Nemo book, p.1
Nemo Book, page 1
part #5 of Nemonymous Series
Table of Contents
– Copyright –
– Epigraph –
THE ROBOT & THE OCTOPUS
DRIVING IN CIRCLES
RUNNING AWAY TO JOIN THE TOWN
SOLID GOLD
GEORGE THE BAKER
THE HILLS ARE ALIVE
HUNTIN’ SEASON
WELL TEMPERED
THE SCARIEST STORY I KNOW
NEW SCIENCE
SOUL STAINS
GRANDMA’S TWO WATCHES
– Closing Epigraph –
– Late-labelling for Nemo Book (2005) –
All stories copyright of original authors: 2005
The authors of these seventeen stories will have their by-lines published in part five of nemonymous, together with a new selection of stories the by-lines of which will in turn be published in part six
A NOTE ABOUT THIS eBOOK: As per the preceding, bylines were originally published in the subsequent issue. The creator of this ebook has elected to include each "Credits" or "late-labelling" section at the end of its respective book. If the reader would prefer to remain in suspense as to the identities of each book’s authors, he or she can simply elect not to read that section until such as time as it is deemed appropriate to the reader.
‘Secret Way!’ said Anne, her eyes shining. ‘Oh, I hope it’s that! Secret Way! How exciting. What sort of secret way would it be, Julian?’
‘How do I know, Anne, silly?’ said Julian. I don’t even know that the words are meant to mean “Secret Way.” It’s really a guess on my part.’
from one of the Famous Five Stories by Enid Blyton
(Five Go Adventuring Again)
THE ROBOT & THE OCTOPUS
“Sit down and shut up!”
Kevin did as he was told. He was in enough trouble already.
“We just had this couriered over from the coast,” said Gabi, sliding the oversized cassette into the machine. She dimmed the lights and then perched her elegant bottom on the edge of the table, just by the Colonel. Fuzzy tones danced across the TV screen.
“Security camera from another computer store,” explained Gabi, lighting a cigarette. “Here it comes...” The door to the store exploded inwards and the robot strode into view.
“Look, I told you, this is nothing to do with me!”
Kevin twisted frantically in his chair.
“You were told to shut up,” snapped the Colonel.
On the screen, the robot moved through the shop, pulling behind it the trolley that carried the octopus’s tank. The octopus was lit up like a falling firework in fiery red and yellow, its strange rectangular eyes watching the panic in the store as the robot walked from shelf to shelf, pulling down blister packs and scanning their contents.
“Why the hell does it drag that octopus everywhere?” shouted the Colonel, in frustration.
“I told you, I don’t know!” Kevin’s voice was shrill with panic. “This has nothing to do with me.”
“Typical engineer. Never takes the blame.” The Colonel turned back to the screen to look at the group of customers huddled in the corner of the room. “Why don’t they run?” he complained. “They’re right by the door!” Gabi took the cigarette from her mouth and held it in her perfect white fingers, red nail polish shining like blood.
“We think the robot is emitting some sort of subsonic growl that disturbs the nervous system. It stole a sound system from a store in Brighton.”
“It’s ridiculous, how can things go so badly wrong?” The Colonel clenched his fists in frustration.
“With respect, Colonel,” said Gabi in tones that implied no respect at all, “Things are working exactly as they should. The nanotechs are designed to protect themselves. They’ve been redesigning that robot’s body to do exactly that. It’s working too. We can’t stop it.”
“It 5 working too,” mimicked the Colonel, sarcastically. “So how do you explain the octopus? How do you explain that?” He pointed to the screen just as the robot, having obviously found the parts needed, pulled one of the cowering customers from the crowd and chopped her up with a large sword. It threw the pieces into the tank. The robot headed back out into the street, dragging the feasting octopus behind it.
“Well?” asked the Colonel. He glared at Kevin again. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” said Kevin. “Maybe the robot just likes octopuses.”
“Octopi,” said Gabi. She stubbed out her cigarette and gazed at the young man. “Kevin, you must have some idea. Where will the robot strike next?”
Kevin gave held up his hands in despair.
“I don’t know. That’s the point. I built those nanotechs to think for themselves! Individually they can do little more than add up or make logical comparisons, but they are designed to link up to form a neural net. They’re like a mobile brain. A brain that can possess objects! That’s what your company paid me to build.” He stabbed an accusing finger at Gabi.
“We didn’t pay you to allow them to escape,” she replied coolly. “You let them get into that robot.”
“Me?” said Kevin. “I’ve never seen that robot in my life. It certainly wasn’t anywhere in my part of the research centre!” He gazed accusingly at Gabi. “What else was your company doing, Gabi? All that secrecy. All those mysterious rooms. What am I being made the scapegoat for?”
The Colonel shook his head.
“Son, part of growing up is knowing when to accept responsibility for your mistakes...”
“Gentlemen,” said Gabi in brittle tones. She took another pull on her cigarette, blew out a cloud of smoke. “We need to focus on what’s important here. We have millions of dollars worth of nanotechs walking round in a robot, dragging an octopus behind them.”
“Maybe if we took a moment to think about this. Maybe it’s not what it looks like...”
“We haven’t got a moment, son! That robot of yours has been walking around Europe, stealing parts to make itself stronger! Anyone who gets in its way gets fed to the octopus! Why?”
“I told you! It’s not my robot...” There was a brief tap on the door. A face appeared.
“Sir, turn to channel nine, immediately!”
Gabi stopped the tape and flicked the channels on the TV. The man at the door was breathless with excitement.
“We’ve caught it! Picked it up with a giant magnet slung beneath a helicopter!”
“Good work, Evans!”
The TV screen showed the robot being carried away by the helicopter. It waved a mournful goodbye to the octopus, watching from the tank.
Gabi stood up and smoothed the creases from her expensive suit.
“Come on, Colonel,” she said. “Damage limitation.”
The two of them headed out of the room. Gabi paused for a moment in the doorway, looking at Kevin.
“We’ll deal with you later.”
“But I didn’t do...”
Kevin lapsed into silence. They weren’t listening to him. That was the trouble with the non-scientifically minded. They just accepted everything at face value. They didn’t stop to consider the wider picture. Now they had caught the robot, they had lost interest in the octopus.
It had to be important. Why would a robot want an octopus? For a pet? He looked at the screen and saw his answer.
The octopus was climbing from the tank. It seemed to be looking for something.
So that’s where the nanotechs went, thought Kevin. No wonder it’s so hungry for flesh. The nanotechs will need lots of energy.
Flopping its way down the side of the tank, the octopus went looking for materials to build itself another robot.
DRIVING IN CIRCLES
It was when the argument reached its height that he thought two things. One: this is it for us. Not this argument, not this specific argument, but the realisation that there was nothing left worth fighting for. Two: he could not even remember what the argument had been about at the beginning. He knew what the argument was about now, it was about everything. But he could not remember how it had started. He peered through the windscreen into the dark, hating her, hating the journey, hating everything.
“And to cap it all,” she said, “you’ve got us lost.”
“I’ve got us lost?” he said. “I’m just driving. It would have been a help if you had bothered to, I don’t know, look out of your window, read a sign, or look at the map. Anything really, other than sitting there letting your mouth go.”
“You must be kidding. Me, try and tell you which way you should drive the car? If I even look in the wrong direction you start muttering about back seat drivers.” They came to a junction and he looked out into the night again. No signs. Why weren’t there any signs anywhere? Sort of thing he paid his taxes for, so that there would be signs. Signs all over in the bloody town, where you could just stop and ask anybody the way. But out here, where there wasn’t even a house to be seen, nothing. He felt angry, because he wanted to blame her for the whole predicament, but he knew that the weekend away in the country had been his idea from the start, a chance for them to get away and try and mend bridges before they were burnt forever. Too late now, as they had both been busy playing arsonist. Left or right, left or right. He heard her tut at his indecision, and he drove right, not knowing if it was the way to the hotel, not really caring. If the truth be told, he’d have been glad if he found the motorway that led back home, because the last thing that he wanted to do now was to spend the weekend with her. Why weren’t there any damn signs?
He drove on through the night, the headlights only ever illuminating the narrow str etch of road in front of the car. There was silence for a while, but they both knew that it was by no means the end of the war. They were just marshalling their forces, regrouping, waiting for the second wave. She struck first. He had come to another junction in the road, sworn under his breath because of the absence of anything to tell them what the roads were, where they led to, where they had come from.
“If we’d left sooner, we could have been looking while it was still light,” she said, “might have been easier, might have seen something across the fields. Got our bearings.”
“Well forgive me,” he began, “I’m so sorry that I have to go to work and earn the money that pays for...”
But he never finished the sentence. He didn’t realise that the corner was so sharp, he only had one hand on the wheel and was pointing the other at her, his eyes following his finger, and then the car shook and rattled as it came off the road and the wheel came alive in his hands, twisting like a snake, everything around them in motion as he desperately fought to get the car back under control and she was screaming and then there was a bang and a thump and a scrape and then a moment of nothing and then they were stopped, inches from an old oak tree that hung its branches out over the road like an embrace.
They sat completely still, completely silent, for a moment. The car engine ticked as it began to cool.
Stalled, he thought. Must have stalled. He sniffed, ran his hand over his chin, coughed, said “Jesus”. Then he started to count seconds off in his head.
“Well, that was clever,” she said.
“Fourteen seconds.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“I hope you’re happy. You could have killed us.”
“Yes, but I didn’t,” he said, and the words “more’s the pity” hung between them like a curtain. He started the car and got it back on to the road.
“Mature, very mature,” she said.
It’s like going grey, he thought. It steals in strand by strand, until one day there is nothing else.
She looked out of the side window, trying to make sense of the dark shapes. “You have any idea what county we’re in now even?”
“I know roughly where we are,” he said.
“That means we’re lost.” It was not a question.
“No,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “It does not mean that we are lost. It means that I know roughly where we are. And if you could just keep quiet for more than thirty fucking seconds, I can get us back to exactly where we want to be. Although why we bothered to come away for this weekend...”
“Don’t ask me,” she said, and turned her face away from him. Then she said “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“Back there, in that field, beside the road. There was something moving. Jesus.”
He laughed both because it was funny, and because he knew that it would annoy her.
“Something moving? In a field? You mean, like a cow? Or maybe some sheep. I know that it’s unusual for the countryside, these days...”
“Piss off,” she said, and he wanted to lift one finger in the air, trace a line down, one point to me. “It was much bigger than a bloody cow, I’m not stupid, I’m hardly going to shout about a cow.”
“How much bigger than a cow?” he asked. She didn’t say anything. He sensed weakness and embarrassment, and so he decided to push on. “Go on, how much bigger? As big as a buffalo? As big as an elephant?” She pursed her lips and he knew that it had struck home. “Jesus,” he said. “And you tell me that I’m irrational. Let me give you a hand with this dear. Something in a field. Moving. Bigger than a cow. Much bigger. You do get them. They have trunks and branches and leaves and they move in the wind.”
“Trees move on the spot, not move about,” she said, and then she would not say any more. He drove on, feeling smug that this round had gone to him, that she, the great exponent of rational behaviour and sensible thinking, had been reduced to being scared of shadows.
His feeling of superiority waned with each corner in the road though, as it became more and more apparent to him that he did not know where they were, or where they might be going. He tried to picture the map in his head but could not. All his careful preparation for the journey had been driven away by the arguments. It also worried him that he was getting too tired to drive properly. There was something wrong with the way that the road turned and twisted, something unsettling about the angle of the camber. He did not give voice to his fears though, as that would have given her a way back in, something to redeem herself for her hysterical outburst and make them even.
When it happened though, there was no need for point scoring, no chance for either of them to try and gain the high ground. They both saw it at the same time, and they both shouted something, neither of them knew what, and shrank back in their seats as the dark shape dipped down over the car, nearly crashing into the windscreen, and then was gone. He had stamped his foot down on the brakes as soon as he saw it heading for them, and the car had come to a screeching stop in the middle of the road. Both of them craned round in their seats, staring out of the rear window. They could not see anything there but the dark.
“Christ,” he said, after a moment. “I thought it was going to hit us.”
“What was it?” she said. “Did you see it? What was it?” There was a brittle edge to her voice.
“I don’t, I don’t know. God it was huge, a bird of prey of some kind maybe, eagle, something, I don’t know. Christ.” She stared at him, and he could not meet her gaze.
“An eagle? Around here? When have there ever been eagles around here? And anyway...”
She let the words hang between them. He knew what she meant. He could say something about birds blown off course by gales or escaped from the secret aviaries of private collectors, but he wouldn’t believe his own words. The thing that had flown over their car was not like any bird of prey he had ever seen. It was too big, far too big.
Too strangely shaped. Too leathery.
He put the car into gear and moved away. She kept looking behind them, but did not see anything there. The car rolled along the endless tarmac for hours, headlights picking out a small world of light, beyond that, everything darkness. Every so often, out in the night, he thought that he saw things moving. He didn’t say anything, but knew that she had seen the same things too, great shapes, moving in the darkness, shapes that were too big to believe, their dark bulks blotting out the stars as they moved, or shapes that were too fast, or were just wrong. Some of them looked a little bit like people. A little bit.
He wondered if she had noticed the road, too. He had to turn to the right to negotiate corners to the left, when he drove downhill the engine strained and he had to drop a gear as if he were driving up a steep slope. He did not want to ask her because now, argument forgotten, he felt her fear and remembered his love, and wanted nothing more than to protect her.
It was later, much later, after hours of driving, that they saw the first signs of human life. They had seen much else, but none of it was something that they could name, or that they wanted to name. The car rounded a corner beneath the dark bulk of a hunched oak tree. Beyond the tree great scars were torn in the earth, and beyond those lay a car on its roof, wheels in the air, like a dead beetle. Nothing in the twisted metal moved. He slowed down, and they both looked over at the car and then at each other, but he did not stop and she did not ask him to.
RUNNING AWAY TO JOIN THE TOWN
It was a wild and moving drama that slouched into town, lit by darkness, old beasts and fiends and conjurers adrift on a river of rising mist. The black canopies of the hoop-crimped fabric wagons rocked in the muddy tracks, snapping like washing on a long, sullied line. And rain fell upon them, darkening further the heavy cloths and coverings stretched over the great creaking cages, drumming on the tarps, lifting a dust from the hay that hung in scarecrow hands from between the bars, until all was saturated, steaming, dark and elemental.
A driver sat at the head of the procession, reins tight between his fists like a garotte, riding the ruts with a seagoing ease. A great, oblong coach lamp swung from a hook above his head. It lit the front of the wagon and the greasy backs of the horses with a tawny, guttering light. His shaven head shone like an ostrich egg and the rain ran in his hollow temples and down the long lines in his cheeks and dripped from the bristled bulb of his chin.
