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Once we reached the old building, Alyssa started trying each door we passed along the wall. One eventually opened, outwards, and we all peered cautiously inside. Pitr and I spoke at the same time.
‘Is it safe?’
‘I can hear something.’
Alyssa pulled the door open wider and strolled confidently inside. ‘That’s just the crazy box banging backwards and forwards in his cage.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
Inside, the old building seemed to be one open space right up to the translucent roof ten metres overhead. I could see that there were light panels on the walls and on the ceiling, but they were either off or broken. There was a stale smell, and specks of dust hung in the air, made sparkling by the light passing through the roof from the new 'day'. The door had opened into an aisle.
‘Are we sure nobody is here?’ whispered Pitr. This time I could understand why he was talking so quietly. The place was making me feel a bit awestruck and intimidated too, and we hadn't even seen that much of it yet. Perhaps it was something to do with the way the echoes sounded, or perhaps it was the spooky thumping and whining. When we got to the end of the aisle, we emptied out directly into an empty central space. Along every wall were cubicles of wildly varying sizes, ranging from only two or three metres wide up to twenty metres or more. And inside every one was a machine.
Back home, we were used to 'bots. They looked after parts of the machines we couldn't, and somebody once told me they looked after all the pipes that brought the raw material to the Tank Room. Our ‘bots weren't big, about the same size as a six- or seven-year-old kid, so nobody thought they were scary. It was a generally sad time when we found one that had died, because that usually meant something was going to stop working soon. Here they had machines 10m tall and 20m long. Huge things. Impressive things. I could almost feel them, as though some unheard vibration signalled quiescent life.
Alyssa walked out into the central space, turned back and forth to get her bearings, then started to lead us towards a stall at one end of the hall.
‘Come on, I'll show you the thumper,’ and she skipped off. I pushed Pitr's shoulder to get him moving and we followed along.
In a stall three metres wide was a small bot. It was maybe half a metre tall, the same wide, and a little longer. Two boxes of some kind had been placed across the entrance to the stall. I pushed at them with a foot and they seemed impressively heavy. The little bot was at the far end of the stall and, as I watched, it came rushing up towards us.
For a moment, I thought it was coming this way because of us, and I took a step back in case it was some kind of sentry. But then it crashed into one of the heavy boxes at full pelt. I looked over the top of the box. A panel on top of the 'bot had been removed and all its workings were visible. That seemed wrong to me, and I felt queasy for some reason. Then I started to see that things didn't look right. I would have expected to see order inside the workings of a 'bot. Tidiness. But inside this 'bot things looked smashed around and there were jagged edges and broken wires.
On the front, two things that looked like eyes had been smashed and torn from their sockets. A panel popped open and a thin arm extended outwards and started to feel at the wall in front of it, but all the little fingers on the end of the arm were twisted and broken. The 'bot pulled the arm back in, made a noise half way between a whine and a whistle, then turned around before shooting off to the other end of the stall and crashing into the wall there. Out the little arm came again.
‘Isn't it funny?’ said Alyssa, laughing as she stood next to me and watched the little bot run head first into another wall. ‘My Daddy brought me to see this when I was a little girl. My people come here to scavenge metal sometimes. He said his father had brought him to see it too, so it’s been doing this forever.’
I had to step away because I was getting an irrational but irresistible desire to slap her. Somebody had done this. Somebody had deliberately broken that machine, cracked it open and hacked at its insides, to make it bang into walls for fun. I knew it was only a machine, but I felt outrage, hot red furious, and tears of anger pricked at the corners of my eyes.
I stepped back up to the barrier boxes and pushed my mind towards the drone. I didn’t know if it would work, but I didn’t know what else I could do to help the little ‘bot.
‘Active,’ glowed in front of me.
I looked at the little 'bot and held the concept of a question in my thoughts.
‘Restate.’
So it didn't understand that. Maybe I needed to be more obvious. I looked directly at the little 'bot again and thought.
‘I want to talk to that.’
A glowing outline formed around the 'bot, then the bot turned and moved over to stop directly in front of me without crashing into the wall. I heard startled noises from either side of me, but I was concentrating on the glowing outline which first turned into a line drawing, and then into a transparent three-dimensional image of the 'bot. Little squares and shapes began to flash inside the drawing, some of which faded, some of which persisted in red or yellow. Next to the picture a column of text rolled up and I understood exactly nothing as it prattled on about 'cognition core’, ‘primary sensory plexus' and a host of other stuff, about half of which either had 'failed' or 'compromised' next to them in red. Eventually, the list stopped and the little drawing of the 'bot looked like it had a rash there was so much red on it. The image cleared and a new message came up.
‘Unit critically compromised. Partial communications available.’
I thought for a moment. I didn't really want to talk to it. I couldn't bear the thought of it carrying on blindly, helplessly bashing itself into walls.
‘Turn it off,’ I said.
‘Confirm unit shutdown.’
‘Confirm. Turn it off.’
There was a click from little 'bot, and an almost inaudible whine suddenly got louder, then slid from a high note to a low note and stopped. The little 'bot settled slightly, and I could feel it was finished.
‘What did you do?’ said Alyssa, but I didn't answer. I couldn't. I had a small lump in my throat that would have made me sound really stupid, so I walked away and started looking at other things. Behind me, I tried to ignore Alyssa goading Pitr into poking it with a stick to see if it would move.