Adam Christopher - The Age Atomic

“Not so fast, honey pie.” The Project jerked to life. Laura jumped back to her left, clamp in her grasp. She pulled it off the bench and it fell downward, yanking her shoulder painfully. The clamp was much heavier than she remembered.

She backed away, knowing that she was out of room and out of time. She raised the clamp in front of her. It had a handle like a gun, complete with a trigger to lock and unlock the three articulated fingers.

The robot ignored her, turning its attention to the other fusor reactor on the bench. It lifted it with one hand like it weighed nothing at all, and turned to the doctor.

“Ta-da,” it said. “Neat, right? We got them fixed. Portable nuclear fusion. Virtually unlimited power.” The robot shook its head; Laura almost imagined it was in quiet appreciation of the technology. The Project was right. Each reactor could power a city. Laura had hoped they would be used for good, of course. They would change the world. Unlimited power, so cheap as to be virtually free, inexhaustible, safe. First every city would have a fusor, one single cylinder replacing a dozen conventional power stations. And who knew what was possible with such power? That was the whole point, the whole thing about science . It wasn’t what you could imagine now; it was what you could imagine five, ten, twenty years from now. What possibilities would the power offered by the fusor reactor unlock in the future? Every city would have one — how about every home? What if every single human being in the United States of America had one each ? Their own personal spark of creation, a flame captured from the embers of the Big Bang itself. Contained, nurtured, tamed .

It made the mind reel.

But it was too much. She knew that. Atoms for Peace were going to put one into each of a thousand machine soldiers. That was too much power, a recipe for disaster. If anything went wrong…

Laura watched the fusor reactor swing in the robot’s hand. A portable power source. A portable Little Boy or Fat Man, or worse. A whole army equipped with fusors would have enough power to knock the Earth off its axis.

“Now,” said the Project. “I’m gonna try a different approach.”

Laura squeezed the clamp’s trigger, making the three fingers flex, making a clicking noise that was as loud as an atom bomb. The robot took a step forward, and she took a step back and hit something tall and hard. She was up against the computer cabinet with nowhere to go.

“Me and the doctor,” said the robot as it walked slowly forward, “we had this thing going on. Quite a plan, see. But, you know, things the way they is, it’s down to you and me now. I mean, I wouldn’t say no, right? Right. So here I am thinking, hell, we got a whole bundle of these babies, so why not, right?”

The robot raised the fusor in front of it, pointing the flat end of the cylinder directly at Laura. It took another step forward.

“Sure, why not,” said Laura, her voice barely a mumble.

Didn’t the Director see everything that was happening in the city? Was she watching now, from the Cloud Club, as her precious Project ran amok in the laboratory?

Of course she was. Laura felt her heart kick. This was part of it. A test of the fusor reactor. An experiment to be observed.

Laura shook her head. The robot took another step towards her.

“Screw you, bitch,” said Laura under her breath, and she powered forward, using the cabinet behind her as a springboard. Squeezing the trigger, she pushed the clamp forward as she moved, hoping that after dozens of installations she could estimate automatically the mating point of the clamp and the reactor in the robot’s chest. All it would take is one turn, just one turn to the left, not even a five-degree rotation, and the reactor would disconnect and she would save herself and maybe she would save the whole damn world.

The Project threw its arms up and leaned back — as though surprised — as she flew at it, and Laura wondered what the noise was, the sound that reverberated around the workshop. She looked up into the eyes of the robot, their red lights rocking back and forth in the sockets like a child’s broken toy, and she realized the sound was her, screaming in anger. She was up against the robot, its metal casing cold and hard, her fingernails trailing silently across the chest. She screamed and screamed again, raising her arm up, her yanked shoulder protesting at the weight of the clamp. Why was it so damn heavy?

The clamp slipped, and Laura tried again, this time tearing her eyes away from the robot’s pretend face to look and align the clamp. There wasn’t much time; any second now she’d be tossed like a sack of wheat clean across the laboratory.

A twist of the wrist, and the clamp still wouldn’t lock. The metal fingers slid across the glass port of the reactor, failing to find any slots at all. She twisted the other way, yelling in frustration.

Her cry died in her throat and she almost coughed. The fusor reactor, it was different. There were no slots in the rim for the clamp, nothing to grip on around the edge, no way of removing it, not by her. The clamp was redundant.

“Lady, please,” said the robot. “Have a little patience.”

Laura pushed away and let the clamp drop to the floor. She turned, desperate to make a getaway. There was no other option.

“It’s OK, I understand.” The robot grabbed Laura by the collar of her lab coat, lifting her until her feet left the floor. “Don’t worry about a thing. I got this honey. Power, I get it, I understand. And trust me, you wouldn’t believe what this thing can do.”

“What are you doing?” Laura struggled, but the robot’s grip was firm, her lab coat cutting into her armpits.

“You need an upgrade, that’s for sure. I tried it on old Philo but it didn’t take. But it’s OK — I know what I did wrong now.”

Laura shook her head, her eyes wide. Couldn’t the robot distinguish between living creatures and machines like itself?

“I can’t use the fusor,” she said, “I don’t need it!”

The robot almost tutted. Then it lowered her to the floor and pushed her hard against the computer cabinet with the end of the fusor reactor, squeezing the air out of her lungs. With the other hand it tore open the front of her coat, then her blouse underneath, then snapped the front of her bra off, exposing the pale skin over Laura’s sternum. The robot tilted its head, and moved the reactor, lining up the flat end between her breasts. Laura gulped in air, each breath pushing her skin against the end of the cylinder. The metal was cold.

Laura cried out again — not a scream of fear, but of anger, screaming at the goddamn robot that was going to kill everyone, including her, as the robot pushed, breaking bone, breaking flesh, as it tried to upgrade her.

Rad woke in a hot sweat, his mouth filled with a foul, chemical taste. He coughed and rolled over, banging into the side of something hard. Looking up, he saw through watering eyes that it was one of the slab tables in the downstairs workshop.

He sat up, yanking the scarf from his neck and awkwardly pulling himself out of his trench coat. It was hot in the workshop, the chloroform-induced headache giving Rad a sudden rush of claustrophobia down on the floor. He grabbed the lip of the table and stood, leaning against it as his coat fell to the ground, where it hit with a dull thud. Rad bent down and picked it up, slipping the gun out of the coat pocket and into the back of his waistband. It was careless of his captors not to have searched him, but he was grateful.

He stood, leaned against the left-side slab and took long, deep breaths as he oriented himself. A breath caught in his throat and he coughed as he saw the machine on the slab, empty earlier, was now occupied. There was a robot lying it in, a flat, unfinished metal head sticking out of the dark green box. Rad watched it as the thumping in his head subsided. The face was crude, nearly featureless save for two short slots for the eyes and a longer one for the mouth. The robot didn’t move.