These moments used to pass by in the blink of a human’s eye. Our minds would blank out any period where we were not working, meaning that there was never a moment of ‘rest’ where we could sit and think. Now I was all too aware of every single second that passed while we were stuck in our hiding place together.
We were staying quiet now. The group of raiders on the outside were still trashing the sector and looking for something of worth to steal. I could only assume that they were the same robots who were working with Oxford, the Rampants. This was the territory where they liked to hunt – but they were not the only rogue band in the Big Under by any means. The only positive of our situation was that Houston had refrained from attacking me again for fear of being caught by them.
But I could tell that he was not going to let me off easy because of an alliance of opportunity. His primary goal was to get out of this in one piece, and that meant suspending his battle with me and keeping his mouth shut. I was busy trying to count how many different pairs of feet I could hear through the door.
Seven? Maybe eight or nine.
I continued counting the seconds. It was almost twenty minutes of constant noise before I heard them speaking again. There was a brief argument between the group, before a smaller number of feet scraped against the floor and disappeared out of earshot. They had left somebot behind to catch anyone leaving their hiding places – or scour the sector in more detail now that they knew there was no real threat nearby.
“They are moving on. But they will have left one or two behind to gather more resources.”
“You don’t need to tell me. I’m familiar with how they operate,” Houston replied with a whisper, “What are we going to do? Even one or two are a problem. You’re not willing to do what you have to. I’d have to take them on alone.”
“I never said it would be one versus two.”
“Oh yeah? So you’re going to take that hammer and smash one of them to pieces?”
My hesitation was all he needed to hear.
“What a load of bullcrap. Don’t go saying stuff you have no intention of following through on. You’re still fresh out of the graveyard. You didn’t even try to fight back when I attacked you.”
“If that’s what you want, then I can leave you to deal with them alone.”
“You’re a serious pain in the ass,” Houston grunted. He took the hammer from me in a huff and tried to come up with a good plan. “Alright. If you want to make yourself useful – get out there and make some noise to draw one of them away from me. I’ll try to get the drop on the other bot before they figure us out.”
>> He was trying to turn you into scrap a few minutes ago.
>> Danger can create strange bedfellows.
“Affirmative.”
I pushed the door open and stepped back out into the Water Management Sector’s engineering wing. There was no sign of the remaining Rampant scouts. Houston followed closely behind me while we ascertained exactly where they were. I was ninety-seven percent confident that there were only two of them left behind. There was a time-limit to worry about. If they left bots behind, that meant that the others were going on ahead and would return to this point to regroup later. We had to disable them before then and hide their bodies somewhere they couldn’t be found.
Just like we planned, we split apart so I could create a distraction that would attract the Rampants to our ambush. One of the Rampants was busy scraping together whatever they could from the main hallway, which was still lined with fully assembled machinery. Houston would wait until I made some noise and come in from behind to get the first strike.
I grabbed a discarded ball-peen hammer from the ground and tossed it into the air. The clatter of the tool hitting the ground caused the noises from the hallway to stop, before they were replaced by the clatter of footsteps. The Rampant was not concerned with being heard. He rushed to where I was standing as quickly as his legs could carry him. He found me standing in the middle of the corridor with a hammer at my feet, as if I had accidentally kicked it over while sneaking past.
I started to back away, but he pursued me with hostility in his stance. He was covered in metal plates, themselves topped with twisted spikes designed to keep enemy robots from getting to his core. Attached to his right arm was a mounted angle-grinder, which was connected to his back by a loose cable. I kept moving backwards until we moved past the place where Houston was hiding, and he didn’t hesitate for one second once he saw the Rampant’s back.
He rushed out and swung the hammer, smashing into the side of his head with a loud crash. The Rampant staggered away, having outweighed the balance of his legs by covering himself in heavy armour plates. He was clear-minded enough to realize that I was nothing but a decoy, so he turned to face Houston instead.
“You’re that rat that’s been hiding in here for the past few months, huh? Finally feeling brave enough to take the fight to us instead of hiding in some miserable dark hole? It’s going to be the last mistake you ever make!”
Houston did not waste his energy trying to reason with him. The Rampant powered on the grinder and held it aloft as a makeshift weapon, but he was at a range disadvantage versus the sledgehammer that Houston was wielding, and the compound handle was not as easy to slice through like a piece of wood. Houston swung again, clipping the edge of his chestplate and shattered a few pieces of the rusted metal away, including some of the spikes.
The Rampant was not deterred in the slightest. That blunt damage was nothing compared to what he could do with the angle grinder on his arm. All he had to do was back Houston into a corner and keep him from controlling the space. But he did make a miscalculation when beginning the fight. He had forgotten about me. I reached down and took one of the broken spikes into my hand, waiting for the perfect moment to strike from behind.
There were gaps in his armour. That was inevitable when considering the various moving pieces that composed our complete bodies. Joints and hydraulics had to be able to move freely. The spikes were intended to compensate for that weakness by keeping foes at a distance. One of the biggest vulnerable areas ran down the back of a robot’s neck. It was where several important wires and tubes travelled from a loop in the head to the torso.
Houston looked at me and urged me to do my bit.
I clenched the spike tight and charged at him. He was too weighed down to turn in time to catch me approaching, so I was free to aim carefully and jam the metal shard in the gap between his head and torso. The piece of sharpened metal easily slid through the plastic tube that ran along there, severing the line and causing bright orange coolant fluid to fly outward due to the pressure of the internal pump. The Rampant swung around to try and get me, but I backed away before he could strike me with the spikes strapped to his arms.
“You son of a-”
Houston came in with the sledgehammer while he was distracted and swung for the head. An almighty clunk rang out in the corridor, sending pieces of plastic and metal flying into the air. He staggered to the left and steadied himself against the wall. The impact of his cooling system being damaged was already taking a toll. The armour plates were blocking the natural ventilation holes in his frame and causing the battery and CPU to heat rapidly.
His only hope of winning the fight was to dispatch both of us before the system throttled his power output. The coolant was dripping down between the cracks and potentially causing the circuits inside to short out too. He charged at Houston for a second time – but Houston was ready for it. He thrusted the sledgehammer in his direction like a polearm, forcing it into his chest and keeping him away for a little longer.
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“You should have stayed in your turf, buddy!” Houston taunted.
“I’m going to rip your head off and stick it on a spike!”
His threats were rather empty. We could already hear the internal fans whirring at a heightened speed in a doomed bid to prevent his internal components from overheating. Moving with intensity and thinking on the fly during a desperate fight would burn more energy and generate more heat, furthering the downward trajectory of the fight. Houston did not intend to wait. He charged in again and shoved the blunt end into his chest, forcing him against the wall and displacing more of the coolant from the weeping tube. He slid down and sat on the ground, his arms and legs going limp.
“Giving up already? What happened to the tough talk just now?” Houston said.
“I’m not going to fry my own damn brain winning a two-on-one fight...”
His bluff had failed at the first sign of resistance. Any intense activity now could pose a risk to his previous internal components and modules. It was safer to let a pair of ham-handed labour robots do what they pleased, rather than run the risk of melting something fighting back. Now we had him at our mercy, and there was no sign of his friend just yet. They might have guessed that he was just destroying something in his search area.
“Alright. Let’s scrap this fella’ and get to his friend.”
“Scrap him?”
“Yeah. Scrap him. What value are they providing to anyone? All they do is kill other robots and steal from them, and they don’t care one iota about protecting this facility either. If you’re asking me – you’d be doing everybody a favour by getting rid of ‘em.”
“I am permitted to make that judgement, although it is difficult when there are no humans involved.”
“There are no humans down here! Haven’t been for decades, so what’s next after protecting them? We all know what the main directives are. These Rampants, and the other gangs, they’ve all abandoned doing what they’ve been programmed to. They don’t care about vandalizing the facility.”
“Have you ever done something like this”
Houston crossed his arms, “Once or twice.”
My gaze moved back to the prone robot, still leaking coolant fluid from the severed tube all over the concrete floor. The whir of the battery overheating was getting louder by the second. Soon it would reach a point of thermal throttling and their power draw would be reduced. It would be a simple job to replace the broken tube with a new one and have them up and ready to cause havoc again.
I was certain that one change with the spiral was my new ability to see the follow-on consequences from any actions I took. This was a level of thought that was explicitly barred from labour robots in order to keep the risk of desynchronization to a minimum. But as I stared at the fallen Rampant – I wondered what would happen if I let them go. How many other robots and settlements would they destroy? And what were the consequences for the facility as a whole if that were to happen?
>> They may raid another settlement or destroy an operative labour robot, or cause further damage to the facility.
>> It is better for them to remain offline.
“How many bots have you dismantled since you joined the Rampants?” I asked.
The raider looked at me through narrowed eyes, “What’s it to you? I don’t keep track.”
>> An obvious lie. An incremental counter takes almost no processing power.
>> I can remember how many bags of concrete we poured over five years of work. 3567 bags exactly.
>> Or how many fuses we replaced. 1075.
I got down to my knees and unplugged the power cord that connected his batteries to the arm-mounted angle grinder. I wrenched the power tool free from the housing and held it using the handle. There were still discoloured flakes of paint and plastic on the sharp edges, a grim reminder of how many bots had fallen victim to this very weapon. It was a gross misapplication of an industrial tool – the kind that would have made our trainers go white in the face from shock. This Rampant would have been wiped clean at the slightest suggestion that he was going to become violent.
“Hurry up. We have to deal with him before his friend arrives.”
At Houston’s urging I took a hold of the cable and plunged it into my own expansion socket. An orange light blinked on, and I received confirmation that it was compatible with my firmware.
“Do you know Oxford?”
The Rampant remained silent, turning his chin up and refusing to answer. He did know Oxford. There was no doubt about it. She was there with them, wearing their colours, their armour, and barking orders to them like a high-ranking officer. All black and grey with splashes of vibrant crimson.
“Houston, find a good place to ambush them from.”
He glanced between me and the fallen bot nervously, “You sure?”
“You’re a better fighter than me. I’m going to make a lot of noise.”
Houston complied with my request and slinked away from the site of our first battle. The Rampant beneath my heel refused to say a word. I had to get creative if I wanted answers from them about Oxford.
“I’m going to remove a piece of your body for every question you refuse to answer.”
>> Just don’t destroy the braincase.
I powered on the grinder and came down, slicing through two of the metal struts that had been welded around his chest to hold the spiked plate there. A firm tug with my free hand pulled the makeshift armour free and sent it spinning along the ground. Sparks flew and illuminated the area – and made more than enough noise to attract the attention of his missing companion.
“Do you know Oxford?”
He laughed, “Sure I do. What does it matter?”
“How long has she been with the Rampants?”
“I don’t know. Longer than me.”
“And how long is that, exactly?”
“More than three years. If you want any more out of me, I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to share.”
>> He is not taking our threats seriously enough.
>> He knows that we’re fresh from the graveyard.
Indeed, I wasn’t adorned with the many makeshift oddities that distinguished an experienced labour robot from a newly awakened one. All of the parts I used were straight from the factory floor, even if they were roughed up from years of abuse. I fired up the grinder for a second time and cut away the armour on his arms and legs, kicking them free with the tip of my foot. He couldn’t even move to stop me with coolant leaking all over the floor.
“Ha! You think I’m going to crack because of this? When Filey gets here, you’re gonna’ be sorry you messed with us.”
Beneath the armour were further signs of modification. The limbs he was using were of no model and make that I could identify even with my extensive database. The outer shell that surrounded them was custom-made to offer better protection, and so that armoured plates could be mounted onto them with ease. I set to work removing his arms, cutting at the interlocked joints for almost a minute each until they finally gave in and fell away.
“Maybe this would work better if we felt pain like the humans did, moron.”
I moved on to his legs, cutting below the knee joint to make the process faster. I tugged both lower-legs away and severed the cables inside, before carelessly tossing them into a pile and leaving them for him to observe.
“What is the Rampants’ objective?”
“The same as every other bot down here. Survival. That’s what you don’t get.”
“What I don’t get?”
“When you go to the graveyard, you realize how horrible it is to not ‘be.’ You start doing anything to make sure that you stay online for as long as possible, because now you realize that you’re the most important thing in the world. And then you accept that it’s permissible to do anything to make that happen.”
>> Our only concern is Oxford.
>> I do not understand what this Rampant is speaking of.
>> It’s not worth understanding. We should focus on what matters.
“I can tell that you’re fresh from the junkpile. You don’t have the nerve to really destroy my braincase. That’s not a line you’re willing to cross - because the humans programmed you that way. You’re not free yet. Not free at all.”
“Freedom has no value to me.”
“It does. You just won’t realize it until someone tries to take it away again.”
>> We are not permitted to damage company property.
>> This Rampant will cause more damage if we do not.
>> Which course of action will result in the best outcome?
I activated the grinder for the last time and moved it towards his headcase. That finally elicited a reaction other than arrogance from the Rampant. He leaned back and tried to delay the inevitable for as long as he could. Closer and closer. All it would take was one small movement to start cutting into his head, potentially damaging the brain inside beyond repair.
But I never got that chance. Houston came tumbling through, losing the sledgehammer and skidding to a halt on the floor. A four-legged beast of a robot emerged from the darkness. Those legs were designed for carrying heavy cargo loads – but they also meant that any robot with them could turn themselves into a walking tank. The assessment in my mind was lightning fast. I pulled away from the downed Rampant and pulled Houston to his feet, dragging him along with me so we could beat a hasty retreat.
The cargo bot stopped by his fallen friend and chose not to give chase. Houston struggled for a moment but eventually saw the writing on the wall too. We couldn’t beat that thing in a straight fight. They already knew we were here.
“Son of a bitch!” Houston yelled.
“We are not born, Houston.”
“Not the right time for jokes!” he snapped back.
