We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  Ziyi remembered her little girl, in a sunlit kitchen on a faraway world. Even after all these years, the memory still pricked her heart.

  “You’re a quick learner,” she said.

  He smiled. Apart from those strange starry pupils and his pale, poreless skin, he looked entirely human.

  “Come into the cabin,” she said, weightless with daring. “We’ll eat.”

  He didn’t touch the food she offered; but sipped a little water, holding the tumbler in both hands. As far as she knew, he hadn’t used the composting toilet. When she’d shown it to him and explained how it worked, he’d shrugged the way a small child would dismiss as unimportant something she couldn’t understand.

  They watched a movie together, and the two dogs watched them from a corner of the room. When it had finished, Ziyi gave the man an extra blanket and a rug and locked him in the shed for the night.

  So it went the next day, and the days after that.

  The man didn’t eat. Sometimes he drank a little water. Once, on the beach, she found him nibbling at a shard of plastic. Shocked, she’d dashed it from his hand and he’d flinched away, clearly frightened.

  Ziyi took a breath. Told herself that he was not really a man, took out a strip of dried borometz meat and took a bite and chewed and smiled and rubbed her stomach. Picked up the shard of plastic and held it out to him. “This is your food? This is what you are made of?”

  He shrugged.

  She talked to him, as they worked. Pointed to a flock of wind skimmers skating along far out to sea, told him they were made by the factory. “Maybe like you, yes?” Named the various small shelly tick tock things that scuttled along the margins of the waves, likewise made by the factory. She told him the names of the trees that stood up beyond the tumble of boulders a long the top of the beach. Told him how spin trees generated sugars from air and water and electricity. Warned him to avoid the bubbleweed that sent long scarlet runners across the black sand, told him that it was factory stuff and its tendrils moved towards him because they were heat-seeking.

  “Let them touch, they stick little fibres like glass into your skin. Very bad.”

  He had a child’s innocent curiosity, scrutinising tick tocks and scraps of plastic with the same frank intensity, watching with rapt attention a group of borometz grazing on rafts of waterweed cast up by the storm.

  “The world is dangerous,” Ziyi said. “Those borometz look very cute, harmless balls of fur, but they carry ticks that have poisonous bites. And there are worse things in the forest. Wargs, sasquatch. Worst of all are people. You stay away from them.”

  She told herself that she was keeping her find safe from people like Sergey Polzin, who would most likely try to vivisect him to find out how he worked, or keep him alive while selling him off finger by finger, limb by limb. She no longer planned to sell him to a broker, had vague plans about contacting the university in the capital. They wouldn’t pay much, but they probably wouldn’t cut him up, either…

  She told him about her life. Growing up in Hong Kong. Her father the surgeon, her mother the biochemist. The big apartment, the servants, the trips abroad. Her studies in Vancouver University, her work in a biomedical company in Shanghai. Skipping over her marriage and her daughter, that terrible day when the global crisis had finally peaked in the Spasm. Seoul had been vapourised by a North Korean atomic missile; Shanghai had been hit by an Indian missile; two dozen cities around the world had been likewise devastated. Ziyi had been on a flight to Seoul; the plane had made an emergency landing at a military airbase and she’d made her way back to Shanghai by train, by truck, on foot. And discovered that her home was gone; the entire neighbourhood had been levelled. She’d spent a year working in a hospital in a refugee camp, trying and failing to find her husband and her daughter and her parents… It was too painful to talk about that; instead, she told the man about the day the Jackaroo made themselves known, the big ship suddenly appearing over the ruins of Shanghai, big ships appearing above all the major cities.

  “The Jackaroo gave us the possibility of a new start. New worlds. Many argued against this, to begin with. Saying that we needed to fix everything on Earth. Not just the Spasm, but global warming, famines, all the rest. But many others disagreed. They won the lottery or bought tickets off winners and went up and out. Me, I went to work for the UN, the United Nations, as a translator,” Ziyi said.

  Thirty years, in Cape Town, in Berlin, in Brasilia. Translating for delegates at meetings and committees on the treaties and deals with the Jackaroo. She’d married again, lost her husband to cancer.

  “I earned a lottery ticket because of my work, and I left the Earth and came here. I thought I could make a new start. And I ended up here, an old woman picking up alien scrap on an alien beach thousands of light years from home. Sometimes I think that I am dead. That my family survived the Spasm but I died, and all this is a dream of my last second of life. What does that make you, if it’s true?”

  The man listened to her, but gave no sign that he understood.

  One day, she found a precious scrap of superconducting plastic. It wasn’t much bigger than her thumbnail, transparent, shot through with silvery threads.

  “This is worth more than ten cartloads of base plastic,” she told the man. “Electronics companies use it in their smartphones and slates. No one knows how to make it, so they pay big money. We live off this for two, three weeks.”

  She didn’t think he’d understand, but he walked up and down the tide line all that day and found two more slivers of superconductor, and the next day found five. Amazing. Like the other prospectors who mined the beach and the ruins in the forests, she’d tried and failed to train her dogs to sniff out the good stuff, but the man was like a trufflehound. Single-minded, sharp-eyed, eager to please.

  “You did good,” she told him. “I think I might keep you.”

  She tried to teach him tai chi exercises, moving him into different poses. His smooth cool skin. No heartbeat that she could find. She liked to watch him trawl along the beach, the dogs trotting alongside him. She’d sit on the spur of a tree trunk and watch until the man and the dogs disappeared from sight, watch as they came back. He’d come to her with his hands cupped in front, shyly showing her the treasures he’d found.

  After ten days, the snow had melted and the muddy roads were more or less passable again, and Ziyi drove into town in her battered Suzuki jeep. She’d locked the man in the shed and left Jung and Cheung roaming the compound to guard him.

  In town, she sold her load of plastic at the recycling plant, saving the trove of superconducting plastic until last. Unfolding a square of black cloth to show the little heap of silvery stuff to the plant’s manager, a gruff Ukranian with radiation scars welting the left side of his face.

  “You got lucky,” he said.

  “I work hard,” she said. “How much?”

  They settled on a price that was more than the rest of her earnings that year.

  The manager had to phone Sergey Polzin to authorise it.

  Ziyi asked the manager if he’d heard of any trouble, after the storm. A missing prospector, a bandit attack, anything like that.

  “Road got washed out twenty klicks to the east is all I know.”

  “No one is missing?”

  “Sergey might know, I guess. What are you going to do with all that cash, Ziyi?”

  “Maybe I buy this place one day. I’m getting old. Can’t spend all my life trawling for junk on the beach.”

  Ziyi visited the hardware store, exchanged scraps of gossip with the store owner and a couple of women who were mining the ruins out in the forest. None of them had heard anything about a bandit attack, or an accident on the coast road. In the internet cafe, she bought a mug of green tea and an hour on one of the computers.

  Searched the local news for a bandit attack, some prospector caught in the storm, a plane crash, found nothing. No recent reports of anyone missing or vehicles found abandoned.

  She sat
back, thinking. So much for her theory that the man was some kind of Jackaroo spy who’d been travelling incognito and had got into trouble when the storm hit. She widened her search. Here was a child who had wandered into the forest. Here was a family, their farm discovered deserted, doors smashed down, probably by sasquatch. Here was the road train that had been attacked by bandits, two years ago. Here was a photograph of the man.

  Ziyi felt cold, then hot. Looked around at the cafe’s crowded tables. Clicked on the photo to enlarge it.

  It was him. It was the man.

  His name was Tony Michaels. Twenty-eight years old, a petrochemist. One of three people missing, presumed taken by the bandits after they killed everyone else. Leaving behind a wife and two children, in the capital.

  A family. He’d been human, once upon a time.

  Someone in the cafe laughed; Ziyi heard voices, the chink of cutlery, the hiss of the coffee urn, felt suddenly that everyone was watching her. She sent the photo of Tony Michaels to the printer, shut down the browser, snatched up the printout and left.

  She was unlocking her jeep when Sergey Polzin called out to her. The man stepping towards her across the slick mud, dressed in his usual combat gear, his pistol at his hip. He owned the recycling plant, the internet cafe, and the town’s only satellite dish, and acted as if he was the town’s unelected mayor. Greeting visitors and showing off the place as if it was something more than a squalid street of shacks squatting amongst factory ruins. Pointing out where the water treatment plant would be, talking about plans for concreting the airstrip, building a hospital, a school, that would never come to anything.

  Saying to Ziyi, “Heard you hit a big find.”

  “The storm washed up a few things,” Ziyi said, trying to show nothing while Sergey studied her. Trying not to think about the printout folded into the inside pocket of her parka, over her heart.

  He said, “I also heard you wanted to report trouble.”

  “I was wondering how everyone was, after the storm.”

  He gazed at her for a few moments, then said, “Any trouble, anything unusual, you come straight to me. Understand?”

  “Completely.”

  *

  When Ziyi got back to the cabin she sat the man down and showed him the printout, then fetched her mirror from the wall and held it in front of him, angling it this way and that, pointing to it, pointing to the paper.

  “You,” she said. “Tony Michaels. You.”

  He looked at the paper and the mirror, looked at the paper again and ran his fingertips over his smooth face. He didn’t need to shave, and his hair was exactly as long as it was in the photo.

  “You,” she said.

  That was who he had been. But what was he now?

  *

  The next day she coaxed him into the jeep with the two dogs, and drove west along the coast road, forest on one side and the sea stretching out to the horizon on the other, until she spotted the burnt-out shells of the road train, overgrown with great red drapes of bubbleweed. The dogs jumped off and nosed around; the man slowly climbed out, looked about him, taking no especial notice of the old wreckage.

  She had pictured it in her head. His slow recognition. Leading her to the place where he’d hidden or crawled away to die from grievous wounds. The place that had turned him or copied him or whatever it was the factory had done.

  Instead, he wandered off to a patch of sunlight in the middle of the road and stood there until she told him they were going for a walk.

  They walked a long way, slowly spiralling away from the road. There were factory ruins here, as in most parts of the forest. Stretches of broken wall. Chains of cubes heaved up and broken, half-buried, overgrown by the arched roots of spine trees, and thatches of copperberry and bubbleweed, but the man seemed no more interested in them than in the wreckage of the road train.

  “You were gone two years. What happened to you?”

  He shrugged.

  At last, they walked back to the road. The sun stood at the horizon, as always, throwing shadows over the road. The man walked towards the patch of sunlight where he’d stood before, and kept walking.

  Ziyi and the two dogs followed. Through a thin screen of trees to the edge of a sheer drop. Water far below, lapping at rocks. No, not rocks. Factory ruins.

  The man stared down at patches of waterweed rising and falling on waves that broke around broken walls.

  Ziyi picked up a stone and threw it out beyond the cliff edge. “Was that what happened? You were running from the bandits, it was dark, you ran straight out over the edge…”

  The man made a humming sound. He was looking at Sauron’s fat orange disc now, and after a moment he closed his eyes and stretched out his arms.

  Ziyi walked along the cliff edge, looking for and failing to find a path. The black rock plunged straight down, a sheer drop cut by vertical crevices that only an experienced climber might use to pick a route down. She tried to picture it. The road train stopping because fallen trees had blocked the road. Bandits appearing when the crew stepped down, shooting them, ordering the passengers out, stripping them of their clothes and belongings, shooting them one by one. Bandits didn’t like to leave witnesses. One man breaking free, running into the darkness. Running through the trees, running blindly, wounded perhaps, definitely scared, panicked. Running straight out over the cliff edge. If the fall hadn’t killed him, he would have drowned. And his body had washed into some active part of the factory, and it had fixed him. No, she thought. It had duplicated him. Had it taken two years? Or had he been living in some part of the factory, out at sea, until the storm had washed him away and he’d been cast up on the beach…

  The man had taken off his clothes and stood with his arms out and his eyes closed, bathing in level orange light. She shook him until he opened his eyes and smiled at her, and she told him it was time to go.

  Ziyi tried and failed to teach the man to talk. “You understand me. So why can’t you tell me what happened to you?”

  The man humming, smiling, shrugging.

  Trying to get him to write or draw was equally pointless.

  Days on the beach, picking up flotsam; nights watching movies. She had to suppose he was happy. Her constant companion. Her mystery. She had long ago given up the idea of selling him.

  Once, Ziyi’s neighbour, Besnik Shkelyim, came out of the forest while the man was searching the strandline. Ziyi told Besnik he was the son of an old friend in the capital, come to visit for a few weeks. Besnik seemed to accept the lie. They chatted about the weather and sasquatch sightings and the latest finds. Besnik did most of the talking. Ziyi was anxious and distracted, trying not to look towards the man, praying that he wouldn’t wander over. At last, Besnik said that he could see that she was busy, he really should get back to his own work.

  “Bring your friend to visit, sometime. I show him where real treasure is found.” Ziyi said that she would, of course she would, watched Besnik walk away into the darkness under the trees, then ran to the man, giddy and foolish with relief and told him how well he’d done, keeping away from the stranger.

  He hummed. He shrugged.

  “People are bad,” Ziyi said. “Always remember that.”

  A few days later she went into town. She needed more food and fuel, and took with her a few of the treasures the man had found. Sergey Polzin was at the recycling plant, and fingered through the stuff she’d brought. Superconductor slivers. A variety of tinker toys, hard little nuggets that changed shape when manipulated. A hand-sized sheet of the variety of plastic in which faint images came and went… It was not one-tenth of what the man had found for her—she’d buried the rest out in the forest—but she knew that she had made a mistake, knew she’d been greedy and foolish.

  She tried her best to seem unconcerned as Sergey counted the silvers of superconducting plastic three times. “You’ve been having much luck, recently,” he said, at last.

  “The storm must have broken open a cache, somewhere out to sea,�
� she said.

  “Odd that no one else has been finding so much stuff.”

  “If we knew everything about the factory, Sergey Polzin, we would all be rich.”

  Sergey’s smile was full of gold. “I hear you have some help. A guest worker.” Besnik had talked about her visitor. Of course he had.

  Ziyi trotted out her lie.

  “Bring him into town next time,” Sergey said. “I’ll show him around.”

  A few days later, Ziyi saw someone watching the compound from the edge of the forest. A flash of sunlight on a lens, a shadowy figure that faded into the shadows under the trees when she walked towards him. Ziyi ran, heard an engine start, saw a red pickup bucket out of the trees and speed off down the track.

  She’d only had a glimpse of the intruder, but she was certain that it was the manager of the recycling plant.

  She walked back to the compound. The man was facing the sun, naked, arms outstretched. Ziyi managed to get him to put on his clothes, but it was impossible to make him understand that he had to leave. Drive him into the forest, let him go? Yes, and sasquatch or wargs would eat him, or he’d find his way to some prospector’s cabin and knock on the door…

  She walked him down to the beach, but he followed her back to the cabin. In the end she locked him in the shed.

  Early in the afternoon, Sergey Polzin’s yellow Humvee came bumping down the track, followed by a UN Range Rover. Ziyi tried to be polite and cheerful, but Sergey walked straight past her, walked into the cabin, walked back out.

  “Where is he?”

  “My friend’s son? He went back to the capital. What’s wrong?” Ziyi said to the UN policewoman.

  “It’s a routine check,” the policewoman, Aavert Enger, said.

  “Do you have a warrant?”

  “You’re hiding dangerous technology,” Sergey said. “We don’t need a warrant.”

  “I am hiding nothing.”

  “There has been a report,” Aavert Enger said.