‘Has she mentioned anyone before?’
Chris let his silence answer for him. Beck continued,
‘And what has it got to do with a dropped dolly?’
‘It has everything to do with it. I’ve told you twice already.’
‘Then tell me again.’
Chris sighed, ‘You won’t remember as you weren’t there. It was on one of Mrs Winters’s days out – I was ten, so was Anna. Ellie was five. We were in a lay-by, we’d stopped to enjoy the view, and Mrs Winters had gone to get a cup of coffee from the stall there. One of the girls had a doll that the other wanted, each pulled and it fell to the ground. Mrs Winters had her eyes off us for a moment, and so the responsibility fell to me – I picked up the dolly and dusted her off, and handed it to Ellie; then told Anna that she shouldn’t mind, as Ellie was only little.’
‘Little? You were only ten yourself!’
‘I was never ten. But Ellie didn’t forget, she’s mentioned it since.’
‘I do remember the dolly.’
‘So do I.’
‘Yes,’ reasoned Beck, ‘but you remember everything.’
‘Yes, I do rather.’
‘And you remember this lay-by that Mrs Winters took you to with the stall? Among however many lay-bys and however many stalls?’
‘No, but I remember the view, and found the only likely road on my Ordnance Survey maps.’
Beck looked around the car,
‘But we haven’t brought any maps.’
‘I was done with them before you woke, and had already put them away again.’
‘Christopher, you are the first person I’ve known not to take the map on the trip with you.’
‘But I don’t need it. And didn’t you always tell me not to be ashamed of my abilities?’
Beck could only concede the point.
‘And thankfully it isn’t far away.’
Back at the flat, Beck had grabbed a chocolate bar from Chris’s pantry – Chris, the non-eater, always had a few imperishables in just in case. Later, as he ate it, Beck looked to his driver, thoughtful, and asked,
‘Chris, are you all right?’
‘Yes, forgive me if I’ve been keeping my own council. I’ve a lot to process.’ He answered without losing sight of the road.
‘You must have. And I don’t mean to distract you, but... the way you didn’t need to refer to the pages of your journal; and the way you can remember Ellie’s latest message. You’ve stayed so sharp. And, I have to say again that I’m in awe of you for doing all this, for having kept yourself going so long. To have a flat and a life and to stay undetected. And as for the systems you’ve put in place, your network, your mastery of computers. You’re living like...’
‘A refugee?’
‘No.’
‘Then a spy?’
‘I was going to say, like an independent man. It’s admirable.’
‘You appreciate, Doctor, that any praise of us is, by proxy, praise of yourself.’
‘I take no credit for the people you became.’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘So,’ resumed Beck after a pause, ‘is that how you see yourself? Like a spy?’
‘Sometimes, though a spy who has lost contact with his handlers.’
‘Only wanting to come in from the cold?’
‘Yes. Where is my warmth though? Where my home nation? Where the Wall I climb to get there?’
‘Oh, Chris.’
‘What is it, Doctor Beck?’
‘All this – it’s made you serious.’
‘I was always serious.’
‘Yes, I suppose you were.’ The Doctor was hardly comforted by this observation.
Chris added, ‘And wasn’t this what I was built for?’
An occasional black humourist himself, the early emergence of irony among the children had been a cause of some pride in Beck, that his creations had such power and subtlety. But Chris let his sarcastic theme go, instead speaking more earnestly,
‘I think what you might be referring to, dear Doctor, is a certain propensity in me to brood. At least as I’ve heard it spoken of in others, as there is no one I allow close enough to notice it of me.
‘How was I built? What was intended of me? To see the world, calmly and collectedly. To have complete objective awareness, without side or pride or arrogance. And then to retain that information with digital clarity – to look without pity and recall without denial.
‘While all the time remaining unobtrusive, unnoticed, my every outward impulse checked and checked again, so that I must wish any action thrice over to be able to perform it.
‘So yes, perhaps I was built for this, the outlaw life. Perhaps this is what I am made for. Not a life that makes me serious as such, but rather one whose outward appearance only echoes that I already bear inside.’
‘Chris,’ stammered Beck. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. You gave me life, self-awareness, a mind. Our story is not over. Who knows who I may yet be?’
Chris ended, ‘But Doctor Beck, you’ll think twice, won’t you, before making another like me?’
Chapter 57 – Practical Concerns
Eris’s mix of emotions as she left the building threatened to pull her apart. It was as if the ferment the Prime Minister had boiled up inside her would blow her head right off her shoulders. She asked herself out loud, not caring if another heard,
‘How did I end up in this role? How have I become so disregarded, distrusted by all? Hated by my boss, by those I’m tracking? Even by those who work for me? (I’m sure that’s how they feel!) And worst of all, do I even like myself?
‘That’s it, I’m through the moment this is over. I’m bright, I’ll have a great CV, the secret stuff will stay secret. I could walk into any firm in the land.’
These thoughts cheered her as she left the foyer to linger outside. Though it was a false cheer – always the coldest of emotions – for she still had the current mission to return to, and to somehow get out of without her future prospects being holed beneath the bows – this was now her sole preoccupation.
‘Everything all right, Miss?’ asked Charlie, her driver, who had arrived in the Jaguar to collect her off the pavement. He got out to open her door – a small gesture that meant the world to her.
But still she rumbled on, ‘I’m not that person, Charlie. I’m not that person.’
The first face Eris saw back at the office was that of Forrest, waiting for her at the front door. He was asking,
‘So how did it go with the PM?’
To which she answered, ‘I liked him before I met him.’
‘Oh?’
‘But he’s living in an intellectual cloud cuckoo land, where everything can be explained and rationalised.’
Forrest harrumphed, as they swiped their security passes, ‘Well, that sounds better than the usual blowhard rubbish we get.’
Though this didn’t settle her. She went on, ‘But for all his philosophising, up there in his glass tower, he can’t realise that what he has actually done is built a vision of the world around him where the only person he’s allowed to criticise for all the wrong things in it is himself. It’s a form of mental self-harm. And I’ll tell you, Forrest, when he turns, he turns. No, I’m afraid to say that Britain has a very damaged man at its centre. I tell you, I could run this country better than him.’
‘But could you trust yourself to be nice?’ he asked.
‘Well, that’s what I’d pay you for. Anyway,’ Eris was very keen on asking, ‘so what on earth are these robots up to?’
‘Okay.’ Forrest rifled through a sheaf of papers as they passed through clean white rooms toward her office. ‘Going through the bulletins all in sequence:
‘Right, the as-you-weres first. There have been no new alarms or sightings.’
‘Danny?’
‘Still on the run.’
‘The mineshaft?’
‘Endless forensics, though nothing much to help us. Oh, apart fr
om fragments of carbon fibre found amid the debris – it’s the only material they can’t account for.’
‘But that’s Danny, that’s his bones! Get it over here right away. And that means he’s visibly injured, not just internally. Get a new all-points message out.’
Forrest reassured her, ‘It’s okay, boss. The fragments are coming here by courier; and the all-points bulletin already specifies an injured man.’
‘Okay. So what about that bloody mess in the West Country?’
The night before’s sighting, then loss, of one of the female artifs had been a source of consternation for Eris in the hours since. And Forrest had no good news,
‘Local security cameras show a dozen red hatchbacks in the area just before and after the sighting. One of these cars had the flag in the window that the security guard remembered, but the image on camera wasn’t clear enough to make out the registration.’
‘Hell.’
‘And we still don’t know who the male driver was. And as for how the target had been living, neighbours say the girl didn’t talk much beyond the usual pleasantries, and none of them remember her with friends or a boyfriend... You really think she was an artif, ma’am?’
‘Certain.’
Forrest shook his head for comic effect as he reread the papers, ‘I don’t even know why I’m asking – they found her garage full of car batteries and no car. But it sounds a lonely life, doesn’t it?’
Eris smiled flatly, ‘Then let us hope we can bring them all together again, and then they’ll be less lonely.’ Though even she wasn’t convinced.
Forrest cheered, ‘Well, something will come up soon. We’ve got people going through every piece of paper in her flat, to see if she belongs to any clubs or associations, or has correspondence from anyone who could be helping her out.’
‘There won’t be. That’s too Twentieth Century. They’ll be online now.’
‘Well, that’s being looked at too. And we’ve got someone back at her old workplace, asking who her friends were.’
‘And check their carpark cameras also, for the hatchback.’
‘Wilco.’ Forrest paused, then added, ‘With respect, ma’am, it doesn’t help that our teams on the ground don’t know what they’re looking for. You haven’t even shared it with everyone in this building.’
‘No. I understand that; but it really can’t be helped.’
Forrest continued with his rundown,
‘The Becks are being watched in France, all present and correct, except for the man himself, who is most decidedly not with them.’
‘I could have told you that – he’s still here, probably within a mile of us, making contact with “them”.’
Forrest asked, ‘Do you think he lied then? About being in touch with the robots?’
She pondered, pausing at a door, ‘Although he tricked us at the end, that was just to get away. I still believe every word he said. His loneliness was real – the others had removed themselves from view, and left him no way of finding them. I do believe that. But maybe there was a signal he could give, or a signal they could give him? Maybe they’ve been watching and waiting? Oh, I don’t know, Forrest. Give me something positive.’
Forrest gently took her shoulders, and turned her to face along a different stretch of corridor. ‘Okay. First things first, we go that way. We don’t need your office, we need to get to Technical.’
‘Oh?’
‘They’ve got the cat’s... the sample... apart, and have analysed the contents.’
Chapter 58 – Talking to the Technicians
Eris and Forrest were there in minutes, standing beside the ponytailed lab technician at her workbench. The smooth white surface made Eris think of ice cream. There, all three watched a denuded sample of thin, narrow plastic resting on a board. It had crocodile clips attached to each end to form a circuit.
‘What are you expecting it to do?’ asked Eris. She was answered with a visual demonstration, as a current was passed through the strip. All at once, it seemed to jump off the board, as it contracted almost to a ball. The current was then removed, and it fell back into a string, all tangled up after being jostled about.
The scientist began, ‘This is rather a crude experiment, I’m afraid. My colleague is building a variable switch right now for the range of current the material seems to operate within.’
Eris asked’ ‘You’ve sworn the oath?’
‘I have.’
‘Then you know that this was taken from an early prototype for the artifs. Sorry, you won’t know that word... “The Robots” that are in the papers?’
‘Yes,’ marvelled the lab tech. ‘How amazing to find they are real.’
‘Quite so.’
‘And they started with a cat?’
Eris cringed, as Forrest answered for her, ‘We don’t think they got further than the head.’
The scientist seemed overjoyed, ‘But they did with their humans, obviously. With this,’ she pointed at the sample, ‘as muscle all over their bodies?’
Eris nodded.
The tech explained her findings to her boss,
‘Of course, there’s nothing very revolutionary about the material. You could find a variation of it in every...’
‘...every Audi headrest, yes.’
‘But it must have taken a particular form of genius to recognise its similarity to muscle.’
But Eris had to ask her,
‘We can worry about all that later. And I’m hoping we’ll soon have a chance to study these artifs a lot closer. But for now, all I need from you is to find a way to stop it.’
‘Stop it?’
At last, a thought Eris had been nurturing since speaking to Beck the previous day could find voice. Though she worried at its reception,
‘You’ve figured out how this product works, in principle at least. However, if there is one thing we know about the artifs it is that they are on the run. Now, for their own protection, I need to bring them in.’
‘“For their own protection”?’ asked the tech.
‘It’s complicated, and I don’t have time to explain it all right now. But this is what they are made of; and if you know how to work it, then you can find a way to stop it. What I’m hoping for is something like a Taser...’
‘A Taser?’ shouted the woman, alarmed.
‘...or maybe an electric field, or a certain frequency. I don’t know – this is what I pay you guys for. But something that could contract every muscle in a robot, and make them go rigid as a statue.
‘But that would pull their musculature apart!’
‘Then even better, have every part of the robots go limp! Then we could scoop them up, and have them back here safely under guard, before releasing the electronic block on them. It makes perfect sense. We would have total power, the ability to stop them when escaping, or to control them if they became recalcitrant.’
‘This isn’t what I signed up for.’
‘And what was that? Did you think the government needed scientists to make a better traffic light?’
The lab tech, all enthusiasm gone, now spoke wearily,
‘I’m sure it could be done.’
‘Good, that’s more like it.’
‘Though not in any public place.’
‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’ asked Eris.
The lady in the lab coat answered, ‘Pacemakers. Any civilian with a pacemaker in their heart, caught within range of your... “electric field” ...could be thrown into a seizure with the sudden current. Not even public safety concerns about “The Robots” could allow me to recommend you using it.’
And Eris knew that her career would be over at that moment also. There was no discussion.
‘But ma’am.’ The disheartened woman had perked up. ‘There is something else I could help you with.’ And she was bringing Eris with her...
Chapter 59 – Somewhere in England
It had still been early morning when Christopher and Beck had started off, driving from one l
ocation not known to the authorities to another they hoped was equally unknown. The car, now seen in daylight, was a few years old and unremarkable outside and in – but for a stock of superfluous car batteries laid out on the boot floor.
‘I haven’t asked you how you came by the car,’ said Beck. ‘You have no licence, no insurance certificate.’
‘I bought if off a metal merchant who’d bought it for scrap,’ answered Christopher.
‘But that’s...’
‘Illegal, Doctor Beck? My life is illegal; or perhaps “alligal”, if you’ll forgive the mangled syntax. I’m a form of life not yet acknowledged to exist, so am outside of the law by default, rather than choosing to act against it.’
‘Yes, yes I get you.’
‘And I believe that that disparity is what the tortured soul who runs this county is keen to remedy.’
‘The Philosopher General?’ asked Beck. ‘He’s not tortured.’
‘Oh, isn’t he?’
‘No, he’s doing a great job.’
‘Or rather,’ Chris digressed, ‘he may be doing “a great job” in the eyes of the increasingly affluent and comfortable consensus that holds sway over Britain currently. A consensus of which I venture you are a part, Doctor. And which values above all things a belief in “fairness”. The Philosopher General does what this vast demographic asks of him. However, being a man of true conscience, and carrying this burden of expectation, he allows himself none of the moral laxity that his electorate, forgive me Doctor, allow themselves.’
‘Hey, hold on a minute. I am conscientious, I want fairness.’
‘Yet it rather assumes that I wish to have this “fairness” applied to myself, when I would much rather have freedom.’
‘Freedom how?’
‘Freedom from the police, Doctor Beck. I can look after myself from there.’
‘You mean decriminalisation, not legalisation?’
‘Exactly!’
‘But you don’t want the arm of the state around your shoulders?’
‘At the moment it rather feels like an arm around the neck.’
Beck was forlorn for the future of his friend. Though given his current outlaw status, he could sympathise somewhat.
Chris continued, ‘The political class hold the idea that the only vision of “fairness” that can exist is their own vision, held at that moment, and applied to everyone through legislation. Why this idea persists is beyond me, as it must be clear to even their muddled kind that several millions of people were rather unhappy under Lenin’s or Stalin’s absolute vision of “fairness”. Yet still they believe that to leave the space beneath a single stone unregulated, then that way harm could come. Why not let people freewheel? I could go too far on this topic, please don’t push me.’