Twisted Metal Read Online Free Page B

hammering started to his right, like a blunt drill skidding across steel. Something was trying to get out, trying to attack. Karel ignored it.
    Cell number two was right in front of him. Karel peered through the porthole.
    The man inside there was big: a body built for ore mining, with wide shoulders and great shovel-shaped hands. This was a robot that could have formed spontaneously beneath the earth and then dug his way free. His body was red iron, rusty and scarred, but with great long streaks of shiny metal showing where the corrosion had been scraped from his body in his climb to the surface. His eyes were tiny and recessed below a circular brim that ran around the top of the head. His legs were short and squat, ideal for pushing and scrambling through tunnels.
    Everything about the man suggested strength and power, and Karel now needed to step inside that cell in his delicate city body. No wonder Gates had told him so little about this client. This was his way of getting his own back, the tough south coast folk teaching the city slicker a thing or two. Gates and Cabeza and the rest would be laughing at the thought of Karel stepping in to meet this giant.
    Well, let them, thought Karel. He grasped the handle and pulled open the cell door. The handle only appeared on the outside of the door, and the isolation room was rigged so that only one cell could open at a time.
    The man inside remained standing in the middle of his cell as the door opened. Only his eyes moved.
    ‘Would you like to come out here for a moment?’ asked Karel. ‘Stretch your legs?’
    Silence. At first Karel wondered if the man in there couldn’t speak, but then:
    ‘I am happy to remain here while we talk.’
    ‘Fine, fine.’ Karel moved forward into the cell. The stranger looked even bigger inside it. His shoulders were almost as wide as the cell itself, so that he would have to take care when turning around. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Karel, son of Kurtz and Liza. I am a Disputant for the Turing City Immigration Office. Do you understand what that means?’
    Again silence. Karel wondered if maybe being so big meant that it took longer for words to reach his mind.
    ‘They said that you were coming,’ said the other robot, eventually. ‘But I still don’t understand your role.’
    Karel had been expecting this. He clasped his hands together, then let go as he felt the deformity in his right hand from where he had hit the Artemisian. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘my job is to speak to robots such as yourself and determine whether or not you are intelligent.’
    ‘Surely that is a job for a woman? Couldn’t you just get a woman to look at a mind and see if it was fused or not?’
    Karel smiled. ‘Usually, yes. But sometimes, even though minds are woven and fused, they just don’t work properly. I’m here to decide if you are a potential Turing Citizen.’
    ‘Well I can save you the trouble. I’m not.’
    Karel smiled again.
    ‘I wouldn’t be so hasty in claiming that. This is Turing City, you know. There’s no need for lies here.’
    ‘I’m not lying. Why would I wish to do that?’
    ‘Some people do. They don’t understand that Turing City is a cooperating city. Any robot able to think is welcome here. Don’t you realize that if you had emerged in Artemis we wouldn’t even be having this conversation? You would already be owned by the state! Every item there, every rock, every scrap of metal, every robot is considered nothing but property.’
    ‘That would seem proper.’
    ‘Proper? Really? Take a look at my body. Do you like the paint-work there?’
    The stranger’s little eyes peered down at Karel’s chest. He took in the curves of the metal there, the pastel traceries of the paint-work.
    ‘It is an elegant example of metalwork,’ he said.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Karel. ‘I bought the original panels from a shop in Turing City and bent them into shape myself. They are of an alloy originally devised by the