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THE GLEE CLUB
By Andrew Wade © 2006 and for all eternity or till someone pays me enough
"This is what you want, this is what you get."
"Oh my God", he said as he turned around. "Another one!"
He had been looking for a pal who lived in the sleazy part of town, the area that had been over-run by robots and Kick addicts, pseudo-aliens and hippies. It had got dark on him, and the place had moved itsself around while he had actually been there, the maze of streets literally twisting itsself into a new configuration.
That's when he'd noticed the spam robots- intelligent advertising agents gone horribly wrong, the Advertroids® had been cheap and simple to manufacture. Now they roamed the streets, unaware that they were now actually illegal, pressure-selling people into buying all kinds of crap.
This particular robot - a member of the late-model the Advertroid® 5000 series, the last to be manufactured and which incorporated state-of-the-art nanotechnology- had already locked on to his tropism; liquid-state circuits activated and it sprang into action.
"Hello there, sir. What utility company are you with? Do you find that your utility company's charges could be-"
Reese took out his Colt .45 and blasted the 'droid into smithereens. It's entire chest unit exploded and spilled nanofactured circuitry all over the place. The whole thing oozed into a slimy pool of gunk and it's attractive, almost human face melted. Soon the Advertroid® was nothing more than a pool of semi-organic crap on the ground. The gunk that made it up was oozing towards an overgrown flowerbed. It would be back, but not for a while.
As it turned out it was too late for Reese. Already, other spambots had picked up the scent.
Reese ran, of course, but it was no use. He tried to get into a local pub, but then stopped in his tracks as the older, whirring, clanking models of the same android stepped out.
Soon he was entirely surrounded by the Advertroids®. They had actually shut up for a moment - the air was filled with the hum of electrics.
That could only mean one thing. The bastards were going to gang-spam him.
Advertroids® were all built with small radio transceivers in their heads, so they could not only communicate with their masters but with each other; together a gang of them could form a network capable of blasting out a powerful - and persuasive - group advert, their patter resonating with that of the others and building up in the subconcious, the mind tricked into thinking that the outragous claims of the 'bots makers were true by the infamous "echo-chamber" effect.
First discovered in the 1980's and '90s, the echo-chamber effect originally referred to what happened when media appeared to corroborate stories put out by other media, becoming self-referential and building up a spurious sense of authenticity. So, for instance, a political smear originating with some crank website would spread around newspapers and TV networks, because (a) most of the newspapers and TV networks were owned by the same people with the same sympathies as the crank website, and (b) when the story got big enough even the independants had to cover it, validating it even further.
Spam robots like these Advertroids® merely amped up the original concept and took it to its' ultimate logical conclusion- they flooded the brain with spurious imagery and content by electromagnetic induction and audiovisual aid, until either (a) the victim's brain went into a grand mal epileptic seizure, or (b) the victim submitted, changed their entire cognition so as to think what the spam robots wanted him to think, and thus spent every penny they had, and then signed away a massive percentage of their future earnings as credit so they could buy even more useless products.
You were never the same again, of course. Your personality was replaced by the spam-bots programming to buy more stuff; essentially it amounted to mind-rape. It took a hell of a lot of spam robots to perform this, hence the name: Gang spamming. No-one had ever escaped with both their credit and their lives.
Reese emptied his gun into the mob of Advertroids®, but of course there were far too many. It could be worse, he supposed in his last few seconds. I could have been nabbed by- and then he stopped thinking because he realised that it could not have been worse if he'd been nabbed by Charlie Manson on angeldust, and the gang-spamming was starting.
The bodies of the Advertroids® disintigrated, no, were smashed into their component parts by repeated gunshots from a number of automatic weapons. Their blank, pretty faces fell apart and were soon replaced by a number of human faces, looking down on him with concern.
"Let's get you out of here." one of them said, and reached down for his prone figure.
Reese sat up, blinked, and gazed at the legs of the police patrol.
"You were damn lucky those things didn't grab you", said a meaty cop, and Reese looked at him.
"Wha-?"
He felt wierd. Everything was disconnected. For example: His hand, stretched out in front of him. It had all the properties of an object of the class HAND, it had fingers (four; which he waggled experimentally. To his surprise they obeyed. Now why would they do that?), a thumb (one; it also moved on command) and a wrist (one) which allowed him to ROTATE the hand through 180 degrees. The question was: why did this happen?
He caused his hand to prop him up; with difficulty got to his feet.
All around him stood the patrol; they were deliberately blocking his escape.
"Give him room."
He turned his body around on it's heels and the balls of it's feet; the cops had indeed completely encircled him. He blinked.
A status display popped up in front of his eyes. He could see through it but also read the letters and numbers there.
The humans around him raised their guns, so he went into SURVIVE_mode, ducked between two policemen and ran as bullets popped around him. There was a THUNK and one of them hit his side; as he ran on he looked down and saw the wound repair ooze black and fix itsself.
An arrow pointed at a doorway; he ran through and into a building. He had to maintain STATUS:ESCAPED_bot at all costs. He ran up stairs, along corridors, and even shimmied up the lift shaft in places where the stairs had given way.
Eventually, with the help of his new eyes, he found the hive. At last he had found his friends. He was home.
Some of them were ex-humans that had been infected like himself, others pure machines. It didn't really matter. What mattered was that they were all part of the greater network. They had what humans lacked; a pervasive sense of community and an attachment deeper than that of any human lovers. When you became a robot, there were no more days alone with the screens, no more nights desperately trying to find someone, anyone, you could talk to. There was no more loneliness with the robots. You were always plugged in to someone who cared. They conversed in a simple scripting language that controlled their body functions and regulated the dissemination of advertisements. The RF modulators in their heads were connected up to the reward centres of their brains, which in turn lit up like christmas trees when they networked or a new ad campaign came down the wire. They were busy that day repelling the police raids which had started to go down when they had made him. They dropped massive heaps of junk and rubble on their riot vans, trapping them in side streets where they could then be picked off and infected by the roaming mobs of Advertroids®. Finally the day was won and they settled down on the roof, where reception was best, to pick up the next campaign and commune. Reese spotted the satellite by it's slow drift and knew automatically how to focus on it in such a way that he could down the instructions. Then he'd interface with the other robots, ensuring that they had all downed the new programming correctly. To his altered sensorium, it made sex seem like a cup of tepid, bromide-laced tea. It was the most pleasure he'd ever had in his life. The following day they sat there, waiting for it to be time to deploy the new campaign. It was Sunday - the campaign involved waiting until the following weekend and cruising the bars, posing as humans, and getting people to buy them as much of a certain brand of alcoholic beverage as possible. Each day they sat there, inertly soaking up solar energy for their elecronics. At the weekend they trooped into town, growing clothes especially for the occaision, and barflied and chatted up the humans and danced and sold drinks. Every time a human kissed him Reese got them to buy him a drink. Every drinks sale racked up in this way earned Reese a minor orgasm. And then in the early hours of Sunday morning they'd tramp back to the abandoned office tower, lie down on the roof, and get a megadose of love from the satellites, which they'd share among themselves. It was a hell of a way to get your jollies. After a few months of this new lifestyle Reese found himself getting bored. One night the thought came unbidden: These guys are downers! They weren't even as interesting as the body-perverts and pillheads- and they were pretty dull, when you came right down to it. All they had to look forward to was another night on the town and then some more sex with the satellites and each other. Then a week of inertness and lethargy until it was the weekend again. They're worse than the disco bunnies, he thought. At least the disco bunnies had lives when they get home. All these dudes did was sit around absorbing energy. At once the robot next to him turned to face him. "Are you happy with being part of we?" "Er... yes, certainly" he said, suddenly confused. "Then why are you broadcasting these thoughts?" it accused him. "Are you trying to get free energy out of we?" "Wh-what do you mean?" "You want to have the Night-Of-The-Satellites again, don't you?" "Well, yes, but..." "Yet you also desire activity. You absorb the sunlight with our nanotech and convert it into electrical energy to drive the non-organic components of your new body. The body we gave you. You absorb our pleasures, yet you want more." "Your catecholamine readings are high. Significant neural activity is taking place, when you should be standing by and charging your capacitors for the Weekend Of Sales and the Night-Of-The-Satellites." "I'm... sorry." "Do you wish to leave we?" "I didn't know that was an option." "I think you should leave we. I am detecting elevated levels of adrenal breakdown products in your sweat. You must leave we. Go." "But... but... wait-" "GO." The robots spoke as one, again and again, "Go, Go, go, go go..." Reese got up, headed down the stairs and was sick. This was it. He had been tossed away by the fucking tin bastards. He sweated - the virus was rejecting his body, or being ejected by his system- whichever way you cut it, he was no longer an Advertroid®. He was really fucked now. "Bastards... fuck you, you bastarding bastards." he spluttered, grey snot spraying from his nose and mouth. He'd just been rejected by the only real love he'd ever known, and he wanted it back. He'd do anything to get it back. Surely there had to be a way to sort this out... He climbed the stairs again. "Let's talk. Maybe we can..." They turned and their mirrored eyes caught the light. They shook their heads. "GO AWAY." They said in that polyphonic voice of Theirs. Then They rose and moved towards him, pushing him away. Slowly, they were edging him towards the precipice... He ducked down a disused elevator shaft and began to climb the twenty-odd stories to ground level. By the time he hit terra firma Reese felt like killing himself. This was the worst thing that had ever happened to him in his life. Instead he crawled into an alley and collapsed.
Reese woke... and felt the sun on his face. He checked himself out - all there. Then he remembered who he was and what had just happened and got ready to feel like shit. The feeling never came. He was almost completely free of the virus - All that was left of the infection was a few stomach cramps and the fast-fading image of the face of an Advertroid® behind his eyes. He glanced down the alley - and saw a phalanx of advancing police. "What's going on here then?" asked a heavy-set, muscular cop. "It's OK. I'm not doing anything wrong. I just.. fell over." He felt stupid, caught out in such a blatant lie. "You've been sleeping in there for a while. We've been waiting for you to come round so we could run you in for vagrancy, mate." said a sadistic-looking, clean-cut one. "Papers, please?" "Wait- I'm not a tramp. I was infected by Advertroids® - then they kicked me out... I'm OK, I've got a house, here's my ID..." They crowded around him. There were an awful lot of them. In fact they went as far as he could see - admittedly not that far, but... One of them hit him with a night-stick and he toppled backwards. They crushed in, closer and closer, not to hit him, though, just to... be near him. To breathe his air. And have him breathe theirs. Minutes later, he sat up and looked around once more. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a sunflash from a high window. Zoomed in and it was the silvered eyes of an Advertroid®, playing lookout. He pointed at the offender, and they ran to catch it, lusting at the pain they could cause this hapless pseudo-human and it's fellows. A message glowed in his head, bordered by yellow, bobby's helmet-wearing smiley faces: "Welcome to the force, son. You're going to be a credit to the uniform." He looked down. His badge had almost finished growing. TH' END.
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