Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [265]
She ran out into the middle of the road, which was about fifty metres wide and obsessively well-paved. Along the centre were empty plinths of concrete like traffic-islands. Tamara bounded up on to the one facing the alley, looked around again and beckoned to Wilde. He dashed after her and jumped up beside her.
‘Cover my back,’ she said. Wilde stood behind her and began scanning up and down the street, his pistol held in both hands, close to his waist. The street had its own strange pedestrians: robots of various shapes and sizes clambering walls, edging along pavements. One or two bowled down the permanent way, in light wheeled vehicles. Ethan had to dodge one of these smartly as he ran over. It sounded a subsonic siren that set everyone’s teeth on edge.
‘You look like you know what you’re doing,’ he said to Wilde, as he stationed himself a couple of metres further back along the plinth.
‘Trained in the militia,’ Wilde grinned. ‘Mind you, it was a long – look out!’
A black, winged missile was hurtling towards them. Wilde raised his pistol to head height and shot it. It came down and hit the roadway in a shower of feathers.
‘Pigeon,’ said Ethan. ‘Take it easy, man. They’re harmless.’
When the alarm spread by this incident had been calmed, the deployment continued. After a minute or two they proceeded behind Tamara along the canyon of office-buildings. Somewhere a couple of streets away, an automated process was sending gouts of flame high in the air at irritatingly irregular intervals. Between flares, the illumination of the buildings themselves was almost as unpredictable: some windows dark, full of the expedition’s reflections as they passed; others, at street-level or high up on the faces of the buildings, lit from within. Shadows and silhouettes moved, but not those of humans. At the same time, it was impossible to believe that a robot-based commercial life was going on; it was all too random, too artificial.
At the next major junction the street they were on crossed one that was narrower, but much more crowded: a slowly moving river of metallic machinery, over which faster entities skittered and skipped.
‘Makes you sick,’ Ethan muttered. ‘Some of the big ’uns would make bloody good cars.’
‘You pay me enough, I’ll catch you one,’ Tamara told him. She waved them all into a skirmish line, again keeping Wilde next to her.
‘Right,’ she said, swinging her back-pack to the ground. ‘Time to hack through the jungle.’
She unbuckled the pack and tugged down the flaps, exposing a piece of equipment with a small keypad, extensible aerials, rows of meters and screens.
‘Amazing,’ said Wilde. ‘Popular mechanics! Amateur radio!’
‘Heap of junk,’ Tamara said. ‘No fucker will miniaturise it. Not enough demand.’
‘You put this together yourself?’
She looked at him. ‘Wouldn’t trust anybody else to.’
Her fingers flew over the keypad. Screens flickered, tiny speakers howled and stabilised.
‘Gotcha! Traffic channel.’
She twirled a knob, looked up at the machines passing like cattle ahead. Made some adjustment, twirled it again. A ten-metre-long crawling machine suddenly swerved right across the road. The machines behind it piled implacably into it and within seconds formed a mounting heap of wheeled or tracked robots. As those in front of it kept moving, a space soon cleared.
Tamara was still watching the feedback.
‘Fucking go! Go! Go!’ she yelled.
The others sprinted across.
Tamara lifted the pack, leaving the control-panels exposed.
‘Still here?’ she said to Wilde. ‘Shit, OK, let’s move it.’
She sidled across the road, Wilde at her back keeping lookout. A machine on four long, stalked legs, its body about the size of a melon, with a cluster of lenses at its front, suddenly reared above the pile-up and scanned them.
‘What’s that?’
Tamara looked up and stopped.
‘Don’t move,’ she said.
Wilde held his breath, and froze in the act of looking over his shoulder at the machine. The lenses withdrew,