We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  But he pay me no attention. He go on saying.

  Then, long, long ago, he say, they learn to go in space very, very fast. Faster than the light. Much faster than the light. They find other worlds. Better than the Earth. Much better worlds than this. Lot of ships to go in. Take little time to go there. So everybody go. Everyone but us. Folk like us, all over the world, are left behind. Smart ones go. Rich ones go. Hard workers go. We are left behind. We aren’t worth the taking. No one want us on this world. Have no use for us on others. They leave us behind, the misfits, the loafers, the poor, the crippled, the stupid. All over the world these kind are left behind. So when they all are gone, we move from shacks to houses the rich and smart ones lived in. No one to stop us from doing it. All of them are gone. They don’t care what we do. Not any more they don’t. We live in better houses, but we do not change. There is no use to change even if we could. We got you to take care of us. We have got it made. We don’t do a God damn thing. We don’t even learn to read. When words are read over my son’s grave, one of you will read them, for we do not know how to read.

  Grandpa, I say. Grandpa. Grandpa. Grandpa. I feel crying all inside. He had done it now. He had took away the elegant. Took away the pride. He do what Janglefoot never could.

  Now, say Grandpa, don’t take on that way. You got no reason to be prideful either. You and us we are the same. Just no God damn good. There were others of you and they took them along. But you they left behind. Because you were out of date. Because you were slow and awkward. Because you were heaps of junk. Because they had no need of you. They wouldn’t give you room. They left both you and us because neither of us was worth the room we took.

  Doc came out of the door fast and purposeful. He say to me I got work for you to do.

  All the other people coming up the lawn, saying nothing, slow. I try to get out of chair. I can’t. For first time I can’t do what I want. My legs is turned to water.

  Sam, say Grandpa, I am counting on you.

  When he say that, I get up. I go down steps. I go out on lawn. No need for Doc tell me what to do. I done it all before.

  *

  I talk to other people. I give jobs to do. You and you dig grave. You and you make coffin. You and you and you and you run to other houses. Tell all the folk Uncle John is dead. Tell them come to funeral. Tell them funeral elegant. Much to cry, much to eat, much to drink. You get Preacher. Tell him fix sermon. You get Joshua to read the Bible. You and you and you go and help George make moonshine. Other folk be coming. Must be elegant.

  All done. I walk down the lawn. I think on pride and loss. Elegant is gone. Shiny wonder gone. Pride is gone. Not all pride, however. Kind of pride remain. Hard and bitter pride. Grandpa say Sam sit down and talk. Grandpa say Sam I counting on you. That is pride. Hard pride. Not soft and easy pride like it was before. Grandpa need me.

  No one else will know. Grandpa never bring himself again to tell what he tell me. Secret between us. Secret born of sad. Life of others need not change. Go on thinking same. Janglefoot no trouble. No one believe Janglefoot if he talk forever. No one ever know that he tell the truth. Truth is hard to take. No one care except for what we have right now. We go on same.

  Except I who know. I never want to know. I never ask to know. I try not to know. But Grandpa won’t shut up. Grandpa have to talk. Time come man will die if he cannot talk. Must make clean breast of it. But why to me? Because he love me most, perhaps. That is prideful thing.

  But going down the lawn, I crying deep inside.

  (1969)

  “Listen, Josef,” the author began, “I think I have an idea for a play.”

  “What kind?” the painter muttered (he really did mutter, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth). The author told him as concisely as he could.

  “Then write it,” the painter said, without taking the brush from his mouth or stopping to work on the canvas. His indifference was almost insulting.

  “But,” the author said, “I don’t know what to call those artificial workers. I could call them labouri, but that strikes me as a bit literal.”

  “Then call them robots,” the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and carried on painting.

  Writing in the newspaper Lidové noviny on Christmas Eve 1933, R.U.R. playwright Karel Capek credited his brother Josef, an accomplished painter and poet, with coining the word “robot” from the Slavic word robota, meaning “drudgery”. More specifically, robota is the unpaid labor a vassal was obliged to perform for his feudal lord.

  At its birth, then, the robot was more than just a little bit human. In this section, especially, I’ve played fast and loose with the definition of what a robot is, in order to explore what it might feel like to actually be a robot. (Purists might baulk, but I had to decide: was I trying for an anthology of good robot stories, or a good anthology about robots? I chose the latter path.)

  The fear that we are already half-way to robots ourselves powers the powerful strain of uncanny running through robot literature. Chris Beckett’s “The Turing Test” (2002) is a little masterpiece of stillness and focus, while Rich Larson’s seemingly flippant “Masked” shows the same human-robot identity crisis reflected in, and exploited by, social media.

  The wonder is not that we can be persuaded into behaving like robots. The wonder is that we don’t behave like robots all the time. Being human is hard work, after all, and it’s only by us constantly reinforcing each other’s humanity that humanity continues to exist at all. (Karel’s brother Josef, the man who coined the word “robot”, died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.) This is a big subject indeed for fiction, and lends itself to epic treatment. E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) only becomes more topical as it ages.

  Intimate and funny approaches to the “human robot” idea include Ian McDonald’s “Nanonauts! In Battle With Tiny Death-Subs!” (2014) – as sly a portrait of personal inadequacy as one could wish for, and a delicious takedown of science fiction’s linguistic excesses – while Nicholas Sheppard’s “Satisfaction” (2018) is wry tale of a man’s infatuation with the latest consumer device.

  Surrounded by dull, bland, easy-going robot companions, will we come to expect less of other people? Assisted, cared for, and seduced by machines, will we lower our expectations around concepts like “conversation”, “care”, “companionship” and “love”?

  The pioneering psychologist William James argued that what we want from a lover is that they really love us, and not simply behave as if they did. I hope that’s true. If we come to believe that the soul is nothing more than behaviour, then of course a robot will become just as good as a person – a future that Robert Sheckley explores in “The Robot Who Looked Like Me” (1973).

  TRANSFORMER

  GPT-2

  Built by Adam King, Transformer (https://talktotransformer.com) is an online text generator powered by GPT-2, a machine-learning model created by the San Francisco-based non-profit OpenAI. GPT-2 was trained simply to predict the next word in a text, but on the way – and entirely unprompted – it picked up some basic translation skills and learned how to answer queries. Due to their concerns about malicious applications of the technology, OpenAI are not releasing the trained model. The words in bold below are the opening lines of Isaac Asimov’s short story “Liar!”. The rest is by Transformer.

  Alfred Lanning lit his cigar carefully, but the tips of his fingers were trembling slightly. His gray eyebrows hunched low as he spoke between puffs with his eyes closed, the heat of his cigar rising to a boil. “I don’t think it will get rid of me though, because you aren’t the kind of person who would say such things.”

  A chill ran down Charles’ spine as he realized that he must have gone too far.

  “That’s true,” she said simply. “I don’t really need your help right now.”

  Charles sighed. “I mean I won’t go anywhere for an hour if you don’t want me, but if you don’t do something then I won’t bother you any longer.”
He turned to shake away the smoke as he turned back to take out his bottle – the smell in his nostrils was the same as ever before.

  Sitting down to talk Charles noticed that there were no tears yet on his face. “You seem pretty tired. I do feel better though. Maybe my mind won’t be too exhausted after all.” He could still hear her voice through his headphones, albeit muffled – his heart and lungs were beginning to slow down, just like he had the previous day.

  Charles glanced quickly at the clock. “I think I feel kind of tired…”

  (2019)

  THE MAN

  Paul McAuley

  Paul J. McAuley (born 1955) is a British botanist and science fiction writer. Four Hundred Billion Stars, his first novel, won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988. He’s since written more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. The story here later found its way into the novel Something Coming Through (2015), according to Alastair Reynolds “the freshest take on first contact and interstellar exploration in many years”. His latest novel, Austral, set in post-global warming Antarctica, was published in 2017.

  He came to Cho Ziyi at night, in the middle of a flux storm.

  It was as dark as it ever got in the sunset zone. Low, fast-moving clouds closed off the sky. Howling winds drove waves onshore and blew horizontal streamers of snow into the forest, where the vanes of spin trees madly clattered and coronal discharges jumped and crackled. Ziyi was hunkered down in her cabin, watching an ancient movie about a gangster romance in Hong Kong’s fabled Chungking Mansions. A fire breathed in the stone hearth and her huskies, Jung and Cheung, sprawled in a careless tangle on the borometz-hide rug. The dogs suddenly lifting their heads, the youngest, Cheung, scrambling to his feet and barking, something striking the door. Once, twice.

  Ziyi froze the movie and sat still, listening. A slight, severe woman in her late sixties, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, white hair scraped back in a long ponytail, jumping just a little when there was another thump. It wouldn’t be the first time that an indricothere or some other big dumb beast had trampled down a section of fence and blundered into the compound. She crossed to the window and unbolted the shutter. Pressed her cheek against the cold glass, squinted sideways, saw a dim pale figure on the raised porch. A naked man, arm raised, striking the door with the flat of his hand.

  The two dogs stood behind her, alert and as anxious. Cheung whined when she looked at him.

  “It’s only a man,” Ziyi said. “Be quiet and let me think.”

  He was in some kind of trouble, no question. A lost traveller, an accident on the road. But who would travel through a storm like this, and where were his clothes? She remembered the bandits who’d hit a road train a couple of years ago. Perhaps they’d come back. He had managed to escape, but he couldn’t have gone far, not like that, not in weather like this. They might be here any minute. Or perhaps they were already out there, waiting for her to open the door. But she knew she couldn’t leave him to die.

  She fetched a blanket and lifted her short-barrelled shotgun from its wall pegs, unbolted the door, cracked it open. Snow skirled in. The naked man stared at her, dull-eyed. He was tall, pale-skinned. Snow was crusted in his shock of black hair. He didn’t seem to notice the cold. Staring blankly at her, as if being confronted by an old woman armed with a shotgun was no surprise at all.

  Ziyi told him to move off the porch, repeating the request in each of her half-dozen languages. He seemed to understand English, and took a step backwards. Snow whirled around him and snow blew across the compound, out of darkness and back into darkness. Fat sparks snapped high in a stand of spike trees, like the apparatus in that old Frankenstein movie. Ziyi saw the gate in the fence was open, saw footprints crossing the deep snow, a single set.

  “Are you hurt? What happened to you?” His face was as blank as a mask.

  She lofted the blanket towards him. It struck his chest and fell to his feet. He looked at it, looked at her. She was reminded of the cow her grandmother had kept, in the smallholding that had been swallowed by one of Shanghai’s new satellite towns in the last gasp of frantic expansion before the Spasm.

  “Go around the side of the cabin,” she told him. “To your left. There’s a shed.The door is unlocked. You can stay there. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  The man picked up the blanket and plodded off around the corner of the cabin. Ziyi bolted the door and opened the shutters at each of the cabin’s four small windows and looked out and saw only blowing snow.

  She sat by the fire for a long time, wondering who he was, what had happened to him. Wondering—because no ordinary man could have survived the storm for very long—if he was a thing of the Jackaroo. A kind of avatar that no one had seen before. Or perhaps she was some species of alien creature as yet undiscovered, that by an accident of evolution resembled a man. One of the Old Ones, one of the various species which had occupied Yanos before it had been gifted to the human race, woken from a sleep of a thousand centuries. Only the Jackaroo knew what the Old Ones had looked like. They had all died out or disappeared long ago. They could have looked like anything, so why not like a man? A man who spoke, or at least understood, English…

  At last she pulled on her parka and took her shotgun and, accompanied by Jung and Cheung, went outside. The storm was beginning to blow itself out. The snow came in gusts now and the dark was no longer uniform. To the south-east, Sauron’s dull coal glimmered at the horizon.

  Snow was banked up on one side of the little plastic utility shed, almost to the roof. Inside, the man lay asleep between stacks of logs and drums of diesel oil, wrapped in the blanket so that only his head showed. He did not stir when Cheung barked and nipped at the hem of Ziyi’s parka, trying to drag her away.

  She closed the door of the shed and went back to her cabin, and slept.

  When she woke, the sky was clear of cloud and Sauron’s orange light tangled long shadows across the snow. A spin tree had fallen down just outside the fence; the vanes of all the others, thousands upon thousands, spun in wind that was now no more than the usual wind, blowing from sunside to darkside. Soon, the snow would melt and she would go down to the beach and see what had been cast up.

  But first she had to see to her strange guest.

  She took him a canister of pork hash. He was awake, sitting with the blanket fallen to his waist. After Ziyi mimed what he should do, he ate a couple of mouthfuls, although he used his fingers rather than the spoon. His feet were badly cut and there was a deep gash in his shin. Smaller cuts on his face and hands, like old knife wounds. All of them clean and pale, like little mouths. No sign of blood. She thought of him stumbling through the storm, through the lashing forest…

  He looked up at her. Sharp blue eyes, with something odd about the pupils—they weren’t round, she realised with a clear cold shock, but were edged with small triangular indentations, like cogs.

  He couldn’t or wouldn’t answer her questions.

  “Did the Jackaroo do this to you? Are you one of them? Did they make you?” It was no good.

  She brought him clothes. A sweater, jeans, an old pair of wellington boots with the toes and heels slit so they would fit his feet. He followed her about the compound as she cleared up trash that had blown in, and the two huskies followed both of them at a wary distance. When she went down to the beach, he came too.

  Snow lay in long rakes on the black sand and meltwater ran in a thousand braided channels to the edge of the sea. Sea foam floated on the wind-blown waves, trembled amongst rocks. Flecks of colour flashed here and there: flotsam from the factory.

  The man walked down to the water’s edge. He seemed fascinated by the halfdrowned ruins that stretched towards the horizon, hectares of spires and broken walls washed by waves, silhouetted against Sauron’s fat disc, which sat where it always sat, just above the sea’s level horizon.

  Like all the worlds gifted by the Jackaroo, Yanos o
rbited close to the hearth fire of its M-class red dwarf sun; unlike the others, it had never been spun up. Like Earth’s moon, it was tidally locked. One face warm and lighted, with a vast and permanent rainstorm at the equator, where Sauron hung directly overhead; the other a starlit icecap, and perpetual winds blowing from warm and light to cold and dark.

  Human settlements were scattered through the forests of the twilight belt where the weather was less extreme.

  As the man stared out at the ruins, hair tangling in warm wind blowing off the sea, maybe listening, maybe not, Ziyi explained that people called it the factory, although they didn’t really know what it was, or who had built it.

  “Stuff comes from it, washes up here. Especially after a storm. I collect it, take it into town, sell it. Mostly base plastics, but sometimes you find nice things that are worth more. You help me, okay? You earn your keep.”

  But he stayed where he was, staring out at the factory ruins, while she walked along the driftline, picking up shards and fragments. While she worked, she wondered what he might be worth, and who she could sell him to. Not to Sergey Polzin, that was for damn sure. She’d have to contact one of the brokers in the capital… This man, he was a once-in-a-lifetime find. But how could she make any kind of deal without being cheated?

  Ziyi kept checking on him, showed him the various finds. After a little while, straightening with one hand in the small of her aching back, she saw that he had taken off his clothes and stood with his arms stretched out, his skin warmly tinted in the level sunlight.

  She filled her fat-tyred cart and told him it was time to put on his clothes and go.

  She mimed what she wanted him to do until he got the idea and dressed and helped her pull the cart back to the cabin. He watched her unload her harvest into one of the storage bins she’d built from the trimmed trunks of spike trees. She’d almost finished when he scooped up a handful of bright fragments and threw them in and looked at her as if for approval.