Mike McQuay - Suspicion

“When do we get to make outside radio contact?” she asked once the initial hunger pangs had died down.

“We will all meet later and discuss those questions.”

“Are you going to put us on trial,” she asked, “for the murder of this other human? We are entitled to a trial, you know.”

“Derec has told us that he will try to solve this mystery,” Rydberg said.

Katherine stopped eating and stared at him. “And what if he doesn’t? What if we don’t ever discover what really happened? You have no right to hold us here as it is. We can’t go on indefinitely like this.”

“If he cannot find out the truth of the matter,” Rydberg said, “then we will assume our original supposition to be correct.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You have no right to determine my guilt or innocence without proper evidence. I’m not Derec, and I hold no romantic visions of a robot-controlled world. You cannot be allowed to have any power over the way I live my life. If you want to hold me for murder, you must put me on trial and prove it. If you put me on trial, I must be allowed to defend myself. I therefore demand immediate access to a radio so that I may provide myself with proper defense representation. I want a certified legal rep, and I want one now!”

“We will discuss the situation later today,” the robot said, “after Friend Derec has been returned to us. Meanwhile, your food is getting cold and will lose its appeal.”

“It already has,” Katherine returned, pushing the plate away from herself. She didn’t like the way this was turning. The radio seemed to get more and more distant to her, and with it, any hopes of ever leaving this place. Her arguments to Rydberg were based solely on laws and customs common to Auroran society. But all law, all freedom, was merely a rationalization away where a robot civilization was concerned.

The final result to her was quite simple: the machines were in charge and they could do anything they wanted.

Derec knew nothing with which to compare the size of Robot City, but as he drove its breadth, he couldn’t help but feel its vastness.

As the parts truck moved quickly through the city streets, the round drone bounced from one machine to another, squeaking loudly, its silver body lighting up in dozens of places, then winking out again as it performed automatic (but definitely sub-robotic) pre-troubleshooting functions on the broken machinery. Finally, it came to rest on Derec’s lap, all of its lights blinking madly, its squeaks turning into a high-pitched whine.

“So, where are we going?” he asked the troubleshooter while idly stroking its dome.

The machine whirred and bounced, but never answered. All at once, its whine turned to a loud, siren-like wail.

“Stop it!” Derec ordered, turning to the front of the truck to make sure he wasn’t attracting attention. He bent double over the thing, trying to muffle its sound without success.”

You’re going to have to stop,” he told the thing. “I can’t just… ”

It sent a jolt of electricity through its body, shocking Derec, moving him off.

“All right,” he said, pointing a shaking finger at the silver ball. “I don’t have to take that from you.”

The thing started bouncing up and down, higher and higher. Derec looked both ways over the truck back, then calmly brought up a foot and shoved the thing right off the truck, where it hit the street angrily, its wail louder as it bounced around like a rubber ball.

Within a few blocks, the vehicle slowed its pace, then got in line behind several other trucks, all filled with equipment. Derec got on his knees and looked over the piles of computers.

The trucks were pulled up to a gate, where a whole line of robots were moving up to the truck back, each taking a single piece of equipment and returning with it to a blockhouse that wasn’t much larger than a single doorway. Beside the blockhouse was the most amazing thing Derec had ever seen in his short memory.

A huge, gray machine rumbled softly, yet with undeniable strength and power. From it issued what could only be described as a ribbon of city. In five-meter-square slabs, the city appeared to be simply extruding from underground through the medium of the gray machine.

It pushed itself along, the slabs gradually forming and reforming as they moved, following some incredible preprogramming that actually let them build themselves. And as the slabs formed walls and floors and corners and stories and windows, they spun off in every direction in a slow, graceful dance that pushed against the already existing buildings, the mechanism that triggered the entire magnificent clockwork of Robot City.

It was as if the entire city were one mammoth, living organism always growing outward, always changing and replicating like the cells in a body, moving in imprinted patterns toward a complete, fully formed being.

It was a plan of monumental scale, an atmosphere of total, logical control for a given end. As he watched a skyscraper literally build itself from the ground up, each story pushing up the story above it and self-welding according to some unseen plan, he experienced the grandeur of an idea so vast that his limited knowledge was humbled by its power. This civilization was the product of a mind that refused to believe in limited options, a mind that accepted that what the imagination could conceive, the hands could make.

To such a mind, anything was possible. Even, perhaps, Perihelion.

The truck lurched, nearly knocking him from his knees. It had pulled up to the gate. The line of robots was now reaching into his bed for their equipment.

If all the action was happening below ground, that’s where Derec wanted to be. Hurrying out of the truck, he grabbed a small terminal that looked as if it had been shorted out by water, and took his place behind a robot heading toward that doorway into the ground.

He reached the doorway, cradling the computer like a baby. Warm air greeted him as he stepped through into barely lit darkness. He was confronted by a short flight of stairs leading down, and followed the robot that walked down before him.

The stairs terminated in a large holding area, brightly lit, frenetic with activity. Automated carts carried robots and mining equipment at breakneck pace. The cars zipped around one another in seemingly rehearsed fashion, their movements perfected over time, since it seemed impossible to Derec that they could move so quickly without hitting one another.

On the far wall sat a bank of elevators, perhaps twenty in all, some of them remarkably large. The robots that moved down the stairs headed toward these elevators, apparently going from here to a lower level where repair or scrap work was being done.

Having no idea of where to go, Derec chose an elevator at random and moved toward it with his burden. A large elevator nearby slid open, and a group of minerbots, covered with mud and soot, moved out bearing the non-operating carcass of one of their own above their shoulders.

Derec reached the elevator. It had no formal controls, but opened for him as soon as he stepped near.

A voice boomed behind him. “Nothing awaits you below, but death!”

He turned to see a huge supervisor robot, twice the size of a man, glaring down at him with red photocells. The robot’s body was burnished a bright, shimmering black.

“I’ve come to inspect your operation,” Derec said, feigning authority. He turned back to the elevator and began to step in.

The robot’s arm flashed out, his mammoth pincers clanging loudly around Derec’s forearm, squeezing tightly but not painfully.

“You are caught,” the machine said, and Derec’s computer crashed loudly at his feet.