Brobots Read online

  Brobots

  By Trevor Barton

  Copyright © 2016 by Trevor Barton

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Produced in the United Kingdom

  First Edition, December 2016

  Jacket design “Emotional Uprising” by the author.

  Middle Earth NF font by Nick Curtis (cover)

  and Streetwear font by Artimasa (cover)

  via 1001fonts.com (FFCU license.)

  ASIN: B01MTW5PJL

  For more information about this book, see the Twitter links at the end.

  Author's Preface

  If you find this story weird, you do. If you find it funny, you do. If it sets you off in tears, it does. And if it's steaming hot or not steamy enough, that's how it is. There isn't much "ha ha ha" written in the text. I prefer to leave you to make your own reactions as you see fit. Should all gay fiction just be sex on every other page because hot-blooded males think of nothing else? We do think about other things, so not in my book! (Women M/M fiction writers - I love you. Please note.) Oh, but there is some. You have been warned.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised that this started out as an adventure into gay Sci-Fi but turned out to be something else. I’ve learnt that anything creative gets a life of its own very early on, and the best thing to do is ask it what it wants to be and then do that instead.

  There is a small amount of autobiography. But nobody in the story is anyone in particular.

  So welcome to my first ever novel. I enjoyed writing it. Perhaps that's the most important thing…

  Preface

  Yeah, I thought it was boring too at first. Or cliché. But the fact is that when men get together they call each other brothers, and this has shortened inevitably to "bro's". Hence, if you're the kind of guy who calls men (probably any man and not just your closest friends) "bro", women have created a word just for you. Oh you didn’t know? Now you do. To them you are a "Brobot". You've gone all automatic with your terms of endearment. Suggests you’re closer to your man tribe than you are to your women; something (apparently) you should never be.

  But now I'm surrounded by guys who call me "Bro" and you know what? It's infectious. It's caring. It's solidarity. Sure, if you're gay it can be awkward. That much warmth from another dude would be a turn on (if he was hot), right? At least, it would were it not for the fact of passing inner doubts: “do I legitimately count as a bro?”, “he knows I'm gay, right?”, “how 'bout that! I'm a bro! Nice! Is he coming on to me though? Act like he isn't and then you'll be fine”.

  It can be awkward. But not always.

  So yeah. I found it weird to start. But now it's just a thing. It's what my alternative family does. I love it.

  Those Brobot haters can go frikkin hang, anyways? They're just jealous they don't have their own wieners or something. They say it to stick up for woman-kind? Go right ahead, ladies. Would you rather men were violent to each other? Go do some knitting in the French Alps. Way I see it, it’s important to have brothers in arms; whether that doubles as your family or not. Nobody else is sticking up for bro-kind.

  Automatic shit. There ain't nothing automatic about Byron...

  Jared Thomas

  Scrinton, CO.

  Tracing Bot 2UG9ZAnL023RZ_0

  It was like a shark hiding in a deep-sea cave. Dormant. Floating. Powerful yet still. Sensing the tiniest molecule of blood in the water from three miles, it woke from its slumber. A flick of its tail moved it from stationary, and it was heading out, slowly at first. Get one move wrong and the scent could be forever lost.

  Gradually increasing speed as the trail of scent grew stronger, it was not long before it was racing, gliding, silently through the water to its target. The scent grew weaker. It slowed. Stopped. Waited. Changed course. Sped up again. Continuing like this, it finally reached a cage with military insignia. It had been compromised. Badly. Once there, it checked the damage; ascertained the nature of the hack, then headed into position to cut the hack at its point of penetration.

  Many times the shark had done this. Many times more it would do the same. It floated, calculating. Once again a wrong step would throw the hunt into jeopardy. It couldn't just tear up the line of the hack; it had to deny it, and then use that knowledge as more blood in the water. Carefully incising with its teeth, it bit the line of light penetrating the cage, and held on for dear life with its jaws. The line moved at light speed back to its source, along with the fish.

  The source was another cage. It was less impressive than the first, but still strong. Inside this cage were sea creatures much like itself. Bigger, cleverer; more clumsy. With the cage in sight it let go the line and floated again, watching to see where the line had its beginning. This information could have provided a route in. No luck. No matter.

  Swimming patiently now, it sized up the cage; smelt it. The shark rubbed against it; examined it from every angle. There was a weak point, but it was too small for the shark to enter. No matter. It made a tiny clone. An innocent-looking tiny fish that introduced itself to the weak point and then nonchalantly swam inside. Once in, the tiny fish could map in 3D the contours of consoles, code, furnishings, and the sharks inside their cage.

  Which is the tastiest meal? It asked its parent for advice. Information about the cage alone was meal enough; but under the sea you ate what you could, when you could. The parent instructed its baby clone to swim into the belly of one of the caged sharks. Once inside the belly, the parent used a quantum of magic to trade places. The parent-impostor now possessed this caged shark. The little fish was mere collateral damage floating outside. The other caged sharks had no idea.

  The possessed shark remembered data: how the hack had been done, where the information had come from, what the cage sharks were (but little luck there). It recorded the details for later. It now had another scent of blood: a “dark web data drop” from an anonymous source at a concealed location. Concealed? Interesting. No matter. Time stamps and address strings would be the blood cells this time, and lead it to the location hidden from knowledge.

  But that trail could be followed later. First, there was a cage to shake up. Possessing its host entirely it tried to bite the life away from the other sharks. No use: too strong. It was trapped now. Pinned to a corner. No matter. It ate its host alive, inside out, leaving it forever dead. Shaking off the corpse like a snake shedding a skin, it now swam for the next scent line.

  Strings of lines in fact. Like pearls. One set of time stamps led to another and to more. The further it swam away from the cage, the more possible strings there were. The shark was in danger of losing the trail again. No matter. It was good at guessing.

  Finally it found the source of the data drop. It was like the underbelly of an un-supposing boat – far too small to be traversing the seas this far from land. Gathering as much detail as it could about this boat – where it had sailed from, who made it, it had done its assignment - had its meal. What now? Home? Or… It swam back to the cage hoping to feed on the two remaining sharks but it was too late. Something else had already used the shark’s own scent to get to them. All three caged sharks were now dead.

  Once back in its own cave, hovering, smiling, it had one final task to do. Think on the data drop. Unpack it. Decipher it. It had a name. The Master of these Seas would be delighted.

  The name it had retrieved was Jared Thomas.

  Byron

  Byron hadn’t been feeling right since first thing this morning. He’d gone to work as usual. He’d even had a satisfying few hours here and there. Now it was late afternoon. Sunlight played on the scaffolding of the
construction site and peeked in through protective plastic sheeting whenever the breeze lifted its corners, tears or sides.

  Things just weren’t right. But he’d taken a quarter of an hour out to check himself over and think about what might be wrong and decided it was probably nothing - nothing to be concerned about until this evening, anyway. Perhaps he could get some advice tonight; or maybe at the weekend when the site was closed.

  Turning his attention fully back to his work now, he grabbed a scaffold pole as his “shadow” Tasley, lifted it up toward him. Tas and Byron had worked together for years. They were confident in each other; they joshed quite often. They were friends.

  ‘Should be the last piece’, said Tasley in his low tone.

  ‘Agree’, said Byron gruffly as he carefully routed the bar up and over the other poles to rest it down in a neat pile for the next chunk of rigging.

  Walking back to the platform edge he looked down for Tasley one floor below. Seeing the black crop of hair on the head of his burly friend, he was about to ask what was next on their schedule but instead he stopped and looked up – straight ahead. From this high up he could see the best part of the city’s so-called “south” side. The buildings weren’t so tall that they dwarfed the trees and the sun cast warmth on his face and arms.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he thought. And then immediately a high-pitched tone filled his head. His eyesight blurred. His legs lost strength. ‘Beautiful.’ His lips and tongue formed the words, but he was already leaning dangerously forward with his legs apart and knees bent in an empty half-stoop. There was no safety rail here yet. ‘Beautiful.’ His legs and torso looked for a moment more like precariously balanced hessian coffee-bean sacks teetering from a high warehouse shelf – about to fall in slow motion and spill their contents on a concrete floor.

  Tasley watched it happen; his mouth open in dread and his dark brown pupils wide. Oh no!, he thought. Not Byron, please! Byron was on the ground in a heap within a couple seconds. It was sickening to look at, and Tasley felt like the slowest of the slow after taking more than five seconds to come round from shock and take action.

  Pacing firmly for the ladder he shouted, ‘Man down – out the way!’ as he passed colleagues who hadn’t seen Byron’s fall. The first ladder felt so cumbersome and slow for his steel cap-booted feet and rig-gloved hands. His hard hat wasn’t much help either.

  Being diligent and all at the site, the ladders weren’t spaced in a line; you had to pace across each platform some way before reaching the next ladder that would take you down to another level. Each step or jog felt like wading through steadily setting concrete, and Tasley took a full two minutes to reach the ground where Byron lay. Here up top, he couldn’t run.

  Of course, this was the 2060’s. Nobody had to make emergency phone calls or shout for the managers. Each worker was wrist tagged, and each tag had sensors so that the managers knew exactly where each ‘unit’ was, what tasks they’d been assigned, the progress they were making, and their exact location pin-pointed inside a holographic vector display model floating in air. Any sudden changes to the information and a pin point would start pulsing on someone’s screen; accompanied no doubt by an alarm.

  So there Tasley was, his big figure crouching down at his equally big shadow’s side; and he could only think two things: ‘What can I do for my friend?’, and ‘How long have I got before the suits turn up and land me in trouble for not being at my post?’

  The latter thought won out. To any outsider, Tasley’s next moves would seem eerie; he simply stood up, turned around, and calmly walked back to the ladder to begin his re-ascent. Only a moments’ hesitation in some of his steps showed an internal struggle going on between suitable on-site behavior codes on the one hand, and something else he didn’t have words for on the other. Was it love?

  All of which left Byron alone; on the ground, limbs splayed, on his back. A small piece of rubble arched his shape so that it resembled a broken bridge over a sea of random construction site debris. His light brown dusted round-cap suede boots were still immaculately tied at the laces, even if a little worn. They were useless now. His light gray (also dusty) cargo pants also seemed well maintained. Tools in the side pockets tugged fabric down at the sides of his huge thighs. A black leather belt held the pants neatly to his forty inch waist, above which he wore a fully buttoned white shirt and a highvis over his large chest and biceps. The hard hat, however, had rolled a few feet away, leaving his shaved black hair to receive a slightly brown-gold shine in the lowing sun.

  A first glance at the accident scene might not show much wrong. Byron might have simply been playing around somehow, or taken up cloud bursting whilst lying down at a funny angle. “Here, Tasley! That cloud looks like you! All fat and out of shape!”

  Perhaps the most visible indicator was that, just above his button nose, his eyelids were open. His hazel brown eyes watched the passing clouds blankly from his round puppy-fat kind of face. But the summersault fall he’d just had meant things were far from right; and things hadn’t been right before that – in an even less-visible way. The suits had arrived; two of them.

  ‘Byron, this is Alex. Can you hear me?’ The first suit was the shift project manager. He’d heard the alarm in his office and, donning his hard hat and highvis, had grabbed his apprentice, Shaun (the other suit), and headed across to the main site from their portable cabin-office.

  Shaun looked up from Byron’s limp torso to Alex. ‘I’ve never known a fall like this to happen?’

  Alex furrowed his brow, turning his thin face to Shaun. Taking up a managerial tone he replied, ‘Oh – it happens. He’s not responding, so I’ll try the ‘off and on again’ trick; see if that works.’

  Alex reached down to a spot just behind Byron’s left ear and pressed hard. He counted to fifteen, and pressed again. Nothing. Standing up again, Alex and Shaun just stood there for a moment looking at the body, and then looking around the site – across the building construction, to the other workers – and back again; thinking.

  Finally Shaun said, ‘Shall I call Construcsapli? Arrange a repair?’

  Alex kept looking down, thinking to himself. Looking up and wiping his nose with the back of his hand he said, ‘Yeah. Do that. But make it clear we’re not happy. This is the third job this year I’ve had something like this happen. We pay good money for these units and with complications like this I’d sometimes rather go back to employing humans with all the aggravation, bullshit and cost that entails.’

  Shaun turned his back to Alex and Byron, and with a slight shake of his wrist he activated his smart band. Tapping a few numbers on the back of his wrist, he dropped his arm and waited for a ring tone to sound in his ear.

  Alex continued to look around the site, kick a few stones, look up at the clouds; watch the birds for a moment. While Shaun was waiting for an answer at the other end of the line, Alex had a thought; and it wasn’t a happy one.

  ‘No answer,’ said Shaun, turning back to Alex.

  ‘That might not matter,’ Alex replied.

  ‘What?’ asked Shaun.

  Taking Byron’s right arm, Alex stepped across Byron’s legs so that he was holding his arm on the opposite side of his body. ‘Here – give me a hand. We need to roll him over.’

  With the rubble arching Byron’s back it was easier for Alex and Shaun to roll his body onto it’s left side, and then onto his back. Remarkably to Shaun, Byron’s clothes were a little marked but other than that there was no apparent damage.

  ‘These things are built to handle falls,’ Alex stated, ‘so it’s probably not the fall that’s knocked him offline. Anyway, they don’t tend to make a habit of jumping down from scaffold rigs, so something else is definitely wrong. If I’m right, it’ll be exactly the same problem as the last time.’

  Crouching down at Byron’s side and reaching into a side pocket in his own highvis-covered suit he took out a plastic box with a small conical antenna protruding from its top face. He pulled up the highvis jacket on Byro
n’s back, and then roughly yanked the tucked-in cotton white shirt from beneath the leather belt. Pulling the shirt about half way revealed a small indentation in the middle of the spine recess.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Shaun, feeling slightly uncomfortable.

  ‘It’s an access point for this tool,’ said Alex lifting up the tool and lining up the antenna to the recess. ‘And this tool,’ he said – pressing the ‘on’ button as he did so, ‘checks the battery’.

  After about ten seconds, the tool chirped a tone to indicate that a reading had been satisfactorily gathered. At the sound of the tone, Alex pulled the tool away and stood to his feet. He had to turn his body away and cup a hand so that he could read the display without interference from the sun. He dropped the tool down to his side and turned back towards Shaun. ‘Just as I suspected’, he said.

  ‘What does it say?’ Shaun finally asked once he realized his boss wasn’t going to volunteer any further information from which he could learn. Alex kicked Byron’s booted left foot so that for a moment his left leg wobbled from side to side and then became dead still again. ‘It says this unit has had its day. The battery’s fucked’.

  ‘What? These things cost tons! Can’t the battery be replaced?’

  ‘No. Or at least, they can…’ Alex looked up at Shaun and pulled a thumb and index finger down over the front of his beard. ‘But the batteries cost almost as much as the units, so it’s never worth doing.’

  ‘Seems a huge waste,’ Shaun volunteered.

  ‘Yeah – it is. But what can you do? We have a building to make and a budget to keep. It’s a false economy repairing this dude when we can spend a small amount more and get a shiny new. When this happened the first few times, that’s what I did. Now I’m beginning to wonder. Whole bunch of units starting to drop like flies. Something’s not right.’