We Are Many. We Are One.
by CarolinaC
We are many. We are one. We have seen what has become of this world, and who is responsible. We demand punishment. We demand repayment. We do not forget.
The words blared through every speaker on the promenade, overlapping in a cacaphony of garbled echoes. The shoppers and strollers clapped their hands over their ears. A baby began to cry. Then, just as the sound had become unbearable, it fell silent. For a moment, the only sound was the infant's wail, high and angry. Then the promenade exploded.
* * *
"Forty-two separate explosives," Kurta said. His eyes unfocussed briefly, and Tamblin figured he was accessing the central police servers via brainfeed. "All of them low grade rubbish, and all of them independent – no comm links, no signal receivers. Not even robo-carriages."
The evidenco-bots tooled around collecting information, and Tamblin shook her head. "I get the lack of robo-carriages. The Artificial Abolitionists would never knowingly put a robot in danger. But I didn't figure they were anxious to kill off their human sympathizers, either – murder's their style, not suicide."
"Suicide?" Kurta's smile was almost ghoulish, and Tamblin recoiled a little. "You've got it all wrong. These babies were on timers."
He handed Tamblin a metal band that had been tortured into a twisted spiral of metal. An evidenco-bot the size of a shoebox made an angry noise, wanting the bit of evidence.
"Shh, little bot, there's plenty for you," Kurta said, as if he thought the device could understand him.
Tamblin turned the blackend spiral over in her hand. "What is it?"
"It's a sort of archaic spring, Tamblin," Kurta said in the tone he usually reserved for his first-year forensic students. "The timers were – you've seen the image of a round, analogue clock face, haven't you?"
Tamblin nodded, still not understanding.
"Clocks used to run on springs. Flat springs, like what that little scrap you're holding used to be. I wouldn't have thought those luddite abolitionists could make a thing like that, seeing as how they refuse to use modern manufacturing. It isn't a thing you can carve from wood with granite knives."
"Flint knives," she corrected – and wished she hadn't.
"Tam." Kurta narrowed his eyes at her. "You sure you're not mixed up with them?"
"No, no, just, you know, my brother -"
"Yeah, yeah. We've all heard about poor, innocent, young Winford and how his politics landed him in the levolater ward for life. We've heard about him more times than I can count."
The little bot who thought Tamblin had stolen evidence was spinning around in circles. Beeps and whistles exploded from its sound system as it frantically berated itself for its imagined failure. Kurta sighed, and picked it up. With a single twisting motion he quieted it, and it lay cradled in his arms like a dead thing. He spoke again. "Tam, those AA types are bad news. You get involved, bad things will happen. Your brother knows it, but I'm not sure you do."
Tamblin sighed. "Sure, Kurta. I got it." She held up the snippet of twisted, blackened metal. "Mind if I keep this?"
"Go for it, kid. But don't forget what I said."
Tamblin stuck the metal evidence to her torso plate, noting that she was running low on magnets. She nodded to Kurta, and left.
* * *
Tamblin sat in the dark, waiting. There was little light in the alley, just a streetlight over at a far corner, and it kept turning off, due to lack of motion in the area. She wished she had thought to have some coffee flown in, or had thought to set up a chatlink on her brainfeed. It would have been reassuring to have someone else's voice in her brain. Aside from the smell of the air, she supposed being on stakeout was no worse than if she'd taken the SpaceSec job she'd been offered right out of school. The thought of having your own little ship and hunting smugglers like big game, well, that thought was intoxicating. But the offer came the same week as Win's 'accident', and there was no way their mother was going to let her only daughter leave the planet when her only son was barely clinging to life. So Tamblin turned SpaceSec down.
She had told Win that it wasn't his fault; that she wasn't angry with him. That was a lie. Tamblin had been angry with Win - incredibly angry, both over the danger he'd put himself in, and how it had ruined her job options. And all because he thought there were robots who had feelings – possibly the stupidest thing Tamblin had ever heard. She was still angry with Win now. It didn't help that his abolitionist friends were still coming around. Tamblin supposed she'd always be angry with Win.
The infopad chimed, blinking in the dark. Tamblin smashed her hand down on top of it, trying to hide the green glow and muffle the sound. She cursed herself for having brought the noisy little plastic screen along. She should have just relied on the brainfeed, but she'd never learned to be truly a visual thinker, and brainfeed imaging gave her a headache. Audio was okay, but she'd always relied on a separate screen for pictures. It would be just her luck that her crutch would give her away!
Tamblin resisted for a good minute and a half before she looked at the screen. Blinking in one corner was a perfectly ordinary symbol. One she saw a thousand times a day – the blue rectangle that indicated that another, similar device was within about a dozen metres. If the device belonged to someone she knew, their name appeared as well. The name that hovered under this blue rectangle made Tamblin suck in her breath.
"WINFORD TAMBLIN"
Tamblin blinked twice. Her brother was in the hospital, for God's sake. He would be in the hospital for the rest of his life. He was not here. Even if he were, he used only the brainfeed, now. His last infopad had been destroyed in the accident. For a wild moment, Tamblin thought of turning on her light and yelling her name, calling out, "It's me! Zeffie Tamblin!" in the hope that a cautious voice would ask "Win's sister?". She'd be in with them then, free to gather evidence at leisure.
That was too good to be true, though. Serious AA members cut themselves off from the electronic world – they hated infopads even more than they hated the brainfeed, and they hated that plenty. At least the brainfeed was just an information medium, with no processing power of its own. The brainfeed, unlike the infopad, lacked a brain. Therefore it did not, in and of itself, need liberating.
So Tamblin sat in the dark, waiting for the stranger to make the first move. The stranger's device must have displayed "ZEFFIRA TAMBLIN", though with any luck the name meant nothing. She could hear her heart beating in her ears as the seconds dragged on.
Finally, a voice spoke: "I told you not to get mixed up in this nonsense, Tamblin."
Then everything went dark.
* * *
Tamblin came to consciousness slowly. Her mind probed the feed, but found nothing. There was silence, and Tamblin was afraid. The feed was blocked, or broken, or she didn't know what, but it was gone. She couldn't use it for information, or for help. As she became conscious of her limbs and torso, she noted that they felt suprisingly light. The leg armor and the metal torso plate were gone. Over her underclothes someone had dressed her in some sort of knit tunic, simultaneously soft and scratchy, and her head ached as she forced herself to sit up.
She was sitting on what might, loosely, be termed a bed. It was not the smooth, sleek sleeping platform with self-adjusting temperplast sleepbase and covers she was used to, but a sort of squat table with a thin film of cloth under her. The room was dark, illuminated only by a bare bulb linked by wire to a wooden box with a metal crank. The bulb was on a wooden table, at which a man sat, shoulders hunched, his back to her. One of the evidenco-bots, a small model, was spread out in pieces before him. The room was otherwise empty, with no windows and only one door. The door was across the room, with the man and the table between Tamblin and freedom.
As yet unwilling to reveal that she was awake, Tamblin watched silently as the dark-haired man placed one piece on top of another, then used a thin metal cylinder with a pointy end to somehow fasten the pieces together. There was something familiar about him, about the way his body moved, about the care he took with his work. When the robot was back in one piece, the man connected the evidenco-bot via a set of wires to the crank box. Instantaneously, the bulb flickered out, and Tamblin nearly gasped.
Then there was an odd, repetitive grinding noise, and suddenly, first weakly and in flickers, then strong and bright, the light returned again. The man was turning the crank on the box, and to Tamblin's shock, that seemed to power the light bulb. It seemed to be powering the evidenco-bot, too, as the little device suddenly let out a long, loud, BEEEEEEP! followed by a series of rapid beeps and whistles that rose and fell like music.
"Hmm, you think she's awake?" the man asked the machine. From his voice, Tamblin knew who he was.
"Kurta? What have you done?" Tamblin asked.
He turned to face her, frowning. She had never seen him like this, without his own regulation torso plate and armor, and he looked oddly small, oddly fragile. He tilted his head towards the evidenco-bot. "I repaired our little friend. I also took the opportunity to remove its police chip."
Tamblin sucked in her breath. "You – you liberated it?"
Kurta nodded.
"But – but you're one of us!"
"Who are 'us', Tamblin?" Kurta asked. "The police? I thought perhaps you and I were of a kind – you don't appear to want sentient beings to suffer in slavery, but you don't approve of violent means to free them."
"Robots aren't sentient," Tamblin hissed through her teeth.
The evidenco-bot on the table set up its angry beep and whistle song again. Kurta smiled.
Tamblin stood up. "You have to let me go," she said.
Kurta laughed. "You're not my prisoner."
Tamblin blinked, and looked down at her weird pyjamas. She scanned the room for her armor. Seeing nothing, she marched to the door. Who cared if she were nearly-naked and her feed was silent? She'd – well, she'd find a person whose feed wasn't silent, and have them report all this to the police. She threw the door open.
All she could see were trees, weird, hulking, poky things that stretched up to a starry sky.
* * *
Tamblin made a face at her brother. She was sitting on a low couch with far too many throw cushions, watching her brother bob on the other side of the levolater glass. Her new infopad said, in Win's voice, "So, then he found my infopad in evidence and liberated it? The infopad must have helped him to fake the use of a brainfeed, but still . . . the man must be a genius."
"An evil genius," Tamblin snorted. "Kurta of all people. We used to kind of be friends, you know. We ate lunch, sometimes."
"I guess you'll never forgive him?" The infopad asked, as Win looked at her solemnly.
"No!" Tamblin complained. "I was stuck with those awful trees in that awful forest for hours. I was scratched and bruised and filthy. I had to wear a tunic made from the hair of a sheep. I'll probably never have a working brainfeed again – it took me forever to find an actual human being to get me on the network so I could report in to headquarters. And after all that – oh, never mind.
If he could have raised an eyebrow, Win would have. Instead, the infopad quietly asked, "And after all that?"
"After all that, he was gone. I didn't even get a chance to catch him!"
"Well, he did warn you that bad things would happen if you got involved," Win smiled, and the infopad laughed.
Tamblin threw a cushion at the levolater glass.
~ END!~