“It’s in pain,” she whispered, but her attention was then caught by a deformed spider, its body and legs all way too long, tip-toeing fragilely amongst the squirming mass of metal creatures.
“But what are they all doing down there?” she asked.
“I think it is someone’s idea of a joke,” Ivan said coldly. “This building houses the handicapped above ground. So where better to send all the hurt and lame machines but underneath it?”
“But that’s not funny at all.” Eva felt something cold grip her heart. The Watcher. Would he do this?
“I don’t know,” Ivan said, guessing her thoughts. “But this is not all. Look here. And here.”
He fiddled with his screwdriver again, zooming back out. Eva saw a robot feeling its way along the cave floor. Then another one. And another. A trailing crowd of orange robots, roughly humanoid, all shuffling in the same direction.
“They are searching for the next power mast,” said Ivan. “You see them, painted yellow? They are turned on in sequence according to a regular period.” Eva saw the masts, dwarf versions of old-fashioned pylons.
“Why do they move so slowly?” asked Eva.
“Look.” He zoomed in on one robot.
“What’s wrong with its eyes?” asked Eva, noticing the cloudy lenses set in the smooth orange head.
“The glass was deliberately contaminated during manufacture. That robot is almost blind. Look at this one here.”
“It seems normal. Why is it moving like that?”
“Faulty connection between the processor and the body. Its brain cannot properly control its limbs.”
The camera ran along the trailing line of orange robots, and Eva saw they had all been tampered with in some way. Their limbs would be stiff and inflexible, or one would be shorter than the other, or they would appear perfectly sound but unable to move properly. The robots shuffled and stumbled and twitched and dragged themselves along a channel in the rippled stone floor, heading for the skeletal metal shape of the yellow pylon.
“They can only hold an hour’s worth of charge,” explained Ivan. “Those that don’t make it to the pylon in time die.”
“What happens to them?”
Wordlessly, Ivan directed the view to the motionless orange body of a robot. It was slowly and inexpertly being taken apart by a group of rusty VNMs.
“But that’s horrible,” said Eva.
“I know. Look at that.”
One of the robots had now reached the pylon. Several black rubber cables hung there, a heavy male socket at the end of each. The robot unhooked the cable with its too short arms and stood, waiting.
“What’s the matter with it?” asked Eva. “Oh, I see.” The robot’s charging socket was located low down, where its navel would have been if it were human. The robot’s arms would not reach that far.
“It’s waiting for another robot to come and help it,” said Ivan.
“Is everything in that cave handicapped in some way?”
“I think so.”
Eva felt dizzy and nauseated from peering at the stream of orange figures, the glassy smoothness of the cave walls. She looked away from the screen into the yellow evening sunlit room.
“That is happening right now, somewhere beneath our feet?”
