Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [42]
The pilot shook his head vigorously. ‘Not allowed,’ he grunted. ‘Not while I’m flying.’
‘Another regulation,’ the Doctor commented without smiling. ‘There seem to be a lot of anti-jelly-baby regulations.
That could be a worrying development for a civilisation, you know.’ He took a jelly baby himself. ‘A very worrying development.’
The pilot glanced at him and it was clear from his abrupt and unconvincing smile that it had suddenly struck the young man that it might be better to humour his weirdo passenger.
‘Uvanov’s one of the topmasters in the robot division,’ he said a little too quickly.
‘And that involves what?’ the Doctor asked, smiling back innocently.
‘Who knows? All the divisions are secretive, aren’t they? But robot division are the worst. Robot division are obsessed with security. Always have been, so they say. I can’t understand why. I mean, what have they got to hide?’
‘Something in the past perhaps?’ the Doctor suggested and watched the pilot closely to see what his reaction might be. The young man showed no particular interest in the idea. ‘Like what?’
he asked.
‘It’s difficult to say,’ the Doctor said, and thought that what happened on that sand miner seemed to have been hidden quite successfully. ‘Sometimes these things are buried so deep no one remembers.’
The pilot said, ‘Not a problem then. If no one remembers, no one cares.’
‘Yes, but what happens if someone does start to remember?’
Only when the Doctor had spoken the thought did some of its possible implications occur to him.
‘Remember what?’ the pilot demanded. ‘You sound as though you know something about the robot division. Are you saying you know something about the robot division?’
The Doctor shook his head and shrugged. ‘It’s all a mystery to me,’ he said. ‘Of course some people don’t feel comfortable with robots, do they? That could be the reason for the secrecy.’
‘The ARF, you mean? They’re no excuse. Strictly bucket brains, they reckon. Couldn’t hit the ground if they fell out of a flier.’ He banked the flier on to a new heading as if trying to make his point more graphically.
The Doctor forced himself not to snatch at the grab handle by his seat. ‘What about the robophobics?’ he suggested. ‘Maybe they’re a threat?’
‘Only to themselves,’ the pilot snorted. ‘Useless bunch of twitchies. I’ve got no sympathy with them. Terrified of robots?
That makes a lot of sense.’
‘Phobias tend not to make sense,’ the Doctor said. ‘At least to the people who don’t suffer from them.’
‘Well, I don’t suffer from them and as long as most people prefer a human at the flier controls I’ve got no problem with robots.’
The Doctor noticed that the cityscape they were flying over was changing rapidly now. It was becoming industrialised. The scale was much larger. There were major factory complexes and large open spaces which looked to be transport marshalling areas. Everywhere there were the tireless robots: the silent, limited-function Dums; the more flexible Vocs with their interactive speech capacity; and the more intelligent Supervocs which functioned as the co-ordinators. The Doctor was still not sure how much the capacity of the robots had been advanced since he was last involved with this eccentric version of a machine-intelligence-dependent civilisation but he could not believe there had been none at all.
The pilot said, ‘We’ll be coming up on the docking bays soon. Where do you want to start?’
It had all ended in tears of course, just as she had been expecting. Most of them were tears of laughter, it was true, but that didn’t make it any better. Everything had been so cultured and so elegant and so cultivated and so magical, right up until someone threw a punch. It was Simbion naturally. Why was it always that fat troublemaker who started these things? Toos wondered. And then someone threw a bottle. And someone ripped out some seating and tried to hit someone with it. And very soon the magic was gone