Robot Wake

By Ed Green

When a powerful robot swoops in to save the scientific team stranded aboard a sinking ship, its motives are questioned by a cynical world. Soon, however, the media is flooded with reports of the machine, which continues to rescue people from one environmental disaster after another. While the public come to see the mysterious robot as a modern day saviour, international leaders question its intentions. It is left to eight year old Dillon to decipher the actions of the automaton...

Robot Wake confronts a question at the heart of the modern social conscience: what are we doing to our planet, and would it be a better place without us?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AUK Authors
• Release date: Mar 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785383526

Book preview

1962

Part 1

Everywhere And Nowhere

The word UTOPIA stands in common usage for the ultimate in human folly or human hope - vain dreams of perfection in a Never-Never Land or rational efforts to remake man’s environment and his institutions and even his own erring nature, so as to enrich the possibilities of the common life. Sir Thomas More, the coiner of this word, was aware of both implications... In his little verse he explained that utopia might refer either to the Greek ‘eutopia’, which means the good place, or to ‘outopia’, which means no place.

Lewis Mumford, 1922

Chapter 1

Space is not a place. By definition, it is empty; bereft of any of the stuff that is used to make places. It is nothing. And so, it is also nowhere. As soon as any thing occupies it, contains it, or in some other way defines it, space ceases to be space. Given the faintest whiff of character - whether it be location, sound, smell or colour - it becomes a place. It becomes somewhere.

This story begins somewhere; a silent aerie, a Low Earth Orbit almost a thousand miles above our blue-and-green bubble... high enough that the sky is stretched into a thin, indigo halo around the colossal mass of the planet silhouetted below. Here, deep within the Van Allen belt, magnetic currents swirl and eddy - prickly charged particles washing back and forth like shingle caught in the tide. The emptiness of pure space presses heavily overhead; its absolute blackness pepper-potted by a million pinpricks of stellar light.

From this lofty perspective, a unique spectator observes the world rotating calmly below. A smoothly polished sphere of the densest, heaviest metal, the peculiar satellite’s form is indubitably male. It is close to bronze in colour, but darker and redder. As wide as a man is tall, the burnished orb bobs without effort in the vacuum, where it is buffeted by waves of radiation, cosmic rays and the occasional solar flare.

Like the face of the moon hovering another quarter of a million miles distant, the object’s surface is pitted with burrs and scrapes that glint with captured sunlight. These flecks of gold also illuminate the only identifying marks on the orb. Six circles circumnavigate the sphere, each one criss-crossing the others like lines of latitude and longitude mapped over its golden surface. Each deep, crisply cut line burns with the fire of the sun’s unfiltered rays. Together, the six loops cut the sphere into a patchwork of geometric tiles; one equilateral triangle inverted on top of another, creating a six pointed star.

The sun spares the alien object its last few rays, before passing gracefully behind a long, gentle curve of the planet’s horizon - leaving the Robot rendered in the cool greys of reflected starlight.

The head perched on top of his celestial body is a much smaller sphere of the same dense metal, circumscribed by a reflective band of black that runs around its middle. This dark visor is a sensory hoop, staring impassively outwards in all directions at once. The satellite also has limbs of a sort - four long, thin appendages that extend from his rotund body and trail away into the void. Each one culminates in a tear-shaped petal of photovoltaic cells. With the sun now hidden from view, the petals curl up on themselves in segmented sections, and wrap around the needle-like antennae. Delicate probes located at the tip of each vane blink with a clean white light.

The Robot watches in silence as the Earth rotates. A titanic ship of seven billion bodies, the planet turns effortlessly on her perfectly inclined axis, revolving neither slowly nor quickly, but relentlessly. Every twenty four hours, each 1440 minutes that pass, over a period of 86,400 seconds, he witnesses sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Time after time, the sun rakes its white-hot light across her exposed skin, changing night into day and then back into night.

Clouds swirl and drift in layers over the land and water far below; some thin as gossamer, others shrouding the planet’s curves in dark shadows like folds of a heavy velvet dress. Beneath this intermittent veil of vapour, the seas shimmer and sparkle with another rising sun. The dry crust in between is awash with activity. It breathes in great gulps of fresh sunlight and excretes elemental nutrients from its pores in a sustaining cycle of growth and rebirth. It is alive.

An LED blinks - a momentary red bead at the centre of the Robot’s smooth black visor. It loiters for a second, and then disappears. The spark rekindles, then begins to flash insistently. The crimson light throbs in time with the beat of information as it is received. Instructions unfold regarding an event: location, threat, severity, timescale. Another moment later, the flashing LED stalls, the flow of data ceases, and stillness returns. With his orders received, the robot shifts position in the cosmic current. The electromagnetic pull on his trailing antennae draws him into a different trajectory, coasting rapidly towards a geosynchronous orbit over the coordinates provided. While compensating for drift by making minute adjustments to the long tillers that drag in his empty wake, he runs a self-diagnostic:

Power status - seventy eight percent charged

Systems - all active and online

Green light for re-entry - 368 miles to descent window... 359... 350...

As he approaches his descent window, the long telescopic spines withdraw smoothly into his body. His head retracts into the safety of his spherical outer shell. Metal plates click softly into place, transforming the robot into a seamless, smooth sphere. Then, with the flick of an electromagnetic switch, he demagnetises his core and gravity snatches him. In a heartbeat, his giant bowling ball body drops out of orbit and into the jet stream; thirteen tonnes of heavy metal hurtling towards the planet below. The atmosphere quickly thickens, the air howling as he slices through the sky with a minimum of friction - a burning anchor headed straight for the sea bed. As the Earth’s surface rushes up towards him, a blazing hurricane of heat flares across his curved outer carapace. His shell glows red, then yellow and finally white with the familiar fire of re-entry. Deep inside his thick metallic skin, the stored energy burns and crackles as it recharges his inner core... 98%... 99%... fully charged.

A thousand miles above the Earth, from the calm darkness of a place somewhere on the edge of space, the spherical figure dwindles rapidly into a speck - carving an angry white scar into the thick marshmallow clouds gathered below.

Chapter 2

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space. Everything else is opinion.

Democritus of Adbera, 400 B.C.

The deep red-chocolate mahogany of their Georgian dining table swirls like slow-moving molasses beneath her fingertips. This close up, its rich grain could be a snapshot of the cosmos, a surging breaker, or the inner chemistry of a crystalline structure. Christine’s mind strays to the fuzzy memory of a TV show half-watched late last night: the Structure of the Universe, or something similarly profound and dull in equal measure. Everything around us is made of atoms, or so she was informed; all of our belongings, our bodies, even the smells that drift in and out of our noses. And, the slightly pompous presenter pontificated, while the mass of an atom is all held within its tiny nucleus, most of its volume is made of nothing but space: apparently a hydrogen atom is ten millionths of a millimetre across, but the proton at its middle is a hundred thousand times smaller, and the electron whizzing around the outside is a thousand times smaller again; it is barely there at all. The atom is almost entirely empty. So space is everything - and nothing - all at once.

Nevertheless, the table-top pressed lovingly to her face feels reassuringly solid. Over her shoulder, a pair of lofty, elegantly leaded windows stand slightly ajar. Outside, the leafy garden rustles and sways in the wind. A cool breeze whispers through the arched opening and brushes the nape of her neck; sunlight has made the wood wonderfully warm where her cheek rests against the lacquered antique surface. With one eye half-open, she squints in soft focus into the early morning glare.

Her own forearms rise like chalky beaches from the dark polished lava of the mahogany. Each one is dappled by freckles that gather in clusters on the sun-kissed upper face, and crested by a thin forest of fine, near-black hairs. Under this close scrutiny, her skin creases and wrinkles disappointingly at each fold and juncture, where ten or maybe fifteen years ago it would have been supple and smooth.

Imprisoned within the table’s glossy sheen, the trappings of breakfast stand in blurry pools of their own colour. Ornate salt and pepper grinders, whose oversize gilt silver handles hang like sabres at their sides. A carton of orange juice (fresh, not from concentrate, darling) with four stocky crystal glasses that cut the invading light into a dazzling rainbow. Behind a variety-wall of cereal boxes, a squadron of hard boiled eggs patiently await orders in their as-yet uncracked shells.

The momentary distraction passes, and the inescapable dryness returns - pounding at her temples and rasping at the back of her throat. An acrid burning smell hangs in the air in spite of the open windows, which admit the throbbing hum of a helicopter hovering somewhere in the sky overhead - either that, or the air conditioning is on the blink again. Away to her right, a clock ticks clinically, and without remorse for her fragile state. That these are the only sounds to be heard from their kitchen table on a Friday morning in oh-so-central London seems like a tiny miracle. Tick. Tick. Tick. Seven something? Twenty to eight. Shit. The hairs rise along her forearms. Emanating from somewhere upstairs and out of sight, the sounds of slapstick violence resonate around the elaborate cornices and decorative plaster ceiling of the extravagantly tall room.

Her eyes attempt to close one more time, but the prospect of yet another furiously headless rush looms large - propelling her partially prepared children hastily from house to car to classroom - all culminating in the shamefaced disarray of waiting for security outside of the punctually locked school gates. Again. The threat of indignity galvanises Christine begrudgingly into motion. She summons energy from some hidden reserves steeped in caffeine and peer pressure, and pushes herself up and away from the respite of their pre-warmed table. Rubbing at her eyes grinds crystals of sleep and last night’s scotch into gritty stardust, and she blinks away the floating spots of light.

KIDS! Dillon, Gus, Aimee! Breakfast’s ready. Come down now, please.

The dull barks and thuds cease, and are replaced by a mute silence, which in turn is quickly filled by the pounding of feet on the worn stair treads. The solid oak kitchen door is flung open to reveal a partially dressed boy. Thick black hair gathers in unkempt clumps on top of his head in an infuriating lack-of-style that would be de rigueur if he were ten years older. Its lustrous, oily tone matches the glossy plastic frames of his glasses. They in turn are perched precariously on a thin, angular nose at the centre of a dainty face - his father’s face; skin drawn taut over the fine bone structure below, none of the puppy fat of the other kids his age. So much prettier than his friends. It can’t be just her that thinks it. The lenses magnify his eyes; long venus-flytrap lashes blink over each warm hazel iris, flecks of gold and green encircling a fine black pupil. Those sweet eyes bob innocently on a level with the tarnished brass door handle, waiting for instruction... as usual. They are the mirror of her own, but imbued with the tacit openness and sincere trust of an eight-year old - a boy who is still the centre of his own universe, who is just barely aware of the breadth and depth of the world outside, and who is only now becoming attuned to the worse characteristics of the people who occupy it; characteristics like deceit, hatred, and greed.

Toast’s burning again, mum.

Mmm? Oh. Thanks, Dillon.

Did you see Dad?

What?

Dad. Did you see him this morning?

No. I didn’t. He was already gone when I woke up.

You were supposed to ask him f-

"Sorry, Dillon. Not now, sweetie. We’re already running late. Get your sister, please. Hi, Gus.