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Miss Maybury appeared in his dreams again.
They were in Windsor Meadow once more, with gorse bushes burning in the background where the flaming white football had touched down, and Bradlee and Eric were still there in the dream, but not contributing anything. Miss Maybury wore her running suit and whistle and had the correct voice now, that very persuasive voice that must be obeyed, which wasn't massively different to the one his mind had given her in the first dream.
"It's time you learned the three laws of robotics, young man."
At first he thought she was talking to him, but that wasn't quite the case. She was talking to somebody filling the same space that he'd filled in the first dream, the same size, the same young age, but bizarrely wearing what looked like armour, without a visor, and with an older man's face, a little indistinct, as dreams can be when it suits them.
"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
"Yes, Miss."
"A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law."
"Yes, Miss."
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"A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."
"Yes, Miss."
"Didn't your father teach you these?"
And then Danny realised that he was an onlooker visible to the dream's participants, that Miss Maybury had turned to him and she thought he was the father, though this came as a mild surprise, even in the dream, and his acceptance of it was as blurry as the image of the armoured child.
Now he was abruptly back in the clean-room of the Scottish MPC, at the screen on the side of the ion implantation machine, after half a dozen sorcerer's apprentices had bumped into his ankles, disturbing him so much he was barely able to work. Another tapped him on the ankle and he turned and it wasn't a sorcerer's apprentice it was the sorcerer himself, Frank, as a bipedal robot with eyes that moved and a jaw that opened, in a head that was Humphrey Bogart as Charlie Allnut in the African Queen, but on a huge pair of shoulders and shiny metal pectorals, an old head on a shiny metal body. And further below, a proud steel erection.
"You should wear clothes," Danny said, feebly.
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"Now why would a robot need to wear clothes? I don't get cold, I don't drop particles."
That was Humphrey Bogart's voice, not Frank's.
"Because…"
"You were right. Sharon's very good in bed, Danny. We had a wonderful time."
Danny lost control and swing his fist around in a wide haymaker, making contact with Frank's jaw, feeling and hearing the bones in his knuckles break as they made contact with the metal.
Yet the dream didn't end there. As Danny held his fist, the pain receded. The breaking bones were all in his imagination, his hand felt OK. He was surprised at this and stared at Frank, perhaps expecting an explanation. And as he watched, the face of Allnut, showing no emotion, gradually receded as Frank the robot slowly keeled over from the force of the blow.
The heavy metal robot hit the white perforated floor with an almighty crash, raising no dust, because there was no dust to raise, but setting off alarms on half a dozen machines nearby, disturbed from their precision tasks by the great vibration.
Miss Maybury briefly appeared in this dream too, raising Danny's arm, the one that had
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delivered the blow, and letting rip with a piercing blast on her whistle. The shrillness woke him with a start.
Reality was only slightly less disturbing than the dream. Danny looked
uncomprehendingly at the arched windows, with chicken wire on the balcony dividing the outside world into pixels, and at the many books on the walls, and the picture showing on the thin, almost feminine, laptop on the table nearby. He wondered why he was lying on a sofa beneath an unfamiliar duvet watching his own home on a screen, viewed from outside, when he should be inside, with Sharon lying beside him.
Then he remembered Angela, the steeple, Frank, and lying awake last night watching the camera's view of home, that Angela had at first been reluctant to set up on the laptop for him, watching the light go off in his real bedroom, and his final thought of thanks that the day had been so busy day that sleep was on its way no matter what his emotions.
He reached across and pressed the arrow keys on the laptop, imagining the hand on the wooden board in the steeple adjusting as it received his instructions. What a crazy piece of engineering that was. He panned to his doorway and then along the street to the blue Lexus that
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Angela had told him was Bradlee's car - most likely somebody else's car, but the one Bradlee and Ronnie had borrowed for the moment. The pair used it as their base, taking turns to sleep in the back and hike down the road for coffee and sandwiches. He'd watched a pizza boy make a delivery to the parked car late last night, and imagined Bradlee explaining to the boy that although he might want to tell his friends about the strange address he'd delivered to, maybe it would be better if he kept quiet, and the boy easily agreeing. Bradlee was in the driver's seat now, his expensive timepiece and the blue of his tattoos showing behind his hand at the steering wheel.
Angela came downstairs around nine, with jet-black hair, longer than yesterday's, and black painted eyebrows. Her eyes were brown and her nose was long and pointed. It seemed to match the wig. She was fully dressed, wearing a black fleece jacket and boots.
"Sleep ok? No, obviously not."
Danny brushed his hair back with his hands. "Weird dreams. And you were in one of them. You were explaining the laws of robotics."
"Very righteous of me. Who'd broken them this time?"
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Danny wasn't sure he wanted to answer that question, or that he was entirely sure of the answer, so he skirted around it. "You make it sound like they're broken all the time."
Angela huffed. "How about a cruise missile? That's a clever robot with eyes and a brain. Look how closely that follows the rules. Its purpose is to harm people, it freely accepts instructions about which people to harm, and it self-destructs to complete its mission. It breaks all three rules about as hard as they can be broken."
Yes, this was the woman who'd coded gp338. Barely out of bed and already deep into the philosophy of science. She reached beneath the coffee table for her cigarettes and lit one with the slow precision of somebody who smokes very few.
Danny's mind wandered across the street, back home, where it wanted to be.
"That's the first night I've spent without Sharon since… a train strike in France three years ago."
"Very touching."
Angela caught his glare and raised her hand in apology. She began to recite:
"At this sweet hour, all things beside
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In amorous pairs to covert creep:
The swans that brushed the evening tide
Homeward in snowy couples keep.
In his green den, the murmuring seal
Close by his sleek companion lies;
While singly we to bed-ward steal
And close in fruitless sleep our eyes."
"That's George Daley," said Danny, very much appreciating her choice of lines. "You must be a poetry fan."
"We have a lot in common." She moved her face from side to side and pursed her lips.
"How do I look?"
"Like nobody I've ever seen before."
"It's whether Frank might recognise me that bothers me. There are more CCTV cameras here in London than any other city in the world, and he has access to most of them. They have programs that automatically identify a human face." She touched her forefinger against the far edges of her painted eyebrows and the top of her lip. "They look at this golden triangle, right here, and identify you. That's why I've got more noses than a coke-fiend. Welcome to the fugitive world. No eyebrows, no real hair, no natural nose."
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"Huh!" Danny had been wondering why Frank's avatar didn't look more like Humphrey Bogart, and she'd just given him the explanation.
Frank had got the bits right that he thought were important, the nose and eyes, but not the parts outside the golden triangle, the full lips, the jaw or the hairline. He probably thought he already looked like Bogart, and in computer terms he did, it just didn't work that way for humans.
He took in her coat and boots, her need for disguise. "Are you going out?"
"I haven't had time to myself for ages.
Too many days spent watching you. I thought I might pretend to be an American tourist - visit St Paul's, tea at Claridges, that kind of thing."
"What about us, what about the plan?"
Angela hadn't needed convincing about Frank's weakness, his Achilles heel for Sharon.
When Danny had rushed back to the apartment last night to tell her, she'd seen it straight away.
"There's not much I can do, is there?" she said. "You're seeing your friend Eric at lunchtime, and Sharon a while later. One of the skills of management is knowing when to not get in the way."
"But I'm relying on you to sort out the Internet connection. We'll need big bandwidth, major league."
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"No problem. Moorhen has its own router at Telehouse."
"How did you get one in there?"
"Lots of companies do. It's a regular commercial deal, nothing special."
This was good news. Telehouse was at the heart of the UK's Internet system, the biggest centre for Internet traffic in the country, an anonymous and little-known building in Docklands, the ideal venue for an unseen war.
The war they were about to fight would be a digital war for the world's computer systems, an arcade game gone out of control, a huge battle fought inside servers and routers and optical fibres and copper wires, all hidden away from the regular world. One more step in the direction that mankind's wars had always been heading - more technical, less personal - high altitude bombers taking over from spears and swords, then missiles launched from the other side of the world, pilotless planes, weapons officers in ships and silos tapping keyboards and praying their electronics outperformed the other side's.
The battle they were about to fight merely took this progression to its next logical stage. It would be purely electronic warfare, software versus software, a virtual war fought inside microchips and motherboards, without all the
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messy physical business of missiles and bullets, just one program against another, and fought for purely electronic territory, for control of a virtual world, because whoever had control of that world also had control of the real one.
There would be an added bonus when this war was won. Danny would be able to sleep in his own bed again.
***
Eric lived in Hackney, a similar district to Islington but with less money. His block of flats was relatively modern, an ugly 1960s building squeezed between surviving Victorian terraces, built in the space created by one of Hitler's bombs, but the inside was beautiful. The furniture was mainly chrome, green canvas and glass, not to Danny's taste but so well coordinated he had to appreciate it. This was a room that had been put together with thought and attention to detail. Everything was immaculate, from the position of the green cushions on the sofa to the angles of the magazines on the coffee table."I really have to thank you for that warning," said Eric.
"That's OK," said Danny. "I'm not sure what you're working on right now, arms, legs,
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toes, fingers, but whatever it is, if you'd gone to hospital you'd probably have lost one."
There was no evidence of Eric's profession in the lounge. Plenty of hi-tech blended in with the décor, a white wide-screen TV and DVD player with home-cinema speakers, a sub-notebook and scanner, but there were no bits of robotic bodies lying around. Danny still hadn't seen any confirmation that Eric was the expert he claimed to be, apart from his easy understanding of Frank.
Eric paled. "I need a drink. Fancy one?"
Danny shook his head. It was lunchtime and he had a lot to do today.
"Let's move on," said Eric. "What can I do for you?" He walked across to the far end of the lounge, where there was a small refrigerator, like a hotel mini-bar, hidden by a draped tablecloth.
Danny wasn't quite ready to make his request. Almost ready, but he needed a few lines of preamble to get himself in the flow.
"Are you still against Frank?"
Eric laughed. "Is that a joke? Have you any idea what he nearly did to me?" He stood, holding a glass of white wine. "You know he's become the planet's dominant species, don't you?"
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The same thought had occurred to Danny.
He'd said it to Angela when he'd seen the articles and mails about researchers' missing limbs, then realised later what he'd said. "Yes."
"The species that controls the most resources, the one that determines what resources are available to other species. That was us, humans, until Frank came along. But now he's got control over almost all our computers, and we rely on computers, don't we?"
"But he's still dependent on us. He can't survive without humans. We could easily survive without him."
Eric sat on the sofa. He held his wine glass very delicately, by the stem, and sipped at the contents. The grip was in such contrast to the way he'd held his beer glass in the pub that Danny couldn't help but stare.
"That's right," said Eric. "He needs our electricity, our microchips, our repairmen to fix his computers. But how many of us does he need, a few hundred? What about the other six billion?
And this is all before he gets mobility. Once he's developed arms and legs, how many of us will he need then? Ever heard of the V-Ultrachip?"
Independently, Eric appeared to have reached the same conclusion as Angela, that
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Frank wanted autonomy. But had he arrived at that same timescale?
"How many days before all this comes together?"
Eric looked at his watch. "Eleven hours and thirty-seven minutes."
That didn't sound like a guess. Danny could come back to the precision later, but right now he should cut to the chase. It sounded like he had a lot less time than he'd thought. "You create robotic arms and legs, right?"
"Something like that"
"Do you do custom work?"
"Mostly."
"What are the chances you could create a robotic male sex organ in less than twelve hours?"
He'd asked Angela almost the same question, though with a longer timescale, and she'd replied, "You burned down my factory."
She'd said it in the same tone she might use to point out a distinctive birthmark or a constellation in the sky. "Not without a factory, I can't."
Eric's eyes opened wide. "What!
Damn, thought Danny, and this had seemed his best chance. "I thought you might be able to build a prosthetic penis."
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Eric was clearly shocked. He rolled the remainder of his wine around his glass for a while, then swallowed it, scowling as the cold hit his sore tooth. "You'd better take a look in the back. I need to show you something."
Behind the lounge was a kitchen, pure white paint and wood, belonging to a French farmhouse, and just as neat and tidy as the lounge A short corridor led from there to the back of the flat. On the way they passed two open doors, one leading into a glorious bathroom, deep blue with low-level lighting, and the other into Eric's bedroom. Eric closed the bedroom door as he went past, but Danny thought he saw a glimpse of black satin on a double bed, though he couldn't be sure. And he could smell perfume.
"You live here alone, Eric?"
"Yeah."
Eric unlocked the door at the end of the corridor. His workshop was almost the same size as the lounge, and better lit by floor to ceiling windows. One of the walls was un-faced brick, decorated with tools and with unfinished items of work, with hands and feet, some showing their mechanical innards and others covered with latex skin, looking far too lifelike and grotesque. There were more on the workbenches, some held fast in vices, and three long red items that Danny
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imagined might be tongues, although they looked too large.
Eric too, realised Danny, was a dealer-supplier in the world of technology junkies. Cook the spoon and take another hit in the shooting gallery of progress. Like Angela, Eric had never asked why Frank had been created, and he never would. Frank had been created because he could be created, and that was sufficient reason. One mountaineer doesn't have to ask another why they climb mountains.
"I specialise in small joint movement and skin sensitivity," explained Eric. "No knees, elbows, hips, shoulders, just the detailed stuff.
Everybody's got to be a specialist these days."
"Me too," agreed Danny. "I do process control for ion implantation."
"Problem is, I haven't got much in the way of qualifications, so I don't get a lot of business from the corporates and universities. I'm in the grey area."
"What do you mean?"
"People with a shotgun round in the foot, a hand taken off with a machete. Everything I do is legal, maybe because the law hasn't caught up yet, but I can't say the same for my clients."
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The end of the room furthest from the windows was curtained off. Eric drew the curtain back. "What do you think?"
There were no hands and feet here. On the wall and workbench were at least fifty human sex organs of different colours, sizes and sexes.
"Bloody difficult, I can tell you," said Eric. "Most bits of the body stay the same shape and sensitivity all day. But not these, oh no. Can you imagine designing a clitoris? Sometimes it likes a direct touch, sometimes it doesn't. How do I work out when? Pricks aren't much easier -
early sensitivity near the top of the shaft, late sensitivity in the glans. Nobody can do a proper erection mechanism, me neither, but then not many people try. I get most of my money from this end of the business. The mainstream robotics companies leave it alone."
Once he'd got over the shock, Danny was pleased to see this display of prosthetic sexuality.
He'd obviously come to the right place.
"Generally the first use of technology, sex," continued Eric. "Always a high priority for the human race. How long after the phone was invented before somebody used it to say; 'The idiot's out for the evening, fancy coming over for a shag?' How long after cars were invented before some horny couple hopped in the back?
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Got no diseases, these, either, always take care of their hygiene. You know what I mean?"
"Can we adapt one of these for Frank?"
asked Danny.
"The man with no dick and no body?"
Eric picked up a device from the workbench. It was a phallus mounted on a long mechanised arm, looking like a fetish Angle-poise lamp. It came with a neatly-coiled electricity lead and control wire. "Nearly finished."
"How far off?"
Eric looked at his watch again. "A lot less than eleven hours."
Then Danny had the first of two realisations. "You were already working on this for Frank?"
Eric nodded. "That's what he was pressuring me about."
"On a deadline?"
"Midnight tonight."
"But how was he…"
The penises were all very lifelike, except none of them were flaccid. But some of the vaginas were most peculiar, very round, without labia, and made for thighs that were far too close together. Unless they were…
And in that instant, something else slipped into place. The overdone macho image at
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the bar, a delicate grip on a wine glass, the immaculate hair and tidiness, the fine taste in furniture, the black satin that he really had seen, the heady perfume that didn't belong to a man, or at least not a hetero man.
"That's right," said Eric, watching the realisation cross Danny's face. "That's my big secret. Nobody knows. Especially not at the pub.
I like to keep it that way."
"Except Frank."
"That's right. The bastard."
"How does he know?"
"He looked at my emails."
Danny wondered why he'd been let in on the secret. Because of Frank, no doubt, but more than anything else because of the night at Moorhen. Though they barely knew each other, they already had a trauma in common and a shared secret. Now they had one more.
"I think I need to go now."
"Don't like gays?"
"No, it's not that. I'm meeting Sharon."
"Well I don't like most of 'em. Real mixed bag like everybody else. Can't stand the theatricals. That's why I spend most of my time with straights."
"Really, it's not that."
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"How about natural selection and hom