“Let’s kick some robot ass,” says Flanagan, with an attempt at rousingness.
“It was my turn to say that,” Jamie tells him bitterly.
Flanagan sighs, wearily.
“Let’s go,” he says.
Book 6
Flanagan
Six robots stand on a hilltop and look down at the rolling green hills of Cambria and breathe in fresh tangy air. The sound of birds is shrill and lovely in the sky. The sun beats down, and the robots sweat, and feel the heat as pleasure. A two-headed push-me-pull-you stag wanders in front of them, and one of its heads flicks a curious glance at them. But the stag has no fear of humanoid creatures. Only humans are hunted on this planet.
I look around at my home planet and I feel a surge of pleasure that cannot be described. The here-ness, now-ness, mine-ness, the truth of the place overwhelm me. This is a land my people created, with centuries of hard toil and bleak dangerous existence. They died in dust storms, they were consumed in random solar flares that poured deadly radiation into every inch of the planet. They bombed the planet’s core to release its icy heart, and used its melted water to create a planet-wide system of waterways. They carefully nurtured Earth-born seeds and sperm and grew fields and orchards and meadows, and filled them with rabbits, badgers, stags, dogs, butterflies, and a whole host of other flora and fauna. And solar panels in orbit around Cambria’s sun provided limitless power to fuel this work.
I look at my fellow Doppelganger Robots. We are an imposing group. Each of us (apart from Harry) is seven foot or more in height, heavily muscled, beautiful, graceful, godlike. Alliea DR is black, with fiery eyes, and a slender waist that is dwarfed by perfect breasts and bulging thighs. Lena DR is coffee-coloured, deadly thin, with long white hair that sails in the wind. Jamie DR is shaven-bald, white, with his huge arms bare and tattooed, but despite his muscle-bound physique he moves with the grace of a leopard. Brandon is cool, lean, clad in black, with black staring eyes. And I – I am built like a gladiator.
We are all of us (apart from Harry) variations on the same theme. We are comic book wish-fulfilment fantasies made real, par for the course for Doppelganger Robots. And our style options were, frankly, limited. There was a wide stock of out-of-service DRs available to us to hack into, and we took the least garish ones.
But entertainingly, Harry DR stands a foot shorter than the rest of us, and has a beard, and fake glasses and spindly frame. He is a Boffin DR, a different fantasy – wish-fulfilment for an Earth-bound Jock who wants to experience the perverse thrill of being a weedy geek. But despite his slight physique, Harry DR has the same enhanced strength as all Doppelganger Robots. We can run faster, punch harder, and withstand more physical pain and stress than any human born.
Today, we go to war.
Lena
It’s been four hours since we escaped from the warehouse where the DR bodies were stored, and every moment has been sheer bliss. Apart from my brief visit to the planet Wild West, I’ve been in free space for over a hundred years. It’s wonderful to, once again, smell flowers and cow shit, and have a skin that changes temperature as the sun goes in and out of clouds. I feel alive.
Curiously, though, I feel disengaged from the enterprise of which I am, notionally, the leader. Flanagan defers to me constantly, but I just murmur, “Up to you.” I feel intoxicated by life and by the newness of my oh-so-perfect body. And liberated, too, by the lack of fear. If this body is destroyed, I can hack into another one. If a tooth falls out, I can will it to grow back. For the duration of my stay on this planet, I am invulnerable, immortal, self- renewing.
On my return to the Quantum Beacon, however, I face certain death; curiously, that doesn’t perturb me.
After activating the six DRs in the warehouse, we worked hard on the next stage of our – Flanagan’s – plan. The other DRs in storage were neutralised and de-brained; it will take weeks of work to restore them to working order. Then we packed a truck with missiles, guns, body armour and camera-bots. There was no security to contend with inside the warehouse because, of course, in the normal course of things only Earth computers can access the interior of such places. No one expected that the system could be breached via a conquered Quantum Beacon that allowed us to hack into the Cambrian mainframe.
We did have to fight our way out however. It was a short sharp shock experience for the four DR guards, who found themselves outgunned and totally taken by surprise. Their heads were blown off their bodies, causing immediate deactivation of the DR-Human link.
In a stolen truck, we screeched a route through the city outskirts and parked near the top of the highest hill we could find. And now, Brandon opens up the boxes and releases the camera-bots. Flanagan dials an all-sets-to- be-activated telephone number and the ringtone on every mobile phone on the planet beeps, or hums, or sings, or plays piano or guitar or orchestra. We have just phoned the entire planet. ..
And, when every human being on Cambria switches on his vidphone, he or she sees Flanagan and the rest of us standing on a hilltop, in a deliberately iconic and dangerous pose. “We are your liberators,” Flanagan says earnestly into the camera, and I feel a prickle of excitement run down my spine.
Flanagan speaks eloquently. But my mind is not on his mission, or his passion, or his eloquence. I am obsessed by the heat on my brow, the smells in my nostrils, and my ultimate sense of power. I have the body I always dreamed of, the body of a warrior-woman-queen-goddess. There’s only so much you can do with flesh and a human genetic heritage; I always feel my real body is a pale imitation of the dream which inspires it.
Now I inhabit my own dream.
And in the background of my self-loving, self-glorifying hymn to myself, I dimly register Flanagan’s words:
“I am one of you. A citizen of this planet. This is a revolution. We will throw off our shackles. We will be free. All you have to do is…”
“ Do nothing. Whether you are on the surface, or dwelling in your underground cavern, stop what you are doing, and focus on the doing of nothing. Sit down, if you can. Eat, if you have food, but chew silently. Do not speak, do not listen if a DR speaks to you. Do not obey instructions from a DR. If you are shot and lie bleeding and dying on the ground, do not whimper or groan. Die silently, die like a human, die proud.
“This is our only weapon. We withdraw our servitude. We refuse to be slaves. We will die, rather than be slaves. Keep your eyes on this screen. Die proud.”
Yeah, what a really great plan. Everyone dies.
Harry
This is so humiliating. Everyone else has a great bod, and I’m stuck in this fucking geek physique. I have pimples. My knees knock. I have a nervous twitch.
This is the battle of a lifetime, and it’s being filmed. They’ll be releasing DVs of this for centuries to come. And I look like a prat. And I’ve got a nervous twitch!
I want to growl with rage, but I can’t even do that. It comes out as… nerdy whine.
Arrrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaagh!
