android French maid, but this was merely a large rounded-off box, a simplistic ‘face’ — two dots for eyes and a smiling curve of a mouth — picked out by glowing lights on its front. Rotating brushes whirled under its dodgem-like skirt, leaving a damp trail on the floor in its wake. It slowly hummed towards him. When it was a metre away, it stopped. A voice came from the machine, speaking in Japanese with a subservient tone. He guessed that it was asking him to get out of its way.
Eddie stepped back. The robot set off again, heading for the service door. He followed. This would be easier than he’d expected—
The robot stopped once more. Its sensors apparently scanned in all directions. He retreated a step. It resumed, the hatch sliding open as it approached. There was barely an inch of clearance on all sides. He would have to wait for it to get all the way through before he could enter…
The door snapped shut the moment it was inside.
‘Buggeration and fuckery!’ Eddie growled. He poked at the hatch, but it was almost flush with the wall, giving him nothing to grip. And attempting to force it open would definitely attract attention. He would have to find another robot and try again. Trying to look purposeful, he headed down one of the corridors.
It didn’t take long for him to spot a tell-tale polished trail on the floor. He followed it, quickly catching up with another machine. It was heading away from the hatch, though; no telling how long it might take to do its rounds. If he delayed too long, Stikes might leave. How could he force it to speed things up?
The rear of the robot, he noticed, had a large flap on its top and a vertical row of little blue LEDs, the uppermost one of which was unlit. Above them was the symbol of a stylised wave. An indicator of how much water the automated cleaner had in its tank…
‘Domo arigato, Mr Roboto,’ he said as he strode up to the machine, which halted. He lifted the flap to find a dustbin-sized water tank, about three-quarters full. The robot spoke, but he ignored it, circling to look for controls. There was a small panel of touch-sensitive buttons on one side. One of them, he guessed from the symbol, was its main power switch.
A plan was forming, but he needed somewhere private to carry it out. He looked at the doors along the corridor. One was a restroom. Perfect.
He retreated, letting the robot continue along its route until it was level with the restroom door — then caught up and, as it asked him to move, jabbed at the power button. The machine fell silent, its lights going out. Glancing about to make sure nobody was coming, he grabbed it and, with considerable effort, pushed it to the door. ‘Can’t believe I’m mugging R2-D2,’ he muttered as he manhandled it into the room.
The bathroom was large and had a tiled floor, both of these facts being good; it would give him space to work, and the people on the level below wouldn’t be immediately alerted by gallons of water coming through the ceiling. He strained to tip the robot on its side. The flap burst open as it thumped down, water sluicing out. He pulled the now considerably lighter machine back upright and checked that the corridor was still clear before hauling it outside.
Eddie clambered into the empty tank. He leaned over the side and pushed the power button again, then curled himself into a ball in the confined space and lowered the lid.
Nothing happened for several seconds. He was starting to worry that he had damaged the machine when it completed its self-test routine and abruptly turned to head back the way it had come. As he’d hoped, the robot had registered that its water supply was drained — and was going for a refill.
He raised his head, pushing the lid up just enough to risk a peek. Someone walked past, but far enough away not to trip the machine’s sensors — the office workers were clearly so used to the robots that they ignored them.
A turn, and the machine rolled towards the service door. Eddie hunched down again and waited. He heard the hatch open. The robot started through it, hesitated as if belatedly becoming aware of the stowaway…
Then went through. The hatch closed. Eddie looked out again, but found only darkness. Robots didn’t need light to see. He had a small torch in one pocket, but there wasn’t enough room for him to fumble it out. All he could do was go along for the ride until he reached the forty-fourth floor’s maintenance hub — and hope he could climb out before the water tank was refilled.
He heard the rumble of other machinery over the robot’s electric whine. It made its way through the dark, then bumped over a threshold. A pause, then Eddie felt a different kind of movement. He was in an elevator, going up.
The ascent soon stopped and the robot reversed out of the elevator on a new floor. Eddie lifted the lid. This time there was light, even if it was only dim. Other robots trundled between various machines, having their supplies of cleaning fluids refreshed and wastes flushed away before returning to the elevator and being taken to a new floor to continue their endless drudgery.
He climbed out and made his way to an area bounded by yellow lines: a safe path through the hardware for maintenance workers. Once happy that he wasn’t about to be decapitated by some swinging mechanical arm, Eddie looked around. He was in the skyscraper’s central core, so couldn’t be far from the lift shafts. The metallic rumble of a high-speed elevator car came from nearby. He followed the path towards the sound and opened a door — to find himself at the edge of a man-made precipice.
‘Shafted,’ he said, peering at the vertiginous drop beyond the safety railing. A bank of eight elevator shafts descended into darkness, the saucer-sized maintenance lights between the doors across the rectilinear crevasse shrinking to pinpricks far below.
The hiss of fast-moving cables and a rising rush of displaced air prompted him to move back from the edge as a car rocketed up the shaft, stopping a few floors above. Eddie looked up. He was six levels from the fiftieth floor, but this block of elevators only went as high as the forty-ninth. He needed one that went all the way…
A short distance along the narrow walkway, he found a guide in the form of a floor diagram on an electrical switchbox. The text was Japanese, but the numbers were self-explanatory. There were two main banks of elevators, eight shafts in each — and another two shafts set apart from the rest. Number one, he assumed, was Takashi’s private lift, making the other the maintenance access to what he took to be a machine floor above the penthouse. He got his bearings and set out for the latter.
This shaft turned out to be narrower than the others. The car, out of sight somewhere below, would hold three or four people at most. The cables were stationary, which was a relief — he could use the girders forming the shaft’s framework to climb up the remaining six floors. Or, a thought striking him,
Seven floors it was, then. He carefully clambered over the guardrail and edged across a girder until he reached one of the vertical struts, then started his ascent. It took less than half a minute to reach the next floor. Six to go. The next stage took the same amount of time, the third a little longer as his body began to feel the strain. It wasn’t the climb itself that was wearing, but the effort of maintaining a grip on the featureless steel. Only the pressure of his hands and feet kept him from a very long plunge.
Three floors to go, and he paused to let the aching in his muscles fade. He took out the torch and shone it upwards. There were the doors to the penthouse… which had extra wiring around them. Alarms. Going the extra floor to the machine level was the right decision.
He set off again. Grip the strut, push his feet against it for support, bring up his hands one at a time, hold tight, raise his feet, repeat. The cramp in his hands returned—
An echoing metallic
The elevator was rising.
Shit! He looked down, seeing the tiny pinprick lights going out one by one as the car blotted them out. It was maybe twenty floors below him — and picking up speed.
He was halfway between levels. There was no way he could climb up to the next before it reached him, but if he dropped back down, the slightest mistake would pitch him down the shaft.
No choice. He swung sideways, let go, fell—
The drop was about eight feet, on to unyielding, narrow steel. Even bending his legs to absorb the impact, Eddie still felt pain slam up through his feet into his knees and hips. He wobbled, grabbing at the strut as he pivoted to push himself back against the wall…
