Amballore House (35 page)

Amballore House underworld was built as a cylindrical shell surrounding a large cylindrical tunnel built under the well! The spacecraft could stop at any point during its descent or ascent, to let out the passenger to the facility.

“Enjoying the ride, my friend?” the rebel robot asked daredevil. DD was too absorbed in his thoughts to answer. He was amazed by the ride and the surroundings. He did not exclude the possibility that he was already dead, that this was his descent to hell, and that the robot was a devil taking him to his posthumous destination.

“Are you a devil?” DD said to the rebel.

“I wish I was. I would rather be in hell than to run around per the whims of my programmers,” said the rebel to DD, referring to the software that dictated its acts.

DD inquired where they were, to which the mechanical man answered that he would soon find out.

They stopped quite a distance down. The spacecraft parked in a huge bay built into the tunnel. They disembarked and were met by Vareed and Eli, who emerged from the astronaut’s cabin. They were the ones flying the spacecraft.

As soon as all the four got out, the spacecraft underwent an instant transformation into the Midnight Express, an ordinary-looking Kerala bus!

DD was taken through a whole-body CT scanner. He was fed through the doughnut-shaped opening of the scanner. The images were fed into a 3-D printer that created a 3-D version of DD. A robot of DD was created, and he looked like, walked like, and talked like DD.

The entire operation was conducted by robots, with no visible human being in the vicinity. Judging from what DD saw, it was a large underground facility with plenty of room for different equipment and for robots to move around easily.

After scanning was completed, he was afraid that the robots would kill him. However, being killed was not something he was afraid of; what he worried about was that he might not be able to steal the
data records, the task he came to accomplish. Unfortunately, robots were dime a dozen all around him, giving him no chance to do what he wanted.

The rebel robot escorted DD out after the robots created his clone. He was greeted by Vareed and Eli, and they all boarded the Midnight Express. It instantly transformed into a spacecraft that shot up with tremendous speed. It then landed just outside Amballore House, outside its perimeter wall, transforming into the Midnight Express as soon as it landed. The trio let DD out.

As it turned out, DD’s mission did not need his kamikaze skills per the wild expectations attached to the task. It was, however, good news that he came back alive—not that he himself cared much for it.

DD got a hero’s welcome from the bureau. Members of the bureau gathered at Judas Toddy Club to celebrate the triumphant return. Over untold fillings of toddy glasses, DD narrated his encounter with the robots. The bureau members absorbed all this with painstaking attention and were ecstatic to learn that Amballore House underworld existed, as they had guessed. They were further fascinated by the idea of the replication of mankind through 3-D printing technology. This was a major success in itself. They were willing to forgo the main objective of the mission of retrieving data collection, in view of major discovery they made. DD was rewarded for his valiant trip, as promised.

According to the intergalactic science project proposed by aliens, for every man or woman, a robot could be built in his or her own image, just as God created man in his own image. The ETs’ mission of mankind replication was admired, if only for the fact that an enduring civilization could be built around indestructible robots, a welcome alternative to mortal human beings in the role of the torchbearers of an advanced civilization.

5
THE ARREST

The Amballore Investigation Bureau placed an ad in Amballore
Times
, promising a handsome reward to anyone bringing Vareed and Eli to them, dead or alive. Since the couple, especially Eli, was fond of visiting Judas Toddy Club, the bureau had left word with Judas and the shop’s patrons to inform them whenever they showed up at the shop.

Even though the dead and deadly couple sowed terror in Judas and his patrons, the reward was handsome enough to make them turn the couple in; it was good enough for Judas to betray his customer, Vareed. Of course, he was Judas after all, the namesake of Judas Iscariot who sold out Christ to the high priests once upon a time.

And so it happened one day that the Midnight Express made a stop at Judas Toddy Club. Vareed and Eli got off the bus and proceeded to the crowded second floor. They settled at their usual seat. They then placed their usual order, fried prawns with a large serving of toddy. Judas appeared showing the usual respect and filled their order, having secretly sent his wife, Elsa, to phone the police.

The crowd was usually very respectful to the couple, even afraid to approach them to engage in small talk. Vareed and Eli usually kept to themselves, minded their own business, finished their drink, paid the bill, and left peacefully. There was always a handsome tip to Judas. But today would be different. Very different.

The Amballore police force sent some of their smartest members to Judas Toddy Club that day. They were experts in martial arts, heavily muscled, young, and bold. They were considered the pride of Amballore’s police force, having been usually deployed to challenging situations, such as to combat dangerous criminals and outmaneuver them, arrest them, and bring them to face justice. They had never met their match in those encounters. The police chief did not expect anything different this time; if it all, it was a piece of cake to outsmart two septuagenarians.

A troupe of such policemen, ten of them, barged into the second
floor of Judas Toddy Club, and approached the couple, ready to apprehend them. As soon as Eli saw the police force coming en masse toward her and Vareed, she realized that the game was up, and her worst fears just materialized. She told Vareed, “At last they have come for us.” She then made herself invisible. She had plans; she had rehearsed her moves in her mind a number of times in the past.

The chief of police, Rajan, heading toward the couple was confused by this sudden disappearance. He checked his glasses to make sure he was not seeing things, put them back, and proceeded to Vareed’s seat. The rest of the police force followed their commander in chief. They approached Vareed; ten well-built muscular men surrounded him in a circle, trapping him inside an impenetrable human chain. Rajan introduced himself and read him the Kerala-Miranda Rights. He then declared that Vareed and his wife, Eli, were under arrest for the mass murders at Amballore House. “As for your right to hire a lawyer, you may shove it,” he deliberately misread. He then proceeded to slap handcuffs on him.

As soon as the police chief made a move to arrest Vareed, the handcuffs were suddenly released from his hands, as if by magical force, and went airborne, flying upward on their own. The cuffs then stopped in midair and slowly started retracing their paths, suddenly descending toward Rajan, flying so fast that they locked Rajan’s hand to the hand of the nearest one to him. This happened so quickly that Rajan and the other officer did not have time to respond. Rajan and his partner could not thwart being arrested by their own handcuffs.

Eli also made sure that they were both shackled at the ankles, having retrieved the shackles from the police chief’s pocket. Handcuffs and ankle shackles severely limited their movement. They nevertheless tried to move, doing a bad imitation of a drunken Amballorean, with slow and unsteady footsteps. Eli further shackled them to a table. She had plans for them later on.

A chair was immediately seen rising all by itself, landing heavily on a third officer, ricocheting off his firm skull onto number four. The pair fell to the ground by the sheer force of impact. But then they
immediately rose to their feet to fight the flying chair, like Don Quixote tried to fight the windmills.

As soon as they were on their feet, number four slapped number three so viciously that the latter staggered but then steadied himself by propping against the wall. This friendly fire was unexpected, and three did not need Eli’s help in returning the favor to four. Their infighting was stopped by the commander in chief, Rajan. The audience speculated that four went bananas when he was hit by the flying chair, prompting him to attack three in response, thinking that he was attacked by three. But a better-informed section of the crowd saw through the brawl and recognized Eli’s invisible hands playing a critical role in the drama. Her mantra was to divide and conquer.

A certain member of the audience, sympathetic to the police force, stepped forward to stop the infighting. It was soon seen that the man suddenly positioned himself upside down. The expert gymnastic stunt hardly looked like it was done voluntarily. He had invisible help.

His feet were caught, with his head down. His body suddenly assumed a horizontal position and was levitating and started describing a circular motion, with his head along the circumference and his feet at the fulcrum. The head clashed violently with the hard skulls of three and four. The man was pronounced dead on the scene, with blood oozing out of his mouth and nostrils. Three and four collapsed to the floor once again, this time unconscious.

Running footsteps were heard, as if by high heels, amid the chaotic scenes. The high-heel steps were heard heading toward Judas who was sitting at his counter hosting a vast collection of alcohol.

One big steel jug of toddy was seen rising from the counter like Jesus resurrecting on Easter Sunday. Not to be outdone, a tray of fried chicken joined the toddy jug. They jogged in midair of their own free will all the way from Judas’s counter to the police force. This scene of a jug of toddy traveling toward a Malayalee of its own free will, in ordinary circumstances, would be a dream come true for him. But, under the extraordinary circumstances of that
particular day, this scene unnerved the spectators and the police force alike.

All the patrons had their jaws dropped halfway to the floor at this incredible scene. The law officers five and six had their jaws dropped, baring their teeth as if they were seeing their dentists. The jug stopped at their gaping mouths and emptied its contents into them. The chicken flew from the tray and into their mouths. The force feeding made them gag. The choking policemen received the Heimlich maneuver from the heavy metallic jug in the form of heavy landing on their heads with a thunderous bang—not exactly the kind of Heimlich maneuver that should be administered to choking victims. Both the men fell unconscious.

The circular human chain that the policemen had created around Vareed had by now all but dispersed. The panicked force members scattered all around the club in search of a safety zone and to avoid whatever force had overtaken the club, and was now systematically demolishing their group.

The next in line, seven, waited for hell to break loose and deliver a vampire from thin air to suck blood out of him. But this, mercifully, did not happen. Instead, the heavy chandelier with its decorative chrome center hanging right above him decided to put a stop to its boring existence of hanging from the ceiling for years on end without getting an offer of a drink. It decided to make a hard landing on the head of number seven. The force of the impact on his head was so ferocious that he fell dead on collision, blood splattering all around.

Eli was famous for her physical strength both in her younger days and in her old age. She was more than equal to many men, and they fearfully admired her stamina and nicknamed her “bionic woman.” It was not difficult for a heavy metal table sitting idly nearby to rise above the floor, to rise to the occasion and get into action, such as heading toward number eight and knocking him down, probably dead.

The last two members, number nine and number ten, were at a loss, too petrified to think, act, or even say anything. All they could think
was to run, and run they did like there were no tomorrow. Invisible Eli tripped them. One of them collapsed to the floor, toppling a table and downing some patrons with him. Eli carried him and hung him upside down from the overhead ceiling beam.

“This will teach you to become an upstanding young man,” Eli chastised him, after hanging him upside down. He was astonished that overhead beam was admonishing him in his mother’s voice.

By this time, number ten had reached the stairs, frantically sprinting, seeking an escape route, and was about to run downstairs, when he suddenly tripped for no apparent reason, and fell to the ground floor, rolling like a soccer ball. Earlier, a robot had stepped out of the Midnight Express, and had positioned itself at the flight of stairs. It was waiting. It picked up number ten and dragged him up the stairs, holding his feet. His head made thud-thud sounds as it collided with the stair steps.

The handcuffed Rajan and policeman number two were still standing, while the rest were on the floor, some crying for their moms, some dead, and yet others at the brink of getting the kiss of death. These two standing policemen were linked together, of course, as if they were partners of a wedding about to take place, patiently waiting for the priest to declare them man and man and make them promise to each other to be held together until death did them part. As a matter of fact, that death would come soon. Suddenly, a cigarette lighter took leave of its owner in the crowd and traveled toward Rajan and his partner.

As soon as the robot reached the second floor, it lifted number ten by his feet and did a hula hoop with him above his head with his feet at the center of the hoop and his body going round and round. Number ten was riding in a horizontal Ferris wheel—not exactly a merry-go-round ride. As he picked up speed, the robot released him, aiming his head toward Rajan and his partner. The force of the head-to-head collision was so severe that two and ten died immediately, the loud cracking skulls sounding like two oversized coconuts exploding. Rajan escaped the collision. The trio was toppled in a single heap, with the chained table tumbling on them. Eli guarded the fallen heroes and made sure that the unshackled
ones did not get up and run. She was not sure if the owners of the collided heads had survived.