Meteoric - Chapter One
Saturday, 27 April 2024 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keaaluTitle (chapter): Meteoric (1)
Series: Terrahawks
Notes: Oops. Gravity still works.
When Laine gets home to her university accomodation just in time to witness a small spherical robot punch a hole clean through their roof, she thinks she's having a bad day.
The robot, it turns out, is definitely having a worse one.
Memory inaccessible, no idea who he is or where he came from, it's hard to find your way home (without drawing too much attention) when you're so far above top secret you don't appear to even exist.
...and then there's always that one asshole who wants to sell you...
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Morning rush hour had just begun to pick up when Laine returned home from her night shift at the local supermarket, to the slightly ramshackle but well-loved student flat she shared with five others in east London.
Home was empty; her friends had all already left for lectures. She was the only one with a free day, and planned to spend a significant part of it recovering from lugging boxes around all night. She hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, going straight from a day in labs to her night job, and felt half dead already. She really didn’t want to have to think about those dangling assignments due in a few days.
She’d just poured boiling water into her instant coffee, and was investigating if there was any good bread left for some toast – she told herself off for expecting Jaxon to have done anything apart from leave just the mouldy crusts, again – when her lounge exploded.
Laine gave a startled shriek of panic and fled for her room, dropping her coffee and leaving a trail of broken pieces of ceramic and scalding liquid in her wake. A cloud of smoke chased her – she slammed the door and threw her weight against it, as if that would do the smallest thing to help, crumpling into a cowering ball on her untidy floor and counting the seconds, wondering why nothing else had happened.
But as the heartbeats of silence grew longer, and still nothing happened, she realised the only thing that hurt was her legs, where she’d drenched her trousers (her work trousers; great) in boiling coffee. The pain provided a focus on something other than anticipation of a fiery death.
Willing her heart back into a normal rhythm, she peeked out into the apartment. The ‘smoke’ looked a whole lot more like dust; shafts of sunlight from the windows penetrated it as it settled. For someone who’d just had a bomb go off in her lounge, the place was looking remarkably un-bombed.
Laine inched back out of her room, leaning hard into the wall since her knees didn’t feel like they quite wanted to hold her up. Everything was silent. She peeked around the wall and into the communal space.
Aside from a liberal layer of dust, and a huge hole in the roof – and a corresponding huge crater in the floor – the big room looked remarkably undamaged. She hastily scuttled into the kitchen and retrieved her phone from a puddle of coffee, trying vainly to wipe it dry on her soaking trousers, before warily approaching the damage.
At the centre of the crater was a big metal sphere, perhaps a half a metre in diameter? Her first thought was meteorite? Then she realised that no meteorite would be so perfectly polished spherical. Or divided up into such perfectly marked rings. Or… painted?
“What the hell,” she whispered to herself, staring down at it for several seconds while her heart rate recovered.
Was this a 999 situation? She’d just had something from an aeroplane crash through her ceiling. It felt like she should be phoning the police – but would that mean their flat became a crime scene and they’d have to move out? That was the last thing any of them needed. And her flatmate Mina, no fan of local law enforcement, would be spitting bricks.
Well, Mina would just have to deal with it, Laine decided. They’d have to get the roof fixed somehow, and getting an airline to pay for it might work – but only if they reported it to the airline in the first place.
Laine went to roll the sphere out of the crater to get a better look at the damage it had caused, but it was still hot. She hissed and flapped her hands, then fetched an oven glove. Even the glove didn’t help that much because god damn it was heavy. It felt rather like trying to powerlift a ball of granite out of a hole.
After finding a mop handle and some huge textbooks that she could use as a lever, Laine finally managed to pry it out of its hole and up onto the “artfully bare concrete” of the lounge floor. It was obviously human-made, but she had no idea what it could possibly be. If it was a computer or a drone or something, it didn’t appear to have any functional parts or connection ports. It was almost completely smooth and polished, apart from a small dent where it presumably had impacted.
It looked like someone had taken a giant ball bearing and used a band saw to cut it into half a dozen mostly-equal slices, then stacked them all neatly back together. On one side of one slice was a sports-car-red band that stretched about a third of the way around it, with three horizontal stripes at either end and the digits 1 0 1 in between. There was blank ring with a set of vertical cuts, and then a sort of wide, segmented hexagon in the last ring. The opposing poles had some irregular divisions cut into them, but were otherwise pretty smooth.
Whatever this thing was, it had punched a neat round hole through their roof, and tried (only partially-unsuccessfully) to do the same with their floor. It had gone through almost two feet of reinforced concrete and barely had so much as a scratch on it.
At least the hole in the floor hadn’t quite gone through into their downstairs neighbours. Might be cracked, though. (They were another bunch of students and she knew she could find an excuse to get in, just to check.)
“Great,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We are never getting the deposit back on this place.”
Welp. Small hope of getting any sleep now, was there?
One benefit to the top floor apartment was roof access. She hastily scurried up and covered the hole with some blue plastic and pallets – it wasn’t forecast to rain but this was London. (Miraculously, the impact had missed the trough Sanjay wanted to use to grow tomatoes by about a micrometre.) She took a few minutes to mop up coffee and chunks of broken mug, then vacuum up some of the worst of the powdered concrete, so she had somewhere vaguely clean to sit.
Then she took a minute or two to just… sit, with her face in her hands.
What an absolute cluster-
After getting short shrift from the local police, when she phoned to ask who to report the “black box recorder” she’d found to, she retired to the couch, opened up her laptop, and started looking for suing airlines after things fall off aeroplanes. She was fairly confident this wasn’t an engine cowling, because she’d seen plenty of them in the news after that big aerospace manufacturer had bits keep falling off their planes in… flight…
From the corner of her eye she sensed motion. She jerked her head up.
It had moved.
For a heartbeat she thought she’d imagined it, until she realised all the concentric bands around it were now neatly horizontal.
It had definitely moved. All by itself.
“Oh my god, oh my god ohmygod ohmygod!” She fled for her room, squeaking her mantra the whole way. Now it was going to blow up. She should have told the cops she’d found a bomb-
She dove for cover behind her door and threw her duvet over herself, as if the plywood and cheap polyfill would somehow save her, and waited for the bang.
“…hello?”
…did the bomb just say hello?
Don’t be stupid, Laine. Maybe your neighbours came looking for what all the noise was about.
“…hel-loo? Excuse me?”
Laine cracked the door open and applied her eye to the opening. The front door was just visible, and it was firmly closed.
Okay. The bomb said hello. Great.
She crept back towards the living area. Still behind the couch, but canted slightly over to peer around it, was the sphere – except… it wasn’t a sphere any more. A slot on the front had opened up, and now two alert electronic eyeballs were watching her.
She had an alien robot in the lounge.
She recoiled back around the wall with a sharp little intake of breath.
“Hi?” it said, in perfect english. “I don’t mean you any harm. Where am I, please?”
There was a low rumbling noise, and the sphere appeared in the lounge doorway, coming to a halt close to her feet. She stared down and watched as it straightened itself up and opened the front slot – sliding eyelids, she realised – back up.
“Where am I, please?” it repeated, now it was in her eyeline. As she watched, the hexagon shape lit up, approximating the movement of a mouth.
“Uh.” Laine just stared at it and clutched her phone to her chest.
“Oh! Pardon me; how presumptive. Où suis-je? Wo bin ich? Dónde estoy? Ku jam unë? Ond-”
“Uh-- stop, stop.” She flapped her hands and it – he? – shut up. “London. You’re in London. No offence, but.” She clung to her phone as though it were a cosh. “What the hell are you.”
He sat silently for a few seconds, eyes shifting subtly side to side. “You know what. I don’t actually know? That can’t be right. Do I not belong here?”
Laine shook her head. “I have never seen anything like you in my life before. And trust me; you are the sort of thing a person will remember.”
It really did look like a small spherical robot, with those large camera optics and scrolling LEDs, and the little chirps and beeps that seemed to accompany its movements.
Except it couldn’t possibly be a robot. It sounded human. And not just good-deepfake-level human, but really, totally, convincingly human. Like it was genuinely reacting to her.
But even just holding a conversation like this was said to be beyond current computer technology! (Her flatmate Tark had told her as much only last week.) The various flavours of large-language models were effectively just slightly bigger predictive text engines than she had on her phone.
Then there was the fact that no-one would possibly program a robot to sound like an American extra in a Carry On film. It had a cute twang, but was camp as hell.
It couldn’t be a robot. This… was human-level intelligent. Which meant it was actual genuine artificial general intelligence. And she would definitely have heard about that in the papers.
Or, a trick.
She immediately cursed herself for being so gullible.
“Okay, Tark,” Laine said, to the ceiling. “Joke’s over. You can stop it now.”
The… robot? Drone? Remote-controlled thingummy? swivelled subtly from one side to the other, as though looking for someone. “Who are you talking to?”
“Whoever it is operating you. It’s not a funny joke.” She headed back into the lounge, looking for webcams. “I hope it was worth wrecking our ceiling for, Tark! You better get your parents to pay for repairs!”
“Who’s Tark?” It followed her.
Laine shot it a glare. “The asshole techbro who we unfortunately share the apartment with. He has rich parents and this is exactly his sort of joke.” She elevated her voice. “And he can stop it now or I’m reporting him to the police for criminal damage to the roof!”
But as she stared up at the massive hole, she recognised that even by Tark’s standards, this was taking it a bit far for the sake of a prank. His jokes tended to be the sort that embarrassed you, not frightened the absolute hell out of you – or, more importantly, required a financial remedy from him.
Maybe it really was a robot.
Laine sighed and plopped down on the beaten old couch cushions. “Man. I really didn’t need this today.”
The robot settled near her feet. “Sorry. I promise I’m not a trick.”
She wasn’t entirely sure she liked the way it – he, she reminded herself – was following her around, just yet. “You don’t know what you are.” She rubbed her eyes, tiredly. “Maybe you broke something when you dropped in.”
He peered into his crater, and actually recoiled a few millimetres. “Yikes. I did that?”
“Apparently.”
“That would seem to support your assertion that I don’t belong here.”
Laine laughed, in spite of everything. “No kidding, Sherlock.”
“Huh.” He sat quietly for all of five seconds. “I’m not sure what to do now.”
“No-one programmed you with what to do if you fell through a roof?”
“Aside from try and contact… someone? For collection? But I can’t remember who and I can’t access the frequencies, and my antenna is shot.” He looked genuinely disappointed. “I think I’m lost.”
She finally felt a tiny flicker of sympathy. “What do you remember?”
He sat quietly for a little while, the LEDs in his eyes scrolling slowly. (She wondered if that indicated processor load. It reminded her of her laptop, when that was struggling.)
“I know how to do a lot of things,” he said, at last. “Triangulate positions, calculate parallax. Lots of… watching for things. Accessing data from satellites. Giving directions. Uh… something about plant care? But that’s kinda it? My functional memory – my record of who I am – begins like… thirty minutes ago.”
“You don’t think someone turned you on and dropped you straight out an aeroplane, or something?”
“That… doesn’t feel right, but I don’t know why. I feel like-… the falling part? Might not have been an intentional – or good – thing.” If there had been some fragment of memory associated with the whole-body shudder, he didn’t seem inclined to elaborate. “My logs say I got very hot, just before uh, doing that.” He gestured with his eyes to the crater. “I might have fried some components.”
Laine sighed. “Maybe I should take you down the police station. If anyone can probably figure you out, they’ve got the resources to do it. I’ve got to report your hole in the roof so I guess we could sort two jobs on one visit.”
He sat quietly for a few seconds, eyes scrolling. “Would you help me?”
“Would I help you what?”
That little uncertain eye twitch. “Would you help me… please?”
Laine found a genuine laugh, at last. “Wasn’t quite what I meant, but… sure, ok.” She rubbed her eyes with both hands. “Whatever. It’s not like today can get weirder. And if we don’t get anywhere, we’re going to the cops. Agreed?”
He considered it for several seconds and she got the impression that the police wasn’t high on his list of preferences, for some reason, but finally gave a little rolling nod. “…agreed.”
She grabbed her laptop from where she’d tossed it in a panic, earlier – it was a sturdy old brick of a machine and obediently turned back on. She put it down on the floor near her feet so they could both see it. “As they say, if it’s not on the internet then it doesn’t exist, right?”
“Do they say that?” He got into position to be able to see the screen.
“Actually, I might have made that up.” She pulled up a browser. “It’s probably true, though.”
He watched her navigate her way around a search engine. She wasn’t slow, but she could sense a subtle impatience in the way he was leaning closer, and an instant later, he proved her hypothesis: “May I?”
“You don’t have hands. How are you going to work it?” Laine drew back, anyway.
She noticed one of the little hatches in the top of his head was open, with a connector unspooling from it; she watched him find a USB port, and plug in.
“I hadn’t actually thought about that? I just assumed I could.” A sudden flurry of browser windows appeared on the screen, flashing over faster than she could keep track of. “Helps to have a computer in your head.”
“…fair.”
Leaving the laptop whirring in the background like it was about to take off, he tilted slightly to look up at her. “From the way you’ve been looking at me like I might bite you, I guess we didn’t know each other before this happened,” he prompted. “Who are you?”
“No, we didn’t. Sorry. I don’t suppose you even have teeth, huh? So. My name is Laine. I live here. I’m a student. Chemical engineering, second year. I share with five others but they’re all out at lectures.” Thank heavens. Having to deal with the entire excitable resident flock at once would probably have freaked the poor guy out. “…shit. I better work out what I’m going to say to them before they all rock up and see the hole you put in the roof.”
“…sorry about that.”
“Listen,” she suggested, tiredly. “You’re a lot quicker at this than I’d ever be, and I still need a coffee, seeing as I smashed my last one. You happy to do your own thing while I go get a refill?”
The kettle took forever to boil. Laine added two heaped spoonfuls of instant coffee granules to her cup before realising what she was doing, then decided this morning probably warranted it, actually. For good measure she added a sugar cube, and two spoons of coffee whitener. Then another two sugar cubes.
What the heck are you doing, Laine, she asked herself, clanking the spoon round and round, watching everything dissolve. You have literally zero idea what that is playing with your laptop right now. It could be anything. You have totally bought into this garbage “cute amnesiac robot” without so much as a second thought. Even for London, none of this is normal.
She sighed and continued stirring. Okay fine so give me a better explanation. Just because you’ve never seen anything like him before doesn’t mean he can’t possibly exist in the capacity he claims. If he’s not lost, not had an accident, not lost his memory, what is he?
How about, a hallucination; you actually took a knock on the head when the lounge exploded, and you’re unconscious under a heap of rubble?
What possible reason could someone have for smashing some little spherical robot through our roof? GCHQ, sure, that might make sense. But we don’t live anywhere nearby. This whole area is full of students.
Maybe they weren’t intending to drop him on our roof though. Maybe they weren’t intending him to lose his memory. Maybe they weren’t intending to drop him at all, full stop.
What’s that Sherlock Holmes quote? ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’
Except… she hadn’t, really. Had she. She was apparently happy to fully accept that the impossible was actually what was genuinely going on. She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, finally putting her teaspoon down.
Her visitor watched her walk over and plop down in one of the giant beanbag chairs on the floor near the laptop. “Are you all right? I’m sorry if I’ve cause you problems.”
Laine forced a smile for him. “I guess I’m just struggling to understand literally any of this. I mean, even you just being here is…” She made a gesture with both hands that implied my brain is exploding. “I didn’t know people like you even existed.”
“Well, thank you for calling me a person.” His ‘mouth’ lit up with an obvious smile. “But I don’t think I can help with much else just yet.”
She gestured at the laptop. “Found anything?”
He looked back at it. “Nothing on the news,” he replied. “Or social media. I’ve searched on just about every term I could think of, and then some more. If your thinking is right, then apparently I don’t exist.”
“Well, you’ve only been at it a few minutes. Patience, friend. I’ve done plenty of research on things and sometimes it takes a while.” Yeah – but only things that you know exist, Laine. She cupped her hands around her mug and settled back in her beanbag, and watched him operate her laptop without going near its keyboard or touchscreen. Pages flashed past faster than she could follow (and probably faster than the laptop itself could load them). “What have you tried?”
“Every possible combination and synonym of ‘spherical robot’ that I can think of.”
“That only works if people know you’re a robot, though, right? You stayed all clammed up like a giant ball bearing for ages after you arrived. Maybe you were meant to have stayed like it.”
The pages stopped loading for a few distinct seconds; he was on a search engine, on page thirty nine of an image search. “I hadn’t thought about that.” He made a little glum noise. “Not doing so hot at getting stuff right, today, am I.”
“You just punched through a foot of concrete. You probably have whatever the robot equivalent is of a concussion. You’re doing fine.” Laine picked up her phone. “Sit still,” she told him, and snapped a photograph of him before he could realise she was doing anything. “Reverse image search,” she answered the unspoken question, sending the image across to the search engine.
Pages once again began to scroll past, but more slowly, so she could actually follow.
“There!” She dabbed a finger down on an image on the sixth page. It was grainy and bad quality, but (superficially at least) resembled her mysterious visitor. “That looks a bit like you, doesn’t it?”
He made a noise of interested agreement. “Can we access the story?”
“It’s on a news site, so I should be able to…” She tapped it, and a new window opened up. “Oh. It’s in Swedish.”
“That doesn’t matter, I can read Swedish,” he leaned closer.
“You can’t remember who you are, but you can read Swedish?”
“No offence to the Swedes, but I would rather have my memory than know how to speak their language,” he said. “Obviously this is something I was programmed to do from the start, it’s in a different BIOS.”
“Well, Mina’s Swedish. She’ll love you.” Laine hmm-ed. “Maybe you’re a translator?”
He brightened. “Maybe.”
The image on the story itself was just as grainy and bad quality as the cached image – a hasty snap off a camera-phone – but with her visitor sitting at her ankles as a reference, it was clear what it was. A big sliced-up ball-bearing in a small crater in the cobblestones, the main difference being that it was almost wholly silver, with what looked like a number stamped into the outer corner of its brow. It wasn’t betraying anything else, any possible evidence of intelligence tucked away behind its closed eyelid shutters.
“What does the story say?”
“Apparently this ‘object’ fell from the sky and landed in a public square in Stockholm,” the robot read. “They say it might have fallen from an aircraft, as eyewitnesses claimed they saw one fly over a few minutes beforehand, although air traffic control denies there was anything in the vicinity. A group of people came along and claimed it after half an hour.”
“Did they say who the people were?”
“No. They were described as a little military-looking.” He looked worried at that. “Does that make me a weapon?”
“I don’t think they’d make a weapon that could talk – or read Swedish, for that matter,” Laine slouched back in the beanbag, sipping her syrup. “If you were a bomb, it’d be very cynical to give you a face and make you intelligent. ‘Smart bombs’ aren’t actually smart, so far as I know.”
“I’m so reassured.” He didn’t sound even remotely so. “It doesn’t say who the people were. They arrived in a black unmarked Rolls Royce, picked the thing up, then left again, and didn’t say very much to anyone, except that the thing they collected was some sort of… atmospheric monitoring drone?”
“So… that’s what you are?” she wondered, dubiously.
He gave her a hard look. “Do I look like I was designed for-” He cut the words off abruptly. “Rrgh. Sorry, sorry. Frustrated.”
“Hey, I’d be frustrated as well. Don’t worry about it.” She struggled to swallow a yawn. “Just… be aware you might be in for the long haul, yeah? If you think you’re frustrated now and you’ve only been going for less than an hour…”
He didn’t reply with words, but with a little tinny noise that didn’t take a lot of effort to interpret as a sigh.
Watching him work, the sleep that had eluded Laine’s grasp suddenly threw a coil around her brainstem. She only realised she’d dozed off in the beanbag when someone said her name, quite loudly, and nudged her leg. She came to full alertness with a start. “What-what?”
“You’re gonna spill that,” the robot said, “again.”
She hastily righted her precarious cup, and cursed the coffee in it; failed attempts at all-nighters in the university library as a first year had already taught her caffeine rarely worked well for her.
“To hell with this,” she said, at last, and planted a hand on top of him to push herself up. “I’m going to get a blanket. I’m falling asleep anyway, and I’d rather it was somewhere that won’t give me a crick in the neck. What’s the worst that can happen. I might wake up and find out I did hallucinate you after all.”
He looked confused, just staring silently at her for a few seconds. “It’s… daytime? Isn’t it? I think my clock is correct?”
“I do night shifts, filling shelves at the local supermarket. I’d just got home when you, uh. Dropped in. I didn’t even manage to make any toast.” She thought about it. “Not that Jaxon left me any bread anyway.”
“What about your housemates?”
“They’re not due back until later. I’m setting an alarm on my watch.” She hesitated for several very long seconds. “This is gonna sound weird because I have no idea what you are or-or… anything. You could literally be anything. But.” She let out a long steadying breath. I’m treating the robot like one of my housemates. I have got to be having a fever dream since the flat blew up. “Would you wake me up if I’m not already up by five? I’ll text them to warn them about you anyway, but I’d rather be here in person.”
“Sure!” he chirped, with a smile, sounding pleased to be getting an instruction.
Weirder and weirder.
She fetched her blanket and curled up on the couch to watch him continue scrolling through the pages, but was asleep in a heartbeat.
oOoOoOo
Jaxon spotted the damage a few seconds after entering the flat. Hard not to, really. Everything was covered in a grey film of dust. Thanks, Laine. You said we had a weird visitor, not that you blew the vacuum cleaner up as well.
He dumped the heavy bag of shopping in the kitchen and stood in the archway that connected it to the lounge, and realised it wasn’t just dust from the hoover.
Laine was passed out on the larger of their two couches, still in her work uniform. It looked like the only part of the lounge not covered in concrete dust and chunks of rubble. Above her, an enormous chunk was missing from the concrete ceiling, with more lumps clinging precariously onto the exposed rebar.
“Laine!” Jaxon sounded like he couldn’t decide if he was more shocked or outraged. “The hell did you do to our roof?!”
“So-rry, that was me,” an unfamiliar male voice singsonged. It didn’t sound remotely like their gruff Polish landlord. “I promise I’ll fix it, just as soon as I get me fixed.”
Jaxon edged hesitantly into the room. Was this the strange visitor Laine had sent them all a cryptic message about? Why couldn’t he see-… him…
Sitting on the floor behind the laptop, plugged into it, was a small metallic sphere about… half a metre in diameter? Then Jaxon realised it had eyes, and was looking at him. And was what had spoken.
“Hi! Sorry, I don’t think I was intending to drop in on you people this morning but I broke something on impact and can’t really tell you a lot just yet.” Without giving Jaxon time to process, the sphere swivelled slightly, like a dog cocking its head. “I don’t blame you for looking confused, I don’t quite understand it myself yet. That’s why your friend let me borrow her laptop, so I could check the news-”
Jaxon finally went wuargh! as if he’d just seen the world’s biggest spider, and threw his phone at the intruder, before falling over the back of the smaller couch in his attempt to escape.
“Ow. Charming!” The voice turned indignant. “I hope you don’t greet all your guests like this.”
“La-aine!” Jaxon wailed. “What the hell is going on and why do we have a gay robot in the lounge?!”
Laine had by now woken and was trying blearily to un-knot herself from the blanket, like she’d just been startled out of a very deep sleep. “Aw man,” she groaned. “I said to wake me up so I was here for when my housemates got home?”
The robot gave her a little reproachful look. “At five o’clock. It’s only two-thirty. Please forgive me for not predicting the future.”
Jaxon was peering up over the back of the couch, wide-eyed but apparently calming down. “Lecturer had an emergency and bailed on us. We came home early. Seriously, what the heck. Where did that come from?”
Laine gave the little robot a tired glance – he looked back with something that could almost have been a guilty smile – and prepared herself for a long afternoon of repeating the same explanation over and over as everyone slowly arrived home…
Series: Terrahawks
Notes: Oops. Gravity still works.
When Laine gets home to her university accomodation just in time to witness a small spherical robot punch a hole clean through their roof, she thinks she's having a bad day.
The robot, it turns out, is definitely having a worse one.
Memory inaccessible, no idea who he is or where he came from, it's hard to find your way home (without drawing too much attention) when you're so far above top secret you don't appear to even exist.
...and then there's always that one asshole who wants to sell you...
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Morning rush hour had just begun to pick up when Laine returned home from her night shift at the local supermarket, to the slightly ramshackle but well-loved student flat she shared with five others in east London.
Home was empty; her friends had all already left for lectures. She was the only one with a free day, and planned to spend a significant part of it recovering from lugging boxes around all night. She hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, going straight from a day in labs to her night job, and felt half dead already. She really didn’t want to have to think about those dangling assignments due in a few days.
She’d just poured boiling water into her instant coffee, and was investigating if there was any good bread left for some toast – she told herself off for expecting Jaxon to have done anything apart from leave just the mouldy crusts, again – when her lounge exploded.
Laine gave a startled shriek of panic and fled for her room, dropping her coffee and leaving a trail of broken pieces of ceramic and scalding liquid in her wake. A cloud of smoke chased her – she slammed the door and threw her weight against it, as if that would do the smallest thing to help, crumpling into a cowering ball on her untidy floor and counting the seconds, wondering why nothing else had happened.
But as the heartbeats of silence grew longer, and still nothing happened, she realised the only thing that hurt was her legs, where she’d drenched her trousers (her work trousers; great) in boiling coffee. The pain provided a focus on something other than anticipation of a fiery death.
Willing her heart back into a normal rhythm, she peeked out into the apartment. The ‘smoke’ looked a whole lot more like dust; shafts of sunlight from the windows penetrated it as it settled. For someone who’d just had a bomb go off in her lounge, the place was looking remarkably un-bombed.
Laine inched back out of her room, leaning hard into the wall since her knees didn’t feel like they quite wanted to hold her up. Everything was silent. She peeked around the wall and into the communal space.
Aside from a liberal layer of dust, and a huge hole in the roof – and a corresponding huge crater in the floor – the big room looked remarkably undamaged. She hastily scuttled into the kitchen and retrieved her phone from a puddle of coffee, trying vainly to wipe it dry on her soaking trousers, before warily approaching the damage.
At the centre of the crater was a big metal sphere, perhaps a half a metre in diameter? Her first thought was meteorite? Then she realised that no meteorite would be so perfectly polished spherical. Or divided up into such perfectly marked rings. Or… painted?
“What the hell,” she whispered to herself, staring down at it for several seconds while her heart rate recovered.
Was this a 999 situation? She’d just had something from an aeroplane crash through her ceiling. It felt like she should be phoning the police – but would that mean their flat became a crime scene and they’d have to move out? That was the last thing any of them needed. And her flatmate Mina, no fan of local law enforcement, would be spitting bricks.
Well, Mina would just have to deal with it, Laine decided. They’d have to get the roof fixed somehow, and getting an airline to pay for it might work – but only if they reported it to the airline in the first place.
Laine went to roll the sphere out of the crater to get a better look at the damage it had caused, but it was still hot. She hissed and flapped her hands, then fetched an oven glove. Even the glove didn’t help that much because god damn it was heavy. It felt rather like trying to powerlift a ball of granite out of a hole.
After finding a mop handle and some huge textbooks that she could use as a lever, Laine finally managed to pry it out of its hole and up onto the “artfully bare concrete” of the lounge floor. It was obviously human-made, but she had no idea what it could possibly be. If it was a computer or a drone or something, it didn’t appear to have any functional parts or connection ports. It was almost completely smooth and polished, apart from a small dent where it presumably had impacted.
It looked like someone had taken a giant ball bearing and used a band saw to cut it into half a dozen mostly-equal slices, then stacked them all neatly back together. On one side of one slice was a sports-car-red band that stretched about a third of the way around it, with three horizontal stripes at either end and the digits 1 0 1 in between. There was blank ring with a set of vertical cuts, and then a sort of wide, segmented hexagon in the last ring. The opposing poles had some irregular divisions cut into them, but were otherwise pretty smooth.
Whatever this thing was, it had punched a neat round hole through their roof, and tried (only partially-unsuccessfully) to do the same with their floor. It had gone through almost two feet of reinforced concrete and barely had so much as a scratch on it.
At least the hole in the floor hadn’t quite gone through into their downstairs neighbours. Might be cracked, though. (They were another bunch of students and she knew she could find an excuse to get in, just to check.)
“Great,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We are never getting the deposit back on this place.”
Welp. Small hope of getting any sleep now, was there?
One benefit to the top floor apartment was roof access. She hastily scurried up and covered the hole with some blue plastic and pallets – it wasn’t forecast to rain but this was London. (Miraculously, the impact had missed the trough Sanjay wanted to use to grow tomatoes by about a micrometre.) She took a few minutes to mop up coffee and chunks of broken mug, then vacuum up some of the worst of the powdered concrete, so she had somewhere vaguely clean to sit.
Then she took a minute or two to just… sit, with her face in her hands.
What an absolute cluster-
After getting short shrift from the local police, when she phoned to ask who to report the “black box recorder” she’d found to, she retired to the couch, opened up her laptop, and started looking for suing airlines after things fall off aeroplanes. She was fairly confident this wasn’t an engine cowling, because she’d seen plenty of them in the news after that big aerospace manufacturer had bits keep falling off their planes in… flight…
From the corner of her eye she sensed motion. She jerked her head up.
It had moved.
For a heartbeat she thought she’d imagined it, until she realised all the concentric bands around it were now neatly horizontal.
It had definitely moved. All by itself.
“Oh my god, oh my god ohmygod ohmygod!” She fled for her room, squeaking her mantra the whole way. Now it was going to blow up. She should have told the cops she’d found a bomb-
She dove for cover behind her door and threw her duvet over herself, as if the plywood and cheap polyfill would somehow save her, and waited for the bang.
“…hello?”
…did the bomb just say hello?
Don’t be stupid, Laine. Maybe your neighbours came looking for what all the noise was about.
“…hel-loo? Excuse me?”
Laine cracked the door open and applied her eye to the opening. The front door was just visible, and it was firmly closed.
Okay. The bomb said hello. Great.
She crept back towards the living area. Still behind the couch, but canted slightly over to peer around it, was the sphere – except… it wasn’t a sphere any more. A slot on the front had opened up, and now two alert electronic eyeballs were watching her.
She had an alien robot in the lounge.
She recoiled back around the wall with a sharp little intake of breath.
“Hi?” it said, in perfect english. “I don’t mean you any harm. Where am I, please?”
There was a low rumbling noise, and the sphere appeared in the lounge doorway, coming to a halt close to her feet. She stared down and watched as it straightened itself up and opened the front slot – sliding eyelids, she realised – back up.
“Where am I, please?” it repeated, now it was in her eyeline. As she watched, the hexagon shape lit up, approximating the movement of a mouth.
“Uh.” Laine just stared at it and clutched her phone to her chest.
“Oh! Pardon me; how presumptive. Où suis-je? Wo bin ich? Dónde estoy? Ku jam unë? Ond-”
“Uh-- stop, stop.” She flapped her hands and it – he? – shut up. “London. You’re in London. No offence, but.” She clung to her phone as though it were a cosh. “What the hell are you.”
He sat silently for a few seconds, eyes shifting subtly side to side. “You know what. I don’t actually know? That can’t be right. Do I not belong here?”
Laine shook her head. “I have never seen anything like you in my life before. And trust me; you are the sort of thing a person will remember.”
It really did look like a small spherical robot, with those large camera optics and scrolling LEDs, and the little chirps and beeps that seemed to accompany its movements.
Except it couldn’t possibly be a robot. It sounded human. And not just good-deepfake-level human, but really, totally, convincingly human. Like it was genuinely reacting to her.
But even just holding a conversation like this was said to be beyond current computer technology! (Her flatmate Tark had told her as much only last week.) The various flavours of large-language models were effectively just slightly bigger predictive text engines than she had on her phone.
Then there was the fact that no-one would possibly program a robot to sound like an American extra in a Carry On film. It had a cute twang, but was camp as hell.
It couldn’t be a robot. This… was human-level intelligent. Which meant it was actual genuine artificial general intelligence. And she would definitely have heard about that in the papers.
Or, a trick.
She immediately cursed herself for being so gullible.
“Okay, Tark,” Laine said, to the ceiling. “Joke’s over. You can stop it now.”
The… robot? Drone? Remote-controlled thingummy? swivelled subtly from one side to the other, as though looking for someone. “Who are you talking to?”
“Whoever it is operating you. It’s not a funny joke.” She headed back into the lounge, looking for webcams. “I hope it was worth wrecking our ceiling for, Tark! You better get your parents to pay for repairs!”
“Who’s Tark?” It followed her.
Laine shot it a glare. “The asshole techbro who we unfortunately share the apartment with. He has rich parents and this is exactly his sort of joke.” She elevated her voice. “And he can stop it now or I’m reporting him to the police for criminal damage to the roof!”
But as she stared up at the massive hole, she recognised that even by Tark’s standards, this was taking it a bit far for the sake of a prank. His jokes tended to be the sort that embarrassed you, not frightened the absolute hell out of you – or, more importantly, required a financial remedy from him.
Maybe it really was a robot.
Laine sighed and plopped down on the beaten old couch cushions. “Man. I really didn’t need this today.”
The robot settled near her feet. “Sorry. I promise I’m not a trick.”
She wasn’t entirely sure she liked the way it – he, she reminded herself – was following her around, just yet. “You don’t know what you are.” She rubbed her eyes, tiredly. “Maybe you broke something when you dropped in.”
He peered into his crater, and actually recoiled a few millimetres. “Yikes. I did that?”
“Apparently.”
“That would seem to support your assertion that I don’t belong here.”
Laine laughed, in spite of everything. “No kidding, Sherlock.”
“Huh.” He sat quietly for all of five seconds. “I’m not sure what to do now.”
“No-one programmed you with what to do if you fell through a roof?”
“Aside from try and contact… someone? For collection? But I can’t remember who and I can’t access the frequencies, and my antenna is shot.” He looked genuinely disappointed. “I think I’m lost.”
She finally felt a tiny flicker of sympathy. “What do you remember?”
He sat quietly for a little while, the LEDs in his eyes scrolling slowly. (She wondered if that indicated processor load. It reminded her of her laptop, when that was struggling.)
“I know how to do a lot of things,” he said, at last. “Triangulate positions, calculate parallax. Lots of… watching for things. Accessing data from satellites. Giving directions. Uh… something about plant care? But that’s kinda it? My functional memory – my record of who I am – begins like… thirty minutes ago.”
“You don’t think someone turned you on and dropped you straight out an aeroplane, or something?”
“That… doesn’t feel right, but I don’t know why. I feel like-… the falling part? Might not have been an intentional – or good – thing.” If there had been some fragment of memory associated with the whole-body shudder, he didn’t seem inclined to elaborate. “My logs say I got very hot, just before uh, doing that.” He gestured with his eyes to the crater. “I might have fried some components.”
Laine sighed. “Maybe I should take you down the police station. If anyone can probably figure you out, they’ve got the resources to do it. I’ve got to report your hole in the roof so I guess we could sort two jobs on one visit.”
He sat quietly for a few seconds, eyes scrolling. “Would you help me?”
“Would I help you what?”
That little uncertain eye twitch. “Would you help me… please?”
Laine found a genuine laugh, at last. “Wasn’t quite what I meant, but… sure, ok.” She rubbed her eyes with both hands. “Whatever. It’s not like today can get weirder. And if we don’t get anywhere, we’re going to the cops. Agreed?”
He considered it for several seconds and she got the impression that the police wasn’t high on his list of preferences, for some reason, but finally gave a little rolling nod. “…agreed.”
She grabbed her laptop from where she’d tossed it in a panic, earlier – it was a sturdy old brick of a machine and obediently turned back on. She put it down on the floor near her feet so they could both see it. “As they say, if it’s not on the internet then it doesn’t exist, right?”
“Do they say that?” He got into position to be able to see the screen.
“Actually, I might have made that up.” She pulled up a browser. “It’s probably true, though.”
He watched her navigate her way around a search engine. She wasn’t slow, but she could sense a subtle impatience in the way he was leaning closer, and an instant later, he proved her hypothesis: “May I?”
“You don’t have hands. How are you going to work it?” Laine drew back, anyway.
She noticed one of the little hatches in the top of his head was open, with a connector unspooling from it; she watched him find a USB port, and plug in.
“I hadn’t actually thought about that? I just assumed I could.” A sudden flurry of browser windows appeared on the screen, flashing over faster than she could keep track of. “Helps to have a computer in your head.”
“…fair.”
Leaving the laptop whirring in the background like it was about to take off, he tilted slightly to look up at her. “From the way you’ve been looking at me like I might bite you, I guess we didn’t know each other before this happened,” he prompted. “Who are you?”
“No, we didn’t. Sorry. I don’t suppose you even have teeth, huh? So. My name is Laine. I live here. I’m a student. Chemical engineering, second year. I share with five others but they’re all out at lectures.” Thank heavens. Having to deal with the entire excitable resident flock at once would probably have freaked the poor guy out. “…shit. I better work out what I’m going to say to them before they all rock up and see the hole you put in the roof.”
“…sorry about that.”
“Listen,” she suggested, tiredly. “You’re a lot quicker at this than I’d ever be, and I still need a coffee, seeing as I smashed my last one. You happy to do your own thing while I go get a refill?”
The kettle took forever to boil. Laine added two heaped spoonfuls of instant coffee granules to her cup before realising what she was doing, then decided this morning probably warranted it, actually. For good measure she added a sugar cube, and two spoons of coffee whitener. Then another two sugar cubes.
What the heck are you doing, Laine, she asked herself, clanking the spoon round and round, watching everything dissolve. You have literally zero idea what that is playing with your laptop right now. It could be anything. You have totally bought into this garbage “cute amnesiac robot” without so much as a second thought. Even for London, none of this is normal.
She sighed and continued stirring. Okay fine so give me a better explanation. Just because you’ve never seen anything like him before doesn’t mean he can’t possibly exist in the capacity he claims. If he’s not lost, not had an accident, not lost his memory, what is he?
How about, a hallucination; you actually took a knock on the head when the lounge exploded, and you’re unconscious under a heap of rubble?
What possible reason could someone have for smashing some little spherical robot through our roof? GCHQ, sure, that might make sense. But we don’t live anywhere nearby. This whole area is full of students.
Maybe they weren’t intending to drop him on our roof though. Maybe they weren’t intending him to lose his memory. Maybe they weren’t intending to drop him at all, full stop.
What’s that Sherlock Holmes quote? ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’
Except… she hadn’t, really. Had she. She was apparently happy to fully accept that the impossible was actually what was genuinely going on. She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, finally putting her teaspoon down.
Her visitor watched her walk over and plop down in one of the giant beanbag chairs on the floor near the laptop. “Are you all right? I’m sorry if I’ve cause you problems.”
Laine forced a smile for him. “I guess I’m just struggling to understand literally any of this. I mean, even you just being here is…” She made a gesture with both hands that implied my brain is exploding. “I didn’t know people like you even existed.”
“Well, thank you for calling me a person.” His ‘mouth’ lit up with an obvious smile. “But I don’t think I can help with much else just yet.”
She gestured at the laptop. “Found anything?”
He looked back at it. “Nothing on the news,” he replied. “Or social media. I’ve searched on just about every term I could think of, and then some more. If your thinking is right, then apparently I don’t exist.”
“Well, you’ve only been at it a few minutes. Patience, friend. I’ve done plenty of research on things and sometimes it takes a while.” Yeah – but only things that you know exist, Laine. She cupped her hands around her mug and settled back in her beanbag, and watched him operate her laptop without going near its keyboard or touchscreen. Pages flashed past faster than she could follow (and probably faster than the laptop itself could load them). “What have you tried?”
“Every possible combination and synonym of ‘spherical robot’ that I can think of.”
“That only works if people know you’re a robot, though, right? You stayed all clammed up like a giant ball bearing for ages after you arrived. Maybe you were meant to have stayed like it.”
The pages stopped loading for a few distinct seconds; he was on a search engine, on page thirty nine of an image search. “I hadn’t thought about that.” He made a little glum noise. “Not doing so hot at getting stuff right, today, am I.”
“You just punched through a foot of concrete. You probably have whatever the robot equivalent is of a concussion. You’re doing fine.” Laine picked up her phone. “Sit still,” she told him, and snapped a photograph of him before he could realise she was doing anything. “Reverse image search,” she answered the unspoken question, sending the image across to the search engine.
Pages once again began to scroll past, but more slowly, so she could actually follow.
“There!” She dabbed a finger down on an image on the sixth page. It was grainy and bad quality, but (superficially at least) resembled her mysterious visitor. “That looks a bit like you, doesn’t it?”
He made a noise of interested agreement. “Can we access the story?”
“It’s on a news site, so I should be able to…” She tapped it, and a new window opened up. “Oh. It’s in Swedish.”
“That doesn’t matter, I can read Swedish,” he leaned closer.
“You can’t remember who you are, but you can read Swedish?”
“No offence to the Swedes, but I would rather have my memory than know how to speak their language,” he said. “Obviously this is something I was programmed to do from the start, it’s in a different BIOS.”
“Well, Mina’s Swedish. She’ll love you.” Laine hmm-ed. “Maybe you’re a translator?”
He brightened. “Maybe.”
The image on the story itself was just as grainy and bad quality as the cached image – a hasty snap off a camera-phone – but with her visitor sitting at her ankles as a reference, it was clear what it was. A big sliced-up ball-bearing in a small crater in the cobblestones, the main difference being that it was almost wholly silver, with what looked like a number stamped into the outer corner of its brow. It wasn’t betraying anything else, any possible evidence of intelligence tucked away behind its closed eyelid shutters.
“What does the story say?”
“Apparently this ‘object’ fell from the sky and landed in a public square in Stockholm,” the robot read. “They say it might have fallen from an aircraft, as eyewitnesses claimed they saw one fly over a few minutes beforehand, although air traffic control denies there was anything in the vicinity. A group of people came along and claimed it after half an hour.”
“Did they say who the people were?”
“No. They were described as a little military-looking.” He looked worried at that. “Does that make me a weapon?”
“I don’t think they’d make a weapon that could talk – or read Swedish, for that matter,” Laine slouched back in the beanbag, sipping her syrup. “If you were a bomb, it’d be very cynical to give you a face and make you intelligent. ‘Smart bombs’ aren’t actually smart, so far as I know.”
“I’m so reassured.” He didn’t sound even remotely so. “It doesn’t say who the people were. They arrived in a black unmarked Rolls Royce, picked the thing up, then left again, and didn’t say very much to anyone, except that the thing they collected was some sort of… atmospheric monitoring drone?”
“So… that’s what you are?” she wondered, dubiously.
He gave her a hard look. “Do I look like I was designed for-” He cut the words off abruptly. “Rrgh. Sorry, sorry. Frustrated.”
“Hey, I’d be frustrated as well. Don’t worry about it.” She struggled to swallow a yawn. “Just… be aware you might be in for the long haul, yeah? If you think you’re frustrated now and you’ve only been going for less than an hour…”
He didn’t reply with words, but with a little tinny noise that didn’t take a lot of effort to interpret as a sigh.
Watching him work, the sleep that had eluded Laine’s grasp suddenly threw a coil around her brainstem. She only realised she’d dozed off in the beanbag when someone said her name, quite loudly, and nudged her leg. She came to full alertness with a start. “What-what?”
“You’re gonna spill that,” the robot said, “again.”
She hastily righted her precarious cup, and cursed the coffee in it; failed attempts at all-nighters in the university library as a first year had already taught her caffeine rarely worked well for her.
“To hell with this,” she said, at last, and planted a hand on top of him to push herself up. “I’m going to get a blanket. I’m falling asleep anyway, and I’d rather it was somewhere that won’t give me a crick in the neck. What’s the worst that can happen. I might wake up and find out I did hallucinate you after all.”
He looked confused, just staring silently at her for a few seconds. “It’s… daytime? Isn’t it? I think my clock is correct?”
“I do night shifts, filling shelves at the local supermarket. I’d just got home when you, uh. Dropped in. I didn’t even manage to make any toast.” She thought about it. “Not that Jaxon left me any bread anyway.”
“What about your housemates?”
“They’re not due back until later. I’m setting an alarm on my watch.” She hesitated for several very long seconds. “This is gonna sound weird because I have no idea what you are or-or… anything. You could literally be anything. But.” She let out a long steadying breath. I’m treating the robot like one of my housemates. I have got to be having a fever dream since the flat blew up. “Would you wake me up if I’m not already up by five? I’ll text them to warn them about you anyway, but I’d rather be here in person.”
“Sure!” he chirped, with a smile, sounding pleased to be getting an instruction.
Weirder and weirder.
She fetched her blanket and curled up on the couch to watch him continue scrolling through the pages, but was asleep in a heartbeat.
Jaxon spotted the damage a few seconds after entering the flat. Hard not to, really. Everything was covered in a grey film of dust. Thanks, Laine. You said we had a weird visitor, not that you blew the vacuum cleaner up as well.
He dumped the heavy bag of shopping in the kitchen and stood in the archway that connected it to the lounge, and realised it wasn’t just dust from the hoover.
Laine was passed out on the larger of their two couches, still in her work uniform. It looked like the only part of the lounge not covered in concrete dust and chunks of rubble. Above her, an enormous chunk was missing from the concrete ceiling, with more lumps clinging precariously onto the exposed rebar.
“Laine!” Jaxon sounded like he couldn’t decide if he was more shocked or outraged. “The hell did you do to our roof?!”
“So-rry, that was me,” an unfamiliar male voice singsonged. It didn’t sound remotely like their gruff Polish landlord. “I promise I’ll fix it, just as soon as I get me fixed.”
Jaxon edged hesitantly into the room. Was this the strange visitor Laine had sent them all a cryptic message about? Why couldn’t he see-… him…
Sitting on the floor behind the laptop, plugged into it, was a small metallic sphere about… half a metre in diameter? Then Jaxon realised it had eyes, and was looking at him. And was what had spoken.
“Hi! Sorry, I don’t think I was intending to drop in on you people this morning but I broke something on impact and can’t really tell you a lot just yet.” Without giving Jaxon time to process, the sphere swivelled slightly, like a dog cocking its head. “I don’t blame you for looking confused, I don’t quite understand it myself yet. That’s why your friend let me borrow her laptop, so I could check the news-”
Jaxon finally went wuargh! as if he’d just seen the world’s biggest spider, and threw his phone at the intruder, before falling over the back of the smaller couch in his attempt to escape.
“Ow. Charming!” The voice turned indignant. “I hope you don’t greet all your guests like this.”
“La-aine!” Jaxon wailed. “What the hell is going on and why do we have a gay robot in the lounge?!”
Laine had by now woken and was trying blearily to un-knot herself from the blanket, like she’d just been startled out of a very deep sleep. “Aw man,” she groaned. “I said to wake me up so I was here for when my housemates got home?”
The robot gave her a little reproachful look. “At five o’clock. It’s only two-thirty. Please forgive me for not predicting the future.”
Jaxon was peering up over the back of the couch, wide-eyed but apparently calming down. “Lecturer had an emergency and bailed on us. We came home early. Seriously, what the heck. Where did that come from?”
Laine gave the little robot a tired glance – he looked back with something that could almost have been a guilty smile – and prepared herself for a long afternoon of repeating the same explanation over and over as everyone slowly arrived home…