RILEY EMERGED FROM the brightly lit factory into the rare sunlit Newer York midday.
As he took his first few Perfect marching steps along the silica-diamond grey shiny streetway, he was pleased to see a few lonely white clouds scudding across the clear sky like pre-Perfect Age cotton scudding past a huge sheet of polished steel. He was even more pleased the thick grey smog, that at its worst could reduce visibility to less than ten feet, was for the first time in many days nowhere to be seen. And finally, better still, the stinging acidic rain had not fallen for over a week.
Riley was soon marching merrily along the streetway Perfectly with clockwork precision. He looked at the buildings on either side lining the streetway. They were all identical Factory Cubes constructed of dark-grey Perfect concrete. They had no windows of course. Only one building in the city had windows, the City Café. The City Library didn't have windows but at least it did have long rectangular windowpanes in its huge front door. All other city buildings, including the homes of the citizens, showed no signs of glass. The HEP stated that the reason for such a lack of windows was to aid the application of the Perfect Laws of Citizenship Privacy that were there to protect and defend the rights of citizens.
Furthermore, in an effort to improve Perfectness, 97 of the 100 well-known Perfect cities of the Earth had exactly the same buildings and street layout. The three well-known cities that were different were New Atlantis, the HEP city of New Sydney, and the School City in New Canberra. But the city in Riley's dream was altogether a different affair. It portrayed a city that was incredibly different from any Perfect Age city. A completely alien-looking city. Its buildings were each and every one unique and each and every one festooned with glass windows. A city like the sky above that, if made public would have to be deemed a case of Perfect unPerfectness. If such a city were real, as Inspector Clark had claimed, that would mean there were actually 101 cities on the Earth. Such an unPerfect number.
The sun glinted on top of Riley's bald head. However, the strands of his metallic aluminium-based woven grey boiler suit did not reflect the bright sunlight, thus allowing him to merge into the bright greyness that was today's Newer York.
The streetway was Perfectly level and if it was not for the side drains it would flood in minutes during a typical acid rain storm.
There was not a lot of flora to be seen, but what little there was, consisted of the short spiky white grass, the odd straggly tree here and there with their withered grey leaves, and the cacti plants in their drab brown, white, black and grey colours. There certainly was no such thing as any flora having the colour green attached to it. Just like every other place on the Earth—except, of course, if Riley's dream represented a reality. The city in his dream surrounded by its Robot Park was a healthy, vibrant mass of green. The City of London. The global capital city of the robots in the pre-Perfect Age.
Riley turned around a right-angled corner of the streetway and found himself marching past a rectangular forecourt consisting of huge rectangular dusty looking light-grey flagstones that fronted the Meeting Building. The Meeting Building was significantly larger than any other building in the city, a huge cylindrical building with polished stainless steel walls rising up to the iron sky, dazzling beneath the blazing sun.
The Meeting Building could accommodate the entire population of the city, as could identical Meeting Buildings in the other 99 of Earth's Perfect cities. And although it was open to daily public citizen visits, once a year a loud blaring siren would whoop continually in a two and a half minute stream of short steady tones called the Perfect Grey Warning and the city's citizens would ceremoniously fill it. It was a ritual that celebrated the Victory of the Robot War. This calling siren would be sounded at a random time, day or night, on any day of the year. This was the one time when loud noise was accepted as Perfectly unPerfectly acceptable. From the moment the siren sounded the city's citizens, HEP and non-HEP, had no more than fifteen minutes to get themselves into the Meeting Building and find their assigned standing positions. The HEP will reward failure of any citizen to meet the deadline with a visit to a Remote Correction Asylum.
But the Meeting Building also acted as a humongous cylindrical plinth upon which the giant figures of a HEP male and female sculptured from industrial navy-blue diamond, stood triumphantly on a mound of twisted stainless steel broken chunky mechanical robots (with exposed ball and socket joints). The two symbolic figures of humanity had their right fists raised victoriously high up to the sky. The Victory of the Metal Monstrosity Monument atop the building was a perpetual reminder of humanity's victory over the robots in the Robot War. Riley knew that the mechanical robots depicted in the sculpture were rare soldier class robots. The vast majority of intelligent robots were so human-like that apparently it was only from their behaviour that you could guess whether they were robots or not.
Riley was fascinated by seeing the actual physical representation of robots even if it was as a twisted and broken pile. This was the only place such a physical representation could be seen. In every other case, it was unlawful to show any representation of the robots. Riley looked up at the monument...but eventually the sharp blinding reflections of the blazing sun from the polished stainless steel and diamond surfaces forced him to lower his streaming copper eyes and look down at his well-polished continuously marching black high-strength polymer boots.
Just then, a HEP aircar whizzed overhead with its distinct hum. He did his best to ignore it. However, when it turned about and swept back towards him, hovering only 250 feet above his head he began to worry that he was being watched.
Perhaps it's time to admit to myself that I am not paranoid and that the HEP really are out to get me. Better keep the pretence of my Perfect marching going... I suppose there's always the sliver of a chance of hope—even for the deluded.
Riley's copper coloured eyes looked about furtively for signs of loitering HEP officers...
He couldn't see any.
But then he saw an unusual sight that caused him to grind his Perfect march to a halt. He realised why the aircar might be hovering in his vicinity. And, thankfully, it probably had nothing to do with him. His sliver of a chance of hope had miraculously materialised. Because marching out of the Meeting Building in Perfect time was a female HEP teacher leading a two-by-two stream of ten-year-old schoolgirls.
Riley's eyes widened in shock. He had never in his whole life seen a girl before, unless you counted the strange unPerfect girl depicted in the unusual painting he saw at the conclusion of his recurring dream. That girl in the painting didn't look anything like a human should look and was probably a surreal interpretation of a girl. He doubted that the girl was an example of a pre-Perfect Age human girl. However, as he thought the strange creatures in the same painting and other paintings he saw were representations of pre-Perfect Age animals, he did not dismiss the possibility that the unPerfect girl might somehow be a representation of a pre-Perfect Age girl.
Riley stared with flabbergasted curiosity at the group of twenty-four marching girls. They were grey-skinned and looked neat and tidy in their bright-pink boiler suits. They were like half-sized versions of his wife, twenty-four bald-headed miniature humans marching beneath the midday sun. For some obscure reason he found their appearance quite amusing and had to stifle a high-pitched laugh.
Quickly, he bundled his way to a nearby bench on the light-grey sandstone flagstones of the forecourt that faced the Meeting Building, as he didn't want the teacher and girls marching past him as they might be going to go in the same direction as him. Their Perfect marching was a great deal faster than his. And that was because they were marching in the footsteps of their marching HEP teacher, and members of the HEP always marched faster than non-HEP citizens.
"Ignore that man," ordered the teacher in her navy-blue coloured boiler suit with its HEP logo on the left-hand breast pocket. She gave Riley a suspicious glance as she marched passed his bench. The pupils obediently followed in her wake ignoring Riley with their eyes directed straight ahead of them. As they began filing past him, he noticed they were, as one would expect, all exactly the same height, and it was impossible for him to tell them apart as they had the same determined expression on their faces.
But then a very unusually unPerfect act occurred.
One of the girls from the last of the twelve pairings broke rank from the march and dumped herself on the bench next to him!
This sort of behaviour was totally unexpected and Riley would not have thought it possible, certainly no boy would even imagine doing such an unPerfect act. To Riley, it seemed positively illegal. He could feel her staring at him with a cheeky look, but he refused to return the stare. But then out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something on her forehead that changed his mind, and it shocked him to the core. The girl was a Red Dot!
He found himself staring at her forehead.
He marvelled at the unPerfect perfectly shaped red dot smack bang in the middle of her forehead, where the red dots always manifested themselves. He forgot that children who had red dots could behave in the most outrageous, violent and uncooperative of ways. In his school, there were rumours that boys with red dots had caused acts of rudeness and even bullied other boys by calling them names. They were always removed from the regular school when they exhibited such poor behaviour. However, strangely enough, they always graduated from school and were assigned to work for the HEP.
It was taboo to mention the Red Dot in any social way as it was deemed another case in the Perfectly unPerfect category. It also proved to humanity that they had the humility to accept the Perfectly unPerfect.
"Mister man?" said the Red Dot girl, prodding Riley firmly in his rib cage. Riley could not believe the girl had spoken directly to him, but for her to actually touch him...! What a liberty!
Riley completely ignored her, but he was curious as to what she wanted.
"Hey," she said angrily, "I'm talking to you!" She jabbed him again with her finger, on his shoulder this time.
Riley didn't say anything and kept quiet.
"Look, I know you're listening. Look at me, you imbecile!"
Riley shook visibly at such rude language but found himself turning his head to look at the girl. If he didn't, he feared there was no way of telling what she might say next to get his attention, and he wasn't sure if he would be able to come to terms with it. This girl was worse than Inspector Clark. What she lacked in subtlety she made up for in cheekiness and straightforwardness.
When he saw the expressive look on her face, he was taken aback because it reminded him of the cheeky expression on the face of the strange-looking unPerfect girl's image he had seen many times in the painting, the gold-framed painting that haunted his recurring dream. Was this Red Dot girl some sort of genetic throwback? How could she have been allowed to mature as a foetus? He had never seen a female adult Red Dot, nor heard of any female of the Perfect Age ever having been a Red Dot. It was rare in men. But he knew one. Moreover, the one he knew was probably his best friend. A guy called Alex Harper who worked as a librarian in the City Library. He was ex-HEP but hated the HEP with more vehemence than any non-HEP citizen he knew or had ever known.
"I know what you're thinking, mister man," said the girl.
Riley said nothing.
"You're thinking that all the buildings in the Perfect Age cities are boring. Boring, boring, boring."
Riley raised his silver thin-haired eyebrows.
"Yeah, I knew it. I could see it in your tormented copper coloured eyes. You're just like me, mister man."
Riley couldn't believe the girl's preposterous claim.
But then the girl proved him wrong.
"You've seen a city with buildings so splendiferous that they make our boring old Perfectly shaped identical buildings look like a punishment of architecture. Good words I used there, weren't they, 'splendiferous' and 'architecture'. I'm top of my class at English, mister man. 'Punishment of architecture' wasn't too bad a phrase either."
Riley was absolutely dumbfounded at what the girl had accused him of, and didn't even register her boasts of her clever implementation of the English language. She had already outdone Inspector Clark. Riley had to say something.
"What city?"
"The one in our dream, mister man," said the girl simply, and devastatingly. "There's no point denying it. You're just like me. The victim of a recurring dream. A dream that shows the dreamer how to find the whereabouts of the Last Robot in her City of London hiding place! Got your attention now, haven't I? You know I'm telling you the truth, because you can sense that I'm a dreamer too."
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I hope you enjoyed this Chapter. I welcome any votes, comments or constructive criticisms (style, spelling, grammar and punctuation errors).
T. J. P. CAMPBELL.