Ian McDonald: Cyberabad Days

Sanjeev brought the hummer to a halt on the ridge top. The light was yellow, the heat appalling. Rai stepped out to survey the terrain.

‘What a shit-hole.’

Sanjeev sat in the shade of the rear cabin watching Rai pace up and down, up and down, kicking up the dust of Ahraura with his big Desi-metal boots. You didn’t stop them, did you? Sanjeev thought. You didn’t save us from the Plaguewalkers . Rai suddenly leaped and punched the air.

‘There, there, look!’

A storm of dust moved across the dead land. The high sun caught glints and gleams at its heart. Moving against the wind, the tornado bore down on Ahraura.

The robot came to a halt at the foot of the ridge where Sanjeev and Rai stood waiting. A Raytheon ACR, a heavy line-of-battle bot, it out-topped them by some metres. The wind carried away its cloak of dust. It stood silent, potential, heat shimmering from its armour. Sanjeev had never seen a thing so beautiful.

Rai raised his hand. The bot spun on its steel hooves. More guns than Sanjeev had ever seen in his life unfolded from its carapace. Rai clapped his hands and the bot opened up with all its armaments on Vora’s Wood. Gatlings sent dry dead silvery wood flying up into powder, missiles streaked from its back-silos; the line of the wood erupted in a wall of flame. Rai separated his hands and the roar of sustained fire ceased.

‘I got it all in here, everything that the old gear had, in here. Sanj, everyone will want us, we can go wherever we want, we can do whatever we want, we can be real anime heroes.’

‘You stole it.’

‘I had all the protocols. That’s the system.’

‘You stole that robot.’

Rai balled his fists, shook his head in exasperation.

‘Sanj, it was always mine.’

He opened his clenched fist. And the robot danced. Arms, feet, all the steps and the moves, the bends and head-nods, a proper Bollywood item-song dance. The dust flew up around the battle-bot’s feet. Sanjeev could feel the eyes of the squatters, wide and terrified in their hovels. I am sorry we scared you.

Rai brought the dance to an end.

‘Anything I want, Sanj. Are you coming with us?’

Sanjeev’s answer never came, for a sudden, shattering roar of engines and jet-blast from the river side of the ridge sent them reeling and choking in the swirling dust. Sanjeev fought out his inhalers: two puffs blue one puff brown and by the time they had worked their sweet way down into his lungs a tilt-jet with the Bharati air force’s green white and orange roundels on its engine pods stood on the settling dust. The cargo ramp lowered, a woman in dust-war camou and a mirror-visored helmet came up the ridge toward them.

With a wordless shriek Rai slashed his hand through the air like a sword. The bot crouched, its carapace slid open in a dozen places, extruding weapons. Without breaking her purposeful stride the woman lifted her left hand. The weapons retracted, the hull ports closed, the war machine staggered as if confused and then sat down heavily in the dead field, head sagging, hands trailing in the dust. The woman removed her helmet. The cameras made the jemadar look five kilos heavier, but she had big hips. She tucked her helmet under her left arm, and with her right swept back her hair to show the control unit coiled behind her ear.

‘Come on now, Rai. It’s over. Come on, we’ll go back. Don’t make a fuss. There’s not really anything you can do. We all have to think what to do next, you know? We’ll take you back in the plane, you’ll like that.’ She looked Sanjeev up and down. ‘I suppose you could take the car back. Someone has to and it’ll be cheaper than sending someone down from Divisional, it’s cost enough already. I’ll retask the aeai. And then we have to get that thing…’ She shook her head, then beckoned to Rai. He went like a calf, quiet and meek down to the tilt-jet. Black hopping crows settled on the robot, trying its crevices with their curious shiny-hungry beaks.

The hummer ran out of gas twenty kays from Ramnagar. Sanjeev hitched home to Varanasi. The army never collected it and as the new peace built, the local people took it away bit by bit.

With his war dividend Sanjeev bought a little alco-buggy and added a delivery service to his father’s pizza business, specialising in the gap-year hostels that blossomed after the peacekeepers left. He wore a polo-shirt with a logo and a baseball cap and got a sensible haircut. He could not bring himself to sell his robotwallah gear, but it was a long time before he could look at it in the box without feeling embarrassed. The business grew fast and fat.

He often saw Rai down at the ghats or around the old town. They worked the same crowd: Rai dealt Nepalese ganja to tourists. Robotwallah was his street name. He kept the old look and everyone knew him for it. It became first a novelty and then retro. It even became fashionable again, the spiked hair, the andro make-up, the slashed Ts and the latex and most of all the boots. It sold well and everyone wore it, for a season.

Kyle was the first to see the exploding cat. He was coming back from the compound HFBR-Mart with the slush cone – his reward for scoring a goal in the under elevens – squinted up at the sound of a construction helicopter (they were still big and marvellous and exciting) and saw it leap the narrow gap between the med centre and Tinneman’s coffee bar. He pointed to it one fragment of a second before the security men picked it up on their visors and started yelling. In an instant the compound was full of fleeing people; men and women running, parents sweeping up kids, guards sweeping their weapons this way and that as the cat, sensing it had been spotted, leaped from the roof in two bounds onto the roof of an armoured Landcruiser, then dived to ground and hunted for targets. A security guard raised his gun. He must be new. Even Kyle knew not to do that. They were not really cats at all, but smart missiles that behaved like them, and if you tried to catch them or threatened them with a weapon, they would attack and blow themselves up. From the shade of the arcade he could see the look on the guard’s face as he tried to get a fix on the dashing, dodging robot. Machine-gun rattle. Kyle had never heard it so close. It was very exciting. Bullets cracked all over the place, flying wild. Kyle thought that perhaps he should hide himself behind something solid. But he wanted to see. He had heard it so many times before and now here it was, on the main streets in front of him. That cat-missile was getting really really close. Then the guard let loose a lucky burst; the steel cat went spinning up into the air and blew itself up. Kyle reeled back. He had never heard anything so loud. Shrapnel cracked the case of the Coke machine beside him into red and white stars. The security man was down but moving, scrabbling away on his back from the blast site and real soldiers were arriving, and a med Hummer, and RAV airdrones. Kyle stood and stared. It was wonderful wonderful wonderful and all for him, and there was Mom, running towards him in her flappy-hands, flappy-feet run, coming to take it all away, snatching him up in front of everyone and crying, ‘Oh, what were you doing what were you thinking are you all right all right all right?’

‘Mom,’ he said. ‘I saw the cat explode.’

His name is Kyle Rubin and he’s here to build a nation. Well, his father is. Kyle doesn’t have much of an idea of nations and nationhood, just that he’s not where he used to live but it’s OK because it’s not really all that different from the gated community, there are a lot of folk like him, though he’s not allowed to leave the compound. In here is Cantonment. Out there is the nation that’s being built. That’s where his dad goes in the armoured cars, where he directs the construction helicopters and commands the cranes that Kyle can just see from the balcony around the top floor of the International School. You’re not allowed to go there because there are still some snipers working but everyone does and Kyle can watch the booms of the tower cranes swing across the growing towers of the new capital.