Eager, p.3
Eager, page 3
Mr. Bell turned round. “Hello, Gavin. Excuse me,” he addressed the Chinese-looking man, who instead of walking away moved closer to the screen.
“So this is your son.” He peered at Gavin. “Your father is very intelligent. Very fine architect. This factory will be one of the best in the world. You know, we are going to build the next generation of BDCs.”
Gavin glowed with pride. His father raised an eyebrow in modesty.
The man continued, “Let me tell you something. These BDC4s are unlike any robot you have ever seen. Just you wait.” He grinned.
Gavin guessed that the man would be disappointed if he told him he had met a BDC4 only a moment ago, so he nodded.
“See you,” said the man with a wave of his hand. He moved toward the group around the model.
“Just a quick call,” said Gavin’s dad. “As you can tell, we’re about to begin the presentation to the corporation. I called my friend, Professor Ogden, to ask his advice. He was very excited when I told him of our decision. He wouldn’t say why.….”
Over his father’s shoulder, Gavin could still see the man with the spectacles, who stiffened and looked back at Mr. Bell. Gavin had an impulse to interrupt his father. He moved close to the screen and spoke quietly. “Euphoric, Dad. I’ve … er … got to wing, though.”
“I’m going to visit him after this meeting. Your mum’s working but I thought you and Fleur would like to come. I can pick you up at five.”
“Fleur’s going to see Marcia. But I can come.”
“Good,” said his dad. “I don’t know why you’re whispering….”
The man had moved further away but might still be in earshot. Gavin was uneasy, although he did not know why.
“I’d better go,” said his dad. “See you later.”
Gavin told the gobetween to switch itself off. He felt foolish. Of course the LifeCorp man had not been interested in their conversation. Probably, he had reacted to what someone at the table had said, or perhaps he had remembered something important. He certainly looked a bit annoyed, as if he’d left something behind in his hotel room, for instance. Anyway, what did it matter if he had overheard them?
Yet an uncertainty was nagging at Gavin.
He left the cubicle and continued along the corridor toward the changing rooms. His game of liveball would be starting in ten minutes. He remembered to contact Fleur on her jinn. She didn’t answer—no doubt she was in the middle of an experiment—so he left her a message to tell her he was going later to see the professor. He sent the same message home to Grumps.
Gavin changed quickly and joined the other liveballers on the playing field. A thin drizzle of rain had started to fall; already the ground was slippery.
“Let’s go!” shouted the coach, and the warm-up began. The ball was set to rise at a low height but still it led the players an exhausting dance as it swooped and zigzagged past them. Suddenly, it was heading straight for Gavin’s chest. He ran forward to catch it and the ball veered away. Gavin dived after it, missed and fell into the mud.
“You moonrock!” cried his friend Omar as he ran past. Gavin was about to get up when an image flashed into his mind. He saw again the man from LifeCorp walking away from his father, then abruptly stopping and glancing back at him. It had happened so quickly that Gavin had not registered it at the time, but now he was sure he was not mistaken. The man had looked round at the precise moment his father had mentioned Professor Ogden. And the expression on his face had not been friendly.
For the rest of the game, Gavin was so distracted that he spent most of it on the ground. The final whistle blew and he realized that he would have to rush if he was going to get all the mud off in time to meet his dad.
“Are you all right?” asked Omar, breaking off from congratulating the winners. “I’ve never seen you play so badly. Like a first-generation robot.”
“Sorry,” breathed Gavin, “got to wing.”
Mr. Bell was waiting at the other side of the hallway. He waved. Gavin ran toward him, skidding the last few meters of the polished floor.
“No need to hurry,” said Mr. Bell.
The big glass doors refused to open. Two women, arriving at the top of the steps and finding their way blocked, frowned in exasperation. Mr. Bell shrugged apologetically. A thin tubular robot with no arms or legs slithered over to him.
“Excuse me.” Its optic sensors swiveled round to examine Mr. Bell’s face. “We do not recognize you as authorized to accompany this boy.”
Mr. Bell stroked his chin. “I’ve just had a haircut—perhaps that’s the problem. I fancy it gives me a squarer jaw, a bit more ‘all action hero.’” He winked at Gavin, who smiled back, but the robot was not amused.
“I shall have to take a retinogram. If you would lean forward …”
The robot’s optic sensors fixed on Mr. Bell’s eyes. He tried not to blink. “Bell, Peter,” said the robot. “Father of Fleur and Gavin.”
“That’s me,” said Mr. Bell cheerfully.
“Thank you, Mr. Bell.” The glass doors opened. “Have a good evening. Goodbye, Gavin.”
CHAPTER 4
“We have to take the hoverbus,” said Mr. Bell. “There’s one along in a moment.”
Daylight was fading. Though the rain had stopped, the pavements were wet and shiny under the streetlamps.
“Dad, who’s that Chinese man?” said Gavin as they turned the corner from the learning center. “You know, the one I met on the gobey.”
“Chinese? Ah, you mean Mr. Lobsang. He’s Tibetan, not Chinese. He’s one of LifeCorp’s top robot designers.”
“He tried to listen to our conversation—I think it was because you mentioned Professor Ogden.”
“Really? Perhaps they’ve met. They’re in the same field, after all,” said Mr. Bell.
“He looked funny,” said Gavin.
“Funny?”
“As if he’d like to run the professor over, given half the chance.”
“Hmm,” responded Mr. Bell. “Well, scientists don’t always see eye to eye.”
They heard the drone of the hoverbus. Mr. Bell held out his jinn and the hoverbus homed in, swooping low to the level of the pavement. The curved double doors parted. His dad climbed on but the step up was too high for Gavin. The hoverbus realized its mistake and sank closer to the curb.
“Welcome aboard,” said the conductor. She extended her thin metal fingers to scan their travel passes, then stepped aside to let them into the body of the bus.
The hoverbus was half full of people who looked as if they had important business in town. Gavin counted at least ten suits and spotted several very expensive jinns. A monitor on a screen showed the path that the hoverbus was taking. Mr. Bell spoke the name of the street they were visiting.
“Sorry, that street is too far from our route. Please select another destination or alight at the nearest stop indicated by the red light.”
“Looks like we’ll have a bit of a walk, but it isn’t too far,” said Mr. Bell.
Gavin loved the hoverbus and wished he could travel on it more often. You could watch a movie on the small screen in front of you, or listen to music, or pick up a lexiscreen to read the news or a story. But he preferred to size up the robots on board. He nudged his father. “Look at that one. I bet it could crush this bus between its hands if it wanted to.”
His dad turned to look at the robot in question. It was over two meters high and very broad. “Too big for us,” he said. “That one belongs on a building site. Can you imagine it making tea or changing Charlotte’s nappy?”
Tea making had not been part of Gavin’s fantasy. He had been imagining exactly what people at the learning center would say to him, with a robot built like a colossus. No one would ever try to bully you if you had one of those.
At the front of the bus a message continuously scrolled across a wide screen. Gavin waited for the beginning of the text and read:
Welcome aboard the Argos. Your conductor for today is Dora.
Patrons are kindly requested to observe the following:
to be furnished with a valid pass for their journey.
to address each other with respect and consideration at all times.
to converse in modulated tones.
to refrain from eating or drinking (refreshments may be purchased and consumed at any of our termini. Please ask Dora for menus).
to sit wherever possible. There is standing room for 20 entities.
standing patrons to hold on to a pole at all times in case of turbulence or an emergency stop.
LifeCorp reserves the right to eject from the hoverbus any such entities who do not comply with the above. Thank you for traveling on the corporation hoverbus the Argos.
Next to the screen was a graphic of a person with multiple heads, to indicate that the message was available in numerous languages. Gavin idly wondered whether the computer knew ancient Greek but decided to find out another time. The hov-erbus had risen almost to roof level and the lure of looking in people’s windows before the blinds came down was hard to resist.
A series of domestic snapshots flickered by him: a woman walking upstairs with a work case and several misshapen carrier bags; a grandmother placing bowls of food before two small children; an older boy stirring a pot while his father chopped vegetables on a wooden board; all of them scarcely noticing a second shadowy world played out behind them in the eerie glow of the gobetween.
His dad followed his gaze. “Not jealous, are you? Of the gobey in every room?”
Gavin shook his head. “It’s not as if we can’t use it when we want.”
“And there’s always the middle of the night,” joked Mr. Bell.
“The house spies on me!” Gavin blurted out.
“What?”
“It threatens to tell Mum if I don’t go back to bed. She told it to.”
“How long before it stops you?”
Gavin did not want to lie. “Half an hour, maybe,” he admitted.
“Then that’s not spying.” His dad sounded relieved. “That’s keeping a friendly eye on you, like a grandparent would.”
“S’pose so,” said Gavin. Mr. Bell put down the lexiscreen he had been reading.
“You know, your mum and I discussed this when we built the house. We agreed it would be dreadful to spy on our own children. You’ve a right to privacy like anyone else. That’s why we don’t ask Grumps questions. His job is to protect you—to be a guardian, not a guard.” Mr. Bell smiled, as if pleased with his turn of phrase.
Gavin could think of several of his friends whose parents did spy on them. They were constantly inventing ways to distract their house or robot. “Thanks, Dad. I suppose it means you trust us.”
He looked out of the window again. It was almost dusk and a steady stream of hoverbuses and flying pods was leaving the city. Hundreds of white lights danced toward them like smiling faces. Then the bus was skirting buildings again, and he realized with a shiver of excitement and apprehension that they had entered the city center.
The buildings were taller here and seemed to form one crowded unbroken row. Thrusting metal structures and concrete monoliths overshadowed ancient buildings of brick and stone. All they had in common was a grimy façade. It was as if the city had been in suspended animation for many years, unable to build anything new, not even able to decay.
Gavin’s father once told him that many of the buildings had been office blocks. Now their shuttered windows represented thousands of dwellings, one on top of the other. The shutters gave the impression that the inhabitants had shut themselves away from life. Gavin knew this was fanciful, that during the day the streets were teeming with people. Even now, if he craned his neck to look down as far as possible, he could see them heading into bars and gobey halls.
Yet who could tell what went on behind closed windows? Gavin tried to imagine what life in the city would be like. Most city people did not have jobs since labor had been taken over by robots. They lived in the city to be fed and entertained. It might be a friendly place to live, he told himself, remembering the row upon row of hedges in Wynston Avenue.
Sudden bursts of bright light interrupted the orange glow of the streetlamps. For a long stretch of the route, every spare centimeter of building was covered with a flashing parade of virtual robots. No wonder people hid behind shutters, thought Gavin, when the front of their house was a billscreen.
“There’s a BDC4!” he cried. “Oh, you missed it.” He managed to make out the slogan: “Robot by name, friend by nature.”
Gavin watched the displays for a moment longer. A thought struck him. “Dad, why do they bother to advertise these robots in the city? If professionals like you and Mum can’t afford them, there’s no way the city people can.”
His father hesitated. “Propaganda,” he said at last.
“What’s that?”
Mr. Bell rubbed his chin. “It’s a message to the rest of us that the technocrats have the most powerful robots.”
“But that’s like saying …” Gavin broke off. He wondered why he’d never realized it before now. “That’s like saying the technocrats are somehow better than the rest of us.”
His dad laughed, unconvincingly, it sounded to Gavin. They fell silent.
The hoverbus dipped toward a park, full of trees, where an elderly lady and her small dog were waiting. Dora stepped down, picked up the dog in one hand and with the other steadied the woman by the elbow. The doors were closing behind them when two young men dived through the gap. Without glancing at Dora, they held out their passes to be scanned and ran to the center of the bus, where they started to climb up the poles, monkey style. The shorter of the two leant over and snatched the other’s woolly hat.
Dora marched down the aisle. “This behavior is not acceptable. Please sit down.”
“We’re holding on to the poles, aren’t we? What’s your problem?” said the man who had grabbed the hat.
“This is not an acceptable way of holding on to the poles. LifeCorp will not be responsible for any injury—”
Before she could finish, the man stretched out an arm and thrust the hat over her face. There was a gasp from one of the people in suits. Gavin grinned and turned to his dad. He was startled to see Mr. Bell’s tight-lipped expression.
Although Dora had lost her sight momentarily, her sensors told her the exact position of her attacker. She stepped forward, seized the young man by the shoulders and plucked him from the pole, which he made a futile attempt to cling to with his legs. Swinging him across the aisle, she put him gently on a seat, as if he was the final cherry on a cake.
His companion quickly jumped down and sat beside him, trying to look nonchalant. The first man folded his arms and glared out of the window.
“Dora showed them,” laughed Gavin.
“Silly to mess with machines,” muttered his dad.
Gavin frowned. “A robot won’t ever harm a human, will it? That’s the way they’re programmed.”
“You’re right,” said Mr. Bell. “But as you’ve just seen, in a show of force a robot will win. I learnt that to my cost when I was younger.”
“What do you mean?” asked Gavin excitedly. It was novel to imagine his dad as some sort of gladiator, facing a snarling-jawed robot on the battlefield.
A red light appeared on the monitor. “Some other time,” said Mr. Bell. “This is our stop.”
CHAPTER 5
Marcia lived in the technocrats’ quarter a kilometer or two from the learning center. This was one of the few journeys Fleur was allowed to make unaccompanied.
Most of the route was under surveillance by cameras and robot patrols, but sometimes Mrs. Bell was nervous about the short distance, especially if there had been a message on the gobetween to say marauders were about. Though one day Fleur had overheard her remark to Mr. Bell that she didn’t always believe the messages. “Sometimes I think they just want to keep us off the streets,” her mum had said.
It was intoxicating to walk on her own, to have a sense that she might choose to do whatever she wanted, even if all she did was visit Marcia. Fleur felt lighter, yet confident and strong, as if her presence was somehow outlined in bold ink. She was more aware than usual of her surroundings, of the gradually darkening sky and the drip drip of raindrops from the trees along the pavement.
She wondered what awaited her. Marcia’s family led a chaotic life and every time Fleur visited, there was a commotion of some sort.
The security gate had been primed to expect Fleur and recognized her from the data in its bank. When it told her it was safe to do so, she walked through the hot fence that guarded the entrance and went uphill to the Morrises’ house. From the outside it looked deceptively quiet. She went up to the front door.
“Fleur Bell,” the house identified her. “You may enter.” The door slid to one side and Fleur stepped into the hall. Or what used to be the hall. Today it was much narrower, like a bowling alley, and appeared to stretch the length of the building. There seemed to be no doors in the new hall so Fleur had no choice but to wait until someone appeared. Judging by the noise, there were several people in the house. Gunshots reverberated from a room next to her, while on the other side of the opposite wall a cheerful male voice was saying, “To the right! To the left! And up and up and up!” She also thought she could hear the faint strains of a stringed instrument.
She had just decided to walk down the narrow hall and try to find the stairs that led to Marcia’s room when a wall moved across in front of her, blocking her way. At first she was startled; then she saw that the wall completely filled the gap from ceiling to floor. She recalled how suddenly and smoothly it had slid into place and her surprise turned to alarm.
Hastily she made for the front door. But no sooner had she turned on her heels than a second wall appeared, blocking the way again. She was trapped. There were no doors or windows in the high box that now enclosed her, nor could she see any control buttons or voice-activated panels on the walls. The sounds of gunshots were closer now and drowned out the other noises, if indeed they were still being made.
