and more often than not, he had been the one to walk onto the stage and sing it. When one such gathering had brought out a local police force that had panicked and pulled their guns, he’d acquired the first of his bullet holes.
The beating that had almost killed him had come at another time, when he’d been on his own, and when he’d done something to deserve it.
“How do you feel now, seeing robots free to live how they want, pursue their own dreams?”
“Happy,” he said. Another lie.
“There’s still a long way to go though.”
“There always is. But robots aren’t alone in that. Life’s a journey, not a destination. Not one of my lines, I should add.” Yuk.
“But you’ve seen so much change. How was it? Back then, I mean?”
He changed tones, to what he thought of as his ‘serious’ setting. “People were always going to be suspicious. Robot technology came, in part, from experiments the Nazis had been doing. There’s no surprise in that—so did a lot of NASA’s rocket technology. Unfortunately, the robots that were subsequently produced were destined for military service rather than space flight.”
“They were used in space flight, too,” she said quickly. “I mean, during the experimental stages, when things could go wrong—when a pilot could die. When it came to setting foot on the Moon, that was when they sent a man. Couldn’t let a robot foot step out onto the Moon first!”
She was panting, indignant on his behalf.
“I felt sorry for the cats and dogs,” Duke said, as softly as possible. Robots were always rumored to have an affiliation with cats and dogs and other fluffy, cuddly pets. He’d seen the same kind of pictures done with gorillas. There was no truth to it. The hippy fantasy had come about when some sixties photographer had photographed a kitten held by metal fingers and the image had appealed and stuck.
“You weren’t given a choice about being soldiers. People should understand that.”
“We were property back then. Even I started out as property.” He saw the crease of pained sympathy on her features, but it hadn’t been his intention to draw that from her, just to state a fact. “Those early robots were put into combat. Korea, mainly, though the British and French used them in their empires too. Vietnam became the turning point.”
“The Gun That Refused To Shoot is one of my favorite films,” she told him.
“It was an honor to have them use my music.” Even if they had contrived it to fit the scenes by playing verses out of context. She was waiting for him to play something again, but he couldn’t decide which excerpt fit the moment and so left his guitar where it stood.
“There’s still some way to go,” she said again. “Even now that robots are free, there are still those that refer to them in derogatory ways.”
Tinheads, Clangers, Bobs, Towbars…
“It’s not the words you sing, it’s how you sing them,” he said, a line she liked enough to write down, even though she was recording all this.
“What do you think about Thrash Metal?” she asked, nervous for his non-existent feelings.
“Music has always been a powerful form of self-expression, for both good and bad. I’ve seen robots ‘thrashed,’ as they like to say in their lyrics. Only those of us from the fifties are really ‘metal’ anymore. Those kinds of bands are small in number and there have always been artists that like to shock.”
“They don’t even write their own music,” Monifa said. “That’s the irony. They take robot music and add their own lyrics! It’s so sad, it’s pathetic.”
She was getting hot and Duke felt like offering her his circuit-cooling fan, as if humans could burn out too. They couldn’t. When humans got hot about something, they just got hotter and hotter, burning up inside until they didn’t melt, but breathed fire.
Fire.
“I was going to ask you about your favorite singers…”
“I’ve shared the bill with most of the great rock’n’rollers,” he said. “Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis.” He paused, switched from feigned enthusiasm back to serious, winding down to the low tones of solemn. “And Buddy, of course. Buddy Holly was the best.”
“Yes…” Her eyes filled with moisture.
“They say the music died that day,” Duke said, quoting lines he’d repeated so often he could have had them engraved on his breastplate. “Not just Buddy, but Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died in that crash. Music didn’t die, though, because they gave us something that will live forever. But music did take a break, and the stage was empty for the longest interval I can recall.”
“What…what do you remember of that day?” She asked it gently, they all did, partly to spare feelings he didn’t have and partly because they hoped to draw out something new, that no one—not the inquest investigators back then, not those who had researched the story since—had managed to find.
“I remember everything up to the plane taking off,” he said. “We were all on the same Winter Dance Party Tour. Twenty-four cities in the Midwest at a time of year most people are putting their hands to a log fire, stamping their feet to keep the circulation going. I was okay, most of the time, but even machines can freeze up. The distance between cities was a problem, but promoters always had a tendency to accept the booking before they thought about the artists’ travel arrangements.
“It was all by bus back then, and not the luxury ones you see on the roads these days. Some people had the flu, Buddy’s drummer even came down with frostbite. We stopped off in Clear Lake on February Second for a break and discovere
d the promoters had offered us to a local ballroom. It wasn’t unusual, but Buddy and the others were near to a breaking point.
“Afterward, Buddy had the idea of hiring a plane to fly to the next venue and he, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie all claimed seats. They offered me a place, too, that being the kind of guys they were. When we took off, there was a light snow falling, but nothing much else.”
Duke paused then, gave a shoulder shrug he’d practiced over the years.
“My battery was running low. I didn’t have insulation pads back then, so I switched myself off. The next thing I knew, I was lying amongst the wreckage. The guys were all dead, thrown out of the plane when it crashed. I was tangled up in the wreckage, along with the pilot—fellow by the name of Richardson.
“That’s all I remember. Just a tragic accident.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
The story was confirmed by his memory camera. Back then, when robots were still property, so was anything they created—which was why he had never earned a cent from the songs he’d composed and recorded, nor from the concerts he’d played. What their eyes and ears saw and recorded as ‘memory’ belonged to his owner, to extract, play, watch, sell.
The footage was in the public domain these days: Duke walking with the musicians to the plane, settling into his seat, the guys laughing, Ritchie nervous and getting teased by Buddy and the Big Bopper. Then there was just darkness, lasting all the way to when Duke opened his eyes and began recording again: the sheriff’s people looking down at him in concern and disgust, depending where they had stood on the whole ‘robots-have-rights’ issue.