Adam Christopher - The Age Atomic

Despite Carson’s disability, Rad and the others had to jog to keep up with the old man. They walked out of the tunnel into a huge chamber, a concourse of elegant marble, the blue ceiling immensely high and studded with lights like the night sky.

“What is this place?” asked Rad as they crossed from one side of the chamber to the other.

Finally Carson broke his silence. “It is called Grand Central. It has been here always, although never used. It is a train station.”

Carson led them up an inclined passageway and then down a set of wide, shallow stairs. Rad jogged alongside him. “There are no trains in the Empire State.”

Rad saw Carson grin under his beard. “Precisely,” he said. “The City Commissioners were never interested in this place. A veritable fortress, right in the heart of the city! I always thought it would be useful one day, so I had one of the tunnels converted to an airship dock. Splendid, isn’t it?”

“That’s one word for it, sure,” said Rad.

“Oh, Mr Bradley, you haven’t changed, haven’t changed a bit.” Carson clapped, his face lit in a grin Rad remembered well. “And, Kane, my dear fellow,” he said, turning to the younger man, “it is a sheer delight to discover you did not perish as we all thought. The Fissure is a strange and wonderful thing.”

“It’s good to see you again, Captain,” said Kane.

“Aha!” Carson came to a halt. In front of them was another large room, as impressive as Rad’s fleeting glimpse of the concourse above, but in a different way. Here the ceiling was lower and curved into great vaulted arcs, illuminated by up-lights that cast triangular shadows against the walls. The vaulted ceiling came together to form the inside of a flattened dome in the center of the room, creating a series of separated spaces like the segments of an orange. There were tables of varying sizes scattered around, and plenty of chairs, like the place was some kind of restaurant.

Carson hobbled forward and pulled out one of the chairs.

“Now, then,” he said, gesturing for the others to sit. “It is time we had a good, old-fashioned chat.”

Jennifer filled Carson in on recent events.

Rad watched as the Captain studied her golden mask, his one good eye moving over the features constantly. Something bothered Rad, and Jennifer had left out a couple of details from her account — like her search for her brother and her own investigations.

Rad rolled his fingers on the tabletop. Finally, he turned to Jennifer. “We’ve got a robot army coming for us, but the thing that bothers me is that your old boss here doesn’t seem to know who you are. You wanna tell us about that?”

“I-”

“And about what your brother has to do with the King of 125th Street?”

Jennifer sighed behind her mask and looked at the three men seated at the table. She pulled off her gloves, and played her fingers along the edge of the wood. Rad felt a jolt of surprise when he realized that her naked hands were now the only part of her, apart from her hair, that was visible. He knew his turn would come to explain to the others what he’d found in the theater freezer, and he wondered what her reaction would be when he told her about the glass head.

“I wasn’t an agent,” she said. “And I didn’t work for Carson, I worked for the City Commissioner — the other one, during Wartime. I was just an ordinary desk clerk, like a hundred others.

“I was attached to the group liaison between the robot yards and the Empire State. It was fine, we were fighting a war, but… I found things out about the ratings used on the Ironclads.”

Rad nodded. “That they’re people?”

“Yes. I mean, why did nobody know? People — men — marched down to the Battery and into the factory, and they never came back, never. Then every Fleet Day the robots would march down Fifth Avenue until the ticker tape was a foot deep on the sidewalks, and they filed onto their Ironclads, and off they’d sail with fireworks and brass bands and… that was it. How could nobody figure that they were men? How could people be forgotten? Friends? Family members… everyone who volunteered or was conscripted?”

“The same way nobody remembered that the last Fleet had never returned from beyond the fog,” said Kane.

Jennifer turned her golden mask to his black one.

Carson brushed his mustache with the back of his index finger. “The Enemy,” he said, “is a living thing, an entity that is also a city. Nobody knew that either, except me, and the City Commissioners. But one thing we didn’t understand, didn’t even consider, was that if the Enemy was a thing alive, then so was the Empire State. The city fights against those in it. It makes you forget, Ms Jones — it has to. Otherwise our entire world, the whole of the Empire State, the whole of the pocket universe itself, becomes a logical fallacy, an impossibility. ”

Jennifer shook her head slowly, clearly failing to follow the Captain’s explanation. Rad waved his hand. “Doesn’t matter, and I don’t understand it myself. But that’s not everything you found, right?”

“No,” said Jennifer. “It was my brother. He’d volunteered to join the navy. I knew that but… but I forgot. When I discovered the robots were men, I looked up the enlistment records, just to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding something. I found his name there, and then I remembered. My brother, I lost my brother.”

The others around the table were quiet. Rad glanced at the Captain, and saw his eye narrow, his brow knitted tightly in concentration. He wished that Kane and Jennifer didn’t have to wear the masks; it felt like they were robots as well.

He turned back to Jennifer. “That’s why you were on the trail of the robot gangs, right? You were looking for your brother.”

“He was in the last enlistment, and then the Chairman vanished and Wartime ended. I wasn’t in the Empire State Building when the robot, the one from the Ironclad, tore it up. But afterwards everything was in chaos. I got through to some people I knew in the robot yards. They were just shutting down, closing everything up. And they just… they just let them out, all of them.”

“The robots?” asked Kane.

Jennifer nodded. “They had several Ironclad complements ready to go, as well as four other batches that were partway through conversion. But I couldn’t get any information, things were… well, they were crazy. I tried to match up the records, but nothing tallied. It looked like they also had a whole lot of volunteers and conscripts who they hadn’t started processing yet.”

Rad nodded. “Your brother among them?”

“I didn’t know, but that’s what I hoped. There was no way to check who had already been turned into one of those monsters, or who had escaped. But the navy just… stopped. The doors opened, and they were left to fend for themselves. Where could they go? They were built and programmed for war, but now they had no function. They couldn’t go back to their old lives, because they didn’t remember them, and neither did their own families.”

“They’re in Harlem,” said Kane. “The ones that hadn’t been finished, they ended up there.”

Rad steepled his fingers and tapped his top lip. “The refugees. The King of 125th Street said he’d worked in the robot yards. So he gathered the leftovers up and began work.”

“Except he was a robot himself,” said Kane.

Rad nodded. “That was a just a diversion. The real king was a man, working while his mechanical assistant collected more refugees and kept them doped on that green stuff, making them dependent on it so they’d have to stick close.”

“Yes,” said Jennifer. Then she fell silent. Rad wished he could see her face, what she was feeling, thinking, but her golden mask was frozen. But he had a feeling about what was coming next.