The Big Trip Up Yonder by Kurt Vonnegut

 

The Big Trip Up Yonder

by Kurt Vonnegut

Gramps Ford, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen, a news commentator was summarizing the day's happenings. Every thirty seconds or so, Gramps would jab the floor with his cane-tip and shout, "Hell, we did that a hundred years ago!"

Emerald and Lou, coming in from the balcony, where they had been seeking that 2185 A.D. rarity – privacy – were obliged to take seats in the back row, behind Lou's father and mother, brother and sister-in-law, son and daughter-in-law, grandson and wife, granddaughter and husband, great-grandson and wife, nephew and wife, grandnephew and wife, great-grandniece and husband, great-grandnephew and wife – and, of course, Gramps, who was in front of everybody. All save Gramps, who was somewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, to be about the same age – somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties. Gramps looked older because he had already reached 70 when anti-gerasone was invented. He had not aged in the 102 years since.

"Meanwhile," the commentator was saying, "Council Bluffs, Iowa, was still threatened by stark tragedy. But 200 weary rescue workers have refused to give up hope, and continue to dig in an effort to save Elbert Haggedorn, 183, who has been wedged for two days in a ..."

"I wish he'd get something more cheerful," Emerald whispered to Lou.

* * * * *

"Silence!" cried Gramps. "Next one shoots off his big bazoo while the TV's on is gonna find hisself cut off without a dollar –" his voice suddenly softened and sweetened – "when they wave that checkered flag at the Indianapolis Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big Trip Up Yonder."

He sniffed sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat, through having been mentioned by Gramps about once a day for fifty years.

"Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard," continued the commentator, "President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the world's ills can be traced to the fact that Man's knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world."

"Hell!" snorted Gramps. "We said that a hundred years ago!"

"In Chicago tonight," the commentator went on, "a special celebration is taking place in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The guest of honor is Lowell W. Hitz, age zero. Hitz, born this morning, is the twenty-five-millionth child to be born in the hospital." The commentator faded, and was replaced on the screen by young Hitz, who squalled furiously.

"Hell!" whispered Lou to Emerald. "We said that a hundred years ago."

"I heard that!" shouted Gramps. He snapped off the television set and his petrified descendants stared silently at the screen. "You, there, boy –"

"I didn't mean anything by it, sir," said Lou, aged 103.

"Get me my will. You know where it is. You kids all know where it is. Fetch, boy!" Gramps snapped his gnarled fingers sharply.

Lou nodded dully and found himself going down the hall, picking his way over bedding to Gramps' room, the only private room in the Ford apartment. The other rooms were the bathroom, the living room and the wide windowless hallway, which was originally intended to serve as a dining area, and which had a kitchenette in one end. Six mattresses and four sleeping bags were dispersed in the hallway and living room, and the daybed, in the living room, accommodated the eleventh couple, the favorites of the moment.

On Gramps' bureau was his will, smeared, dog-eared, perforated and blotched with hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice and homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets – a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate. To say nothing of the daybed in the living room for Em and himself.

"Boy!" called Gramps.

"Coming, sir." Lou hurried back into the living room and handed Gramps the will.

"Pen!" said Gramps.

* * * * *

He was instantly offered eleven pens, one from each couple.

"Not that leaky thing," he said, brushing Lou's pen aside. "Ah, there's a nice one. Good boy, Willy." He accepted Willy's pen. That was the tip they had all been waiting for. Willy, then – Lou's father – was the new favorite.

Willy, who looked almost as young as Lou, though he was 142, did a poor job of concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at the daybed, which would become his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move back into the hall, back to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door.

Gramps missed none of the high drama he had authored and he gave his own familiar role everything he had. Frowning and running his finger along each line, as though he were seeing the will for the first time, he read aloud in a deep portentous monotone, like a bass note on a cathedral organ.

"I, Harold D. Ford, residing in Building 257 of Alden Village, New York City, Connecticut, do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made." He blew his nose importantly and went on, not missing a word, and repeating many for emphasis – repeating in particular his ever-more-elaborate specifications for a funeral.

At the end of these specifications, Gramps was so choked with emotion that Lou thought he might have forgotten why he'd brought out the will in the first place. But Gramps heroically brought his powerful emotions under control and, after erasing for a full minute, began to write and speak at the same time. Lou could have spoken his lines for him, he had heard them so often.

"I have had many heartbreaks ere leaving this vale of tears for a better land," Gramps said and wrote. "But the deepest hurt of all has been dealt me by –" He looked around the group, trying to remember who the malefactor was.

Everyone looked helpfully at Lou, who held up his hand resignedly.

Gramps nodded, remembering, and completed the sentence –"my great-grandson, Louis J. Ford."

"Grandson, sir," said Lou.

"Don't quibble. You're in deep enough now, young man," said Gramps, but he made the change. And, from there, he went without a misstep through the phrasing of the disinheritance, causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling.

* * * * *

In the paragraph following, the paragraph that had belonged to everyone in the room at one time or another, Lou's name was scratched out and Willy's substituted as heir to the apartment and, the biggest plum of all, the double bed in the private bedroom.

"So!" said Gramps, beaming. He erased the date at the foot of the will and substituted a new one, including the time of day. "Well – time to watch the McGarvey Family." The McGarvey Family was a television serial that Gramps had been following since he was 60, or for a total of 112 years. "I can't wait to see what's going to happen next," he said.

Lou detached himself from the group and lay down on his bed of pain by the bathroom door. Wishing Em would join him, he wondered where she was.

He dozed for a few moments, until he was disturbed by someone stepping over him to get into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard a faint gurgling sound, as though something were being poured down the washbasin drain. Suddenly, it entered his mind that Em had cracked up, that she was in there doing something drastic about Gramps.

"Em?" he whispered through the panel. There was no reply, and Lou pressed against the door. The worn lock, whose bolt barely engaged its socket, held for a second, then let the door swing inward.

"Morty!" gasped Lou.

Lou's great-grandnephew, Mortimer, who had just married and brought his wife home to the Ford menage, looked at Lou with consternation and surprise. Morty kicked the door shut, but not before Lou had glimpsed what was in his hand – Gramps' enormous economy-size bottle of anti-gerasone, which had apparently been half-emptied, and which Morty was refilling with tap water.

A moment later, Morty came out, glared defiantly at Lou and brushed past him wordlessly to rejoin his pretty bride.

Shocked, Lou didn't know what to do. He couldn't let Gramps take the mousetrapped anti-gerasone – but, if he warned Gramps about it, Gramps would certainly make life in the apartment, which was merely insufferable now, harrowing.

Lou glanced into the living room and saw that the Fords, Emerald among them, were momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that the McGarveys had made of their lives. Stealthily, he went into the bathroom, locked the door as well as he could and began to pour the contents of Gramps' bottle down the drain. He was going to refill it with full-strength anti-gerasone from the 22 smaller bottles on the shelf.

The bottle contained a half-gallon, and its neck was small, so it seemed to Lou that the emptying would take forever. And the almost imperceptible smell of anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, now seemed to Lou, in his nervousness, to be pouring out into the rest of the apartment, through the keyhole and under the door.

* * * * *

The bottle gurgled monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of music from the living room and there were murmurs and the scraping of chair-legs on the floor. "Thus ends," said the television announcer, "the 29,121st chapter in the life of your neighbors and mine, the McGarveys." Footsteps were coming down the hall. There was a knock on the bathroom door.

"Just a sec," Lou cheerily called out. Desperately, he shook the big bottle, trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass, and the heavy bottle smashed on the tile floor.

The door was pushed open, and Gramps, dumbfounded, stared at the incriminating mess.

Lou felt a hideous prickling sensation on his scalp and the back of his neck. He grinned engagingly through his nausea and, for want of anything remotely resembling a thought, waited for Gramps to speak.

"Well, boy," said Gramps at last, "looks like you've got a little tidying up to do."

And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through the crowd and locked himself in his bedroom.

The Fords contemplated Lou in incredulous silence a moment longer, and then hurried back to the living room, as though some of his horrible guilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long. Morty stayed behind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he also went into the living room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway.

Tears streamed over her cheeks. "Oh, you poor lamb – please don't look so awful! It was my fault. I put you up to this with my nagging about Gramps."

"No," said Lou, finding his voice, "really you didn't. Honest, Em, I was just –"

"You don't have to explain anything to me, hon. I'm on your side, no matter what." She kissed him on one cheek and whispered in his ear, "It wouldn't have been murder, hon. It wouldn't have killed him. It wasn't such a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he'd be able to go any time God decided He wanted him."

"What's going to happen next, Em?" said Lou hollowly. "What's he going to do?"

* * * * *

Lou and Emerald stayed fearfully awake almost all night, waiting to see what Gramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacred bedroom. Two hours before dawn, they finally dropped off to sleep.

At six o'clock, they arose again, for it was time for their generation to eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They had twenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by the bad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to their son's generation.

Then, as was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited, they began preparing Gramps' breakfast, which would presently be served to him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. The toughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine, on which Gramps spent so much of the income from his fortune.

"Well," said Emerald, "I'm not going to get all panicky until I'm sure there's something to be panicky about."

"Maybe he doesn't know what it was I busted," Lou said hopefully.

"Probably thinks it was your watch crystal," offered Eddie, their son, who was toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdust cakes.

"Don't get sarcastic with your father," said Em, "and don't talk with your mouth full, either."

"I'd like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and not say something," complained Eddie, who was 73. He glanced at the clock. "It's time to take Gramps his breakfast, you know."

"Yeah, it is, isn't it?" said Lou weakly. He shrugged. "Let's have the tray, Em."

"We'll both go."

Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semi-circle of long-faced Fords standing around the bedroom door.

Em knocked. "Gramps," she called brightly, "break-fast is rea-dy."

There was no reply and she knocked again, harder.

The door swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, the soft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by to every Ford, was empty.

A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice, slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly, under the furniture and behind the drapes, for all that was mortal of Gramps, father of the clan.

* * * * *

But Gramps had left not his Earthly husk but a note, which Lou finally found on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenir from the World's Fair of 2000. Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud:

"'Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after last night's bitter experience, I say good-by. The cares of this world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns and I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.'"

"Gosh," said Willy brokenly, "he didn't even get to see how the 5000-mile Speedway Race was going to come out."

"Or the Solar Series," Eddie said, with large mournful eyes.

"Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back," added Morty.

"There's more," said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: "'I, Harold D. Ford, etc., do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.'"

"No!" cried Willy. "Not another one!"

"'I do stipulate,'" read Lou, "'that all of my property, of whatsoever kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike.'"

"Issue?" said Emerald.

Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. "It means we all own the whole damn shootin' match."

Each eye turned instantly to the bed.

"Share and share alike?" asked Morty.

"Actually," said Willy, who was the oldest one present, "it's just like the old system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here and –"

"I like that!" exclaimed Em. "Lou owns as much of it as you do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who's still working. You can snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, while poor Lou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and –"

"How about letting somebody who's never had any privacy get a little crack at it?" Eddie demanded hotly. "Hell, you old people had plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle of that goddamn barracks in the hall! How about –"

"Yeah?" challenged Morty. "Sure, you've all had it pretty tough, and my heart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick."

"Silence!" shouted Willy imperiously. "The next person who opens his mouth spends the next sixth months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to think."

A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head.

* * * * *

In the next moment, a free-for-all was under way, with each couple battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into the room.

After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, the cops broke in, followed by television cameramen from mobile units.

For the next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Fords, and then the apartment was still and spacious.

An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televised to 500,000,000 delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard.

In the stillness of the three-room Ford apartment on the 76th floor of Building 257, the television set had been left on. Once more the air was filled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, coming harmlessly now from the loudspeaker.

The battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in the police station, where the Fords and their captors watched with professional interest.

Em and Lou, in adjacent four-by-eight cells, were stretched out peacefully on their cots.

"Em," called Lou through the partition, "you got a washbasin all your own, too?"

"Sure. Washbasin, bed, light – the works. And we thought Gramps' room was something. How long has this been going on?" She held out her hand. "For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven't got the shakes – look at me!"

"Cross your fingers," said Lou. "The lawyer's going to try to get us a year."

"Gee!" Em said dreamily. "I wonder what kind of wires you'd have to pull to get put away in solitary?"

"All right, pipe down," said the turnkey, "or I'll toss the whole kit and caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybody outside how good jail is ain't never getting back in!"

The prisoners instantly fell silent.

* * * * *

The living room of the apartment darkened for a moment as the riot scenes faded on the television screen, and then the face of the announcer appeared, like the Sun coming from behind a cloud. "And now, friends," he said, "I have a special message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over 150. Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone was developed? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longer feel different and out of things.

"After years of research, medical science has now developed Super-anti-gerasone! In weeks – yes, weeks – you can look, feel and act as young as your great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn't you pay $5,000 to be indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you don't have to. Safe, tested Super-anti-gerasone costs you only a few dollars a day.

"Write now for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address on a dollar postcard, and mail it to 'Super,' Box 500,000, Schenectady, N. Y. Have you got that? I'll repeat it. 'Super,' Box 500,000 ..."

Underlining the announcer's words was the scratching of Gramps' pen, the one Willy had given him the night before. He had come in, a few minutes earlier, from the Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building 257 from across the square of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green. He had called a cleaning woman to come straighten the place up, then had hired the best lawyer in town to get his descendants a conviction, a genius who had never gotten a client less than a year and a day. Gramps had then moved the daybed before the television screen, so that he could watch from a reclining position. It was something he'd dreamed of doing for years.

"Schen-ec-ta-dy," murmured Gramps. "Got it!" His face had changed remarkably. His facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealing kindness and equanimity under what had been taut lines of bad temper. It was almost as though his trial package of Super-anti-gerasone had already arrived. When something amused him on television, he smiled easily, rather than barely managing to lengthen the thin line of his mouth a millimeter.

Life was good. He could hardly wait to see what was going to happen next.

You can check out Kurt Vonnegut's wikipedia page here

This story is taken from Project Gutenberg. The etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1954. For legal reasons the following statement must be included: (This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org).

Bookspot - Rememory by Fraiser Armitage

 Bookspot - Rememory by Fraiser Armitage

In the future, memory is currency. Felix is broke, on the run, with nothing in his head but a combination of numbers.

Someone robbed him of his mind. Now it's time he took it back.

On the run from the law but without any memory of why. This bite-sized cyberpunk novella hits straight in with a pace that doesn't hold up until the end. A fantastic blend of twists and reveals that keeps you guessing all the way.

Art - Eric Gagnon

Art - Eric Gagnon 

Flying Steam-Ship Arrival

Big Boat Floating Over

Corpa City 03

[from] Old Science Fiction Sketches

Spaceship Hanger

The Cold Halt

The Sentinel

Check out more from Eric Gagnon here

Doctor Mecha

 

Doctor Mecha

by Chris Morton

Doctor Mecha had been ten years old when he made his first invention. Of course he hadn’t been called Doctor Mecha then. Young Alfred, he’d been. Alfred Junior. Alfred Huang Junior. Son of a pilot, son of a nurse. His parents had a large house on the coast of Dunedin, and at that time a flight to the Motherland took ten hours and was so expensive that even on his pilot’s wages and discount, the father could only afford the family to visit once a year during the summer.

Nevertheless, Alfred had a rather close relationship with his grandparents. In fact he’d been able to recall snippets of memories involving the earliest visits of all; being pushed on the swing, sat in a high chair being fed by his grandmother and even a mountain walk to see wild sheep when he’d dropped an ice-cream and cried and cried, comforted by his grandpa and tasted chocolate chunks for the first time. When he couldn’t have yet been three years old, they’d found him in the outhouse covered in engine oil, cleaned him up and told no one – but he’d remembered this incident vaguely and one day when he was nine, he brought it up with his grandma.

“Black, sticky … was it oil?” he’d asked.

“But … how?” his grandma had gasped. “You must have been only. … How old was he?” she shouted over to the connecting room where Alfred’s grandpa was sat, out of sight as was typically the case.

Alfred communicated with his grandparents using a software programme named Skype-x. A pad called a ‘laptop’ that was basically a screen and keyboard (a dormant pad with alphabet and numbers to ‘key in’) was used for this kind of communication. A video image of the other person would appear on their respective screens. The quality was poor and there were often delays and occasional shut-downs, but before this there had only been the telephone, which meant no visual image at all.

When he was just over ten and a half years old, young Alfred had a brainwave. If he could somehow make the laptop at his grandparent’s house mobile …

He tended to talk to his grandma in her kitchen while she cooked or prepared food. She would often disappear out of sight momentarily. He’d lean at his screen, wishing he could look around to follow her movement. His grandpa would come to say hello for all of five seconds.

Their house was on a riverbank, deep in the Cotswolds. The ground-floor had five rooms; the kitchen, wash room, a spacious living and dining room, another dining room and a toilet. Beside the living room area were double glass patio doors leading to their large flower garden with the flowing river at the bottom.

“If I could just get their laptop to move.”

* * *

In a few weeks he’d rigged up an unsophisticated contraption – it had started off as a box with wheels, remotely controlled with a swivelling top on which the laptop could be attached. The swivelling motion could also be controlled remotely via his computer. He’d downloaded the program needed which worked on the same principle as archaic, remotely controlled toys. Practising in his room, Alfred could command his laptop to move around on the wheels, to twist so the screen could point at all three hundred and sixty degree angles. But then he started to go all out, replacing the smaller wheels with a set of thicker track tires. It could jump down from his desk and land safely to the floor where it moved about the room.

“Mum, Dad!” he’d shouted, once he was ready to reveal what he’d been doing for all those spare hours in his room. “Mum, Dad! It’s finished!”

They’d come in, to witness the scene. The mobile computer shifting about his room like a little toy robot. Their ten year-old son stared up at them, beaming.

“What can it do?” asked his father. Home on leave, he’d been tired, rubbing his eyes. It was six o’clock in the morning and little Alfred had been up all night.

“So this is what you’ve been working on?”

But they’d been interested, they really had. Proud of their little prodigy.

“I’m going to send one of these to Grandma and Grandpa!”

“You’re going to …”

“What’s it for?” asked his mother.

“You’ll see.”

If they had only known where it would lead. If they could have stopped that moment in time; stopped him from getting involved in his new love for robotics.

* * *

That’s what they’d called it: the robot. His grandparents had even given it a face. A little head on a spring attached to the top that would wobble about cutely.

In his little computer body, Alfred could roam the house. “How are you doing, Grandpa?” he’d ask back from his room in Dunedin, tilting the screen to see his grandpa sucking on his vapor.

“My goodness, Alfred,” his grandpa would joke. “Didn’t see you there … creeping up on me like that.”

“Open the doors for me, Grandpa.”

And through the little robot, Alfred would move out into the garden, across the grass and down towards the river.

Sat in his room in Dunedin, Alfred thought about how to improve the device. “Stairs,” he’d murmur to himself. “If only I could build it some legs.”

It could bob down steps easily enough, but getting back up again was an impossibility so far.

“Somebody fetch me out of here!” he’d shout, stuck under a tree root, stuck on his side.

This, however, was not the next update.

On Alfred’s birthday, his parents had bought him a gaming headset. Virtual reality. VR. In those days it was like a wrap-around head-band with a visor; no direct link to the brain. You viewed a screen just like the pad, but with it pushed up to your eyes it could trick the brain into experiencing a full awareness of your virtual surroundings.

The headset was for fantasy games such as Dragon Warriors, Virtual Fighter and other classics. There were virtual sports games … but young Alfred had the idea of linking it up to his computer, the little ‘robot’ that he’d sent to his grandparents. If he could really see through its ‘eyes’, properly experience an awareness of actually being there, at their house in the Cotswolds.

He bought a globe-cam (a globe-shaped device enabling three hundred and sixty degree vision through a complication of built in lenses) and sat with that and the headset in his room, knowing what he wanted to achieve, not yet quite knowing how.

* * *

When Alfred was twelve the second world trade war was at its peak. Further politics had led to poverty in many parts of the Motherland, though with owning a house, his grandparents had escaped the worst of it.

His parents, however, were not so lucky. New Zealand and especially its minor cities had become cornered off from the rest of the world. Dunedin, the southernmost of them all had become a regular ghost town. His father moved to Japan for test flights of the JP-2 jets (space-tourism had been put on hold, although preparations for its inevitable boom were still underway) and not long after this, Alfred and his mother followed.

He was schooled in the Okinawa prefecture, then at fourteen was given the chance of specialising at the Tokyo college of robotics.

By that time the little laptop-come-robot at his grandparents house was moving around with arms and legs. He’d send them updates with instructions on how to assemble the extra parts while at the same time always updating his own model, trying to persuade at least his grandma to use it in the same way he did; sending her the headset and everything, all to no avail. But it was this model he’d entered for an inter-school science competition and it was this that won him the scholarship to Tokyo.

At the age of fourteen, he was the youngest freshman in the history of that college, a record he still holds to this day.

“Our little prodigy.”

His parents had been so proud.

That year, he qualified as the number one student of the college, his team designing a robotic stag-beetle, realistic enough to pass as genuine.

The fifteen year-old Alfred hadn’t visited his grandparents in person for four years, yet when he’d put on his visor he’d be in their house, their world. In the body of ‘Little Alfred,’ he’d roam the town at night.

“Grandma.”

They were in the kitchen.

“Grandma, are you okay?”

Using controls from the gloved pads he was wearing back in their Tokyo apartment, Alfred moved the robot along the kitchen sideboard to where his grandmother was bending over the sink, breathing deeply.

“Grandma,” his voice rang out through the microphone. Little Alfred moved closer, next to her now, it turned up at her face – she’d gone white, she was going to faint. “Grandma!”

“Grandpa!”

“Grandma, hold on! I’m going to get help.”

Little Alfred jumped down from the work surface, made its way to the next room where Grandpa was sleeping, snoring in his favourite chair.

“Grandpa!” screamed Alfred from his home in Tokyo.

He heard a crash from the kitchen.

“Grandpa! Somebody! Help!”

Alfred took off his headset, dialled an international number; emergency services for the Cotswold area. He told them the address. They’d need an ambulance.

When the call finished, he returned to the headset again. Back in the body of Little Alfred, he shifted back to the kitchen to see his grandma had hit her head. Her body was shaking in a disturbing set of spasms.

“Grandma!”

He moved closer to the face on the floor. She was smiling.

“Alfred, my boy.” Her lips large and purple moved slowly, so close to his eyes.

“Grandma, don’t go. They’ll be here soon. I’ve called for help,” he explained, pleaded. “Just hold on. Help is on its way.”

“I love you, Alfred.”

* * *

The death of Alfred’s grandmother (and shortly after, his grandfather) is said by some to have been the driving force for his persistence with the Mecha project.

Without proper funding, the robots Alfred was building in college were never to be more than models. Along came a new wave of financial crash as oil was losing its value and those countries with power held on to their bargaining chips. Statisticians predicted it would take years before the Middle East and Russia would catch up with the Western and Eastern powers. World leaders had become irritable. They wanted soldiers, not doctors. They wanted armies.

They needed protection.

Status.

“Status,” his tutor had said, staring at the seventeen year-old Alfred. “If you quit now, you’ll never build anything.”

Alfred’s design for the robot doctor had been passed from hand to hand, from university to university. It was certainly impressive. There was impact. Revolutionary, the reply had told him.

Alfred had then been called before a board of directors: a company from the Eastern Union.

In a silver room of mirrored walls and thick green carpet, the four men sat behind a wide curved desk in their immaculate suits that spelled money and funding and a career with prospects.

“Controlled from a remote location by an expert, you say?”

“That’s right,” said Alfred. He stood before them with no seat, the soles of his sandals sinking into the carpet. The room was circular and he wondered if it were intentional for him to be feeling this dizzy. Intimidation, he thought. They want something. They need this. He should have been smiling, but sensed something was wrong.

“Controlled, how?”

“I’m sure you’ve read the proposal. My paper,” said Alfred, “explains it all in –”

“Yes, yes, we’ve read the paper,” said another. He coughed, looking across at his three colleagues. “What we want is to hear it in your own words.”

The others rumbled in agreement. They were young, these men. Surprisingly young. Who were they?

“My own words,” the seventeen year-old Alfred repeated.

Another cough, then silence as they waited.

“The robot,” Alfred began. “It is of a humanoid figure. But the hands, they the most important feature. To have successfully replicated the human hand –”

“Yes, yes, we know about that,” one of them cut in.

“Then you see how that breakthrough has allowed, has enabled, opened up … the possibility,” Alfred stumbled, “of creating a force of robot doctors to be sent –”

“A force, he says,” sneered the youngest looking man of the three.

“Let him continue.”

“These models,” carried on Alfred. “They can be posted all around the world. We are finding cheaper ways to build them. The actual materials involved in assembling the droids is relatively inexpensive. The programming simple.”

“How many of them can you build us?”

This question came from the oldest of them and in a murmur. Looking up from the carpet, Alfred stared at the three poker faces. “How … many?”

“An army, you say?”

“Yes, I mean, no, not an army. They are doctors,” Alfred mumbled. “Controlled by … you see, that’s the beauty of it. Sending a qualified doctor to a remote location, his expertise will be needed once every, well I’m not in charge of the stats but all the predicted data is there.” It was Alfred’s turn to cough. “The idea is,” he stumbled, “is that just one doctor can, through the remote manipulator, be in many places at once.”

“At once?”

“No, I mean no, not at once. But a doctor can jump from location to location. Where they are needed. It could revolutionise …”

“Revolutionise what, Alfred?”

But Alfred was staring ahead, all the way past the three of them; he was staring at the future, for he could see it even then.

“This army,” he heard. “Just how quickly can we get production online?”

* * *

Things moved quickly. Doctor Mecha, as he would soon be known as, was forced to sign the agreement.

“Status,” his tutor had said. “I know what you want, Alfred. “But to get a project as large as this one underway, there are short-cuts and there are short-cuts.”

“There’s no other way?”

“Trust me,” his tutor had replied. “If you want these doctors of yours to go into production, it’s better you stay in the project. If you don’t,” he said darkly, “then it could take a lot longer for them to realise …”

“That we should be saving people, not killing them?”

“That,” his tutor replied, “is the nature of humanity.”

But Alfred still didn’t understand. He left the room, left the university. He returned to his parents, to Okinawa. For three weeks he hid from them. It had been a dream. A mistake.

Then two men had caught him on the way home.

“We have the signatures of your friends,” they’d said lightly.

One on each arm, they’d led him back to his home.

“We’ll be seeing you,” they’d said.

On every street corner. In every shop, in every restaurant; outside his window; dark silhouettes on the beach at night. They were there, waiting.

“We’ll be seeing you,” they’d repeat. “Your parents. You love them, don’t you?”

* * *

Some argue it made no difference. That the Eastern Union would have invaded the Baltics anyway. That the loss of lives would have been greater, yet the result the same. By then the Eastern Union was the largest and richest superpower. They had the resources, the numbers.

Doctor Mecha’s robot army spread quickly across Europe. They were giants, controlled from booths in classified locations. Booths packed with soldiers, remotely destroying cities and towns. The opposing armies were human; rebel fighters were human. They had tanks, they had weapons, but the soldiers of the East were expendable and larger in number. The Eastern army of Mecha droids could be repaired; they marched on like ants, swarming nation after nation.

White flags were raised. It was over in months. The Eastern Union controlled half the world’s commerce. They owned half the world’s resources.

The Western powers were quick to negotiate their holding over the Motherland, which remained as a neutral zone of sorts. France and the Scandinavian Union were taken by the Eastern Union while Canada re-joined the West. Africa, along with United Iran joined the East, while the Argentines gave in to Western control.

“Fall in or become our enemy,” was the Eastern message.

“Join the Western powers or give yourselves over to communism,” had been the answer from New Washington.

Alfred’s father had taken early retirement. No longer a test pilot, he revealed to Alfred (who by then had moved in to the adjoining apartment) that the next generation of pilots were already being trained in methods of remote piloting.

“No need for pilots at all,” he’d said over dinner, holding his fork out absently. “Gamers, that’s who they’re employing. Damned kids. Damned …”

He let his fork drop, looked away to the window.

Alfred’s mother took up the plates. Her forced smile hurt Alfred more than he could express. Their politeness, their understanding. They never blamed him, not out loud.

“It would have happened eventually,” his mother said to him, another time when they were in the kitchen. A glass of wine was in her hand. “And anyway, we’re lucky, really.”

“Lucky?”

“To be on this side,” she explained, eyes dazed, unable to meet his own. “You know, you probably did us a favour,” she hiccuped. “If the West had got there first …”

* * *

“So this is it, then?”

“This is it,” replied Alfred.

They were stood in a warehouse. Alfred’s friend, Suki, worked here assembling engine parts for automotives. The room was full of buckles and jacks; wires and belts. In the corner a crate of square watermelons stood out in the space next to a similar stack of super-sized kumquats. Between them a large robot stood in the shadows. From a small window above, rays of sunshine streaked at the dusty air.

It was red and gold in colour with thick arms and torso. Bulky yet agile, with large hands and fingers that were enveloped in replica flesh. Across the robot’s front was stamped the Eastern Union flag.

“And how in the hell did you manage to –”

“Let’s just say I pulled at a few connections.”

Suki looked across, suitably impressed.

“Never seen one this close.”

“You even seen one?”

“You mean in the flesh?”

Alfred laughed. “Flesh,” he repeated. “Don’t tell me, you’re starstruck.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m a dumbass.”

“Why I brought you here,” retorted Alfred. He was nineteen by then. They both were.

“You have the RCC for this?”

The robot was immobile.

“Controls didn’t come with it,” answered Alfred.

“Wait, you mean …?”

“Don’t worry yourself,” Alfred said, placing a palm on Suki’s shoulder. “It came from a trusted source.”

“A source that could be watching us at this very moment,” answered Suki in a whisper. “How you know it’s not gonna spring into life? Dice us up for breakfast,” he murmured, moving closer nonetheless.

The large robot stood there stoically. Like a tower, a statue. It stared ahead at nothing, this killing machine. The threat of its appearance, Alfred could only imagine what that must be like when the power came on.

“And you’re gonna take it apart?” asked Suki, staring up into the robot’s eyes as though it were more than just a complication of cables, plastic and metal. As though it were listening …

“The plan,” answered Alfred.

When their eyes met, he huffed, not exactly knowing. Gazing around at the dismantled engine parts, Alfred suddenly felt so small. He stared back at Suki.

“You’ll help me.”

“You know I will.”

“It may take some time.”

“Got your back, man. No one else comes in here.”

“No boss that’s gonna –”

“Hey, when it comes to this place, there’s only one boss, and that’s me.”

Suki walked back to Alfred. He took his hand. “You gotta do this, I know.”

“Yeah …”

“Give it hell, dude. You designed it. It’s your baby.”

Just the two of them and the dormant robot. Every day, Alfred would go there. Doctor Mecha taking apart his creation piece by piece. The months wore on while meanwhile the Eastern Union took Canada.

The Western powers were by then building their own Mecha droids. They were larger, stronger, but moved much more slowly. The first Mecha battle took place in Michigan in August 2044, bizarrely becoming more of a sports event than a political fight for territory. The media coverage focussed on the Mecha themselves, comparing design and strategy. Bets were won and lost. Individuals and conglomerates – money was there to be made. The West then came out with a newer, faster model, this one manned by humans sat within the robot bodies of the Mecha. These models proved at first to be superior; despite the loss of human life, the Western powers were fighting back. But the Eastern Mecha were so large in number that it wasn’t long before they had regained their ground. Bets were exchanged again while the Eastern Union moved south to Washington, the whole world watching the live feeds.

“You heard the latest?” asked Suki.

Alfred’s Mecha robot lay splayed across the warehouse in bits.

“Don’t tell me. We’ve taken Hawaii.”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet,” Alfred repeated.

He stood up, hands on hips. A tall, thin twenty year-old. Much taller than Suki, by this time much thinner. Suki drank too much beer. Alfred worked too hard.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” said Suki.

“I don’t wanna hear it.”

“Just hear me out.”

“I know what you’re gonna say. So don’t. Not you as well. Get enough of this from my parents. Find a job, plenty of opportunities for a young man of your talent.”

Alfred spat on the concrete floor.

“You know, the answer could be in the communications.”

“It’s not the communications.”

“Break the connection, they’re about as useful as this one,” Suki murmured, walking over to an engine he was working on.

Alfred stared at his own engine – at the broken robot. “Too obvious,” he sighed. “Anyway, we’ve been through this before. It has to be –”

“Has to be what? You been at it for a year and what’ve you found?”

“It’s here,” Alfred whispered. “The answer’s staring right at me.”

* * *

Later that night, the two of them sat in the warehouse eating noodles and watching the latest video feed.

“Gotta hand it ’em,” slurped Suki. “Those brutes can sure kick some ass.”

The view on the screen was showing a close up of an Eastern Mecha pulverising a tank from the Western Powers. As they watched, it lifted the said tank up, which by then was a nugget of metal. It lifted it high and threw it across the street-turned-battlefield, then turned to see a Western Mecha running at it full pelt.

The Western model was much larger. It had a human inside, but the human was not visible; though the stance, the posture was much more human-like as it bowled over the Eastern Mecha in the mightiest of tackles.

“You know these feeds are delayed,” commented Suki, waving his chopsticks at the screen. “If that WEB takes out ours, I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

Alfred laughed, appreciating the fact that Suki still had the power to lighten his mood. He stared across at his friend, at his light hands stabbing the chopsticks back into his bowl; watched as he lifted out more noodles that with a flick of his wrist, he’d woven into a ball.

“They don’t use weapons,” Alfred said, looking back at the screen. “They use gloves, gloves made of the hardest steel.”

“You know as well as I do that weapons are useless.”

“Bullets don’t make a dent. Electric bolts are like snacks to them …”

“Lasers?”

“Lasers,” Alfred scoffed, still looking at the screen while like a wrestler, the Eastern Mecha had turned the other onto its back. “Time it’d take to penetrate even the first layer of shielding.”

“So make ’em more powerful.”

“Make them …” And then the sudden realisation.

“Look at their hands,” Alfred whispered.

“Which ones?”

“Ours … our own …”

“Dunno what you mean, they’re not, you mean their gloves? Or you mean –”

“Exactly,” Alfred said, rising unsteadily. “My God, why didn’t I see it before!”

He began pacing the room, his brow furrowed in intensity. He’d gone over to another world. “The hands,” he was mumbling.

“I still don’t –”

“Can’t you see it?!” shouted Alfred.

He turned back to Suki, taking him by the shoulders. “I can destroy them,” he said, eyes now shot with madness. “I can …”

* * *

Alfred’s father came to his room later that night. He’d let himself in to Alfred’s place when Alfred had failed to answer any calls. He’d ascended the stairs, pushed open the door.

“So you’re packing?” he asked, for Alfred was sat in the middle of the room stuffing belongings into a large rucksack.

Alfred looked up, dazed.

“Yes, I mean …”

“You’re going away?”

Unable to meet his father’s eyes, Alfred replied that it was complicated.

The father sat down on Alfred’s soft double bed. He pulled out a stick of chewing gum, tore at the wrapper and began to chew slowly.

“This thing you’ve been working on …”

“What thing?”

Staring down at his son, the father said nothing.

With a huff, Alfred went back to his packing, stuffing in a bundle of socks from under the desk next to him. He moved over to a drawer, sifted through a pile of t-shirts. Looking back at his father, he said again: “It’s complicated.”

“You know your mother and I are very proud of you.”

“You’re very …?”

“What you did.”

Alfred went back to the t-shirts, the hunch of his back at his father. “What I did was cause all of this,” he mumbled. “This, war. This –”

“It would have happened with or without you.”

“But I designed them, dammit!”

Alfred slammed the drawer shut.

“Nobody can blame you. This past year, we know you’ve been trying to put right what you did.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

“And now you’ve found a way,” continued the father. “We could see it in your face. When you came home tonight. We saw you through the window and your mother said –”

“So what if I have?” huffed Alfred, twisting round, jutting his face up in defiance. These people, what did they know?

“You can destroy them?”

“I can. … Yes,” Alfred relented. “I can and I will.”

He heard his father sigh, watched him chew slowly, grasping for the right words. “We were afraid this day may come,” the father spoke. “You’re an intelligent boy. More than intelligent.”

“Your little prodigy.” Alfred stuffed the chosen t-shirts into his pack. “The prodigy who destroyed the world.”

“Peace will come.”

“Peace?!”

“It will come. Soon. Eventually. One state. One rule.”

“My God,” Alfred spat. “You sound just like them.” This man before him, the greying hair and sad expression. The man who had once beamed at Alfred with such sparkle, so proud.

“Who are you going to give this idea to? The Americans?”

“Maybe.”

“You want to give power over to the West?”

“The West will bring peace.”

“The West will fight back. They’ll want the return of what they’ll say is rightfully theirs. My God, Alfred,” the father cried. “This war could go on forever if you even the balance.”

“How do you know I want to even anything?” said Alfred with forced rebelliousness. “Maybe I’m just a traitor. Could be that I’ll give the Western powers the means to crush us all.”

“Alfred, my boy, we both know that’s not what you want.”

“So what do I want, then?”

“To erase your part in this. To destroy your own Mecha. That’s what you’ve been working on …”

“Suki,” Alfred murmured.

“Not, not Suki. Your mother and I. … You’re our son. We see it in you. The shame, the regret, the … anger.”

“Then you understand,” said Alfred now rising to a standing position. He picked up his backpack. “Be seeing you, Pa.”

“Alfred …”

But Alfred was already out the door. He was off without even saying goodbye to his mother. Or to Suki, the only friend he had, who’d stuck by him.

“Suki,” Alfred hushed, walking through the night; the lit up harbour below him, where his passage was waiting; a boat not to the mainland but to the Pacific island of Guam, still under Western rule.

Alfred had set up a meeting and from there he’d be taken by fighter jet to Washington.

Flying in a jet like his father.

He smiled, coughed and he sang out loud, making his way down the hill to the busy harbour below.

They’d believe him – even then he was with the nickname of ‘Doctor Mecha’ in some reports.

Going over to the other side.

But he’d end it. End it for good.

The hands.

Alfred laughed.

It’d been so damned obvious.

The flesh. The weakness.

“Mr. Huang.”

Alfred turned at the sound of his name. At the formality. At the suit.

“Mr. Huang, I’ve a message for you.”

A thickset man in dark-red business clothes. Sunglasses and the notability of profession. He was holding out a gun, the barrel pointed casually at the easily dressed twenty year-old roboticist looking back at him in shock.

“A message,” the man repeated. But they both knew what was coming next.

* * *

In 2059, the Western Powers finally surrendered to Eastern Union control. In seventeen years the East and their Mechas had achieved total world domination.

Suki was by then married with a second baby on the way. The next generation would learn that the Mecha war had been a revolution. Scholars would say that it had been inevitable and even necessary. A one planet rule.

The Mecha army remained. People were encouraged to call them Peace-bots, or Peas, for short. Their design changed to that of a more cuddly appearance. A matriarchal, watchful eye. Less for intimidation and threat, more of a reminder that peace should remain at all cost. That we had to work together.

Doctor Mecha’s name began to be thrown around in legend. Some say he’s alive even now. Some say it was his parents who sold him out, who notified the authorities when he threatened to betray the Eastern Powers in the hope of stopping the war and bringing about a settled peace. Others say it was his friend Suki, who later, to the contrary, became outspoken in defending the name of his former friend.

A thousand history essays, a thousand debates. If he could have in fact done so, would Doctor Mecha have been right to put a premature end to the fighting?

Very few people died in the third world war. Robots fighting robots. Eastern Power. World control. Victory!

Peace.

Some say we’re living on borrowed time. A poisoned chalice; a corrupt leader – that this is all it would take for the world as it is to regress into a much darker age. That utilitarianism ignores justice.

On every street corner the Mecha robots stare down at us as we pass. They are watching. Listening. Those men behind the machinery in their castles, far away. They care for us, keep us in line.

* * *

A statue of Doctor Mecha stands in New Times Square. He’s bending down inspecting the hand of a first model Mecha droid. The droid too is made of grey stone, though the Eastern Union flag across its front is boldly painted in red and white.

If you gaze at them for long enough you may see the sadness in Doctor Mecha’s eyes. The lanky figure of the roboticist. Lost hope. Confusion. A well meant vision that somehow would never turn out to be quite what he’d hoped.

It’s unknown if the sculptor intended this impression, but many have commented upon it. The sad scientist, they say. And there’s talk of the authorities taking it down, replacing it.

Go see it yourself, while you still have the chance.

Doctor Mecha, the child prodigy who grew up to be remembered as the father of the modern world; whose original design for remotely controlled droid doctors finally came to use during the Great Rebuilding. With no wars, no famine, and disease under control, there is even talk of Mecha droids being sent to Mars; talk among scientists that they could go even further; that the possibilities are endless.

Chris Morton is the creator of this blog.

He has released two sci-fi novels,

one collection of short stories

and a few other scribblings.

You can find his amazon page here.