Last Robot

Chapter 4. THE RED DOT GIRL

RILEY EMERGED FROM the brightly lit factory into the rare sunlit Newer York midday.

As he took his first few Perfect marching steps along the silica-diamond grey shiny streetway, he was pleased to see a few lonely white clouds scudding across the clear sky like pre-Perfect Age cotton scudding past a huge sheet of polished steel. He was even more pleased the thick grey smog, that at its worst could reduce visibility to less than ten feet, was for the first time in many days nowhere to be seen. And finally, better still, the stinging acidic rain had not fallen for over a week.

Riley was soon marching merrily along the streetway Perfectly with clockwork precision. He looked at the buildings on either side lining the streetway. They were all identical Factory Cubes constructed of dark-grey Perfect concrete. They had no windows of course. Only one building in the city had windows, the City Café. The City Library didn't have windows but at least it did have long rectangular windowpanes in its huge front door. All other city buildings, including the homes of the citizens, showed no signs of glass. The HEP stated that the reason for such a lack of windows was to aid the application of the Perfect Laws of Citizenship Privacy that were there to protect and defend the rights of citizens.

Furthermore, in an effort to improve Perfectness, 97 of the 100 well-known Perfect cities of the Earth had exactly the same buildings and street layout. The three well-known cities that were different were New Atlantis, the HEP city of New Sydney, and the School City in New Canberra. But the city in Riley's dream was altogether a different affair. It portrayed a city that was incredibly different from any Perfect Age city. A completely alien-looking city. Its buildings were each and every one unique and each and every one festooned with glass windows. A city like the sky above that, if made public would have to be deemed a case of Perfect unPerfectness. If such a city were real, as Inspector Clark had claimed, that would mean there were actually 101 cities on the Earth. Such an unPerfect number.

The sun glinted on top of Riley's bald head. However, the strands of his metallic aluminium-based woven grey boiler suit did not reflect the bright sunlight, thus allowing him to merge into the bright greyness that was today's Newer York.

The streetway was Perfectly level and if it was not for the side drains it would flood in minutes during a typical acid rain storm.

There was not a lot of flora to be seen, but what little there was, consisted of the short spiky white grass, the odd straggly tree here and there with their withered grey leaves, and the cacti plants in their drab brown, white, black and grey colours. There certainly was no such thing as any flora having the colour green attached to it. Just like every other place on the Earth—except, of course, if Riley's dream represented a reality. The city in his dream surrounded by its Robot Park was a healthy, vibrant mass of green. The City of London. The global capital city of the robots in the pre-Perfect Age.

Riley turned around a right-angled corner of the streetway and found himself marching past a rectangular forecourt consisting of huge rectangular dusty looking light-grey flagstones that fronted the Meeting Building. The Meeting Building was significantly larger than any other building in the city, a huge cylindrical building with polished stainless steel walls rising up to the iron sky, dazzling beneath the blazing sun.

The Meeting Building could accommodate the entire population of the city, as could identical Meeting Buildings in the other 99 of Earth's Perfect cities. And although it was open to daily public citizen visits, once a year a loud blaring siren would whoop continually in a two and a half minute stream of short steady tones called the Perfect Grey Warning and the city's citizens would ceremoniously fill it. It was a ritual that celebrated the Victory of the Robot War. This calling siren would be sounded at a random time, day or night, on any day of the year. This was the one time when loud noise was accepted as Perfectly unPerfectly acceptable. From the moment the siren sounded the city's citizens, HEP and non-HEP, had no more than fifteen minutes to get themselves into the Meeting Building and find their assigned standing positions. The HEP will reward failure of any citizen to meet the deadline with a visit to a Remote Correction Asylum.