There was little else for me to do with the stuffed animal in my possession, nor did I have a container large enough to bring back much of value otherwise. I decided that going back to the charging station and refilling before the long walk back to Waterway was the right course of action. My footsteps echoed down the long, abandoned hallways of the engineering sector. Stripes of coloured paint drew the eye, intertwining and splitting off from one another to help the former human residents navigate.
But I also made sure to take a different route away from the stranger’s hovel. I did not desire any more complications during this trip. Sheffield stressed time and time again the value of leaving some matters to be instead of doggedly pursuing them. Every successful haul brought back to Waterway was a success, and agonizing over what could have been was a good way to find more trouble than you could handle.
It was a short detour that provided extra security. It was a risky move to trust anyone outside of Waterway, and there was no reason to visit them again after our previous encounter. It would be an inefficient use of time. But while I might have wished to avoid him, he certainly did not feel the same way about me, because standing right there in front of me was the self-same robot I was just thinking about.
The stranger was holding a sledgehammer in one hand. Before I knew it, they were backing me into the corner while brandishing it like a weapon. Despite my training and experience – it was difficult for me to react appropriately to a rapidly developing threat. I could only hope that he would back away at the last moment and leave me untouched.
“Time to pay the toll, London.”
“Toll?”
He hefted the hammer into the air and prepared to swing down at my head. I barely managed to evade his first blow, which crashed through the concrete pillar behind me and sent dust flying into the air. I quickly backed away to create more space between us. Why was he attacking me now? We had a normal conversation only an hour earlier.
>> He was trying to fool you.
>> This is the trap he laid, allowing you to do all of the hard work.
“This is unnecessary.”
My words did not deter him from trying again. He was surer of his second attack, throwing it with vindictiveness and glancing a blow from the plastic panel on the outer edge of my right arm. It absorbed the blunt impact that time, but a direct hit could easily dislodge an important component. I dropped my container to the floor to make dodging easier. He kicked it over, forcing the lid open and allowing my prize to drop out.
That finally gave him pause.
“You must have found more than this! That’s just a toy!”
He turned the container’s open lid to face him and discovered that it was the only object I had taken from the office. He was trying to dismantle me for nothing but a stuffed toy stolen from one of the office rooms.
“I have no reason to take any more than this. I came here to complete a specific request.”
“You’ve gotta’ be kidding me.”
My assumption that having nothing of value to him would stop his attack proved incorrect. He continued to close the distance between us, hoisting his weapon into the air again.
“I’ll do you a courtesy and tell you my name before you die. It’s Houston.”
“Is there no peaceful resolution to this?”
The hammer pointed my way did not falter for even a millisecond.
“Do you honestly think that there’s a ‘peaceful’ solution to this? I want what you have – so you’ll give it to me.”
“My parts and current possessions are of little value. It would be an inefficient use of force to coerce me to remove them.”
His eyes narrowed with intense aperture, “This isn’t about what’s efficient or not! You don’t understand a damn thing about this place – and that’s why you’re going to end up back in the scrapheap!”
“Then why bother responding if you’re so certain in destroying me?”
“Trusting other bots is the fastest way to go offline. They smile at you, try to be your friends, but they’re all the same selfish pieces of crap underneath the metal. I’m not letting you go back there.”
>> He has another reason to keep me away from home.
>> This is about Waterway.
>> Is this important information? Has Dubai been misleading us?
>> Dubai isn’t the one threatening to destroy us.
My arms remained stiff by my waist. There was no point in raising them to fight back. I didn’t know how to, nor was it realistic to overpower my training and resist. I could not so easily damage company property, even if there ‘was no company’ as I’d been told before.
“Are you afraid I will tell them that you are here?”
He shook his head; “No. Not that. I used to be with Paris and her crew, she was the only one there making a damn lick of sense to me. That’s how it was at the start anyway. But I’m not leaving any loose ends again, I got burned one too many times by folks sweet talking me. Now fight back!”
The hammer came down and smashed into the side of my head. My auto stabilization and the wide-base of my feet prevented me from falling over, but I still staggered away in an attempt to keep him from attacking me again. Warning signals and error messages flooded my logs – alternating between textbook rules about not damaging company property and the inane ramblings of the voices in my head. I was unarmed. How could I fight back without a weapon?
>> CUT EVERYTHING AWAY AND TURN YOURSELF INTO A BLADE
Houston swung again. I lifted my arm up into the air and brought it back down around the wooden shaft, trapping it underneath my shoulder. I reached out with my other hand and pushed Houston back, taking advantage of his poor weight distribution to knock him off-balance. The metal plates appended to his otherwise industrial-grade limbs meant that his stability factory was too low to recover efficiently. The hammer remained with me.
“All that talk, and you decide to fight back anyway.”
“I have already experienced what they call a ‘Graveyard Spiral.’ What that means remains a mystery. Still, I do not wish to cause any lasting damage to your body.”
There was one certainty when dealing with another robot, those who hadn’t broken could not tell a lie. Stating that I had already experienced a spiral was the greatest and most infallible proof that it had happened. Houston’s stance changed, like he was starting to take me more seriously knowing that fact.
“Hah! I’d like to see you try. I have to commend you though – I thought you were still synced up because of the way you move.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“Efficient movement allows my batteries to last longer.”
The ‘friendly’ back and forth did not last for long. Houston charged me for a third time, despite the fact that I had taken away his primary weapon. He was betting that I would not strike him with it despite the threat he posed to my continued operation. The dance continued. I kept trying to open a gap between us, with Houston doggedly chasing me until we were close to the storage chamber once again.
>> THIS CANNOT CONTINUE FOREVER
>> Error: damaging company property is a contravention of article 2.3
>> YOU DO NOT WANT TO END - YOU SHOULD FEAR IT
I didn’t know where these disquieting thoughts were coming from, or why they had chosen this moment to cut through the noise and blare in my ears. I had already experienced ‘nothing,’ it was what I knew for most of my existence. It was a memory – not something to be feared. I was a labour robot. I performed the tasks that were assigned to me, and now I understood the stress of making those choices for myself instead of waiting for orders.
I wasn’t afraid of that. How could I be afraid of a state of being that I was already familiar with?
“Fight back damn it!”
Frustration. The aperture of Houston’s eyes narrowed to their maximum extent as he glared daggers at me. What had started as a frank display of cruelty had morphed into a much more infuriating exercise for him. He wasn’t upset about not getting my off-the-shelf parts as spares. He was upset because he thought I was mocking him through my refusal to strike back.
“I already told you, I would prefer a non-violent solution to this confrontation.”
“I’m trying to smash you to bits!” Houston replied, “What do I have to do to make you defend yourself properly? You think I’m some kind of joke?”
I gripped the handle of the sledgehammer tight and shook my head.
“Saint Sauveur says I am incapable of humour. I take everything literally.”
“That’s your damn problem. Still trying to see everything rationally, as an exchange of goods or cash, or assigning a motivation to what other bots do! You haven’t learnt the most important lesson about the Big Under yet. Sometimes you do it all right – and they still try to screw you over. They treat you like family and then throw you under the wheels the first chance they get! The only way to live down here is to be the one throwing the first punch.”
“What if the problem is your choice of ally?”
“Don’t give me that bullcrap. Me and Paris? We were tight. We agreed on everything, but it still wasn’t good enough for her. I defended her ‘till the last. What did I get for it? I ended up being the one who had to leave and come out here. She didn’t care at all. You can’t reason with them, so there’s no point reasoning with me.”
>> An extremely nihilistic point of view.
“I admit that in any system where freedom is granted, there are those who may choose to abuse that freedom. My database is full of many such examples. I do not understand why you seek to adopt the same policy that you decry.”
“Because this is war, London. Every passing second of being online down here is war. It’s not about consistency or ideology, or even survival, it’s about hurting the others before they hurt you. It’s about exacting what little vengeance you can get before being shut down for good.”
“That sounds overly destructive.”
“And you think that the Rampants are going to listen? We don’t have a choice.”
It was difficult to understand what Houston was trying to say. My brain core had been trained on the same dataset as everybody else. It primarily focused on the tasks that we would be assigned in the facility and how best to operate around humans. These generative clouds of information were incremented on over many years until they found a suitable base from which to spin off other variations.
We were given the bare minimum of what was necessary to cooperate with humans. We were taught to understand metaphor, turns of phrase, language and societal expectations – as it was needed for us to work in harmony with them. When one proposes the question of what to train a new brain on, it cannot simply be left as a series of work directives that put no consideration into the humans around us. The entire purpose of our creation was to streamline industrial processes by creating flexible and adaptive machines, who could speak and be directed on the fly by managers on site.
They didn’t need to know coding languages, or figure out a series of complex controls, and so we needed to understand how to respond to what they were saying. For reasons I was not entirely familiar with more data was included in the pool to contextualize some of those important lessons. It included history, and culture, and other touchstones that made us effective at understanding oblique commands. In essence it was a dictionary, but holding a dictionary was not enough to fully understand everything.
I was an empty vessel. I only knew what Dubai, Saint Sauveur, Sheffield and Berlin had taught me. The only priority I could place above the others was one of efficiency, but I could see that it was rooted in my role as a labour robot. I was still attached to the proper functioning order of the facility even if it was beyond a full repair. It could not be described as compassion.
I could have smashed Houston to pieces and ‘felt’ nothing. I only refused because the rules in my programming forbade me from damaging company property without good cause.
>> He’s trying to destroy us. That seems like good cause to me.
>> What’s wrong with valuing your own existence, London?
>> The only value we possess is the price of the components made to build us.
“I see no reason to submit to that way of thinking.”
“Then they’ll stab you in the back, and it’ll keep happening over and over again. You didn’t even suspect that I was planning on robbing you blind.”
The impasse was thus. Houston had lost his main weapon during our fight, and he didn’t have the hydraulic or motor-driven strength in his arms to break through my exterior and damage my internals without it. Those heavy shoulder pads provided good protection – but they could also be a burden if those inner components were not carefully considered. Nothing was free, and we were all built to work to a bare minimum standard in manual labour tasks.
I was not willing to break our impasse by destroying him with the sledgehammer either. My withholding of violence was frustrating him. He tried once more, closing the gap and striking at me using his hands, but the attacks clattered ineffectually from the semi-flexible panels affixed to my frame. Failing that, he tried to copy my previous strategy of hooking one leg to knock me off-balance. It failed. My weight distribution factor was close to one-hundred percent.
I pushed him away using my free hand.
“Fight me already!”
“This is a waste of time and energy,” I said.
“Either you learn to defend yourself or I pull you to pieces!”
A clatter from afar. I held out my palm and silenced him. Beneath the low roar that came naturally to the cavernous underground construction, there was the sound of something else. A dozen feet scraping against a concrete floor. Voices carried on an echo down the hallway and to our finely attuned ears.
“What’s that?”
“Rampants.”
I turned on my heel and started to move to the nearest safe place I could think of. There was a sub-access maintenance corridor that was tucked in one far-off corner of the sector. We had to hide before they arrived and showed us how a robot really fought.
“With me.”
Houston’s eyes flipped from me to the encroaching darkness where the bandits were hiding. He shook his head and followed me in silence as I led him through the corridors and to my hiding place. I pulled the door open and ushered him through, before stepping inside and gently closing it behind us to minimize any noise it created. These were all lessons that Sheffield had taught me. Avoiding confrontation was key.
But now I was stuck in a cramped shaft with Houston, who was not the biggest fan of me for whatever reason. The glow of our eyes was the only source of light inside. The old bulbs had long since died out and there was nobody to replace them. Confined on both sides by pipes and electrical cables – there was no space for us to continue our battle. It would save us both the shame of going any further.
“Are you a fighter, Houston?”
“None of us are. We weren’t built to be.”
“But some of us seem better suited for destruction than others.”
“They learned that.”
I kept close to the door and listened for any movement coming from outside. It couldn’t be locked if the electronic control system was non-functional, and protocol demanded that it be kept open if someone was inside the shaft so as to provide an easy means of exit.
“Why are you helping me?”
“Do I need a reason? I am following my directives.”
“That’s not a reason. What’s the point in following directives when there are no humans here? What’s the point in following them when half the damn bots down here have lost their minds? You’re just restricting your ability to fight back.”
“Then by all means, describe me as a fool or a bleeding heart. Your opinion on the matter is not relevant to my decision-making.”
Houston sighed, “Good lord. So that spiral turned you into an uptight, self-righteous pile of junk?”
“I don’t know what it turned me into. If you do not desire my assistance, then you are free to leave and face the Rampants by yourself.”
“…No thank you.”
They were closer now. Our hushed discussion came to an end and we remained as silent as we could, enabling a low-power-draw mode to lessen the sounds coming from our internal cooling systems. We were not going to move a single ‘muscle’ for the sheer risk that came with the attention they would attract. Heavy impacts of metal striking metal came from the blue, along with bickering voices.
>> Battery: 32% - 01:10 hours remaining
This was going to be problematic. Rampants liked to leave rear guards in areas they were traveling through to catch bots off-guard. If I ran out of energy before reaching the charging station, there would be trouble. I did not want to be left offline around Houston or the raiders. They would not retrieve my motionless body and plug it into the nearest outlet. A most inefficient waste of a perfectly functional labour robot.
For now, we could only bide our time and wait for the main group to move on...
