Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

The Goldfish skimmed forwards over the plain and we ran after it again. The ground was pocked with craters and scars, but in the distance it bulged into wide, low hills like bubbles in heating porridge. The valley we’d crashed into had seemed as bare and lifeless as if Mars had never been terraformed at all. Now we began to see little signs of life again: patches of purple lichen and emerald moss on rocks, and tufts of arctic grass.

‘Look!’ cried Carl, pouncing on something.

A small robot, about the size of a chicken, was crawling doggedly across the ground on four angular legs. Carl picked it up and its legs waggled pitifully in the air.

‘What?!’ Josephine was already breathless from running, but now her breathing hitched with panic. ‘I said big robots, Goldfish…’

‘I don’t mean that little guy, Josephine,’ the Goldfish said indulgently. ‘Come on, gang!’

‘Don’t call us that,’ muttered Josephine, but we followed it over a rise and it jabbed forwards with its nose in the air, pointing.

There, roaming placidly across the tundra like grazing bison, were the Goldfish’s robot pals.

Or, as you and I would call them, ‘the giant metal spiders’.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘ Perfect ,’ breathed Josephine.

‘ Really ?!’ asked Carl.

The robot spiders were easily as big as elephants. Technically, I suppose, they had six legs rather than eight, projecting from black metal bodies about the size of a car. But I don’t believe anyone could look at the way they moved, one poky black leg at a time, and not think ‘giant spiders’. Sometimes they would stop moving and lower that boxy abdomen towards the ground – raising huge, multi-jointed knees towards the sky – and plop seeds into the soil as if they were laying eggs. Some of them sprayed out finer clouds of seeds or puffs of liquid from dispensers on their flanks. Sometimes they’d scoop up little samples of soil on long spoony things that then retracted back into the body.

‘What’s their top speed, Goldfish?’ asked Josephine in a tense whisper, as if afraid of disturbing wild animals.

‘Well… I don’t actually have that information in my system,’ said the Goldfish. ‘But looking at them, I guess twenty-five miles per hour?’

‘Then we’d only have to travel fifteen hours a day and we could make it to Zond within three days!’ cried Josephine. She pointed to the nearest spider as it ambled southwards, sowing seeds and minding its own business. ‘That one’s ours ,’ she decided fiercely, and went running after it, as intent on her prey as a caveperson hunting down a woolly mammoth.

We followed, although I don’t think any of us were very clear about what we were going to do with a giant spider even if we caught up with one.

The spider did not recognise the Goldfish as a Robot Pal, or us as something that shouldn’t be run over. Josephine dodged a huge foot as it crashed down almost on top of her.

‘Goldfish!’ she ordered. ‘Fly up there and interface with it – make it do what you say!’

‘I’ll try ,’ said the Goldfish, and maybe it was my imagination but its perky voice had begun to sound a little harassed. Still, it did as she said – flew up to hover above the spider’s thorax, and its eyes flashed rapidly as it beamed an invisible flow of information into the other robot’s computer.

The spider was just as keen on doing its job as the Goldfish was on teaching us maths. So I guess it wasn’t surprising that it seemed confused and suspicious about the stream of new data telling it to stop what it knew it was supposed to be doing. It slowed down for a moment, but then twitched crossly and stamped its way onwards. The Goldfish bobbed wearily in the air in a way that somehow suggested a visible sigh , then flew after it and tried again.

This time the spider stopped moving, reached up irritably with a foreleg and flicked the Goldfish away. The Goldfish hit the ground at high speed with a resounding smack . The spider scuttled away, covering us in a fine dust of scratchy, sneezy seeds like ink from an escaping squid.

‘Goldfish!’ cried Noel, running to the fallen robot.

‘I’m OK, kids!’ said the Goldfish indefatigably, as it bounced up from the ground. But there was a nasty scuff along its side and a dent in its cheerful face.

‘Oh, Goldfish,’ Noel said sadly, stroking the battered place.

‘What’s going wrong?’ demanded Josephine.

‘Well guys, that is not a very sophisticated robot!’ said the Goldfish, and might have said it through its teeth if it’d had any. ‘I can’t get through its firewall. It just thinks I’m a threat.’

‘What if we could open up the casing – get into the CPU? Could you do a direct link?’ Josephine asked.

‘Well, sure, I might be able to force a reboot,’ said the Goldfish. ‘But…’

‘But it won’t exactly hold still for us to do that,’ Carl finished.

Josephine gnawed her lip anxiously as the spider and its central processing unit stomped away at a very brisk twenty-five miles an hour, but whether she would have come up with some new idea we never found out, because Noel announced, ‘I can get up there! Come on, Goldfish!’ And he jumped astride the Goldfish’s back and made a sort of giddy-up clack against its sides with his heels. Now I might have expected the Goldfish not to be totally thrilled with this, but I suppose it really did know how few options we had left because it took off like a rocket. There was just the echo of Noel’s excited whoop left behind.

‘Bloody Noel ,’ said Carl.

‘He’s really getting into this Goldfish-riding thing,’ I said, thinking also that the Dalisay brothers had more in common than I’d thought.

We ran and leaped to catch up. Ahead, we saw the Goldfish tip Noel carefully onto the spider’s back. Frankly at the rate it was going it might have carried Noel off into the sunset without us getting anywhere near it, but I guess after a while, when it realised no one seemed to be trying to reprogram it again, it relaxed a bit and slowed down and we managed to catch up.

Noel was rattling and sliding about on top of the spider and saying silly things like, ‘ Oh , wow. This is, erm, yeah, wow .’

‘You all right?’ Carl called up anxiously.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Noel. ‘There’s nothing to hold on to?’

‘Grip with your knees!’ Carl suggested.

‘They don’t bend that way!’

‘Get into the central processing unit!’ Josephine bawled.

Noel was now lying spreadeagled on the spider’s thorax, trying to grip the sides. ‘I can’t – I don’t see anything to open! It’s just smooth!’

The Goldfish ducked between the spider’s legs, under its belly and up the other side.

‘The access panel is underneath,’ it informed us.

‘Well, then it’s just badly designed!’ exploded Josephine.

‘It wasn’t designed for these circumstances ,’ said the Goldfish.

‘Well, maybe I could reach under there,’ mused Noel, who was clearly very determined to be helpful now.

‘No, don’t be an idiot,’ Carl told him. But Noel didn’t listen – he tried to lean under the spider’s belly, and sure enough, nearly toppled straight off. In this gravity, falling from that height probably wouldn’t have hurt him much, but going under one of the spider’s massive feet certainly would.

‘ Noel !’ Carl shouted, helpless.

Noel managed to grab one of the spider’s legs. There was an awful few seconds where there was nothing we could really do but make hissing noises through our teeth and watch him dangle as the spider thundered along, before the Goldfish flew in and somehow nudged him back on to the spider’s back.