Android Avenger

by Ted White

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

All of a sudden I was moving faster than usual. The other passengers standing on the subway platform seemed rooted to their places. It took me only seconds to reach the top of the six flights of stairs, and then I was out of the station and moving down Fulton Street at better than forty miles an hour! What was happening to me? It was as though I were the helpless passenger in a runaway car. Something else had assumed control and was guiding me. My body turned into an office building and raced down the corridor to a room where a man was sitting at a console. He'd begun to swing around in his chair when my mouth opened, and a thin, blood-red ray shot out, cleaving the man from head to abdomen. Then it was over. My mouth closed, and I stood there, stunned. Up to today I was Bob Tanner, an average, sane Citizen. Now what was I, man or murder machine?

Release date: October 2, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 105

Sample

I WAS SHAKING when I came out of the Arena.

I always feel a little shaken, but this time the tensions had wrapped my stomach in knots of pain and salty perspiration stung my neck where I had shaved only a little over an hour earlier. And, despite the heavy knot in my stomach, I felt strangely empty.

I’ve never been able to sort out my reactions to an Execution. The atmosphere of careful boredom, the strictly-business-as-usual air, failed to dull my senses as it did for the others. I could always taste the ozone in the air, mixed with the taste of fear—whether mine, or that of the Condemned, I never knew. My nostrils always gave an involuntary twitch at the confined odors and I felt an almost claustrophobic fear at being packed into the Arena with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine Citizens on Execution Duty.

I had been expecting my notice for several months before it finally came. I hadn’t served Execution Duty for nearly two years, and since it usually figured out to once every fourteen months or so on rotation, I’d been ready for it. A little apprehensive—I always am—but ready.

At 9:00 in the morning, still only half awake (I’d purposely slept until the last minute), vaguely trying to remember the dream I’d had, I waited in front of the Arena for the ordeal to begin. Our times of arrival had been staggered in our notices, so that a long queue wouldn’t tie up traffic, but as usual the checkers were slow and we were backed up a bit.

I didn’t feel like waiting. Somehow I’ve always felt more exposed on the streets, although the brain-scanners must be more plentiful in an Arena than almost anywhere else. It’s only logical that they should be. The scanners—electroencephalic pickups, actually—are set up to detect unusual patterns of stress in our brain waves as we pass close to them, and thus to pick out as quickly as possible those with incipient or developing neuroses or psychoses—the potential Deviates. And where else would such aberrations be as likely to come out as in the Arena?

Often I had wondered why my own fears had not triggered one of the devices, and signaled the Proctors to come and take me. I knew my own feelings of insecurity—they bordered on paranoia at times. Yet, I’d escaped unscathed for the first thirty years of my life. Why?

Morbid thoughts like these kept flashing through my mind as I waited, and then I had moved to the front of the short line. I flashed my notification of duty to the checker, and was waved on in. I sank into the plush depth of my seat with a sigh. It was on the aisle in the “T” section, as usual.

Once this had been a first-run Broadway theater—first a place where great plays were shown, and then later the more degenerate motion pictures. Those had been times of vicarious escape from reality—times when the populace had ruled, and yet the masses had averted their eyes from the world. Many changes had come since then, with the coming of regulated sanity and the achievement of world peace. Gone now were the black arts of forgetfulness, those media which practiced the enticement of the Citizen into irresponsible escape—or so they said. Now this crowded theater was only a reminder.

And a place of execution for those who would once have sought escape here.

Perhaps thirty people were sitting on the floor of the Arena, where once there had been a stage. They sat quietly in chairs not so different from mine, strapped for the moment into a kind of passive conformity. My eyes were drawn to them—their strangeness had always exerted a perverse sort of attraction over me. As usual, most of them were young—from about ten into the early twenties. Their kind never lasted far past puberty. These were the rebels, the potential enemies of society. Criminals. Probably some of them hadn’t yet realized it. But they were on the verge of antisocial insanity, and the brain-scanners had singled them out. Now society would deal with them.

A flurry of movement at the gates caught my eye. Apparently at least one of them was a full-fledged Rebel. He was struggling furiously, and three proctors were having an awkward time getting him into the Arena without hurting him.

Then, as they moved into the floodlights, I saw with a faint shock that it was a girl.

She was dressed in man’s clothing, but betrayed by her unsanitary and neurotically long hair.

Long, blonde hair. For a moment I forgot where I was, and allowed myself to revel in this nearly forbidden sight. The soft waves fell halfway down her back, disarrayed now, wildly framing a face whose fierce criminality seemed to illumine her features with a fire and beauty almost beyond my recollection.

My eyes were caught by the shining highlights of her hair as the floodlights stirred it in a gentle mockery of sunlight. Something within me responded, and …

I felt a bright hot tension in my eyes, and then suddenly the scene on the floor below sharpened, and I felt as though I was hovering in mid-air directly over the defiant girl.

They were strapping her into one of the chairs, carefully pulling the soft leather straps with their attached metal electrodes around her, pinioning her. One set joined her arms to the armrests, another her legs to the specially devised footrests. Her tunic was opened—one of the proctors mumbled an apology—and a third set was passed around her chest, the metal plate fastened just under her left breast.

And then she was alone.

I stared at her, drawn magnetically to her eyes.

Strange eyes; light blue irises, surrounded by a ring of dark blue, and flecked with gold. They were shining. She had been crying, the stains still on her cheeks. No longer aware of the chair I was sitting in, or the physical distance which separated us, I looked deeper into her eyes, and they seemed to melt, like a pool of clear water growing deeper. I could almost see into, beyond them—into the darkness beyond.

Her eyes widened as she became aware of me, and then she returned my look, her unvoiced appeal probing deep within me.

Suddenly I could no longer see her. I felt a wrenching twist, and found myself once more sitting in my seat high above. A citizen settled himself down into the seat immediately before mine, restoring my sight of the floor below.

Sweat poured down my face, my clothes seemed plastered to my body. I glanced to my right, but the Citizen beside me had noticed nothing. Surreptitiously, I touched my sleeve to my face, and felt my cheeks flush.

Then, before I could look below again, the lights dimmed and rebrightened. I could feel the casual air depart from the place. All around me Citizens straightened in their seats. My hand moved out involuntarily to the board in front of me, and I stared down at it.

A very simple set-up, of course—nothing more complicated is needed—a bulb and a pushbutton. You wait until the bulb lights, and then your thumb or forefinger, which has been straining over the button, plunges down, jabbing almost viciously. That is, it does if you’re me, Bob Tanner. My neighbors’ hands moved with bored precision. One thousand little blue bulbs lit with half a watt or less of electricity. And one thousand relays—assuming all the buttons were alive, something one could not take for granted—clicked over, each endeavoring to be the first to unloose the tide of electricity which would sweep over the stoic dolls on the floor below.

I watched my hand move, unbidden, over the vicious little button, and with a feeling of horror I saw the little blue light snap on.

Let it be me, and not one of those automatons! I thought to myself, stabbing painfully at the pushbutton.

The overhead lights, momentarily drained, dimmed again, the seated figures below jerked for a few seconds, and then it was all over. Our pushbuttons were as dead as they’d been at our entrance and our power as executioners was gone. At least for the next twelve months.

I climbed jerkily to my feet, the catharsis of the experience I’d just undergone leaving me drained of my own energy, and waited for the row behind me to empty. When its last man moved out into the aisle, I followed him up the aisle and down the steps to the exit.

Something always hit me when I left the Arena, leaving the faded red plush and soft lights for the brightly sunlit world of 2017. Usually it would be a fairly common sort of after-reaction, a nervous exhaustion, first in the knees and then in the pit of my stomach, and I would start to shake. I didn’t have to be told this was a neurotic attitude, and the very fear of this only reinforced the reaction.

This time—this time I could not snap out of it. The world seemed unreal, out of focus, blurred around the edges and paper-thin. The intensity of my experience made even the bright sunlight pale. It had never happened like this before —what was happening to me?

Still not under control, I stepped from the sidewalk onto the moving street and damn near killed myself.

THE MOVING ROADS are still found only in the largest cities. New York, London, Tokyo, are the only ones to my knowledge. New York’s are the oldest, thirty years old now. I doubt we’d ever have had moving roads if it hadn’t been for the ban on vehicular traffic in 1982, when they finished the new freight and passenger subway system. Originally the idea had been for some short-haul transit to fill in the gaps between subway stations, and the streets would be planted with grass while the moving strips went underground along with nearly everything else. But in those days we still had politics to contend with, and the disclosure of the huge swindle perpetrated by the Independent Party machine—grafting almost the entirety of a fifteen-million-dollar bond issue—pretty well ruled out any more underground construction. By then, what with sewers, water mains, central heating mains gas and electricity mains, and the new transit network, Manhattan was honeycombed underground. To construct a new underground network of moving passenger belts would’ve eaten up that fifteen million for a starter, and taken many times more for completion. The Mayor of New York—an Independent man—was no fool. He used the one avenue open for escape: he built the moving streets on the surface, where the former streets had been.

The result is that in Manhattan we have the only beltways exposed to the elements, and, naturally, the only beltways which close down at the first sign of inclement weather. Even a mild shower will stop them, ever since a woman slipped on a wet street and sued the city to a fare-thee-well. Nowadays, of course, no one would think of pressing suit against anyone else; there is no corruption in the city government, and indeed there is very little government of any kind. The citizenry is sane, after all.

Or so they teach in school.

The moving roads are set up as a series of endless belts side by side, the one closest to the sidewalk moving at five miles an hour, and each one over moving five miles an hour faster. On a wide avenue, like Sixth, you can get a center strip which goes up to 20 miles an . . .