The Iron Womb

 A cold front had pushed down from the Arctic circle and covered Britain two days ago and was showing no signs of moving.  What would have been a dismal December rain under normal circumstances was now a feathery-light ballet of snowflakes, whirling in the streetlights and covering the pavements with a crisp white coating that would soon freeze and turn to ice.  Two men were stood outside in it; one was smoking and the other was shivering.  Small talk passed between them in staccato snippets until the cigarette was finished and they walked back inside together.

 They had been stood outside a warehouse under an industrial floodlight.  A hundred metres away a chain-link fence prevented casual entry and fifty metres closer there was a sentry-box with a night-watchman inside.  The night-watchman was one of the new class-80 Deterrents, shaped like a mechanical spider and about the size of a Bentley.  It hummed softly to itself as it took in input from cameras located across the compound as well as temperature and motion sensors.  Everything was quiet; nothing was stirring, not even a mouse.  Which was the only reason the Deterrent wasn’t patrolling.

Wilson closed the security door behind him, hearing the click of its lock engaging.  A moment later and there was a second click as the locks in the steel doorframe engaged as well.  He shivered, again, but not from the bitter arctic cold this time; rather he felt these rooms were death-traps.  They were as secure as they could be, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that if a fire broke out he’d be cooked alive before he could get the damn doors to open.  He woke up sometimes from dreams that the power had gone out and he’d been suffocating in darkness in this very room, his fingernails clawing pathetically at the door.  Before his feelings could start turning into claustrophobia Wilson started talking.

“They call her the Iron Womb,” he said.  He liked starting with the most interesting piece of information he had, regardless of how confused that left his audience.

“Who and who?” asked Stefan.  The room was a secure meeting room and had a narrow table with four chair clustered at one end of it.  At the other end, where the two men were stood, was a whiteboard and a flipchart.  Neither had any pens, and the whiteboard was smeared with colour from ineffectual erasure.

“Clara,” said Wilson.  “You met her this morning.”

“You mean… Lady Abel?” Stefan frowned.  “She seemed, well, elderly, to be blunt.  I’m not ageist, you understand, but I would be surprised if she was still capab— if she was still in her, uh, childbearing years.”

“Lady Abel, codename Clara,” said Wilson.  “That’s her.  She’s the official mother of all eight of the night-watchmen.”

Stefan’s frown only deepened as he tried to guess what Wilson was leading up to.  “She didn’t give birth to a Deterrent,” he said.  “Not unless she’s like a Tardis.”

“A what?”

Stefan scrutinised Wilson’s face to see if he was being serious or not.  He was sure that Wilson was old enough to have seen some of the earliest Doctor Whos, but then Wilson seemed to have odd holes in his memories of pop culture.  Almost like he’d had to learn it from a book, which was weird in itself.  “Bigger on the inside than the outside,” he said at last, deciding he didn’t want to get sidetracked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Wilson.  His lack of humour seemed almost mechanical at times.  “She did produce all eight of the brains though.”

Stefan stopped thinking and just stared.  “That can’t be right,” he said.  “The Deterrents are entirely synthetic.  They don’t have brains, they have computer cores.  Very expensive computer cores.  That the dev teams program at an exorbitant cost.  That keeps going up, might I remind you?”

“You don’t need to,” said Wilson. “But let me ask you: does it make sense to you that it keeps costing more to write programmes for the same system?  Shouldn’t it get cheaper and faster over time as libraries are built up and knowledge is shared?”

“Turnover on the teams—“ started Stefan and stopped.  Wilson’s smile was only just short of gloating.  “They don’t turn over that much,” he said, reaching the conclusion himself.  “So there should be economies of scale and reuse.”

“Right,” said Wilson.  “There should.  But there aren’t, because there is wetware in there.  Human-ish brains.  Birthed by the Iron Womb.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Wilson smirked. “Because I’m handing the project over to you.”

“You don’t work on it!”

“True.  Because I’m the primary stakeholder.  You wanted a promotion, Stefan, and this is it.  You’re getting to run the Deterrent teams and you’ll be reporting directly in to me.”

Stefan walked over to a chair and pulled it out from the table and sat down.  “This is a lot to take in,” he said.  “Those teams are trouble.  This seems like a anti-promotion.”

“They’re less trouble than you’ve been led to believe,” said Wilson.  He produced a whiteboard marker from a pocket and started writing on the whiteboard.  “We mislead lower levels of the organisation about certain budgets and teams in order to make specific projects undesirable.  The Q3 figures that you’ll remember….”  As he worked through calculations and timelines and the scale of the deception became clear to Stefan he found himself leaning forward on the table, avidly asking for more information.  The briefing took nearly two hours, at the end of which Stefan was sure that he was in for a work of trouble if anything went wrong, but that there were a lot of safeguards in place to make sure that didn’t happen.

“One last thing,” said Wilson.  “The Iron Womb will be birthing a new brain in January.  Your priority needs to be having a home ready for it.”

“A new Deterrent?”

“Not precisely new,” said Wilson.  “We’ve been working on it since March.  But you need to deliver it ready-to-go before the Iron Womb delivers her side of the deal.”