‘And I cried, Doctor Beck, as I came back online. Wept, just as you had built me to be able to do; at the pain and the confusion and the hopelessness of it all. For those minutes I couldn’t go on.’
‘But you did. How did you snap out of it?’
‘I found my arm worked, so I reached to my hip-pad and silenced the injury alarm. I selected screaming sensory input after screaming sensory input, and dulled each signal. Then I thought, as I lay there, “What do I need? How do I get it?” Forget how I looked, forget what had happened, forget anything that couldn’t he hidden at night beneath a long black coat.
‘And then something did happen as I lay there. For I wasn’t to be completely ignored in the shadows. A man in a business suit, dashing for the taxi rank, stopped along my darkened byway, and found some relief in my direction.’
‘What, where you were lying?’ Beck was agog.
‘He must have thought I was a sleeping vagrant. It’s popular apparently, among those without souls. He was a little like me then.’
‘You do have a soul.’
‘Ah, but am I sentient or just programmed to appear so?’
Beck became stern, ‘We didn’t program a thing into you. You were an empty memory and an empty processor, everything you are you formed yourself.’
‘Ah, but for those without a knowledge of computing, there’s no way of knowing. Ultimately it’s down to trust. You had a theory once, Doctor...’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘...that all matter is conscious, something in the electrons. And that when you have enough of them all buzzing together, then you get a mind.’
‘Yes.’
‘And do you still believe that?’
Beck answered, ‘Even more so, when I look at you now. For if there’s nothing behind your eyes, Chris, then there’s nothing behind mine. I utterly believe that.’
‘And how do you feel working alongside me now, knowing that I’m fallible?’
‘That there isn’t anyone in the world I’d rather have here.’
Chris gave a weak smile, ‘Then let’s get back to the car, it’s not-quite legally parked.’
Chapter 47 – The Victor and his Prize
‘Are you sure we weren’t followed?’ asked Ellie again from the window-seat of Victor’s flat.
‘Absolutely certain – I’ve seen enough films to know how to lose a tail; even if they were there, which they weren’t. And anyway, it’s been hours, and they’d have been here by now.’
‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ she conceded.
He asked, ‘Well, at least come away from the window.’ A flicker of a smile formed on his lips, laced with fear, before he added, ‘Especially if you don’t want to cause any attention from the neighbours.’
‘How do you mean?’ she asked.
‘Well, I’m hardly renowned for the beautiful women I bring home.’
She nearly smiled herself, but only nearly.
Victor tried again to break the mood,
‘Then at least come and have some of the soup I’ve boiled.’
‘I told you not to bother,’ she moaned from the window-seat.
‘But with the day you’ve had you must be famished.’
‘No.’
‘A drink then, for your nerves?’
‘I’m not a china doll!’
Another man might have left the room at that point. But not Victor, who felt himself on an absurd quest to save this woman from whatever trouble she laboured under. Leaving the soup to look after itself, he began,
‘My brother has a glass eye; he’s had one all his life. It’s never stopped him doing anything he wanted, but when he was young he used to get self-conscious about it, would hate anyone spotting it. But his feelings didn’t add up, for as soon as someone did know about it he didn’t care, he’d laugh his head off, pop it out and flip it like a coin.’
At last she turned from the window,
‘You’re not talking about your brother, Victor.’
‘No.’
‘So, what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying, show me your glass eye.’
And at that moment, there really was nothing more right or proper to do. Though, it would take all of her skills to do it properly, with just the right amount of slow and quick, and shock and awe.
She got up from the window-seat, and stood before him, walking forward very slowly,
‘You’re sure you want to see it, Victor? Even if it’s something you won’t like?’
‘Look, I know you’re in trouble, but I don’t care. What harm could you, of all people, have done anyone?’
She gently pulled her blouse from the waistband of her skirt, saying,
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to seduce you.’ (Not that that would have worried him at all.) ‘I wonder, Victor, have you read those stories of “The Robots” in the newspapers?’
‘Yes, but...’
‘And how they’re living in secret, out amongst us?’
‘And what’s that got to do with us?’
To herself she whispered, ‘Thank you, Doctor Beck, for building me so well that he doesn’t realise even now.’
Victor didn’t hear this, and was jabbering, ‘Do you mean you you’ve seen one? You mean you know they are? Is that what’s troubling you?’
Arriving within arm’s distance of Victor, she lifted her blouse above her left hip, to show the smoothly seamed silver strip of gleaming buttons, flush with the golden skin around it.
‘This is my control panel, Victor. It’s where I regulate my internal systems, and where I recharge.’
She took his hand, and gently held it over the panel, to which he neither grabbed or resisted, but let his hand be limp in hers as she moved it slowly in a stroking fashion over the metal, saying,
‘This is my glass eye, Victor. You see there’s no harm from it. You see I’m no danger.’
‘No,’ he barely murmured.
After a while, she moved his hand away to hang back at his side, saying,
‘And so you see how your offer of the drink was really very kind, but I think you might need it more than me.’
Chapter 48 – Chris’s Flat
In another flat, in another town, Gawain Beck was listening to more of Christopher’s views on the society that had ‘spurned’ him,
‘...Outsiders, who aren’t allowed to live, built oddly, built wrongly, not given oxygen to breathe... I love this country; I love everything about it... I don’t think I could have fitted in anywhere else... even though it shuns me, turns me into a fugitive, a pawn for tabloid games...’
For the first time, Beck began to worry over what the years alone had done to his creation. Had he built him well enough to form the same moods and manias as the rest of the population?
Chris continued, ‘...But we can’t hide away. I fear every time I go near the enemy, Doctor. But what can I achieve otherwise? Stuck here, we’re out of the loop. We need to be in-the-know, not out of it...’
‘Monomania, Christopher.’
‘Doctor?’
‘The obsessive focus on one topic.’
Chris halted, as if mid-breath,
‘Is that how I seem to you?’
‘You appreciate, Chris, how for me, everything you do is a study of my own work.’
‘Of course. But please appreciate, Doctor... that I have had a very long time to bear these feelings without a person to share them with. This then is something of an uncorking for me. And you help me with that simply by listening. But I promise you, Doctor, that by the morning I’ll be right as rain.’
Beck didn’t want to intrude, but had to ask,
‘Is that because by then you’ll have the feelings out of your system, or because the feelings only come at night?’
‘Doctor, please...’
‘Because it’s well known that the sun can burn off depression; though it can’t catch the demons hiding in the shadows. Depression is a vampire, Chris. It waits in dark spaces; but it can a
lso only come in if we invite it.’
Chris didn’t answer Beck’s theme though, instead asking,
‘Am I a test-case to you?’
‘No, you’re a friend who sounds unhappy.’
Chris smiled, ‘And you are right on both counts.’
Beck reminded himself that he was there to listen, so moved the conversation on, giving Chris a chance to tell whatever he liked of his life,
‘An interesting place you’ve got here,’ said Beck, remembering his first look at the Sixties apartment block as they arrived.
‘Thank you.’
‘And you don’t have any trouble?’
‘None at all. Before, I rented a little house in a much nicer area than this – I really can understand the human wish to “settle down”. Although the neighbours were too forthcoming, and I was not able to let them in.
’Here, though, people keep themselves to themselves, respecting my space. Here I’m much more comfortable.’
As he said those words, Chris gestured with his arm across the lounge of his current abode, leading Beck’s eye across his maps on the wall, the tool-heavy workbench with its soldering irons and circuit-boards, and finally the stack of car batteries, resting in a low metal tray to avoid any potential leak of their acid seeping through the floor, to drip through the neighbours’ ceilings like alien blood.
Beck looked around him,
‘This is a proper little nerve-centre.’ He saw a laptop then, folded closed at the end of the workbench. ‘And is that where you keep in touch with the others?’
‘Sometimes. Would you like to see?’
‘In time, yes, definitely. Though you told me that if you’d had a new message you’d have seen it on your phone?’
Chris nodded, waiting to see where Beck was headed.
‘So there is no urgency. Meanwhile, after what you told me on that street-corner, don’t you think your health is more important for half-an-hour?’
To this, Chris answered with his body. In a flash he was stood stock-still and upright in the centre of the room. Without his overcoat, Chris was wearing a charcoal suit of straight trousers and three-buttoned jacket. His new pose made him look a little like Charlie Chaplin, sans cane.
One arm then did a perfect, judged and balanced circuit of its shoulder-orbit before returning to rest straight at his side. The second arm then performed its opposite orbit.
After this, one leg then stuck itself out forward at ninety degrees, and did the strangest John Cleese silly walk circuit from its hip. Before bending at the knee and bringing itself back beneath the body to return to matchstick-straightness.
‘Stop, stop,’ called Beck, he hoped in time to stop the second leg performing its own version of the Masonic rites. Though Chris was having none of it, and the second leg performed as did the first.
Resigned, Beck then watched as, with all four limbs now dead-straight and pointing to the floor, Christopher’s body began a rhythmic swaying. First his head circled on its axis, while still always facing forward. Before his head became still again, and the motion moved down to his upper-torso, then down to his abdomen, then hips, then knees. The same sequence then moved back up his body, arriving at his head again and then stopping.
Then a combination of these circuits began at each level of him, spinning at different rates, until Christopher was gyrating in a way Beck had seen no acrobat or dancer ever attempt. With his arms bound to his side, he had no counter-weight to balance, yet retained a perfect pose. His feet were as rooted to the ground as those of a gold-winning gymnast as they landed after somersaulting from the bar.
The movements became more extreme. Some parts of Chris almost reached Beck as they were flung out in his direction. Beck wanted to reach out and grab his friend before he pulled himself apart, or he misjudged and flung himself to the hard floor; but there was to be no misjudgement. Meanwhile, the solemn look on Chris’s face rent him both absurd and appearing to be in perfect control.
At last, Beck could take it no more. Perhaps at the first imperceptible micro-movement in the Doctor’s muscles, the artif then stopped, returning straight and upright without a quiver.
‘Okay, okay, you’ve proven yourself,’ said Beck, a little perturbed in ways he couldn’t quite get a handle on. ‘Jesus. But for that bus to fling you into the side-road like it did, then it must have done some damage. Perhaps to a part of you not exercised in your little dance just then.’
‘Then I can put it off no longer,’ declared Chris. ‘I knew my display wouldn’t fool you. You always got to the root of our problems. No hard feelings, Doctor,’ and Chris put out his hand.
Beck shook it, and as he did so gasped,
‘You’re ice-cold!’
‘Plastic-cold, Doctor. Ambient room temperature.’ Christopher pulled Beck up into a half-hug. ‘And that’s not all, is it,’ he whispered in his ear, close enough for the Doctor to feel his very...
‘Breath!’ shouted Beck. ‘You have no breath.’
Chapter 49 – Ellie’s Shame, Victor’s Shock
Ellie had gone oddly shy after her display with Victor. She had tucked her blouse back into her skirt, and felt as if she’d shown him more than a little hip. Though at least it had got the job done; he hadn’t run off screaming. And as such, that was the only real criteria with which she could judge the encounter. A success then, though it felt anything but.
At least the distraction had snapped her out of her window vigil. Now she was curled up with her legs beneath her at the edge of Victor’s sofa, and looking away from the centre of the room.
From the kitchenette, Victor asked,
‘If you don’t want that drink, then would you mind if I do?’
She shook her head without looking. Coming back with a tumbler of beer, Victor sat at a different chair, though facing in Ellie’s direction.
She said, not bearing to look at him,
‘I should have shown you more nicely than that.’
He was still too shocked to try and say something polite to comfort her. She continued,
‘It was like I was coming on to you, trying to embarrass you. I should have shown you from a distance; or just told you. I don’t know why I had to make you touch me, I don’t know why I did that.’
He reasoned, ‘Perhaps you needed to be touched? And catching me off-guard was the only way you thought you’d get that?’
‘Oh my,’ she gasped. ‘You remind me of an old friend, getting to the heart of me like that.’
‘Another... robot?’
‘No, but one of us. One of the family. A man I could trust.’
‘How many are you?’
‘So few you wouldn’t believe, enough to be wiped out in a heartbeat; hence why there are no others within a hundred miles of here.’
‘It must be lonely.’
‘Yes.’
Each were too nervous to pursue the theme. But Victor added,
‘Though you really are incredibly... lifelike... I mean, accurate... I mean...’
‘It’s okay.’ She finally looked at him, ‘I know what you mean.’ Adding, ‘And thank you for being kind.’
He pondered, ‘I’m not sure I’ve been that. I don’t think I’m back to my senses.’
She smiled a little, at last, before noting,
‘Look at you, you’re so kind that you don’t even realise it when you are being. Look at what you’ve just learnt about me... and I can tell from how you’re talking to me that you still respect me. In your eyes I haven’t been reduced to the level of a toaster or microwave. You’re still polite, you’re still offering me drinks.’
‘But why would that change?’ he asked. To which she answered,
‘But you’ve read those newspapers, Victor. You’ve heard how people talk. Saying how we’re not natural, and how they’d come at us with pitch-forks and burn us at the stake.’
‘But that’s just people sounding off, unleashing frustration. They wouldn’t say that if they met you.’
‘
Wouldn’t they? But anyway, you are being kind. And... maybe for you it’s not entirely sinking in yet. But that might be a good thing, for it means I can be gone before you realise what you had on your hands. And if they come and ask you about me, then you can tell them honestly, because they’ll understand that it left you in shock. I really think they will understand. So please be truthful, Victor. Don’t carry lies for me. Just... don’t call them tonight, will you. For old-time’s sake, for our friendship in the office. Just don’t call them.’
And there was no way that Victor would.
Instead he said,
‘I lost my job, you know.’
‘Oh, Victor.’ For the first time in a while Ellie was free to worry about someone else.
He explained, ‘That manager wouldn’t let us through. Angela was screaming to be let in to warn you, but he held her back. You probably didn’t hear through the heavy doors.’
‘Oh God. I thought you’d all left me to it. Oh, Angela.’
‘So I ran out of the back door. He shouted after me, “You’ll never work here again. That’s a promise.”’
‘And still you ran. Brave boy.’
‘There was nothing brave about it. I’d left it too late. By the time I got around to the front of the building, the police were all over it. But you weren’t there, and I had the sense that the hounds had lost the fox.
‘So I tried to remember where you lived, and drove around your estate hoping to find you. I’d been there for ages, and was all set to leave...’
‘I’d been in the town gardens, trying to think.’
‘...when I saw those men in their bad suits acting strangely on the pavement; and then there you were.’
‘Oh, Victor.’ She jumped up and ran over to his chair and hugged him, nearly spilling his drink.
‘Well, I don’t deserve this,’ he said, awkwardly.
‘Oh, Victor, you deserve more than I can ever give you. I’d given up, you see. I must have known they would be there, and I walked right into them.’
They hugged, until Victor said,
‘So you see I’ve nothing to go back to. And now I’ve got you in my arms, and I don’t want to let you go.’
And nor did she want him to.
Chapter 50 – Artificial Heart
‘You think it’s bad? And you haven’t even seen me with my shirt off.’ Christopher laughed, as he removed himself from Doctor Beck’s personal space, far enough for Beck to no longer be aware of his lack of warmth or breath. Beck was regaining his wits though after the shock, and remembering his handiwork,