Dr. Park handed Jillian a pair of safety goggles. “Put these on, please.”
Jillian was about to protest that she didn’t need them, she understood now to stay back and not touch any classified technology, but then she glanced at SABRINA, which was now apparently entertaining itself by fountaining what looked like actual fire out of its tail. She put the goggles on.
“Very good,” Dr. Park said, pulling a thermometer from her pocket and swiping it on. The readout flickered on in midair above her hand. She gave it to Jillian. “Read this, please.”
Jillian tilted it so the hologram display faced her. “Seventy-two degrees.”
“Very good. Room temperature.” Dr. Park turned to the flame-colored not-a-dog that sat wagging its tail on the tiles. “SABRINA, warm this, please. Ten-point-two degrees will be sufficient.”
“Request acknowledged,” SABRINA said. “On it.”
Jillian’s mouth fell open. “It can talk?”
“Oh yes,” said Dr. Park, in a tone that said sometimes we wish it couldn’t. “Say hello, SABRINA.”
“Hello, SABRINA,” said SABRINA.
“We just love its sense of humor,” Dr. Park said.
Jillian just stared.
“Ten-point-two degrees,” SABRINA said. “Easy peasy.”
There was something so distractingly weird about the words easy peasy coming out of this thing that Jillian only now noticed that SABRINA had reached out one stubby leg and taken hold of the thermometer. She hadn’t even seen it move. It now sat, five stubby legs and one unsettlingly stretched-out one. Where was its voice coming from? Not its mouth. It sounded like it was talking from every part of itself all at once, like every crumb of it had a mouth of its own, but they all spoke in one voice.
“Read it again, please,” Dr. Park told Jillian.
Jillian leaned in. “Eighty-two-point-two degrees.”
“Thank you, Jillian. Thank you, SABRINA. Now cool it down, please. Twenty-six-point-four degrees.”
“Sure thing,” SABRINA said.
The readout dropped accordingly.
“Note the exactitude.”
“I’m noting it,” Jillian said. “It’s very, um, nice.”
Dr. Park took a bottle of water and a glass from the nearest desk. “Hand these to SABRINA, please.”
Jillian paused, unsure what to do. “It doesn’t have any hands—ahh!”
She very nearly dropped the bottle. Standing before her was a scarily accurate replica of herself, right down to the bitten fingernails and the silver patch on its jumpsuit. It reached out and took the glass and bottle neatly. “Thaaank you.”
Then, with an inhuman smoothness, part of SABRINA was holding the bottle, another part of SABRINA was holding the glass, and what was being poured back and forth between them was . . . SABRINA. It had turned the poured part of itself neon green for some reason. With what looked like gold glitter in it. Then it poured itself back into person shape and handed the glass and bottle to Jillian.
Dr. Park took the bottle back from her, but not the glass.
“Drop that, please,” Dr. Park said.
“On the floor?”
“On the floor.”
Jillian, by now having learned there was no point in questioning this, held the glass out over the tile floor, then let go.
Instead of shattering, it came to rest around knee level in midair, and SABRINA was gone. The glass floated, suspended, as if in a cloud of clear jelly. Which then grew a pair of cartoony eyes and winked at Jillian.
Next SABRINA shot out a pair of long, thin spikes and used them as knitting needles to make a washcloth-sized square, also of its own material. (“Observe the tensile strength of the fabric,” Dr. Park suggested.)
Then it made needle-tipped darts and fired them into a clipboard Dr. Park held up, each dart splitting the last at the dead center of the bull’s-eye. (“Lucky shot,” SABRINA said each time, with what sounded like way more humble-bragging irony than needed.) Then the darts dissolved and floated back to SABRINA as iridescent mist.
Then it folded bits of itself into paper airplanes and flew them into every wastepaper basket in the room, turned part of itself into a screen and played a few seconds of a movie, and took a light bulb out of a ceiling panel and lit it up, brighter and brighter, until it exploded with a flash and a spray of glass. SABRINA caught every splinter.
“Oh no,” SABRINA said, sounding amused. “Oopsy daisy.”
“Doesn’t really talk like a robot,” Jillian said.
“Well,” Dr. Park said, “SABRINA’s not like other robots. Even the modern robots you’re probably thinking of—the teachers and medbots and so forth, all top of the line in their own right—are very simple machines compared to it.”
“Oh stop,” SABRINA said. “You’ll make me blush.”
Jillian studied SABRINA. “Does it know it’s a robot?”
“Do you know you’re not?” SABRINA replied. “And if so”—it paused dramatically—“how, exactly?”
“Manners,” Dr. Park told it. “No asking our new guest existential questions on her first day.”
“My only day,” Jillian corrected, trying to keep the disappointment from her voice. Being able to see everything she’d be missing out on was just making it harder to think about being sent home. SABRINA was about to go to 80 UMa c with her parents. Jillian, as much as she loved Aunt Alex, couldn’t help but be just a little jealous.
Dr. Park didn’t seem to hear her, anyway. “As you’ve probably gathered,” she said, “SABRINA is fully sentient. It learns from the world much like a child does. Its personality has some set parameters—our field crews wouldn’t get too far if SABRINA wasn’t helpful and innovative, for instance—but it’s also constantly informed by input from its surroundings and upbringing and the company it keeps, same as yours and mine. So, you know”—Dr. Park smiled briefly—“try to set a good example.”
Jillian glanced around the lab. Very serious-looking men and women, dressed in white coats like Dr. Park, were up to their eyeballs in work. She got the impression they tended to stay that way, at least while they were in this room. “Where’d it learn its, um, sense of humor?”
“Oh.” Dr. Park made a face. “SABRINA watches a lot of TV.” Then she lifted her chin toward SABRINA. “Look.”
The shards of light bulb that SABRINA had caught were beginning to sink, like SABRINA was made of quicksand. Dr. Park handed it the plastic bottle from before.
“Much obliged,” SABRINA said. Now it had shape-shifted into an octopus for some reason, hanging from the ceiling by two arms while two lifted the bottle daintily and three more tied themselves into intricate knots, seemingly for fun. The last arm was busy spitting the glass shards out from its tip and into the bottle, one by one, with delicate little ptoo sounds and a faint musical tinkling as they hit bottom. After those came the light bulb’s base and housing, which wouldn’t fit into the bottle opening. So SABRINA made a blade and sliced off the entire top of the bottle, then put those things inside and reassembled the bottle around them, melting the halves back together with heat it produced from somewhere.
SABRINA gave a tiny burp from somewhere (“Excuse me.”), handed the bottle to Jillian, and transformed back into the flame-colored dog. Jillian noted that it had kept two of the octopus arms this time, and it was now jumping rope with them, humming a little tune to itself.
Dr. Park reached into a pocket and produced a rock the size of an orange.
“Time for the grand finale,” she said. “Your parents requested this demonstration specifically, just for you. Kind of a souvenir of your tour.”
Jillian knew what that meant. She’d have to leave soon. She felt like she’d just gotten here, but like her mom said, they were on the clock. Getting to space on time was more important than Jillian’s tour. She forced a smile.
“S
tand here,” Dr. Park said, pointing to an X made on the floor with tape.
Jillian stood on it.
“Take this.” Dr. Park passed the rock to her.
Jillian took it.
“Throw it at SABRINA,” Dr. Park said. “As hard as you can.”
Jillian raised an eyebrow. Dr. Park nodded encouragingly.
“Bring it on,” said SABRINA. “I can catch bullets. See?”
SABRINA stretched and flattened into another screen, then tilted down to present Jillian its surface as it played a video for her. There was SABRINA, absorbing machine- gun fire and regurgitating it at a series of paper targets in the distance. The next shot in the video was, of course, the obliterated bull’s-eyes. Closer up, the targets weren’t paper. They were steel-armored reinforced concrete, thicker than Jillian’s whole body. Each had a hole in the back where its bullet had punched straight through.
“No big deal,” SABRINA said coolly, lifting its shoulder in what weirdly did actually look like a shrug.
“Way too dangerous to do that one in here,” Jillian’s dad called out from the sidelines. “There’s another one with a flamethrower that we can’t do either. But trust me. It’s cool.”
“But if it can catch bullets,” Jillian asked, hefting the rock, “why bother with this?”
“SABRINA won’t be catching it,” Dr. Park said. “Go on.”
“Okay,” Jillian said. Dramatically, she wound up the pitch and let it fly.
Maybe a bit too dramatically. The rock sailed out of her hand and fully over her head, toward the expensive-looking, fragile-looking machinery in the room behind her. Reflexively, she shut her eyes, waiting for the crash and the yelling and the getting kicked out of the lab and sent back to school.
None of that came. She turned.
Behind her was what looked like a tornado made of lemon-yellow cotton candy. Behind that was a satiny-looking cushion on the tile floor, also lemon yellow, but with ruby-red fringe and purple tassels. There was something on it. Several somethings. Jillian had to take a few steps toward the stuff on the cushion before she recognized what it was.
The rock she’d thrown. Somehow, in the split second when she hadn’t been looking, SABRINA had sliced it into hundreds of paper-thin shards. Each with a beautiful sky-blue center and a hole in the middle like a doughnut.
“Oh cool,” she whispered. “A geode.”
Then she realized what she was really looking at. She’d cracked geodes with a hammer before. It had taken forever and come out a total mess. These looked like they’d been cut by a laser. Even at that see-through thinness, not one looked to have broken. The whole process hadn’t made a sound.
The yellow tornado dissipated into a fine sparkling mist and spread across the room. It was like being in a snow globe full of glitter.
Dr. Park, meanwhile, brought the pillow over to a desk and scraped off the geode slices into an envelope. “These are yours to keep,” she told Jillian. Then she tossed the pillow up into the air, where it also vaporized and began to spread smokily across the ceiling.
“As you can see,” she said, “SABRINA is not a toy. It is an exquisitely calibrated piece of technology. Think of it as part equipment, part teammate. You want to get to know your teammates before you work with them, right? All new surveyors have to meet with it like this, familiarize themselves with what it can do, before they’re in a position to rely on it in the field.”
“Maybe someday,” Jillian said wistfully.
“Well, you’re here, aren’t you? Take Your Kid to Work Day, right?”
“Right,” Jillian said, trying to hide the disappointment in her voice. Pretending like SABRINA was going to be her teammate in the field just made her sad.
She thought of the logo on her T-shirt. She thought of the machine guns, the bullet holes. “What is it really, though? Some kind of weapon?”
“No,” Dr. Park said. “Think of SABRINA as a very advanced probe. We send it through before the field teams to make sure everything at the destination is safe for human exposure. That alone has saved lives. And then once they’re through—if SABRINA’s determined the environment is suitable—it serves as part of their equipment. It’s very useful.”
“Understatement of the year,” Jillian’s dad said. “SABRINA’s saved our butts a million times. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to stay under weight capacity, bringing it instead of trying to stuff a mountain of gear into the pod.”
“So it’s, like, a multitool,” Jillian said, thinking of the one in her hiking backpack that she never really got to use. Hers had a screwdriver and a little knife and a compass and some tweezers and whatnot. SABRINA was a multitool times ten thousand.
“Exactly,” her mom said. “A multitool that’s mission safe. We tend not to travel with sharp things. What you really don’t want, in space, is a punctured suit.”
“I thought SABRINA’s job is to make sure a planet is safe for humans,” Jillian said. “With air and an atmosphere and whatever.”
“It is,” her dad said. “And it does. You’re right: we don’t usually go to planets where we need the suits. We wear them through the portal anyway. Just like they make the pod about ninety-eight percent out of plastic, in case we encounter an atmosphere that corrodes metal. We’re extremely careful. Wait’ll you see the suits. They’re very old-school.”
Jillian had a hard time imagining anything in this place being old-school. But as she was finding, it was pretty hard to get excited about suits when you had a cloud of talking, shape-shifting, microscopic smart robots standing—or hovering—right there in front of you.
“So it just, like, does whatever you say?” She pointed up at the ceiling, where the cloud was now spiraling, like SABRINA was thinking of cooking up another tornado. “You didn’t tell it to do that.”
“SABRINA is semi-autonomous,” Dr. Park said. “That means it takes directives from its handlers—that would be me in the lab, and the teams in the field—but in between it pretty much does what it wants.”
In demonstration, SABRINA turned itself in midair into a velociraptor and dropped down onto Dr. Park’s head, safely tucking its clawed hind legs underneath it and fluffing its feathers. Then it lay down and curled up like an oversized cat.
Dr. Park lifted it gently down. It squawked in protest but allowed itself to be lowered. “Within reason.”
SABRINA was weaving between Jillian’s legs now, booping its velociraptor head against her knees and making ridiculously adorable little meeping noises. She had to resist a bizarre urge to scritch it behind where its ears would be. “Would it listen to me?”
“Not without one of these,” Dr. Park said, tapping the blue square at her temple. “SABRINA’s not keyed to you. But it might do what you ask if it likes you. And you ask nicely.”
SABRINA snapped its head up to stare at Jillian. Its eyes glittered with intelligence.
“That’s fine,” Jillian blurted, suddenly nervous. “I was just curious. I’m good just watching it from here.”
“Give it a try,” her mom coaxed.
Her dad joined in. “You never know what you like until you try!” Then he turned to Dr. Park. “She does have the wristband,” he told her. “It might work.”
“It should,” Dr. Park agreed. “Anyone with lab clearance should be able to assign directives.”
The stares of three adults and one robot were now fixed on Jillian.
“Um,” she said. Wristband or no, the idea of asking SABRINA to perform tricks felt wrong somehow. If SABRINA was a dog, Jillian could give it treats. But she had nothing a machine would want, and she hated being told what to do for no good reason.
“No, really, it’s okay,” she said airily. Then, half out of interest and half just to change the subject, she pointed across the room. “Hey, what’s over there behind the glass anyway? Is that the portal? Can I see?”<
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“That is indeed what’s next on the list for your tour,” Dr. Park said. “Come on over.”
She led Jillian and her parents over to the dividing wall. The glass was thicker than Jillian had expected it to be, reinforced with steel plates. The heads of the bolts were bigger across than the palm of her hand. There was wire mesh embedded into the glass, floor to ceiling.
Those walls hadn’t been in the documentary. In the documentary it had just been the bare metal ring of the portal itself, and the bright orange egg of the quadpod. Figures in suits had climbed into the pod, and the pod had glided forward on its runners into the portal and disappeared.
Jillian reached out a fist and knocked on the glass. The thickness and density of the wall absorbed the sound entirely.
A door was tucked into the far side of the wall, also glass, but with some kind of unseen scanner that beeped at their approach and slid softly open.
Several workers entered, and Jillian’s parents, but SABRINA stood by, holding the door open for Jillian, goofily bowing like she was somebody important. “After you,” it said in its beehive voice.
Jillian raised one foot to step forward, then put it down. That close, the portal was huge. It could have gulped a dozen of her whole. “I don’t know,” she said.
What are you saying? she asked herself. This is what you wanted! This is where they go to space! You’ve waited forever to see this!
“It’s cool, new kid,” SABRINA told her. “Trust me.”
Jillian had no idea why this was so reassuring. Maybe because SABRINA had turned itself back into the mascot, and it was hard to think of a six-legged cuddly dog lying to you. Maybe she’d just seen enough movies to know that robots weren’t supposed to lie to humans, period. Or maybe she just knew, deep down, that the scarier a thing seemed to start with, the cooler it ended up being. Like learning to swim, or riding a hoverbike.
Maybe this room being extra scary just meant that it would end up extra cool.
She swallowed, and braced herself, and went through the door.
Chapter 3
Jillian vs Parasite Planet Page 3
