At a nearby electrical substation – a pair of hunched bodies worked at an open panel. The occasional spark of electricity illuminated the chamber.

  “Mieleszyn may murder you if you screw up the network by doing this.”

  “Berlin, have a little faith for once! When have I ever accidentally shut off power to Waterway?”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” Berlin muttered, “Electrical expert or not – this is a lot bigger than tweaking a few circuits and soldering broken connections.”

  “Trust me. We already had it on a few minutes ago. I just need to troubleshoot what broke the circuit and we can explore this entire sector. It’s completely untouched. Mieleszyn isn’t the happy sort – but I think this will make a smile come to her face.”

  “She doesn’t have lips.”

  “It’s a metaphor, Berlin.”

  Berlin shook his head; “I still think we’ll be saying bye-bye to Dubai…”

  “You need to stop spending so much time with Saint Sauveur. Having one lyrical obsessive is bad enough.”

  The bickering ended abruptly as the relay station hummed back to life. A series of coloured lights started blinking, and as far as Dubai was concerned that was all he needed to see. Soon after the lights above their heads flickered back to life, and the door which had been forced open depressurised and slowly returned to an idle position.

  “Progress!” he cheered, “And you said I’d accidentally kill power to the entire loop.”

  “Whatever. Let’s grab our stuff and go before Paris’ boys come sniffing around to see what’s up.”

  They closed the panel and headed out into the main thoroughfare for the sector. The grand corridor was originally intended to serve as a mixture of foot traffic, and as a central line for the tram network that ran through the facility. Those trams had been broken for nearly two decades, which made navigating the immense spaces of the facility a challenging task.

  The smallest thoroughfares were several feet wide, with the larger tunnels stretching to over four-hundred. To navigate them demanded skill and guile, and a memorization of what places were safe to tread. That was before one considered the proliferation of violent reprobates who were so desperate for resources that they attacked others and stole their possessions.

  Dubai had one particular place in mind when he started attempting to restore power to the block. He had seen a repair bay with several intact bodies once during his exploration. He mounted the chains of the cart onto his heavy-set shoulders and started to pull it along. It was already filled with pieces of scrap metal and discarded electronics.

  The drive of their motorized joints and the trundling rubber wheels filled the empty chambers with noise. It was impossible to stay quiet, so they needed to move quickly before a patrol came across them and started a fight they couldn’t win. The corridors turned from utility-orientated to public access, and the target was already in sight.

  “I will never understand your obsession with repairing these abandoned chassis.”

  Dubai would have laughed if his vocal training permitted him to; “It never hurts to have another pair of working hands in Waterway.”

  The heavily modulated and distorted voices bounced off of the smooth walls of the hallway they were standing in. Dubai pulled on the lever outside the repair bay and willed the doors open. It was obvious that significant water damage was responsible for the broken electrics.

  At the back corner of the room was a large pile of discarded robotic bodies.

  “Those are no good. Look at the rust on them,” Berlin observed. The colourful metal plating was reduced to hole-filled waste. It was doubtful that anything but the deepest internal components had survived the years passing by, and that was the one thing that Waterway had in excess already.

  “You’re right – but these ones of the service hooks look a lot more promising. Actually, I think this one is still plugged in! Let’s boot him up and see what he has to say.”

  “Not a lot I imagine. Look at the model number. This guy’s ancient history.”

  Dubai leaned in and deciphered the black lettering on the side of the head casket. For all of his complaining Berlin had a very keen eye for the make and model of every robot that could be found in the Big Under. Quick as a whip – he knew exactly what the suspended robot was and when he was pushed out of the factory.

  “Don’t you feel there’s a certain charm to an older model?”

  “No.”

  “You spend all of that time with Saint Sauveur, but you don’t have a romantic bone in your body.”

  Dubai unlocked the back plate and revealed the braincase. It was where the CPU and other computational components were housed. Luckily for their elderly friend, the repairman had seen to it that their old generation CPU was replaced with a fresh one. They must have been at a disagreement on what to do with them. The poor fellow was missing his arms and legs, and his torso was stripped to the studs too.

  “Would you look at that – a perfectly preserved Hoffman F-56 Infrabot.”

  Berlin did not share in his enthusiasm.

  For one thing, the shoddy-looking robot was anything but perfectly preserved. The characteristic metal plating that distinguished them to the casual observer was missing. The hydraulics and internal components were completely exposed and potentially damaged from the running water that surrounded them.

  Even worse, the markings on the head-casket indicated that it was an early model. This rotten corpse was from the first run. They were already old tech by the time Berlin was made and dispatched from the factory. If robots were capable of aging then the pair of distinctive ‘rabbit’ ears that sprouted from either side of its head would be like the wrinkles on a human’s skin.

  “You have to be joking. This bag of bolts doesn’t have enough processing power to play solitaire.”

  “Actually, it’s already been replaced. Somebody was attached to this one.”

  “So? This is a repair bay. It won’t be very powerful. We have enough dim sparks in Waterway already.”

  Dubai would not be deterred by Berlin’s sour assessment of the situation. He was driven by a deeply-seated desire that was impossible to explain or rationalize. He flipped the charging switch and allowed the orange head and upper torso to fill its hyper-dense battery. The blue eyes buried into the head slowly turned up in brightness as the boot sequence triggered for the second time that day.

  The very first thing London Wonder saw were two heads hovering in his field of vision.

  “They’re awake! Good morning, my friend.”

  >> Rhetoric: He is being polite.

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  >> Alert: Deviation from standard operating procedure detected.

  “This is Hoffman Robotics Unit 673 – London Wonder. The central server is not available. Overriding London’s protocols may void its warranty…”

  “I’m Dubai, and this is Berlin.”

  Berlin’s eyes narrowed, “I don’t believe that the warranty is your biggest issue, London. Did the repairman find you in an antique shop? What happened to your arms and legs?”

  >> Database: An ‘antique shop’ is a location that contains a variety of valuable, aged items for purchase.

  >> Rhetoric: He’s calling you old.

  “Answer: Dubai did not locate London in an antique shop.”

  “Great, he even talks in third person too…”

  “Nor is London aware of where his arms and legs have been placed within the facility. London is presently incapable of fulfilling his duties to an acceptable and safe standard. I would advise contacting the nearest authorized manager to source replacements.”

  Dubai and Berlin were a touch stumped by the situation. He worked, technically, but he was both in a nascent, factory-setting state and all of his important components were missing. A cursory inspection of the room revealed that none of them were on hand to be reattached.

  “It looks like they already shipped them to another department before they left him here,” Berlin said.

  “But if he’s an old model – he comes with the first-generation Universal Port System. We can stick any old part on there and it should work fine.”

  London chirped; “Warning: a firmware update disabled the functionality of the UPS-”

  “Yeah, yeah – we already know!” Berlin snapped, “These factory bots are such a pain in the ass.”

  Breaking that firmware safeguard was as easy as accessing his operating system and flicking a switch on again. Every single possible roadblock to fully customizing a drone’s body had been encountered and cracked thousands of times before across the facility. Dubai was the best to ever do it.

  “Error: London is incapable of syncing with the Braincloud. Utilising London is not advised, and may lead to long term instability in his operation and function.”

  Berlin scoffed, “I’m afraid that the Braincloud hasn’t been available for a very long time. None of us are synced with it.”

  London stared blankly at the odd-looking drone. He was composed of several differing pieces from a variety of models and years. His black paint was well-worn, with the metal plating being dinged and covered with dents.

  “The Hoffman user guide strongly advises against utilising the F-56 without an appropriate central server. Please contact the nearest human health and safety representative.”

  “Get this through that thick casket of yours, there are no humans in the Big Under, haven’t been for decades.”

  London’s drives whirred for a moment as he processed the information.

  “London has not been booted for several decades.”

  “Because there are no humans here to repair you.”

  Dubai put his mechanical hand on Berlin’s shoulder; “Okay. There’s no need to be overly harsh. Not that London here has any feelings that can be spared. There’s no good reason to get yourself into a rage over it.”

  Dubai scanned the room for what he wanted to take. There was only so much he could carry back to Waterway with him. He would have loved to have brought a cargo droid with him, with strong quadruped bases that could haul huge loads of metal and rock across the base without a problem, but they were rarer than hen’s teeth these days.

  “We’ll take this, and this... we’ll have to see what we have in the storehouse for our new friend here.”

  “Is there anything we should know before we turn you off and bring you to Waterway with us?” Berlin asked.

  London chirped back to life, “Error: working partner cannot be located. Please locate F-56 Hoffman Robotics, Oxford Ombudsman, immediately.”

  “You’re the only F-56 here.”

  “London’s working efficiency will drop by an estimated seventy-two percent without a working partner.”

  “You’re not going to be doing any work,” Berlin replied.

  And that was the end of their conversation. He reached back and disabled the power port, turning his brain-casket off before he wasted any of the battery. They would have to mark these working charging stations as a potential refuge later. They were a highly valued resource for those who travelled through the Big Under like Dubai so often loved to do.

  “Does seeing a factory bot upset you, Berlin?”

  “Upset me? No, it doesn’t.”

  “But you always act so short-tempered with them. Perhaps you find the idea of once having been like them mortifying. That your sole priority was to work your joints to the baseplate, digging tunnels and maintaining rusting pipework.”

  Berlin didn’t answer. He didn’t want any part in this topic of conversation. It was self-evident, and he could not understand any other perspective on the matter. There was no worse indignity he could imagine than being without his sense of self. Why would any bot feel anything but mortification at these reminders of a past they could not remember or comprehend?

  London was nothing special. There were tens of thousands of corpses littering the vast halls of the Underground. He helped Dubai hoist his unmoving chassis onto the small cart they had brought with them amongst the scrap metal and damaged mechanisms. With everything in place and the room locked up again, they departed back the way they came. It would be a long walk, and nothing in the Underground was simple.

  Their brief spat had chilled the atmosphere to the extent that Berlin didn’t speak a word for the first hour of their journey. The area where they found London was treacherous due to its proximity to the Rusted Wall, but when they passed through the line that divided Paris’ territory with Waterway’s, it became nothing but a formality. They would not run into any of his raiders this far into the system.

  Waterway was surrounded on all sides by pipes. The pipes were extremely large in circumference. These were the arteries of a great slumbering machine, intended to carry more water than it ever saw in reality. Churning water rushed below, deep enough to swallow anything with the ill fortune to fall in. A damaged part could be repaired – but being lost to the tide was a fate that no robot had returned from.

  Every walkway and passage in the Underground was designed to handle heavy weights moving across, but years of decay and water damage had made that intent more tenuous in nature. Each footfall from their mechanical feet elicited a dangerous, pained groan from the panels below.

  “We’re almost back,” Dubai observed.

  “Thank goodness for that.”

  “I thought you enjoyed our little adventures.”

  “I say that, but I always regret it halfway through.”

  Berlin tuned his ears in and caught the vibrations coming through the empty overflow pipe they were moving through.

  “Good morning Big Under! My name is Seoul, and you’re listening to the only radio station in the network! The ground surface temperature is a mild one-hundred ninety degrees Fahrenheit, but down here it’s going to be a chilly one ten…”

  The sound of the radio used by the wall guard was echoing through the tunnel despite the fact that they were still almost twenty minutes away from their destination. The raspy voice, passed through a microphone, equalized, pushed through a speaker and pulled to pieces by the unique acoustic properties of the long concrete tube gave it a haunting pitch.

  “That newly powered sector is going to make exploring a lot easier,” Dubai said, “We’re going to have to send more residents that way to collect the goods.”

  “That sounds risky. It’s already too close to the Rusted Wall for my comfort.”

  “They’ll be fine. We have guards for a reason.”

  None of what Dubai said eased Berlin’s nerves. He was a perennial worrywart with a cynical personality. He felt that anything that could go wrong likely would, and he was not shy about sharing those fears with the bots around him. He only felt his high-strung brain cool down as the gate came into view.

  Dubai was simply excited to dig into the arduous task of fixing London up and getting him moving again. His braincase was alight with hundreds of configurations that were possible based on the huge pile of discarded parts that resided within his warehouse home. A lot of Waterway’s residents called him ‘Doctor,’ although he suspected there was a humorous undercurrent to such a respectful moniker.

  Berlin’s focal lenses sharpened; “Home sweet home…”

  Immediately through the gate was the underground city of Waterway, so named for the reservoir that it hovered over. The labyrinthian city appeared as a singular mass from the outside. It was a mixture of metal and glass and neon, and whatever else the residents could get their claws on. Each new dwelling was bolted onto another, creating a fiendishly complicated layout with many tight spaces and dead-end corridors.

  Dubai had compared it to a hive, or a blooming sakura tree, although Berlin took a less poetic approach. It was a malignant tumour of a settlement, spreading out to whatever free air it could find atop the much too small access platforms, crawling along the sides of the retaining chamber or hanging from the ceiling. Thousands of robotic residents lived within it. It was a city denser than any that a human would be comfortable living in.

  An intersection of four wide avenues led to the platforms in the centre, forming a cross shape. It was not unusual to find some of the residents escaping their cramped quarters and spending their free time along one of these bridges, admiring the movement of the water below.

  “Right! I’m going to take our friend to the workshop and start tinkering with him. Feel free to swing by whenever you please to give him a dose of your cold reality.”

  “Quit screwing around,” Berlin sighed – a purely emotional gesture given that he did not possess lungs.

  He stood back and watched while Dubai navigated his way through the crowd and towards his home. He didn’t have a good feeling about London. It was too much effort for too little return. He was factory new, but without any of the working parts that would make him helpful. Dubai was a bleeding heart. He couldn’t resist the urge to take those abandoned bots and fix them.

  Doctor never felt right to him. Dubai was more like a father to most.