Theme Planet (34 page)

“No trick. You still live. But if
you’d
really
stepped into the sun tunnel, really - in an actual physical
sense - then you wouldn’t have lasted a single picosecond. You would be gas,
Katrina. In fact, less than atoms.”

“Well, that’s a great magic
trick,” said Kat, face grim.

Behind her, the time-displaced
inferno raged on, lighting a huge steel chamber that was, to all intents and
purposes, a five-thousand-square-kilometre cube. It was gloomy, lit in a sort
of dull silver-grey, and a cool wind was blowing in, smelling of grease and
burned oil.

“This is the Jackhammer Hall?”
she asked.

“Yes,” said SARAH.

“But... nothing’s happening.”

“It will. But it’s random. Chaos
personified. We must be careful.”

They stepped away from the
furnace and began to walk, SARAH leading the way once again. Katrina studied
the back of the avatar, and realised it was a creation done to perfection - but
then, so were the androids, right? And they were created by Man, not by Machine
Mind, as she suspected was the case with SARAH.

Katrina’s job, in the real world,
when she wasn’t being the cliché that was “full time mum” - the job she had
actually studied for, the job she trained for, hell, the thing she was
naturally
good at -
was advertising. Katrina could sell a tramp a Rolex.
She could sell heroin to a pregnant mother, amyl nitrate to a redneck, a
wheelchair to a goldfish and Satanic recordings to God. She had not just been
the No. 1 Uber-Super-Duper-Best-Selling-Top-Motherfucker Sales Person/Persona
at Fleck, Flick & Flack Quad-G Advertising Agency, she had become a
(hush, lest one sell out) a
partner
in the firm. Or The Firm. She had
generated so much damn income for the business that every male partner bust a
bollock when she considered leaving to set up her own independent (and
independently competitive) Agency. After all, Katrina was the woman who sold
Coke on Mars. Shit, she sold Mars Bars on Mars, without any irony.

She was the sort of woman who got
the job done. And with flair, creativity, underhand aggression and originality.

When she left to become a
full-time mother, the partners at Fleck, Flick & Flack Quad-G
Advertising Agency had bust
double-bollocks
and many had gone on to have
an entertaining career with alcohol.

And so. Katrina was no stranger
to the world of double-talk, pillow-talk, bollocks, bullshit and spin. She
could smell a slogan from a billion parsecs, create a strapline on the toilet,
and create a marketing campaign from the
contents
of the toilet.

She’d been dubbed the Mistress of
Bullshit.

The
Queen
of Doubletalk.

And that was why Androids Inc.
came to her for the marketing of their
new, improved, special model, Generation
6
Personalised Android Companions.
It had been Katrina’s first
inauguration into the world of Androids. Before then, she’d never really
thought about them. They were illegal on Earth, and would be “slotted,” “killed,”
“pulverised,” “retired,” “put to sleep” or simply “given a pension” (which had
to be Katrina’s favourite, especially after three quarters of a bottle of vodka
when the lights were low and she was feeling particularly low and worthless
after selling three million prams to women who already owned prams). What had
her great mentor Greenbald III once said?
“Make the fuckers buy something
they already have. The only way to true fortune.”
And he’d been right. And
Katrina had followed his logic and advice. And it made her feel like a cunt.

Still. Her time with Androids
Inc. had been interesting and fruitful, and she’d learned a very great deal.
She spent time in the factories on Mars, and further out in the mining colonies
of Delta Proximata, Beta Galvanata and Trejo Machinata, where she’d discovered
and observed and analaysed the full gamut of android inception, creation,
construction, packaging, delivery, malfunction, and destruction. It had been
quite a learning curve. And yet another curve that left her reaching for the
vodka, feeling quite sick, and leaning on Dexter’s very broad dumb-cop shoulders
for support...

The androids had started off bad.
Malfunctioning, genetically and in various code processes. Watching the
Androids Inc. vidtapes and filmys, Kat saw androids sit up from the bench, or
crawl out of the VATS, and then just bubble away. They had to be scooped up
with shovels. They weren’t put in body bags, they were shovelled into buckets.
In silence, with the professionalism of an advertising partner on the sniff of
a big deal, showing no judgement for crimes against humanity or morality or God
whatsoever, Kat had watched the history of Androids Inc., watched its promo
vids and filmys made for the eyes of the military, mining corps, harshworld
explorer adventure companies and, of course, the governments. All these things
had passed through Katrina’s grasp, all this hidden
history -
hidden, at
least, to the normal people of the Earth. Kat had been in a privileged position
to watch the rise and rise of the android - around the same time AI became
self-aware. But whereas AIs, despite superior intelligence and enhanced
cognitive ability over their masters, recognised in humanity
something,
whether that be sheer weight of numbers, or ability to breed at a supersonic
rate (on a galactic timescale, humanity was like so much warm bacteria in a jar
of rotting meat) -whatever, AIs had made a universal decision to
cooperate.
Not
so androids.

It was called the Inferiority
Complex, and it ran thus:

An android was a created human.
Humans were superior, in that they created the androids.

But androids were superior, in
every other respect.

Humans looked down on androids as
inferior, biologically, because they were created.

Androids looked down on humans as
inferior, biologically, because they were so feeble in every way.

Androids had many of the same
feelings and drives and desires. With one major, serious difference:

A distinct lack of empathy.

That’s not to say it wasn’t
there, and in many cases was manufactured
in,
but an android just didn’t
love his brother android, or indeed, man, woman and child, in the same way a “normal”
non-created human would.

Not that many humans were
normal...

In the end, they didn’t get the
contract, not because of Katrina’s skills as an advertising whore (which she
was, she freely admitted), but because of a global outbreak of murders by
androids, on Earth and its many colonies. It seemed the inhibitor chip placed
behind the ear was an easily removable mod, and having the same arrogance and
pride as their human creators, the first thing any self-respecting newborn
android did was head for the cutlery draw and a bottle of whiskey
(sterilisation
and
oblivion in one handy 70cls).

It had been an eye-opener for
Katrina, subsequently swallowed by the joys of motherhood, the horrors of
caring for young children, the black hole swallowing her career Dexter being
shot at work, and the fact that androids were soon illegal, decommissioned and “Non
Reportable” under Oblivion Government legislation.

Now, as Katrina walked, for some
reason the avatar before her
reminded
her so much of the androids. And
she shivered. After all, the androids were
bad,
right? But illegal.
Decommissioned. Expendable. Non-human. Waste. Walking garbage. Yeah, they might
look like you and I, but that’s just a façade right? They don’t feel like
humans feel. Don’t empathise with their fellow Man...
(hey, but then, half
of her fellow Men don’t empathise with their fellow fucking Man, it’s called
hatred, and jealousy, petty criminology, base stupidity, greed and lust and
every fucking scumbag is out for himself, right?)...

Androids Inc. said the androids
were perfect. They’d been wrong. Oh, so very, very wrong.

How was this avatar so different?
An android created by a machine? An alien intelligence? It was still a false
human. A created thing. An organic machine. A biological horrorshow. Or was it
just code in a computer game? Was there really, actually (hush)
nothing
there?

Shit.

Katrina rubbed at her eyes, head
spinning, head thumping, reality and dreamscape merging, nightmare and reality
blending to become one and the same.
Where am I? What am I doing? What the
hell is real? Am I really here, walking this grey steel terrain? Or is it just
another figment of a dream or nightmare? Are my children here? Can I even feel
pain...

She pinched herself, hard. It
hurt like a bitch-bite.

Suddenly, SARAH halted and held
up a hand. Molly and Toffee giggled, as little girls are wont to do. Katrina
pulled them close in a protective cocoon of bone and flesh - her own bone and
flesh. A pathetic, weak cage, but it was all she had. And she would give
everything to protect them. Kill anybody and fucking
everybody
to
protect them.

Just like an android,
she reflected.
Ha. Yeah,
right.

“What is it?”

“We are approaching.”

“How can you tell?”

“The smell. It’s getting
stronger. Can you smell it?”

And Katrina could. Oil. Grease.
Heat. Friction. Suddenly, before them, a piston the size of a skyscraper
screamed from the roof, from the sky, from whatever the hell was up there in
the gloom. It was circular, and grey, and thick, and it powered down with a
groan like the dying of worlds. It ran out of momentum as it reached floor
level, and there was a tiny
click
as the mammoth piston touched down,
but if Katrina had been standing under it, she would have been squashed into a
pancake of crushed bone and gristle on a platter of comedy blood. A cartoon death,
only without the elasticity of regeneration that cartoon characters possessed.

“Wow!” said Toffee, in awe.

“Cool,” grinned Molly.

“Not bloody cool when we have to
walk across the steel desert with the possibility that these things might come
down and crush us!” snapped Katrina. Then to SARAH, “Is there any other way?”

“I wish there was,” said SARAH,
face filled with apology.

“Yeah. Right.” Katrina’s eyes
narrowed. “Then let’s do it. You go first. And if I get squashed, you make damn
sure you get my children out of here alive.”

“I will endeavour to meet your
wishes,” said SARAH.

They moved fast, eyes turned up.
At first, nothing was happening; it was as if the ride - above ground, up there
on
Theme Planet -
as if it wasn’t running. And that was just fine with
Katrina. After all, it was only
fun.
Enjoyment. Second-hand pleasure.
Fake fear.

A piston screamed down, some way
to Kat’s right. A distant pillar of steel sent by God to smash the unholy. She
gave a sour, bitter smile. “Shit,” she muttered, nervous now, and pushed on,
into what was not exactly a run. Not exactly.

The girls were trailing behind,
holding hands, moaning constantly. It was a truism that all children of the
Theme Planet generation abhorred physical effort unless it meant working thumbs
and hips on the latest game console.

“Come on,” muttered Kat.

“But I’m tired,” said Molly. “Can
we have a rest yet?”

“We’re in a very dangerous place,
sweetie,” said Kat through gritted teeth. “We can’t exactly sit down and have a
picnic.”

“I don’t see no danger,” said
Molly, staring hard at her mother.
God, you’re going to be trouble when you’re
older,
Katrina thought, but kept from vocalising the prospect. The last
thing she needed
here and now
was a mutiny.

They moved on, fast through the
gloom. The stench of hot oil got stronger and stronger, and occasionally a
distant
thump
echoed
through failing light. Pistons rocketed from the heavens at progressively
shorter intervals, easing from a sporadic, occasional
thump
to a sound like a stampede of
dinosaurs, or maybe a sequence of pounding canon fire. Katrina found she was
half-running, her head hunched down subconsciously - as if that would somehow
protect against a million tonnes of pressurised steel cylinder.