The Doomsday Code

Liam rubbed his head, still thudding with a dull ache. ‘So, when have you come from?’

He laughed a little sadly. ‘The end of times … I suppose.’

‘The end? But when?’

Locke said nothing. Outside the hut, there was a growing clamour of voices.

‘What do you mean by the end, Mr Locke?’

Locke waved the question away. ‘Maybe I’ll explain later. For now, though, I better tell that crowd of barbarians outside that there’ll be no Norman nobles beheaded today.’

‘You’re not going to kill me?’

‘Depends if you get in the way or not.’ He splayed his hands. ‘My advice? Don’t get in the way.’

‘Why? What’re you up to? Why did you come back here?’

He smiled again. ‘I came back to find out about something. Originally. But my plans have changed somewhat.’ He got up off his stool. ‘Be a good man and stay here … and don’t try and run or I’ll set Rex on you.’

The hooded figure stirred at mention of the name.

‘Is that a — a support unit?’

Locke clearly didn’t know what he meant by that.

‘A … clone,’ Liam added, unsure whether Locke was familiar with that term either.

‘A gen-engineered product? Good God, no. They’re far too expensive and far too unreliable. No, this is something altogether more practical. Do you want to see?’ Locke asked with a glint in his eye.

‘Errr … all right.’

He reached over and with a theatrical flourish he tugged the hood down to reveal a dented and rusted metal skull. Metal, that is, down to where the bridge of the nose would be on a human skull. From that point downwards, a synthetic skin cover descended, starting as a scorched and partially melted, jagged edge and becoming a waxy plastic-looking version of a nose, mouth, cheeks and jaw — an almost convincing facsimile of the lower half of a human face.

‘The people that sent me back … well,’ he sighed, ‘in the year I come from, we were lucky to get our hands on this model.’ He rapped the metal skull on the top, and the robot stirred with a soft whir of servo-motors. ‘Army surplus combat cyborg. Insurgency model with a synthetic plastene skin sheath … or at least what’s left of it. Used in the last Oil War. He’s not a particularly pretty boy but he’s as tough as a tank.’

‘Those people outside? They follow him … they seem to — ?’

‘Worship him?’ Locke shrugged. ‘Yes … “worship”. I think that about sums them up. The simple fools think of Rex as some sort of a God-sent instrument of justice sent down to lead them in a war against their Norman overlords. They’ll do anything he tells them.’

‘You mean, anything you tell them?’

He laughed. ‘Indeed. Rex is programmed to take my verbal commands only. They think “The Hood” is leading them. And that works just fine for my purposes.’

‘And what’s that, Mr Locke?’

He tapped his nose. ‘We’ll talk later.’ He got up from his stool and stooped down to exit the small hut. Liam could hear the crowd outside and Locke’s voice explaining something about the ‘sheriff being a useful hostage’.

Liam turned to look at the robot’s face. Half human, half rusting metal dappled with peeling army-green paint. And two small and faint pin-points of blue light: LEDs that glowed dully, just like the power-up indicator on the displacement machine back home in 2001.

Liam nodded gingerly and waved. ‘Uh … so, errr … hello.’

It continued to stare at him, motionless and silent.

CHAPTER 54

1194, Nottingham Castle

Bob surveyed the recruits as they trained, standing in the middle of several dozen of them, paired and sparring with wooden baton swords and wicker shields. The sun had climbed high enough now that it shone down into the castle’s main bailey, making the men perspire under the weight of their chain mail.

He observed their leaden and clumsy swordplay and evaluated their abilities as individual combat units.

[Evaluation: combat efficiency — insufficient]

There was no numerative score he could sensibly apply to them yet. They were that bad. Barely better than malnourished old men and young boys, struggling to remain standing under the weight of their armour, let alone able to sustain effective melee combat with properly weighted swords and heavy iron shields.

However, merely having columns of men tramping around the Nottingham countryside wearing the royal burgundy tunic sporting three amber lions and managing to approximate the look of soldiers seemed to have had the effect that Liam was after. The banditry, the raids, the lawlessness had receded from the town and the surrounding farming villages and disappeared deep into the woods.

Bob’s AI took a moment to shuffle through a high-level menu of mission objectives. The current primary goal of subverting a peasant uprising originating from Nottingham appeared to have been met. But until he received a tachyon signal from the field office confirming that history had realigned itself, it remained a mission goal yet to be struck off the list.

Liam O’Connor seemed content to leave the majority of the logistics of running the castle, leading the garrison and overseeing the feeding of the people of Nottingham to him. The fleshy part of Bob’s mind seemed to want to communicate something to him about that. An emotion of some sort. He tried to identify it, tried to find a human label for it, and finally came up with one.

Pride?

His silicon mind stepped in and decided to phrase that more concisely.

[Analysis: mission achievement verification bonus]

He tried out one of his library of smiles — one of the smaller ones that looked less like a horse flashing its gums. It matched that small buzz of satisfaction he was feeling. He decided the smile worked and matched this mild emotion he was currently experiencing. He labelled it: [Proud-Smile-001].

A voice calling down from the gatehouse disturbed his musing. He looked across at the gatehouse’s entrance archway to see a wounded man being helped through the gates by several others.

‘You may now rest,’ he instructed the drilling recruits, and stepped across the courtyard towards the new arrivals.

Drawing closer, he could see the burgundy and amber colours on the man and recognized the face as one of the dozen men assigned to escort Liam to Kirklees Priory. He was aware that Liam was a day late but had assumed he had decided to stay with Cabot a second night. Bob’s pace quickened until he stood beside the man being lowered gently to the ground by several men from the town.

‘Sire,’ said one of them, ‘we found ’im collapsed in the marketplace.’

Bob knelt down and inspected him. Blood soaked half his tunic, turning it almost black.

‘He will not survive for very long. He has lost too much blood.’

The soldier was one of the first intake of recruits; Bob retrieved the man’s name from his database. ‘Henry Gardiner, you must tell me what has happened.’

The man looked up at him. ‘Sire … sire … they ambushed … us! They …’ He coughed, spluttering a dark spray of blood down his chest. ‘A … a … drink … please.’

Bob called for one of the water-bearers and then carefully helped the man to sip a ladle of water.

‘Continue when ready,’ he said as the man finished and let the ladle go.

‘Ambushed us … yesterday. The Hood’s men …’ he panted in short rattling breaths. ‘The sheriff …’

‘What has happened to the sheriff?’

‘Took … took him …’

‘He is alive?’

Henry Gardiner appeared to be waning fast, his eyelids fluttering, his face pinching from the pain.