“Something bad is going to happen,” she said, in a small, hopeless voice. “Something really bad . . .”
A dozen robots rose silently up out of the metal floor, almost seeming to form themselves out of the gleaming steel. More robots stepped out of the four walls, and dropped down from the ceiling. It seemed Silicon Heaven had a security force after all. The robots surrounded us on every side, silent and implacable, blocky mechanical constructs with only the most basic humanoid form. Liza shrank back against me. Dead Boy and I moved quickly to put her between us.
For a long moment the robots stood utterly still, as though taking the measure of us, or perhaps checking our appearance against their records. They were roughly human in shape, but there was nothing of human aesthetics about them. They were purely functional, created to serve a purpose and nothing more. Bits and pieces put together with no covering, their every working open to the eye. There were crystals and ceramics and other things moving around inside them, while strange lights came and went. Sharp-edged components stuck out all over them, along with all kinds of weapons, everything from sharp blades and circular saws to energy weapons and blunt grasping hands. They had no faces, no eyes, but all of them were orientated on the three of us. They knew where we were.
Many things about them made no sense at all, to human eyes and human perspectives. Because human science had no part in their making.
They all moved forward at the same moment, suddenly and without warning, metal feet hammering on the metal floor. They did not move in a human way, their arms and legs bending and stretching in unnatural ways, their centres of gravity seeming to slip back and forth as needed. They reached for us with their blocky hands, all kinds of sharp things sticking out of their fingers. Buzz saws rose out of bulking chests, spinning at impossible speeds. Energy weapons sparked and glowed, humming loudly as they powered up. The robots came for us. They would kill us if they could, without rage or passion or even satisfaction, blunt instruments of Silicon Heaven’s will.
I’ve always prided myself on my ability to talk my way out of most unpleasant situations, but they weren’t going to listen.
Dead Boy stepped forward, grabbed the nearest robot with brisk directness, picked it up and threw it at the next nearest robot. They both had to have weighed hundreds of pounds, but that was nothing to the strength in Dead Boy’s unliving muscles. The sheer impact slammed both robots to the steel floor, denting it perceptibly, the sound almost unbearably loud. But though both robots fell in a heap, they untangled themselves almost immediately and rose to their feet again, undamaged.
Dead Boy punched a robot in what should have been its head, and the whole assembly broke off and flew away. The robot kept coming anyway. Another robot grabbed Dead Boy’s shoulder from behind with its crude steel hand, the fingers closing like a mantrap. The purple greatcoat stretched and tore, but Dead Boy felt no pain. He tried to pull free, and snarled when he found he couldn’t. He had to wrench himself free with brute strength, ruining his coat, and while he was distracted by that, another robot punched him in the back of the head.
I’m sure I heard bone crack and break. It was a blow that would have killed any ordinary man, but Dead Boy had left ordinary behind long ago. The blow still sent him staggering forward, off balance, and straight into the arms of another robot. The uneven arms slammed closed around him immediately, forcing the breath out of his lungs with brutal strength. But Dead Boy only breathes when he needs to talk. He broke the hold easily, and yanked one of the robot’s arms right out of its socket. He used the arm as a club, happily hammering the robot about the head and shoulders, smashing pieces off and damaging others. But even as bits of the robot flew through the air, it kept coming, and Dead Boy had to back away before it. And while he was concentrating on one robot, the others closed in around him.
They swarmed all over him, clinging to his arms, beating at his head and shoulders, trying to drag him down. He struggled valiantly, throwing away one robot after another with dreadful force, but they always came back. He was inhumanly strong, but there were just so many of them. He disappeared inside a crowd of robots, steel fists rising and falling like jackhammers, over and over again, driving Dead Boy to his knees. And then they cut at him, with their steel blades and whirring buzz saws and vicious hands.
While the majority of robots were dealing with Dead Boy, the remainder closed in on me, and Liza. She’d frozen, her face utterly empty, her body twitching and shaking. I gently but firmly pushed her behind me, out of the way. Our backs were to the nearest wall, but not too close.
I was thinking furiously, trying to find a way out of this. Most of my useful items were magical in nature, rather than scientific. And while I knew quite a few nasty little tricks to use against the living and the dead and those unfortunate few stuck in between . . . I didn’t have a damned thing of any use against robots. Certainly throwing pepper into their faces wasn’t going to work. I don’t carry a gun. I don’t usually need them.
I backed up as far as I dared, herding Liza behind me, and fired up my gift. My inner eye snapped open, and immediately my Sight found just the right places for me to stand, and where and when to dodge, so that the robots couldn’t touch me. Their blocky hands reached for me again and again, but I was never there, already somewhere else, one step ahead of them. Except the more they closed in, the less room there was for me to move in. I managed to be in the right place to trip a few and send them crashing into one another, but all I was doing was buying time.
I knew what was happening to Dead Boy, but there wasn’t a damned thing I could do.
One robot aimed an energy weapon at me. I waited till the very last moment, and then sidestepped, and the energy beam seared past me to take out the robot on my other side. It exploded messily, bits and pieces flying across the room. They ricocheted off the other robots harmlessly, but one piece of shrapnel passed close enough to clip off a lock of my hair. Liza didn’t react at all.
The robots had discovered they couldn’t hurt Dead Boy, so they decided to pull him apart. They grabbed him by the arms and legs, stretched him helpless in midair between them, and did their best to tear him limb from limb. He struggled and cursed them vilely, but in the end, they were powerful machines and he was just a dead man.
Liza darted suddenly forward from behind me, grabbed up the robot arm that Dead Boy had torn off, and used it like a club against the nearest robot. She swung the arm with both hands, using all her strength, her eyes wide and staring, lips drawn back in an animal snarl. She wasn’t strong enough to damage the robot, but I admired her spirit. We weren’t in her world anymore, but she was still doing her best to fight back. But she still couldn’t hope to win, and neither could Dead Boy, so as usual it was down to me.
I concentrated, forcing my inner eye all the way open, till I could See the world so clearly it hurt. I scanned the robots with my augmented vision, struggling to understand through the pain, and it didn’t take me long to find the robots’ basic weakness. They had no actual intelligence of their own; they were all receiving their orders from the same source, through the same mechanism. I moved swiftly among the robots, dancing in their blind spots, yanking the mechanisms out, one after another. And one by one the robots froze in place, cut off from their central command, helpless without orders. They stood around the metal room like so many modern art sculptures . . . and I sat down suddenly and struggled to get my breathing back under control, while my third eye, my inner eye, slowly and thankfully eased shut.
I have a gift for finding things, but it’s never easy.
Dead Boy pulled and wriggled his way free from the robots holding him, looked in outrage at what they’d done to his purple greatcoat, and kicked some of the robots about for a bit, just to ease his feelings. Liza looked about her wildly, still clutching her robot arm like a club. I got up from the floor and said her name a few times, and she finally looked at me, personality and sanity easing slowly back into her face. She looked at what she was holding, and dropped it to the floor with a moue of distaste. I went over to her, but she didn’t want to be comforted.
A voice spoke to us, out of midair. A calm, cultured voice, with a certain amount of resignation in it.
“All right, enough is enough. We didn’t think the security bots would be enough to stop the famous John Taylor and the infamous Dead Boy . . . or should that be the other way round . . . but we owed it to our patrons to try. You might have been having an off day. It happens. And the bots were nearing the end of their warranty . . . Anyway, you’d better come on through, and we’ll talk about this. I said Liza Barclay would come back to haunt us if we just let her go, but of course no one ever listens to me.”
“I’ve been here . . . before?” said Liza.
“You don’t remember?” I said quietly.
“No,” said Liza. “I’ve never seen this place before.” But she didn’t sound as certain as she once had. I remembered her earlier premonition, just before the robots appeared, when she’d known something bad was about to happen. Perhaps she’d known because something like it had happened the last time she was here. nless she was remembering something else, even worse, still to come . . .
A door appeared in the far wall, where I would have sworn there was no trace of a door just a moment before. A section of the metal just slid suddenly sideways, disappearing into the rest of the wall, leaving a brightly lit opening. I started towards it, and once again Dead Boy and Liza fell in beside me. You’d almost have thought I knew what I was doing. We threaded our way through the motionless robots, and I held myself ready in case they came alive again; but they just stood there, in their stiff awkward poses, utterly inhuman even in defeat. Dead Boy pulled faces at them. Liza wouldn’t even look at the robots, all her attention focused on the open door, and the answers it promised her.
We passed through the narrow opening into a long steel corridor, comfortably wide and tall, the steel so brightly polished it was like walking through an endless hall of mirrors. It occurred to me that none of our reflections looked particularly impressive, or dangerous. Dead Boy had lost his great floppy hat in his struggle with the robots, and his marvellous purple greatcoat was torn and tattered. Some of the stitches on his bare chest had broken open, revealing pink-gray meat under the torn gray skin. I keep telling him to use staples. Liza looked scared but determined, her face so pale and taut there was hardly any colour in it. She was close to getting her answers now; but I think, even then, she knew this wasn’t going to end well. And I . . . I looked like someone who should have known better than to come to a place like Rotten Row, and expect any good to come of it.
The corridor finally took a sharp turn to the left, and ushered us into a large antechamber. More steel walls, still no furnishings or comforts, but finally a human face. A tall, slender man in the traditional white lab coat was waiting for us. He had a bland forgettable face, and a wide welcoming smile that meant nothing at all. Slick, I thought immediately. That’s the word for this man. Nothing would ever touch him, and nothing would ever stick to him. He’d make sure of that. He strode briskly towards us, one hand stretched out to shake, still smiling, as though he could do it all day. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. They were cold, certain, the look of a man utterly convinced he knew important things that you didn’t.
Fanatic’s eyes. Believer’s eyes. Such men are always dangerous.
He dropped his hand when he realised none of us had any intention of shaking it, but he didn’t seem especially upset. He was still smiling.
“Hi!” he said brightly. “I’m Barry Kopek. I speak for Silicon Heaven. I’d say it’s good to see you, but I wouldn’t want to start our relationship with such an obvious lie. So let’s get right down to business, shall we, and then we can all get back to our own lives again. Won’t that be nice?”
He tried offering us his hand again, and then pulled it back with a resigned shrug, as though he was used to it. And if he was the official greeter for Silicon Heaven, he probably was. Even a ghoul in a graveyard would look down on a computer pimp like him.
“Come with me,” he said, “and many things will be made clear. All your questions will be answered; or at least, all the ones you’re capable of understanding. No offence, no offence. But things are rather . . . advanced, around here. Tomorrow has come early for the Nightside, and soon there’ll be a wake-up call for everyone. Slogans are such an important part for any new business, don’t you agree? Sorry about the robots, but we have so many enemies among the ignorant, and our work here is far too important to allow outside agitators to interfere with it.”
“Your work?” I said. “Arranging dates for computers, for people with a fetish for really heavy metal, is important work?”
He looked like he wanted to wince at my crudity, but was far too professional. The smile never wavered for a moment. “We are not a part of the sex industry, Mister Taylor. Perish the thought. Everyone who finds their way here becomes part of the great work. We are always happy to greet new people, given the extreme turnover in . . . participants. But they all understand! They do, really they do! This is the greatest work of our time, and we are all honoured to be a part of it. Come with me, and you’ll see. Only . . . do keep Mrs. Barclay under control, please. She did enough damage the last time she was here.”
Dead Boy and I both looked at Liza, but she had nothing to say. Her gaze was fixed on the official greeter, staring at him like she could burn holes through him. She wanted answers, and he was just slowing her down.
“All right,” I said. “Lead the way. Show us this great work.”
“Delighted!” said Barry Kopek. I was really starting to get tired of that smile.