Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

A thought was coalescing in his mind as he hit Reply. If it would be too late then, didn’t that imply that it wasn’t too late now? What if some future version of himself in a parallel universe was looking back at him sitting here now and cursing him for a bloody fool, just as he was doing with the version of himself of a few years earlier?

‘Eva,’ he began to type recklessly.

Sounds like all you do is work! Do you have any holiday you can take this summer, and if so, do you fancy joining me in Corfu again like you did a few years ago? It’s been ages since we spent any decent time together and I don’t want to sound utterly soppy but I miss you. I never tell you that even though I often think it because I don’t know how you’d feel about it. But what the hell: I’d love us to spend some time together this summer. Do you remember how great it was last time? This is going to sound crazy but there was a moment, do you remember it, when we got sort of lodged in a doorway together? I’ve kicked myself so many times for not kissing you then.

He was distracted by a crunching noise coming from the data cupboard. Benedict glanced up but couldn’t see anything amiss, so he turned back to the screen and continued.

Anyway, I don’t want to jeopardize our friendship so if this is totally unwelcome then just say so and I’ll never mention it again, but I’m reading your messages and realizing that your life is moving on and I don’t want to end up kicking myself even more for just letting that happen and never being man enough to say what’s on my mind.

The noise from the cupboard was growing worryingly loud now, more of a thudding than a crunching sound. Irritated at being distracted but sufficiently unnerved by the possibility of something being wrong with what was, after all, a cupboard full of very expensive equipment, he pushed his keyboard aside and went to investigate.

*

Benedict opened his eyes and watched as the polystyrene ceiling tiles and strip lighting of the office swam into view. There was something else too, dark and blurry and closer to his face than the ceiling. He struggled to focus on the inorganic arm protruding from a hole in the cupboard door. Boris. There was a sharp pain in the side of his face, he realized, and he lifted his hand to touch it.

‘Don’t move,’ a woman’s voice barked. A female voice was in itself an unusual phenomenon in his office. He tried to turn his head and focus on the face as it hove into view above him.

‘What did I just say? Don’t move.’ Now the face moved directly into his line of vision and he recognized it as belonging to Lydia, another PhD student, from the Solid State team along the corridor.

‘What happened?’ His voice came out as an embarrassing croak.

Lydia appeared to stifle a smile. ‘I’m afraid your robot appears to have gone rogue. I’m using my powers of deduction here, Watson, but it looks like it punched through the door and hit you in the face. I was just checking my gallium arsenide cells when I heard a load of banging and then a squeal, and I found you lying on the floor and Boris hanging halfway out the door of his cupboard. I’ve turned the power to your room off at the fuse box, by the way — hope you didn’t have anything unsaved on your computer but Boris was still twitching rather alarmingly.’

Benedict started to peel himself up off the carpet.

‘You stay right there. The ambulance will be here any minute.’

‘Ambulance?’ he groaned. ‘That’s really not necessary.’

As he clambered to his feet waving away Lydia’s restraining hand, two green-clad paramedics appeared in the doorway.

‘The patient’s in here,’ Lydia called to them. ‘I did tell him not to move. He was knocked out by a robot, you know.’

‘Robot attack, is it?’ said the first paramedic, a large grey-haired man of about fifty, in a thick West Country burr. ‘We don’t get many of those, I don’t mind telling you.’

‘Honestly, it’s nothing,’ Benedict said. ‘Look, I’m fine now, really, it’s just a graze.’

‘We’ll be the ones to decide that,’ said the second paramedic, a skinny young man with a large nose. ‘Sit yourself in this chair and let me have a look in your eyes. Bright light, try not to blink. Now, this young lady said you were out for the count. How long was he unconscious?’ This last addressed to Lydia.

‘Not more than a few minutes, I’d say,’ she told him. ‘I heard a loud noise which must have been the robot arm punching through the door, and found him out cold on the floor. I phoned for the ambulance but he opened his eyes almost as soon as I put the phone down.’

‘You’ve got a bit of a bruise but it doesn’t look that bad,’ said the older man. ‘Still, can’t be too careful with a head injury. We’d better take him in.’

‘No really, I’m absolutely fine,’ Benedict protested. ‘I certainly don’t need to go to hospital.’

‘Well, we could release you into her care, I suppose. Will you be with him all night, young lady? Take him straight to A&E if there’s any vomiting or strange behaviour?’

Benedict looked pleadingly at Lydia and she sighed. ‘Yes, I can take him home with me tonight. I’ll keep a good eye on him.’

This seemed to be enough to placate the paramedics, and they picked up their bags to leave. As they reached the doorway the older man turned back towards them.

‘So that’s what you lot get up to down here, is it?’ he said disapprovingly. ‘Shenanigans with robots? And then they get a mind of their own and something like this happens? I’ll tell you the name of a film you should watch, young man. It’s called 2001: A Space Odyssey and it will teach you a thing or two about just how far you can trust computers. Mark my words, it never pays to go against nature,’ he added darkly, before stalking away along the corridor.

Benedict and Lydia looked at each other and covered their mouths with their hands, both waiting until they heard the double doors along the hallway swing shut before exploding into laughter.

‘Do you think Boris has achieved consciousness?’ asked Lydia when she’d stopped laughing long enough to catch her breath.

‘What, and set out to cause the downfall of his human masters and take over the world?’ Benedict guffawed, and then winced at the pain in his head.

They both glanced over at where Boris was hanging limply from the door of the data cupboard, looking not at all like a supreme, humanity-crushing intelligent life form, and cracked up again.

‘Right, that’s enough shenanigans with robots for one night, young man,’ said Lydia. ‘Come on, get your stuff together and we’ll head back to mine. There’s nothing we can do about this now. It’ll have to be sorted out in office hours.’

‘Oh, you don’t actually have to look after me tonight, you know,’ Benedict said. ‘I just needed you to say that so they wouldn’t insist on taking me in. I’m fine, see, perfectly all right to head home now.’

‘What, and have it on my conscience when they find you dead in the morning from a blood clot on the brain? Not likely. You’re coming with me, and that’s that.’

*

When Benedict woke the next morning his head still hurt, but he couldn’t have said whether it was due to Boris’s assault, Lydia’s cheap plonk, or the rather vigorous pounding it had taken on her headboard.

Crikey, he thought, looking over at her naked body, only partly obscured by sheets. Not timid old Benedict after all, eh.

Okay, so she’d done most of the running. Or all of the running if he was honest, but he hadn’t put on a bad show. The first time he’d been a bit trigger-happy, but surely the second, third and fourth times would have made up for that? Perhaps there were some advantages to a build-up of sexual frustration.