Atomic Swarm Read online

  ‘Don’t worry, sir, I have everything under control.’ She checked the time on her phone. ‘I should have you out of there in the next five minutes.’

  The old man looked surprised at the girl’s comment at first. It was nice of this young slip of a thing to try and say reassuring things, although he couldn’t imagine there was much she could do really. But that was fine – it would make it easier for the young girl if he appeared to be comforted by her optimism.

  He smiled. ‘Well then, I’ll just sit back and enjoy the view.’

  Brooke turned and surveyed the crash site. The timing of the pile-up couldn’t have been worse. It had happened during rush hour and the city was gridlocked. In the far lane, the cars coming out of Boston were rooted to the spot. And the vehicles on the bridge ahead were stacked, bumper to bumper. There was no way the emergency services were going to get through.

  Brooke checked her phone one last time.

  Running. It wasn’t really Jackson’s thing. He hated the feeling of blood rushing to parts of his body that were much happier relaxing in front of a computer or a console. But Brooke did sound desperate.

  A man trapped in a car. It was just the kind of scenario Brooke and he had talked about and precisely what Brooke’s latest robotic creations were designed to deal with. The brilliant mechanical engineer now wanted to use the robots she had previously had to employ in their dealings with MeX – a top-secret robot defence force – for tackling emergencies and helping people.

  MeX had been dissolved following the death of Devlin Lear, its creator and famous dot.com billionaire.

  Along with the Kojimas, two professional computer-gaming twins from Japan, Jackson and Brooke had both been part of a four-member team, without knowing that Lear was using them as pawns in a multimillion-pound theft. Once they had worked out what he was up to, they’d exposed Lear for the criminal he was. And when he went missing at sea, Jackson had tried his best to put a line under the whole affair and return to his normal life. Brooke, on the other hand, had different ideas and, as usual, had pretty much got her way. It was, in fact, partly how Jackson’s move to America had come about. Jackson’s scholarship worked for everyone – while he got to study for a prestigious university degree, Brooke and her father had him on hand whenever their projects required some number-crunching.

  As the five-storey Metropolitan Storage Warehouse loomed large in front of him, Jackson allowed himself a slow trot. He was in serious danger of coughing up a lung. The enormous dark brown building on the edge of the MIT campus was evocative of a medieval castle. On the side of it, in enormous white letters, were the words ‘Fire Proof’ – this was also how the building was commonly referred to. It had been built in 1894 to provide secure storage for anyone with something to keep safe from theft, fire and bombing, and its basement was the perfect location for J.P.’s experimental robotics laboratory.

  Jackson hurried up to a small side door. As he approached, it opened automatically. The entry system was something Brooke had knocked up – a high-level security lock that used a small laser radar to invisibly scan the unique telltale patterns in a person’s heart rate and breathing.

  He ran down two flights of steps before entering the lab. It was a huge space, running the entire length of the Fire Proof building, which was about the size of two Olympic-sized swimming pools end to end. Brooke and her father, however, had still managed to fill it. It was crammed with desks, computers and highly complex scientific apparatus. Jackson ran past the section of the lab dedicated to Brooke’s mechanic’s paraphernalia, where her self-driving car Tin Lizzie was caged in an elevator. A few months ago, Tin Lizzie had achieved second place in a competition called the X Car Challenge, in which cars had to drive themselves from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Brooke’s robotic car had led the race until suffering a puncture on the outskirts of LA, and she finished just behind the winning car despite driving 30 kilometres with a flat. Brooke had taken the defeat badly and Tin Lizzie had sat there gathering dust for some time afterwards.

  Beside Tin Lizzie was what Jackson had been looking for: a line of stout metal enclosures that ranged along one of the lab’s walls like pig pens. Each pen contained a different robot, plugged into an assortment of brightly coloured curly-flex cables.

  The first three pens each contained spherical objects about the size of a beach ball, which were held in place by a thick aluminium swing arm. The first pen was reserved for Punk. With his twelve sharp spikes retracted, the brushed-metal robot could have been mistaken for a miniature globe – his pockmarks and rough welds representing the planet’s oceans and continents. But in fact Punk’s hidden prongs packed a real punch.

  The sphere in the second pen looked like a giant eyeball. Its surface was pristine gloss white and, on one side, it had a centrally mounted fish-eye lens. The third ball-shaped robot was as perfectly round as the other two, but was bright yellow and criss-crossed with black hazard-warning stripes.

  Jackson disconnected several data cables and pipes that were attached to the yellow-and-black robot, then drew a shape in the air with his phone. The motion sensors in the prototype handset, designed by Brooke, recognized the gesture and a virtual keyboard appeared on the phone’s smooth plastic surface. Jackson entered a hexadecimal access code and pressed the shimmering red SEND icon.

  The sound of compressed air being vented came in four short bursts and the swing arm holding the robot suddenly retracted.

  Keeping a tight hold of his handset, Jackson traced a new shape in the air and sections of the robot started to unfold, revealing a series of tightly packed plastic joints, like the segments of an orange. As they slowly unfolded, it became clear that the bulk of the sphere was composed of four mechanical robot hands. Each hand had three fingers and a thumb and was able to extend on an intricate network of intersecting metal ribs, which formed a hub at the centre.

  Jackson continued to move his phone freely in the air like a wireless joystick and the machine began to move towards him. After rolling a couple of full revolutions, it extended the fingers of each hand and walked on its fingertips.

  Jackson turned his back to the robot and squatted down. He drew a gesture in the air, to which the robot responded by climbing on to his back and wrapping its mechanical claws round his shoulders. Moving the phone carefully now, Jackson felt four pairs of mechanical hands hug him securely, clasping his shoulders and waist until they hung from him like a rucksack.

  ‘I’ve got Fist,’ said Jackson into his handset as he grabbed a large raincoat from the back of a chair and struggled to stretch it over the robot on his back.

  ‘Good!’ came Brooke’s reply through the phone’s directional speaker. ‘Don’t waste any time, amigo! Time’s a tickin’!’

  *

  ‘Where’s that pickup driver?’

  A man in a navy pinstriped suit, who Brooke guessed was the driver of the Lamborghini, rushed from wreck to wreck, skittishly puffing on a cigarette. ‘Did you see him brake? He’s a maniac! How was I supposed to stop?’

  ‘He’s trapped in his truck,’ said Brooke. She signalled for the man to stop. ‘I wouldn’t go near him if I were you; it’s teetering dangerously on the edge of the river bank.’

  ‘As long as I get his insurance details first, the old fool can drown for all I care!’ The enraged man continued to vent his anger, but Brooke was too distracted to listen. A jarring metallic whiff was clinging to the inside of her nostrils – one the young mechanic recognized as the smell of gasoline. She looked down and could see the potentially explosive steel-blue liquid streaming around her running shoes.

  ‘Put that cigarette out!’ Brooke shouted in horror at the ranting man next to her.

  ‘Says who?’ he replied arrogantly.

  Brooke just pointed at the gasoline. ‘Put it out now or you’ll burn us all alive.’

  The man went pale and hurriedly stubbed out his cigarette on a credit card from his pocket. ‘You only had to say!’

  Brooke ignored him. Time
was running out.

  Come on, Jackson! Hurry up!

  CHAPTER 3

  Jackson pedalled hard along the Cambridge streets on his mountain bike, his flapping coat revealing momentary flashes of the strange plastic skeleton wrapped round his back. It was part of his and Brooke’s arrangement with J.P. that the robots should never be seen outside the laboratory. The mackintosh was the best Jackson could do.

  The bike was a Cannondale Bad Boy, an urban racer with a single ‘solo’ fork at the front and single-speed gear at the back. A matt jet-black carbon fibre frame, one of the lightest in its class, held it all together. Buying the bike, in his first week in Boston, was why Jackson needed to supplement his college fees by selling the virtual goods he made from playing Whisper. He’d had no money ever since, but as the bike swallowed up the road ahead, he knew it was worth it.

  As Jackson approached an intersection, he prepared to engage the bike’s most impressive feature: an experimental hydrogen fuel cell, designed by Brooke. The cell and hydrogen reservoir were housed inside the frame and produced electricity, which powered a hub at the centre of the back wheel. Just as Jackson was about to push the power button mounted on his handlebars, the lights at the intersection turned red. Jackson considered running the lights, when he noticed two MIT police officers on mountain bikes waiting at them.

  He slammed on his brakes and skidded to a stop beside the two officers. They were on tricked-out Specialized mountain bikes. Custom-butted aluminium frames, RockShox and front-mounted police lights and sirens.

  ‘Nice bikes!’ said Jackson.

  One of the officers nodded from behind his mirrored shades.

  ‘D’you always wear your coat over your knapsack?’ said the second cop from behind an identical pair of shades. The flap on Jackson’s coat had ridden up and the cop was eyeing what he thought was a section of yellow backpack behind it. ‘It makes you look like a hunchback!’

  Both cops laughed hysterically.

  Jackson needed something to distract them from Fist. ‘I wish I was allowed blues and twos on my bike,’ he blurted out, motioning to the lights and sirens on the police bikes, while furtively reaching behind his back to pull the flap of coat quickly down.

  ‘Why? Are you thinking of riding fast?’ asked the second cop sternly.

  ‘Er, no… of course not, officer,’ Jackson answered nervously.

  Just then Brooke’s voice blurted out of the phone in Jackson’s breast pocket, without even ringing. Jackson had left the handset in push-to-talk mode, which enabled his and Brooke’s phones to work like walkie-talkies. ‘Where are you?’ she shouted.

  ‘I’m getting nearer,’ mumbled Jackson self-consciously, aware the two cops were listening in.

  ‘So’s my next birthday, tiger, but I need you before then! Get a move on!’ came Brooke’s loud reply.

  ‘That’s my mum!’ said Jackson to the cops. ‘I’m late for my tea!’

  The two cops just stared blankly at him.

  Not a moment too soon, Jackson was saved by the change of the lights. The two mounted cops waited for Jackson to move off first and then stayed behind him for what seemed like thirty minutes but was probably more like a painstaking thirty seconds.

  Eventually, the police officers peeled away and Jackson turned on to the main road alongside the Charles River. Cars were at a virtual standstill in both directions, so Jackson mounted the kerb. From Brooke’s description, she was about two kilometres up.

  With the path ahead clear, Jackson pushed the red button Brooke had fitted to his handlebars. There was an audible sigh and a judder from beneath his seat as pressurized hydrogen gas and oxygen, stored in his bike’s frame, shot into the cylindrical fuel cell hidden in the down tube. Within microseconds, electric current was flowing to the hub of his back wheel, causing its motor to spin. Jackson could feel the front of the bike lighten as the back wheel tore at the tarmac. The wind whipped his face as his speed rapidly increased. He glanced at the tiny wireless bike computer next to his left hand: 50 kmph! 60 kmph! 85 kmph!

  It took him no time at all to reach the crash scene. As Jackson disengaged the hydrogen booster and slowed his bike to a stop, he could see the battered pickup on the edge of the Charles River, its nose hanging over the water. He could also see Brooke with her head inside the car, obviously chatting to the driver.

  It was typical Brooke. She had obviously already taken control of the situation, herding the other drivers to the safety of the park across the road, while she and another man tended to the trapped pickup driver. Jackson remembered the first time they’d met in the flesh, when he’d arrived in America. It was certainly unusual to accept an invitation to live and study in a new country with someone you’d never actually been in the same room with. But they had already been through so much together. From different corners of the earth, they’d fought remotely alongside the Kojima twins, as part of MeX, and then stood up to Devlin Lear, exposing his corrupt deeds to the world.

  The amazing thing was that all these incredible adventures and life-changing experiences had taken place through means of highly advanced technologies that used the Internet as their communication medium. Brooke, Jackson and the twins had never needed to meet to achieve any of it. But now the two friends shared the same laboratory every day and, despite Brooke’s tendency to be moody and extremely bossy, they got on like a house on fire.

  ‘Not a moment too soon,’ said Brooke when she spotted Jackson. She immediately walked up to him and began to whisper in his ear. ‘Old Man Cooper, the driver of the truck, is trapped in the cabin by his steering wheel. He seems upbeat enough, but there’s a doctor with him who told me he suspects things might be a little more serious – he thinks the impact of the wheel on his chest could have caused internal bleeding. And I gotta tell ya, that truck of his is only one slip away from a high dive. We need to get him out of there, pronto!’

  Jackson hurriedly pulled off his raincoat, retrieved the phone from his pocket and began to draw in the air the precise movements that he needed Fist to make. The doctor looked on, disbelieving, as the spider-like machine on the boy’s back responded to these gestures by unfurling and beginning to walk on the fingers of two of his mechanical hands towards the ancient pickup truck.

  ‘What in God’s name is that?’ the young doctor asked Brooke, cowering behind the truck.

  ‘This is Fist,’ said Brooke. ‘F. I. S. T. That’s “Fire, Industry, Security, Tactical” to you. I modelled him on the piston-rod hydraulic spreaders that fire-fighters use to free people trapped in cars. I thought their technology was in need of modernization.’

  Looking at Brooke’s determined face, Jackson didn’t think now was the time to remind Brooke that, on her father’s instructions, they needed to be as discreet with Fist’s identity as possible. It was bad enough that J.P. would find out about using him in public, even though it was to save the old man.

  Fist climbed up the back of the truck and then performed a gravity-defying walk along the truck’s side, ending by clinging to the driver-side door, horizontal to the ground.

  Jackson carefully manipulated the gestural interface on his phone with two wand-like flourishes, and two of Fist’s yellow plastic hands dug in around the hinges and handle of the car door. Gripping the underside and roof of the truck with his two other hands, Fist effortlessly ripped off the door. He then walked on to the truck’s hood, two hands dropping down through the cavity where the windscreen had been to smoothly peel back the console and steering wheel.

  For a moment the pickup truck pitched precariously forward towards the river until Fist jumped quickly on to its roof, the weight causing the ancient vehicle to tip back on to the pavement again. Brooke and the doctor wasted no time, pulling the old man to safety through the space where the door had been.

  The doctor quickly checked over Mr Cooper and gave him the all clear. But as they walked towards the gathering of drivers at the edge of the park, the pinstriped Lamborghini driver accosted Brooke and the old m
an.

  ‘So you’re the idiot who is going to pay to fix the front of my Lambo!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ stuttered the old man. ‘But I don’t see how –’

  The businessman didn’t allow him to finish. ‘Thanks to you indiscriminately slamming your old beater’s brakes on, you have criminally damaged a four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar car! I am also late for a very important meeting and I will be billing you for my time.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Brooke interjected furiously. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Cooper. I saw the whole thing. You were driving at a perfectly steady speed for the conditions. This man clearly can’t drive!’ she fumed, pointing at Mr Pinstripe.

  ‘Excuse me, little girl, but the adults are talking. Those other sheep might have been content to take orders from you, but not me!’

  ‘That’s it! I’ve had enough of this guy,’ said Brooke, glowering at Mr Pinstripe. ‘Jackson, give me that phone!’

  Brooke walked straight up to Jackson and snatched the handset from him. She turned to the pickup as Fist, now under her control, rose from the bonnet. It was the first time Mr Pinstripe had been quiet since the accident. He just stood, gaping like a goldfish, as Brooke’s yellow mechanical creation sprang from the rusty pickup and bounded straight for his sports car, like a dog chasing a bone.

  When he reached the metallic purple Lamborghini, Fist grasped one of the expensive-looking aluminium wheels with a single plastic hand and ripped it clean off! As Fist moved to the roof, the car’s owner gasped at the sight of sixteen plastic fingers dancing across the pristine metallic surface to grip all four corners.

  ‘So, are you going to stop bullying nice old Mr Cooper and admit that this accident was caused by your dangerous driving? Or shall I ask Fist to rip you a convertible?’ Brooke asked sweetly.

  The man just nodded.

  CHAPTER 4