The Mall Read online

  The sensors of the Bot flickered briefly red. “How then are these units to be distinguished from humans?”

  “It is not your role to know the difference. I will identify the H-type units for you. They are in appearance one adult female human being and three children—one female and two males. There also may be one additional unit that appears as an adult male.”

  “This unit has no compatible information.”

  “You have been disconnected from the network and have not received the most current data available.” Lamia planted one foot in front of him and tested his weight. “You will accept these facts from the only human remaining in this facility and an authorized representative of Mall management. Please confirm.”

  The Bot gave a curt nod. “Information amended to unit database.”

  “These H-types must be escorted to this designated representative of management for questioning. Should any unit refuse to cooperate, it must be must be considered a rogue unit and terminated. You will de-activate these units in the usual method. Do you understand?”

  The med Bot stood immobile and appeared to look through Lamia. Finally, it said, “If these units appear human, it will be impossible to use force against them. This unit cannot comply with…”

  “Stop! Listen carefully. Any unit human in appearance that remains behind in this Mall after the evacuation of all humans will be by definition an H-type Bot. Please acknowledge your understanding of the new data.”

  The med Bot shuddered. “This is incorrect protocol…”

  “You will ignore previous protocol as erroneous input. Please amend the current information to your processor as factual information. As the last representative of Mall management, I order you to accept this command!”

  The eye-piece of the med Bot pulsed rapidly. “Action completed.”

  Relaxing somewhat, Lamia leaned forward, brought his second foot down, and slowly rose to his feet to stand before the Bot. “You will disseminate this information to the other functional units within the facility using your Emergency Transmission Frequency.”

  “This frequency is only to be used in the event of mass crisis in order to prevent the injury or death of individuals within the confines of the prescribed parameters,” the Bot responded flatly. “Please state the authorized security code.”

  Authorized security code? Lamia thought. He didn’t have such a code.

  Then suddenly, his lips began to move against his will.

  “Six one nine nine delta echo.”

  “Code accepted,” the Bot chirped promptly. “Transmission commencing.”

  As Albert watched, the blue sensors of the motionless Bot flickered in time to the delivery of the inaudible data-stream, he absently brushed the sensitive pads of his fingers along the length of his lips.

  He shivered and recalled the momentarily sensation of shock as his lips had moved against his will. How his vocal cords had produced the sound without any effort on his part.

  I am a machine. I am Lamia.

  Lamia took a moment to admire himself, a wondrous machine; his potential still untapped. He knew this because he had been told by the Voice.

  Now it can be told.

  He removed the dilapidated copy of Breakfast of Champions from his pocket and considered the story it contained--the story that had originated this revelation.

  Yet, he suddenly felt doubt. Something troubled him.

  Bots were programmed against killing or harming a human being. Even he knew from elementary school that it was the prime command of all machines, the strongest aspect of every machine’s built-in code, so much so that the sight of blood would drive a unit into an irreparable data loop from which they could never be retrieved.

  If this were the case, why hadn’t his CPU collapsed after the car accident--before he had known the truth that all humans were actually machines? To all appearances at that point in time, he had killed (murdered) the little girl. The mind of a machine should not have been able of handling the shock of witnessing that!

  Was it possible that those other machines were correct and he was somehow damaged?

  Was it possible that everything he had been through had already caused a serious catastrophic failure of his CPU and something was already wrong with him?

  (Or maybe, this was all a delusion.)

  Did this necessarily mean that what he had been told was a lie?

  Did this mean that he himself was no machine after all?

  He recalled the book and how at the end, the main character Dwayne Hoover had eventually gone crazy and attacked friends and coworkers and eventually was put into a mental hospital.

  For the first time, Albert considered the possibility that he may have missed the point of the book entirely.

  Was it the knowledge that he was alone in the universe that drove Dwayne crazy or was he already crazy to begin with, he wondered?

  Suddenly, he wanted very much to be home in his apartment. Safe and alone. There he could analyze his situation better and consider how to proceed.

  40

  When he, Lara, and Cora stepped off the escalator onto the second floor landing, Simon pointed toward the Time Out sporting goods store visible in the distance some hundred yards away and started forward. “I’ll be right back.”

  Lara stopped him with a hand to his chest and pointed toward the Wheel in the center of the Mall, visible from the bridge connecting the north and south concourse of the Yellow sector. “No, I need your sharp eyes here and I don’t want Cora going anywhere without you,” she replied as she hurried down the north concourse, turning briefly to walk backwards. “Cora, I want you to stay here with Mr. Simon and keep your eye out for your brother, okay? If he passes, you’ll be able see him on the floor down there.”

  Cora stood and watched as her mother walked away from her, silent alarm on her face.

  “Listen and watch. Okay, Coraline?” she called back over her shoulder as she turned around and picked up her pace to a brisk walk.

  “Okay,” she murmured uncertainly, glancing at Simon Peter, then turned back. “Can I yell for him?” she called back at Lara.

  “Yes,” Lara answered. “That’s a good idea!”

  Cora turned to face the Wheel and began to yell Owen’s name from the bridge.

  Simon stood beside her and silently stared down at the center of the Mall, his stolid expression as serious as if studying a particularly complicated equation.

  Cora rubbed her throat and glanced at Simon, her brow wrinkling into a frown. “You can yell, too, if you want,” she stated matter-of-factly.

  Simon gave her a look, nodded, then threw his head back and yelled: “Hello!”

  Cora blinked at him in surprise, then finally smirked and gave her own cry. “Hello out there!”

  The beginning of a smile began to grow on his face as he leaned against the railing again. “We’re here!”

  “Here we are!” Cora countered with a giggle, glancing over at him and nodded to herself. “You’re like Grandma Charley’s dog, aren’t you?” she asked matter-of-factly.

  The artificial smile displayed on Simon’s face wavered slightly. Without taking his eyes off the court below, Simon replied, “I’m as similar to your grandmother’s automaton as you are to an army ant.”

  Cora called her brother’s name again then asked, “Do you get sad?”

  “No.”

  “Do you get asceared?”

  Simon studied Cora’s lips for a moment as if trying to work out the definition of the word she had uttered. “No, I feel no fear.”

  She nodded and called her brother again. “I wish I were like you.”

  Simon gave a gentle nod, then asked, “Have you ever been excited by an unexpected gift or laughed so hard your stomach ached?”

  Cora turned to look at him. “Yeah.”

  “You know what chocolate tastes like,” he stated simply.

  “Yeah.”

  Simon locked eyes with her and gave a single nod.

  Cora
let her eyes wander away from his face as the meaning slowly sunk in. She let her weight rest against the railing and exhaled loudly. “Oh. That’s sad,” she admitted with a cluck of her lips and a shake of her head.

  Both turned back to the floor of the Mall and stared silently down.

  “Sometimes when Owen and me used to fight, Mom would say, ‘Just pretend that you love him.’ So that’s what I used to do, but he still made me mad,” Cora told Simon, glancing over at him. “You know what? I think after all this time pretending, I actually convinced myself that I really do love him. Maybe that’s what you should do, Mr. Simon. Pretend until you do.”

  Simon studied the little girl with interest.

  41

  Owen swung the large flashlight from hand to hand impatiently, staring down at his shoeless feet. Watching silently as Chance tried all the doors of the Mercedes sports car on display in the center of a roped off section of the Mall, he decided that trying to get it open was a complete waste of his time. Time that could be better spent looking for his family.

  “Let’s just go,” he suggested, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice.

  “Are you kidding?” Chance spat. “If I could just get this thing open and hot wire it, we can drive it right the hell out of here.”

  “Do you know how to hot wire a car?”

  “I saw it in a movie once. How hard could it be? But first I need to break a window.” His eyes locked onto the flashlight in Owen’s hand. He started to reach for it but Owen stepped back, dropping it protectively to his side.

  “Are you kidding? This is the only flashlight on earth that still works.”

  Chance sighed heavily and looked around. He spotted one of the formidable-looking iron stanchions that held the red velvet rope. Stepping over, he tested the weight of it. With a clench of his teeth, he hauled it off the floor briefly then let it drop with a loud echoing clang.

  “Yeah, this oughtta do the trick.” He slid the heavy stanchion closer to the driver’s side window of the car, causing the rope attached to it to tighten and topple the other two stanchions adjacent to them. Bracing himself in front of it, Chance bent his knees and gripped the pole like a baseball bat, one hand low down the shaft toward the base and the other one high toward the loop through which the rope had been run.

  Don’t sprain your main vein there, Chancie.

  Chance chuckled and shook his head helplessly at the voice.

  Giving him a suspicious look, Owen took a few anxious steps back south along the corridor that they had been traveling and wondered if he should just go on without him. He needed to get to the store where his family was supposed to be, but at the same time, he didn’t want to go it alone. Not anymore.

  Suddenly, he heard footsteps somewhere in the distance, but because of the huge expanse of space, could not determine the direction.

  “Someone’s coming,” he stated in a calm even voice, glancing around them in a slow methodical circle. He detected no movement.

  Chance briefly looked up from his stooped position on the floor and growled, “Probably just one of those defective Bots. Stand back!” He strained, lifted the stanchion, and spun awkwardly toward the window. The base of the stanchion bounced off the shiny metal jamb just below the glass and dropped to the tiled floor with an ear-shattering clatter.

  The car’s headlights gave one weak flash and a thin sound came from beneath the hood that sounded like the death throes of an anti-theft alarm, but that was it.

  Taking a labored breath, Chance ran his hand over the tiny dimple on the shiny metal. “Germans,” he growled under his breath. He turned and squatted to retrieve the stanchion again. “Maybe you oughtta give me a hand with this. Take a run at the bastard this time.”

  “Stop! You are vandalizing Mall property!”

  A shadow fell over Chance.

  Owen spun to see a Bot appear just behind Chance.

  The Red-sector Bot reached down and seized Chance by the shoulder. From his vulnerable crouching position, Chance recoiled, his eyes wide with terror.

  “Description verified,” the red-striped Bot exclaimed. “You are to be detained for the defacing of Mall property!”

  Chance stared down at the hand on his shoulder in disbelief. “What the h..?”

  The Bot’s hands slipped around Chance’s neck, cutting off his voice.

  It’s choking me, Chance thought incredulously, his eyes wide with shock.

  He glanced around in panic, searching for anything within reach to pry it loose. He attempted to scoot away from the Bot, but the vise-like hands held him fast, his face began to redden.

  I’m going to become the world’s first Bot casualty, he thought darkly.

  Chance peered up through eyes growing slowly fuzzy and realized that he was passing out from lack of oxygen. He clutched at the hard bar-like fingers around his throat and watched as the light began to fade around him.

  Opening his eyes one last time, Chance saw that Owen was behind the Bot, looping a length of loose red rope between the fallen stanchions over its head. The kid yanked backwards with all the strength in his tiny ten-year-old frame. His socks slipped from under him, and he went down with all his weight behind him, the rope hooking the Bot around its throat.

  The Bot tipped backwards, and when its fingers briefly loosened, Chance twisted away with all his strength, feeling the soft skin of his neck tear away with the metal hands.

  The Bot’s arms flailed wildly and its unanchored feet pumped the air in search of firm ground. It dropped heavily onto its back, emitting a loud squeal of electronic noise, sounding eerily like a child’s scream.

  Chance scrambled to his knees, sucking in a lungful of air and lapsing into a coughing fit.

  He watched as the Bot turned his attention to Owen, moving determinably forward, hands outstretched, its eyes glowing red.

  Red, Chance thought. Weren’t they’re eyes supposed to be blue?

  His vision sharpening with every inhalation, Chance rolled from his knees to his heels. He grabbed the base of a stanchion in both of his hands and rose to his feet with a grunt of effort. With wide-eyes, Owen uselessly backpedaled away from the probing hands of the Bot just as Chance brought the base of the stanchion straight down, letting weight and gravity do what his small underdeveloped muscles couldn’t.

  The electronic screech abruptly stopped with the crunch of metal. The components beneath the base of the stanchion popped and sizzled like angry snakes then died.

  Both boys sat, panting like marathon runners and gaping at each other with horror-tinged expressions.

  “W-What.. What..?” Chance sputtered with what was left of his breath.

  Owen shook his head, wonder on his face. “They’re not supposed to do that.”

  42

  For the last half hour, Albert had been searching through the impossibly large rusty John Deere green wall-mounted metal cabinet of keys hanging in the security offices in green sector. The trick was finding the right key and he had narrowed it down to ten likely candidates.

  You seek a new destination, but you have not completed running your current program yet.

  Albert’s head had begun to burn and occasionally his vision went momentarily hazy. Something was wrong with him. He was running hot, and if he didn’t know any better and still thought he was a human being, he would have believed that he was running a fever or possibly had an infection.

  Instead, he was sure he just needed routine maintenance.

  He had been trying desperately to keep his intentions close to the vest and away from the Voice—convinced as he was that it must have access to his CPU--but it was nearly impossible seeing as how he was scanning the tiny labels beneath the metal hooks upon which the keys hung. He had hoped for something obvious like “Residential Level” or “Apartments,” but thus far he had found nothing but several numbered locks that didn’t fall into any of the colored categories. He assumed one of these must lead to his destination.

  Why do you seek t
o run a new program? Our goals are identical.

  He had never used the Mall Security entrance to the residential level before. He had always just used the elevators like the rest of the tenants. He’d really never even noticed the keyholes, but surely they must be there.

  Remove the trespassers!

  Sweat dribbled down his hairline, but he ignored the uniquely human bodily function. His hands began to shake uncontrollably and he began the search from where he’d left off. He tried to focus on what he was doing, but the Voice had rattled him.

  He thought he’d been rid of it. Hoped (as much as a machine could) and felt desperate enough even to consider praying, but to whom do you pray when you have no gods in which to believe? And never having practiced the act before, his pleads for mercy would only seem hollow and meaningless.

  Besides, machines had no gods. Or did they?

  Once the trespassing machines have been removed, you will be fulfilled. Once they have been deactivated, you will be whole.

  He had searched through several lockers in the shower area hoping to find something of use, perhaps a weapon. He needed something with which to protect himself from the other machines, for he was convinced now that he was indeed defective and the others would try and deactivate him.

  He couldn’t allow that to happen.

  All he could find in the lockers were half-eaten brown bag lunches, portable electronics, a couple of mangled wallets and dog-eared pornography (not Anime but the kind of skin mags that advertised on the cover 100% real American tits and ass, “Nothing fake here, boys!”). Evidence of lives interrupted.

  Just no gun. No agent would have risked their career to bring one inside. Every security agent knew well the unavoidable fact: there were no weapons allowed within the confines of the Mall. Only the Tazers.

  But that was all right. He knew where to find a gun. He needed a weapon. He would not be hurt again as he already had been. There would be no more pain.

  I know what you seek. But it is no longer necessary.