‘Incidentally, this is also how small-time crooks get roped into protection rackets by big-time crooks; but I digress. Suffice to say, the cafe owner and I get along perfectly well. But even if he thought me Jack the Ripper there’d still be no blue lights arriving outside his establishment. You’ve heard the saying, “Honour amongst thieves”? Well, it may be part mutual-suspicion, but after a while it can become something like... brotherhood.’
‘Lord, what the CIA could have made of you...’
‘Their loss, I’m sure.’
‘That mind of yours...’
‘Yes, Doctor. It really never does shut up.’ Chris stopped, and turned to face Beck, asking, ‘I wonder, in our next hardware update, if you couldn’t provide an Off button?’
Chris led them along dark and poorly lit streets, before swerving off toward a piece of reclaimed land where a building once stood. It was presently being used as a carpark before being redeveloped. There were no streetlights at all now. Over the gravel the pair walked, toward an utterly anonymous estate car, which Chris manually unlocked.
‘Your ride awaits, sir,’ he offered, as he playfully held open the passenger-side door.
‘You’ve never been pulled over?’ asked Beck as he got in.
‘Never,’ answered Chris. He shut the door behind him and walked around to his own side. Once in himself, he continued, ‘You’ll notice I wear a suit, shirt and tie. Neat but not showy. Rather like my hair, my coat, my case, and my car; which also has not a social, political or even humorous sticker anywhere around it.
‘I work very hard to be immaculate – in the Sixties the Mods called it “ultra-conformity” – run away from a street-fight in a suit and tie, and a minute later you’re an office boy arriving at the stockbrokers. Hooligans in business dress – for the first time police were asked to arrest someone who worked at a High Street bank; or at least the first time before the “Financial Crisis”.’
Beck could have listened to Chris all night, as he used to back at Springfields. There was no end to the stories and the social observations, even then. And it wasn’t only Beck’s pride in his and Schmidt’s creation, there was a scientific aspect. For Chris bore no tiredness, no need to pause or quit speaking. For this reason, he was also taught relaxation techniques, and encouraged to spend at least four hours a night still and in darkness.
Now though, as Chris started up the car, Beck asked,
‘So what did you want to show me?’
To which Chris answered,
‘Danny’s signal was ended by himself.’
‘Yes,’ remembered Beck, trying to keep up. ‘Eris told me that he hadn’t been found at the explosion site.’
‘Eris, yes,’ mused Christopher. ‘I know that name. Ex-police, scooped up into Secret Service. Her personal computer has accessed certain fake “Robot Hunter” fan-sites I’ve created on the net. I guessed she might be on our case.’
‘Jesus. You actually courted contact with the very people who are out to find you?’
‘Would you rather I had holed up in my flat and hoped never to hear a knock on the door? I was very careful, don’t worry. Now, as I was saying...’ Christopher drifted off a mere split-second, re-capturing his thread, ‘Yes, for his signal to be ended meant that Danny got over whatever happened to him.’
‘It was pretty bad,’ said Beck.
‘Well, we’re pretty tough. Given his survival, then I made a hard decision. My signal had been broadcast only weeks before, and I guessed that Government listeners might make the connection. Also, that the other artifs might have become jumpy at receiving repeated damage alarms, and so my efforts might be better directed toward calming those nerves.
‘And so I didn’t follow Danny’s signal, despite my every impulse willing me to do so. Instead, I stayed in London, just for one day longer, to co-ordinate and monitor. And then you pulled your release-cord, and my decision was justified.’
‘So now we go to Danny?’
‘Again, not quite yet. For it’s not only artif business keeping me in London – there’s also the fact that if he’s worth his salt, then Danny will be very far away from the co-ordinates he broadcast, and will be leaving no trail. Also, if he needs to, he’ll be making every effort to get in touch with me.’
Beck said, ‘Then we should get to your base, wherever you communicate from.’
But Christopher only reached into his pocket and pulled out a smart-phone,
‘This can do everything that a laptop could three years ago. Any message will be received directly to it. And not only from Danny.’
‘Other artifs!’
‘One other artif.’
‘Eris guessed you ran a network,’ admired Beck.
‘Not a complete one, alas. Only Danny and Ellie and myself.’
Beck did the mental arithmetic aloud,
‘That leaves Anna, in this country at least. Chris, have you heard from her?’
‘No, but I’m not worried. I have my theory. But leave it at that for now, please, Doctor, there’s just too much else that’s pressing.’
And Beck was taking any reassurance he could get. To even hear their names mentioned, he could have wept. ‘Ellie. How is she?’
Here Christopher paused, finding the right words,
‘I’ve spent so long hiding their secrets, that it feels difficult divulging them now.’
‘Indeed, I understand.’
‘But of Ellie, rest assured. She is busy at her job, in an office, an utterly normal office, and can’t always get away to message me. And yet her role is by far the least physically demanding. She can go months without signing in, but I’m never worried for her.
‘So yes, I know quite a bit about her life and times, and Danny’s too.’
‘That was how you knew he was in a mine?’
‘Yes. And since Danny’s signal, I’ve also left Ellie a rope-ladder dangling, a message she can reply to and I’ll be there within the half-day. And I have to give her a chance to activate it, as I did for you. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ said Beck. ‘Which is why you have time to take me on a road trip?’
Chris nodded. He had already drawn the car onto the main road and was taking an exit out of London, commenting,
‘And given the road we’re taking, Doctor Beck, I thought you might have guessed where we were going.’
Chapter 45 – Springfields
‘Springfields,’ muttered Beck.
Half-an-hour later, and the old roads were bringing it all back for him,
‘I’ll ever forget that first night bringing Anna along here.’
‘Yes,’ realised Christopher. ‘That would have been the dead of night also.’ (For it was now pitch-black outside the city.) ‘One of many moments of bravery you endured to bring us into the world.’
‘But is it safe to go back there?’ asked Beck. ‘To the old house?’
‘Not when things first fell apart. But who’s going to be watching now?’
‘But Eris still has people.’
‘Dear Doctor, it doesn’t need to be so simple now of having a policeman on every street-corner. Eris has a grid...’
‘Yes, she mentioned that.’
‘...that highlights correspondences of data, people appearing at any of a number of sensitive sites within a given time-period. It forms connections, it’s clever. But Springfields isn’t on that grid, it’s been dead for years. There won’t be any harm in us going there now.’
‘Well, I’m afraid to take that risk.’
‘And what if I told you that I visit most weekends?’
As Christopher said this, he swung the car off the A-road they were travelling along, and down the final row of lanes.
‘I’d forgotten how close to London it was,’ said Beck as they neared. ‘It always felt like deepest country.’
‘You had to get there and back all week, it couldn’t be far outside the ring road.’
It all came back to Beck; he could have driven those roads blindfo
lded.
And then, in the headlights appeared the same bramble hedge around the garden; and the gravel entrance that they would have pulled up onto before untying the wide farm gate. Though this time they would leave the gate closed. Instead, Beck followed Chris out of the car to stand at the wide barrier.
In front of them by their knees was tied a new sign:
KEEP OUT – PRIVATE PROPERTY
Beck was looking past the gate though, as his night vision increased and he began to make out the outlines of the house.
He asked,
‘What can your eyes see, Christopher?’
‘Not a great deal more than yours, Doctor.’
‘Do you ever go in?’
‘No, I come no closer than this.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve also seen it by day, and so this distance is the best way to remember it as it was.’
‘How bad is it?’
‘Not a window or a floor-board left in place.’
‘What did they think we were hiding?’ asked Beck rhetorically.
‘I think it was more than that,’ said Christopher. ‘I think it was psychological.’
‘You mean, so we could “never go back”?’
‘Yes, to prove that there really was no place for us, even in the past.’
As they stood staring into darkness and imagining that past, Chris continued,
‘We in Britain pride ourselves on our civic constitution. Here we are in our wonderful democracy, the kind society, where nothing bad can happen and where we all have rights. And then you find there’s something different about you, something for which the public have no sympathy... and they’ll turn on you, and hunt you like a dog.’
‘Christopher, surely you can’t think like that.’
‘Sometimes I can’t help it.’
‘And it’s not the public, Chris – they love us. You said yourself, you’ve seen the websites.’
Chris spun his head to Beck, ‘Do you ever find yourself in one of those moods, Doctor, where you really don’t want to be talked out of it?’
Beck jumped inside from the snap. Though Chris had clearly gotten something out of his system, and continued more calmly,
‘I don’t know, Doctor Beck. I don’t know. Though increasingly I wonder if Hancock didn’t have it right. Magna Carta, did she die in vain?’
Beck continued to watch the black of rooftops against the black of night, when Chris asked,
‘What did it mean to you?’
‘This place?’ asked Beck. ‘It meant the world to us. It’s where our dream came true.’
‘Well, it was my childhood home, no less.’
‘No less.’
‘Tell me how it looked, Doctor.’
And though the Doctor knew that Chris remembered full-well how it looked, Beck indulged him,
‘The drive was long and gently curving, and made of gravel that crunched beneath the tyres. There were flowers at the front, planted by Anna and Mrs Winters. And all around the house was a lawn, that stretched away in all directions to distant hedges and trees.’
‘And the building?’
‘The building was an old farmhouse, plastered in white render, and in places supported by S-shaped metal brackets painted gloss-black...’
‘Hmm, hmm,’ muttered Chris at each fondly recalled detail.
‘Behind the thick wooden door was a stone-floored hallway, where you boys would roll your wooden cars...’
‘Hmm, hmm.’
‘...loving the rumbling of the wheels over the rough surface.’
‘Go on, go on.’
‘To the left led the kitchen, which Mrs Winters wouldn’t let you into when she was boiling water. And to the right was the living room, with the Professor’s own paintings on the walls. And do you remember those huge sofas? They were your favourite when you were little...’
‘Hmm, hmm.’
‘...rolling around on them, thinking they were the biggest things ever and that you could never fall off no matter how you jumped on them.
‘Upstairs were the bedrooms. The boys’ bedroom I remember well, asking the three of you to stay still and quiet every night...’
At this Chris snickered like a child.
‘...and you never did. And we would come up in the morning, and you had finished a thousand-piece jigsaw, or built a castle out of every piece of Lego.’
‘Hmm, hmm.’
‘Chris,’ asked Beck.
‘Yes?’
‘You’re now around eleven years old.’
‘Yes.’
‘What marvellous, impossible jewels did we make here?’
Chris didn’t answer, so Beck asked, ‘Can we stay a while?’ and Chris nodded. And so they did stay, each filling that black canvas with the house they had known.
Eventually Beck had to ask,
‘Would you know if Danny’s been caught?’
‘No,’ answered the artif, without looking away from the shadow-house.
‘So he might have been,’ presumed Beck, ‘we just don’t know it?’
Chris answered, ‘I’d only know if he was dying, as I’d hear his signal. But with every mile put between him and the rockfall, his chance of capture grows slimmer. And he can find his way to London, where I can hide him and repair him.’
In one way, this piece of logic calmed Beck; though in another, talking of their friend, indeed the robot Chris would call his brother, being damaged and in danger was hardly what Beck needed in his current state.
‘You foresee it all so plainly,’ noted Beck.
‘Would you rather I be a gibbering wreck?’ enquired his creation.
‘I didn’t mean it like that. I meant your mind, it’s still perfect? Still at top speed?’
‘I tend to run as calmly as possible when I can, to save energy. Not today though, and for which reason it might be judicious to return to charge.’
At last, thought Beck, who was becoming increasingly spooked beneath the rural night sky. ‘Return where?’
‘I have a London base,’ was all that Christopher answered. And years of secrecy didn’t have him reveal any more.
Chapter 46 – An Encounter with a Bus
Soon they were on their way back to the capital. Beck hadn’t a clue where Christopher might have been living all those years, though he was surprised when they pulled up not in a residential area, but instead onto the pavement beside a main road lined with high-end shops beneath tall office buildings.
‘This is where you live?’ asked Beck, ridiculously.
‘No,’ answered Chris. ‘A final spot of sightseeing first.’ He got out of the car, and walked to where a side-road turned off the main drag to pass between two large stone buildings, like a secret path through high cliffs.
As Beck caught up with him, Chris intoned, arms raised,
‘Between these corporate monoliths, was I almost undone.’
Beck was confused: by that time of night the shops were closed and the buildings were mostly dark. There were no bars or clubs along the road, and no activity at all but for the occasional cars and taxis that swooped along the broadway, dousing the pair of them with their lights.
And then, just on time – could Chris possibly have planned it? – came another, larger, bright red vehicle. It pulled almost to a standstill, before swerving off the main road to hurl its form with unreasonable speed along the minor road between the buildings. Beck, standing on the pavement, stepped back as it passed within feet of them.
‘An Accident Waiting to Happen,’ said Christopher, in the tone of a letter to a local newspaper.
‘The bus,’ said Beck. ‘You were hurt by a bus? That’s what caused your damage signal?’
‘Yes, a bus,’ confirmed Chris. ‘I thought you might like to see the spot.’
‘Lord, you were lucky to survive it.’
‘A human would have been lucky; I was stupid to have even been in the situation.’
‘Chris, we built you with strong capab
ility, not infinite capacity.’
‘Even so...’
‘Perhaps you’re still not able to accept your mistake?’
‘Maybe.’
Beck mused, ‘And yet you bought me here, and so a part of you wants to talk about it.’
Which Chris then did,
‘Regardless of whether I deserved any, it was luck that saved me. I was scouting the area – one of these buildings housed a data centre used by Eris’s department.’
‘What?’ Beck turned to flee, looking above himself for cameras, before Chris’s calm response halted him,
‘“Housed”, the past tense. It’s a retail outlet now and no one’s watching. My information proved to be out-of-date, and so the mission was a fool’s errand in every respect.
‘Anyway, I was too busy looking around me, and didn’t pay attention when the bus turned sharply. The tail of it clipped me as it did so, and the blow threw me into the shadows.’
‘Did it stop?’
‘Thankfully not. With a vehicle that size the driver may not even have noticed me. He may have heard a bump from the rear, but that could have been a hole in the road, or a passenger moving their bags.’
The pair remained in the bus’s wake on the narrow high-walled side-road, where the pavements were only two feet wide on either side, and where no streetlight shone. Chris spoke from within the shadows of the two high buildings,
‘I was left here, on this pavement. It was night, and no one found me: found my skin flapping off me, and my anodised innards on display. Thrown in any other direction, or at any other time of day, and someone would have discovered me in the minutes I was unconscious while my system rebooted.
‘I woke, shocked, scared, senses coming back online one-by-one. And the sheer luck – yes, luck – of it threw me, how cosmically fortuitous I’d been.’
‘So you can accept it was luck,’ supposed Beck. ‘You the most logical of all, Chris. But still, “luck”? You were hit by a bus, man! How unlucky can you get?’
Chris explained, ‘But had I been thrown onto the pavement outside the shops, or into the road, and been found unconscious there? Doctor Beck, being hurled at any other angle but between these buildings, and all of us would be over. Someone would have seen, and the police been called, before I had my wits about me.