Barrington Bayley - The Rod of Light

‘True.’

He turned back to Cricus. ‘So you come to serve the Work? Then be grateful, for you shall! Gargan has ordered more brains to be added to the pile. Yours are as good as any other.’

Jasperodus became convinced of danger too late to flee. A net shot out from between the handles of the wheel machine to drape itself over him, so that he found himself struggling in a mesh of reticulated tungsten steel that tightened with his every movement. A tug from his captor toppled him to the ground. Rope he could have torn to shreds, but this net was made specifically to catch robots. He threshed about, before realizing he was only enmeshing himself further, then became still.

A second net had trapped Cricus. The riders now dismounted, propped up their machines on short extensible rods, and reached behind their saddles to open large square boxes that were placed there. From these they took out objects which unfolded to form fairly large wheeled carts.

Without another word they lifted Jasperodus and Cricus one by one into the carts, which they then attached to the rear of their vehicles. With the same machine-gun noise as before, the machines set off, towing the carts behind them.

Over the racket, Jasperodus bellowed to Cricus. ‘What will be done with us, Cricus?’

His friend’s frightened voice drifted to him. ‘ I don’t know… some experiment or other. …’ Then: ‘ At least we shall be of use to the Work. …’

Raising his head over the shallow rim of the truck, Jasperodus saw that they were approaching the junkheap. It was now visible as a sprawling pile, twenty to thirty feet high, of immobilised robots. Arms, legs, heads, torsos, all were tangled and tossed together. He had seen such sights before. It was common to see junked constructs piled high in scrapyards, in the yards of iron foundries, in the streets of Tansiann, and on the outskirts of robot townships. The difference was that the robots on such heaps were generally dismantled, emptied of useful parts, while here they seemed mainly complete. Only the obvious fact that their motors controls had been disconnected, he guessed, prevented them from being fully functional.

Standing by the pile, however, were three hulking constructs of a type to strike fear into any robot who had ever known slavery to humans. They were wreckers, machines whose enormous strength enabled them to subdue those superannuated constructs who objected to their own destruction. Jasperodus, who had fallen into the clutches of such creatures once before, felt a flash of anger at what Cricus had led him into, and he began to reckon what his chances of escape might be in the instants after the steel net was removed.

The truck bounced to a stop. Briefly he took the time to notice a thick cable that emerged from the foot of the pile to snake across the ground and into one of the big sheds. Then he got ready to spring to his feet, to run, as he was lifted out of the truck and lowered to the ground.

In the event he was not even given the opportunity. A wrecker placed a giant foot on his back, holding him down. The net was drawn back, but only far enough to expose his head. A steel hand forced his face into the dusty earth, from which barely a blade of grass grew. The inspection plate at the back of his cranium clicked open. They were switching off his motor functions.

Only then, with nothing connecting his mind to his limbs, a steel puppet whose strings had been cut, was he tumbled out of the net like a fish onto land.

The wreckers picked him up, one by his arms and another by his legs, and flung him high in the air. Up he arced, to fall with a crash and a clatter near the top of the heap, where he lay gazing helplessly at the sky.

Seconds later he heard a second crash, not quite as loud. It was the more lightly built Cricus, landing in his turn on the pile.

Jasperodus was disposed over perhaps a dozen living metal corpses. His head, for instance, rested on some luckless constructs face. Did all the occupants of the pile remain mentally active, as he did, he wondered? He presumed so. But from their silence it was to be deduced that not only their power of movement but also their voices had been switched off.

Experimentally he tried to speak, and found that he was dumb.

Why had he been placed here? To await the attentions of Gargan and his cohorts—put in store, so to speak? Three or four minutes passed while he deliberated this question, and he could find no other explanation. That his inspection plate had been left open did not, during that time, occur to him as significant; but now he first heard, then felt, a stealthy slithering movement in the pile below him. The face of the robot on which he lay was pushed aside an inch or two, causing his own head to loll; and something, a flexible metal tentacle by its feel, began to touch and tap at his cranium.

He heard a humming sound. The tentacle had entered his open inspection window! It was drilling into his brain!

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the humming stopped. Instead, Jasperodus heard something else: a confused chattering noise, made up of hundreds of muttering voices, all of whom seemed to be trying to address him.

It was a short while before he realized what the voices consisted of. He heard them not with his ears but in his head. They were the subvocalised thoughts of the robots in the pile around him, and they were not trying to talk to him at all.

Every one of them was muttering away to itself.

The chattering separated and floated away, like scum and tangle collecting on the surface of a pond into whose depths Jasperodus now found himself sinking.

And then, in those depths, the visions began.

At first they were fragmentary: glimpses of landscapes, of sunsets, of faces, buildings and countless artifacts, interspersed with brief sequences that were more abstract in character. He recognised them as graph curves, winding and dancing in as many as forty dimensions.

At first, too, the visions imposed themselves on his imagination only. His eyes continued to see the broody sky. Eventually, however, after how long he did not know, the new neural input completely coopted his sensorium and the external world vanished from his sight and hearing. He began to hear voices again—not the superficial chatter he had heard earlier, but operational machine talk—a number-crunching logic language.

Slowly Jasperodus became aware of what was happening to him. He was descending into the construct brain’s equivalent of the subconscious. Nor was it merely his subconscious; the tentacle that had drilled into his skull was a neural cable. It connected together the brains of all the robots in the pile, pressing them into the service of one huge, ramshackle—and probably arbitrary—link-up. This subconscious was a collective one.

In this inferior region practical functions lived side by side with archetypal images and stubborn fears. In that respect, it paralleled the human subconscious exactly. There were horrendous dreams of being torn apart by wreckers. There were irresistible voices demanding submission (stemming from the compulsive obedience to humans generally built into robots). There were also looming figures undeniably reminiscent of the robot cult gods. In the fading shapes Jasperodus was fascinated to discern, albeit in disguised form, gigantic Mekkan, dazzling Alumnabrax, Infinite Logic (another construct god)….

Yet apart from these archetypes, no robot personalities confronted him. He was a lone individual here in the turgid waters of the collective mind. Why was that? Why, for other robots, did individuality persist only on the level of attention, the superficial level of self-image…?

The answer was not hard to guess at. Of all the robots in the pile, only he possessed consciousness. His attention was real, not fictive; and due to that, the neural cable had inadvertently directed it from the external world to the inferior mind.