We, Robots

by Simon Ings

“Maybe someday,” I said. We sat together on the couch for a while, and it was awkward, so we went and laid in the bed. Finally, David said:

  “Will you talk about me?”

  “When?” I said. “To whom?”

  “Now. To me.” I looked over at him, and he didn’t seem to be wearing a particular expression. So I just described how he looked, and what his voice sounded like.

  It’s become a regular thing, now. Maybe once a week, we lie down together, and I talk about the way his hands move when he performs a particular task, or the way the skin around his eyes stretches or folds when he looks around. It seems to give him a kind of peace, like he’s reassured to know I’m looking back at him as hard as he’s looking at me. I think maybe that’s the reason he first took a shine to me, back at the club. It’s weird to think of him as having insecurities, but I can only respond to the reality that presents itself—at least if I want to maintain this thing.

  We’re thinking about getting a dog, or maybe a large rabbit. The man of no scent preference has valiantly agreed to clean any litter boxes, so long as I buy the food.

  David has a thousand parts that could wear out, and for some of them, he’s the first real test. The fact is, one day I’ll have to get used to someone who breathes, and sweats, and pees. Maybe that’s a good thing. Until then, I’ll spend my days awake and my nights asleep, and in between, I’ll dream I can upload.

  (2012)

  MEN OF IRON

  Guy Endore

  Born Samuel Goldstein in 1901, Guy Endore was an American novelist and screenwriter, His screenplay for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) was nominated for an Oscar. His novel Methinks the Lady… (1946) was the basis for Ben Hecht’s screenplay for Whirlpool (1949). Endore had a successful career in Hollywood, at least to begin with, scripting Mark of the Vampire and The Curse of the Werewolf (based on his novel The Werewolf of Paris: the nearest werewolf literature ever came to a classic like Dracula). Investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but never subpoenaed, Endore nevertheless found himself blacklisted by the major studios. Still he chiselled away, writing under the pseudonym Harry Relis. His last credit was the 1969 TV movie Fear No Evil. He died in Los Angeles the following year.

  “We no longer trust the human hand,” said the engineer, and waved his roll of blueprints. He was a dwarfish, stocky fellow with dwarfish, stocky fingers that crumpled blueprints with familiar unconcern.

  The director frowned, pursed his lips, cocked his head, drew up one side of his face in a wink of unbelief and scratched his chin with a reflective thumbnail. Behind his grotesque contortions he recalled the days when he was manufacturer in his own right and not simply the nominal head of a manufacturing concern, whose owners extended out into complex and invisible ramifications. In his day the human hand had been trusted.

  “Now take that lathe,” said the engineer. He paused dramatically, one hand flung out toward the lathe in question, while his dark eyes, canopied by bristly eyebrows, remained fastened on the director. “Listen to it!”

  “Well?” said the director, somewhat at a loss.

  “Hear it?”

  “Why, yes, of course.”

  The engineer snorted. “Well, you shouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because noise isn’t what it is supposed to make. Noise is an indication of loose parts, maladjustments, improper speed of operation. That machine is sick. It is inefficient and its noise destroys the worker’s efficiency.”

  The director laughed. “That worker should be used to it by this time. Why, that fellow is the oldest employee of the firm. Began with my father. See the gold crescent on his chest?”

  “What gold crescent?”

  “The gold pin on the shoulder strap of his overalls.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes. Well, only workers fifty years or longer with our firm are entitled to wear it.”

  The engineer threw back his head and guffawed.

  The director was wounded.

  “Got many of them?” the engineer asked, when he had recovered from his outburst.

  “Anton is the only one, now. There used to be another.”

  “How many pins does he spoil?”

  “Well,” said the director, “I’ll admit he’s not so good as he used to be… But there’s one man I’ll never see fired,” he added stoutly.

  “No need to,” the engineer agreed. “A good machine is automatic and foolproof; the attendant’s skill is beside the point.”

  For a moment the two men stood watching Anton select a fat pin from a bucket at his feet and fasten it into the chuck. With rule and caliper he brought the pin into correct position before the drill that was to gouge a hole into it.

  Anton moved heavily, circumspectly. His body had the girth, but not the solidity of an old tree trunk: it was shaken by constant tremors. The tools wavered in Anton’s hands. Intermittently a slimy cough came out of his chest, tightened the cords of his neck and flushed the taut yellow skin of his cheeks. Then he would stop to spit, and after that he would rub his mustache that was the color of silver laid thinly over brass. His lungs relieved, Anton’s frame regained a measure of composure, but for a moment he stood still and squinted at the tools in his hands as if he could not at once recall exactly what he was about, and only after a little delay did he resume his interrupted work, all too soon to be interrupted again. Finally, spindle and tool being correctly aligned, Anton brought the machine into operation.

  “Feel it?” the engineer cried out with a note of triumph.

  “Feel what?” asked the director.

  “Vibration!” the engineer exclaimed with disgust.

  “Well, what of it?”

  “Man, think of the power lost in shaking your building all day. Any reason why you should want your floors and walls to dance all day long, while you pay the piper?”

  He hadn’t intended so telling a sentence. The conclusion seemed to him so especially apt that he repeated it: “Your building dances while you pay the piper in increased power expenditure.”

  And while the director remained silent the engineer forced home his point: “That power should be concentrated at the cutting point of the tool and not leak out all over. What would you think of a plumber who brought only 50 percent of the water to the nozzle, letting the rest flood through the building?”

  And as the director still did not speak, the engineer continued, “There’s not only loss of power, but increased wear on the parts. That machine is afflicted with the ague!”

  *

  When the day’s labor was over, the long line of machines stopped all together; the workmen ran for the washrooms and a sudden throbbing silence settled over the great hall. Only Anton, off in a corner by himself, still worked his lathe, oblivious of the emptiness of the factory, until darkness finally forced him to quit. Then from beneath the lathe he dragged forth a heavy tarpaulin and covered his machine.

  He stood for a moment beside his lathe, seemingly lost in thought, but perhaps only quietly wrestling with the stubborn torpidity of his limbs, full of an unwanted, incorrect motion, and disobedient to his desires. For he, like the bad machines in the factory, could not prevent his power from spilling over into useless vibration.

  The old watchman opened the gate to let Anton out. The two men stood near each other for a moment, separated by the iron grill, and exchanged a few comforting grunts. Then they hobbled off to their separate destinations, the watchman to make his rounds, Anton to his home.

  A gray, wooden shack on a bare lot was Anton’s home. During the day an enthusiastic horde of children trampled the ground to a rubber-like consistency and extinguished every growing thing except a few dusty weeds that clung for protection close to the house or nestled around the remnants of the porch that had once adorned the front. There the children’s feet could not reach them, and they expanded a few scornful coarse leaves, a bitter growth of Ishmaelites.

  Within were a number of rooms, but only one inhabita
ble. The torn and peeling wallpaper in this one revealed the successive designs that had once struck the fancy of the owners. A remnant of ostentatiousness still remained in the marble mantelpiece, and in the stained-glass window through which the arc-light from the street cast cold flakes of color.

  She did not stir when Anton entered. She lay resting on the bed, not so much from the labor of the day as from that of years. She heard his shuffling, noisy walk, heard his groans, his coughing, his whistling breath, and smelled, too, the pungent odor of machine oil. She was satisfied that it was he, and allowed herself to fall into a light sleep, through which she could still hear him moving around in the room and feel him when he dropped into bed beside her and settled himself against her for warmth and comfort.

  *

  The engineer was not satisfied with the addition of an automatic feeder and an automatic chuck. “The whole business must settle itself into position automatically,” he declared. “There’s altogether too much waste with hand calibration.”

  Formerly Anton had selected the pins from a bucket and fastened them correctly into the chuck. Now a hopper fed the pins one by one into a chuck that grasped them by itself.

  As he sat in a corner, back against the wall and ate his lunch, Anton sighed. His hands fumbled the sandwich and lost the meat or the bread, while his coffee dashed stormily in his cup. His few yellow teeth, worn flat, let the food escape through the interstices. His grinders did not meet. Tired of futile efforts, he dropped the bread into the cup and sucked in the resulting mush.

  Then he lay resting and dreaming.

  To Anton, in his dream, came the engineer, declaring that he had a new automatic hopper and chuck for Anton’s hands and mouth. They were of shining steel with many rods and wheels moving with assurance through a complicated pattern. And now, though the sandwich was made of pins, of hard steel pins, Anton’s new chuck was equal to it. He grasped the sandwich of pins with no difficulty at all. His new steel teeth bit into the pins, ground them, chewed them and spat them out again with vehemence. Faster and faster came the pins, and faster and faster the chuck seized them in its perfectly occluding steel dogs, played with them, toyed with them, crunched them, munched them…

  A heavy spell of coughing shook Anton awake. For a moment he had a sensation as though he must cough up steel pins, but nothing appeared save for the usual phlegm and slime.

  *

  “We must get rid of this noise and vibration before we can adjust any self-regulating device,” said the engineer. “Now this, for example, see? It doesn’t move correctly. Hear it click and scrape. That’s bad.”

  Anton stood by, and the engineer and his assistant went to work. From their labors came forth a sleek mechanism that purred gently as it worked. Scarcely a creak issued from its many moving parts, and a tiny snort was all the sound that could be heard when the cutting edge came to grips with a pin.

  “Can’t hear her cough and sputter and creak now, can you?” said the engineer to the director. “And the floor is quiet. Yes, I’m beginning to be proud of that machine, and now I think we can set up an adjustable cam here to make the whole operation automatic.

  “Every machine should be completely automatic. A machine that needs an operator,” he declared oratorically, “is an invalid.”

  In a short time the cams were affixed and the carriage with the cutting tool traveled back and forth of itself, never failing to strike the pin at the correct angle and at the correct speed of rotation.

  All Anton had to do was to stop the machine in case of a hitch. But soon even that task was unnecessary. No hitches were ever to occur again. Electronic tubes at several points operated mechanisms designed to eject faulty pins either before they entered the hopper or after they emerged from the lathe.

  Anton stood by and watched. That was all he had to do, for the machine performed all the operations that he used to do. In went the unfinished pins and out they came, each one perfectly drilled. Anton’s purblind eyes could scarcely follow the separate pins of the stream that flowed into the machine. Now and then a pin was pushed remorselessly out of line and plumped sadly into a bucket. Cast out! Anton stooped laboriously and retrieved the pin. “That could have been used,” he thought.

  “Krr-click, krr-click,” went the feeder, while the spindle and the drill went zzz-sntt, zzz-sntt, zzz-sntt, and the belt that brought the pins from a chattering machine beyond, rolled softly over the idlers with a noise like a breeze in a sail. Already the machine had finished ten good pins while Anton was examining a single bad one.

  *

  Late in the afternoon there appeared a number of important men. They surrounded the machine, examined it and admired it.

  “That’s a beauty,” they declared.

  Now the meeting took on a more official character. There were several short addresses. Then an imposing man took from a small leather box a golden crescent.

  “The Crescent Manufacturing Company,” he said, “takes pride and pleasure in awarding this automatic lathe a gold crescent.” A place on the side of the machine had been prepared for the affixing of this distinction.

  Now the engineer was called upon to speak. “Gentlemen,” he said fiercely, “I understand that formerly the Crescent Company awarded its gold crescent only to workmen who had given fifty years of service to the firm. In giving a gold crescent to a machine, your President has perhaps unconsciously acknowledged a new era…” While the engineer developed his thesis, the director leaned over to his assistant and whispered, “Did you ever hear of why the sea is salt?”

  “Why the sea is salt?” whispered back the assistant. “What do you mean?”

  The director continued: “When I was a little kid, I heard the story of ‘Why the sea is salt’ many times, but I never thought it important until just a moment ago. It’s something like this: Formerly the sea was fresh water and salt was rare and expensive. A miller received from a wizard a wonderful machine that just ground salt out of itself all day long. At first the miller thought himself the most fortunate man in the world, but soon all the villages had salt to last them for centuries and still the machine kept on grinding more salt. The miller had to move out of his house, he had to move off his acres. At last he determined that he would sink the machine in the sea and be rid of it. But the mill ground so fast that boat and miller and machine were sunk together, and down below, the mill still went on grinding and that’s why the sea is salt.”

  “I don’t get you,” said the assistant.

  *

  Throughout the speeches, Anton had remained seated on the floor, in a dark corner, where his back rested comfortably against the wall. It had begun to darken by the time the company left, but still Anton remained where he was, for the stone floor and wall had never felt quite so restful before. Then, with a great effort, he roused his unwilling frame, hobbled over to his machine and dragged forth the tarpaulin.

  Anton had paid little attention to the ceremony; it was, therefore, with surprise that he noticed the gold crescent on his machine. His weak eyes strained to pierce the twilight. He let his fingers play over the medal, and was aware of tears falling from his eyes, and could not divine the reason.

  The mystery wearied Anton. His worn and trembling body sought the inviting floor. He stretched out, and sighed, and that sigh was his last.

  *

  When the daylight had completely faded, the machine began to hum softly. Zzz-sntt, zzz-sntt, it went, four times, and each time carefully detached a leg from the floor.

  Now it rose erect and stood beside the body of Anton. Then it bent down and covered Anton with the tarpaulin. Out of the hall it stalked on sturdy legs. Its electron eyes saw distinctly through the dark, its iron limbs responded instantly to its every need. No noise racked its interior, where its organs functioned smoothly and without a single tremor. To the watchman who grunted his usual greeting without looking up, it answered not a word but strode on rapidly, confidently, through the windy streets of night—to Anton’s house.
/>   *

  Anton’s wife lay waiting, half sleeping on the bed in the room where the light of the arc light came through the stained-glass window. And it seemed to her that a marvel happened: her Anton come back to her free of coughs and creaks and tremors; her Anton come to her in all the pride and folly of his youth, his breath like wind soughing through treetops, the muscles of his arms like steel.

  (1940)

  A BAD DAY FOR SALES

  Fritz Leiber

  Fritz Reuter Leiber was born in Chicago in 1910 to actor parents. His father, an even more celebrated Fritz Leiber, was famous for his Shakespeare, but earned precious little from his performances, and home life was a struggle. His son, unable to support his desire to follow his parents into theatre, held down full-time jobs for most of his life. He also wrote – forty books by the time of his death in 1992, all the while wrestling with his life-long addiction to alcohol. Leiber gained more of the field’s numerous awards than did more famous contemporaries like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, but he realised his best work only towards the end of his life: Our Lady of Darkness (1977) was the foundation on which today’s genre of urban fantasy rests.

  The big bright doors of the office building parted with a pneumatic whoosh and Robie glided onto Times Square. The crowd that had been watching the fifty-foot-tall girl on the clothing billboard get dressed, or reading the latest news about the Hot Truce scrawl itself in yard-high script, hurried to look.

  Robie was still a novelty. Robie was fun. For a little while yet, he could steal the show. But the attention did not make Robie proud. He had no more emotions than the pink plastic giantess, who dressed and undressed endlessly whether there was a crowd or the street was empty, and who never once blinked her blue mechanical eyes. But she merely drew business while Robie went out after it.

  For Robie was the logical conclusion of the development of vending machines. All the earlier ones had stood in one place, on a floor or hanging on a wall, and blankly delivered merchandise in return for coins, whereas Robie searched for customers. He was the demonstration model of a line of sales robots to be manufactured by Shuler Vending Machines, provided the public invested enough in stocks to give the company capital to go into mass production.