We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  But seeing her there, that drunken kid’s hand in hers, that hand she couldn’t even feel, I knew, once and for all, that no human motive is ever entirely pure. Even Lise, with that corrosive, crazy drive to stardom and cybernetic immortality, had weaknesses. Was human in a way I hated myself for admitting.

  She’d gone out that night, I knew, to kiss herself goodbye. To find someone drunk enough to do it for her. Because, I knew then, it was true: She did like to watch.

  I think she saw me, as I left. I was practically running. If she did, I suppose she hated me worse than ever, for the horror and the pity in my face.

  I never saw her again.

  *

  Someday I’ll ask Rubin why Wild Turkey sours are the only drink he knows how to make. Industrial-strength, Rubin’s sours. He passes me the dented aluminum cup, while his place ticks and stirs around us with the furtive activity of his smaller creations.

  “You ought to come to Frankfurt,” he says again.

  “Why, Rubin?”

  “Because pretty soon she’s going to call you up. And I think maybe you aren’t ready for it. You’re still screwed up about this, and it’ll sound like her and think like her, and you’ll get too weird behind it. Come over to Frankfurt with me and you can get a little breathing space. She won’t know you’re there…”

  “I told you,” I say, remembering her at the bar in that club, “lots of work, Max…”

  “Stuff Max. Max you just made rich. Max can sit on his hands. You’re rich yourself, from your royalty cut on Kings, if you weren’t too stubborn to dial up your bank account. You can afford a vacation.”

  I look at him and wonder when I’ll tell him the story of that final glimpse. “Rubin, I appreciate it, man, but I just…”

  He sighs, drinks. “But what?”

  “Rubin, if she calls me, is it her?”

  He looks at me a long time. “God only knows.” His cup clicks on the table. “I mean, Casey, the technology is there, so who, man, really who, is to say?”

  “And you think I should come with you to Frankfurt?”

  He takes off his steel-rimmed glasses and polishes them inefficiently on the front of his plaid flannel shirt. “Yeah, I do. You need the rest. Maybe you don’t need it now, but you’re going to later.”

  “How’s that?”

  “When you have to edit her next release. Which will almost certainly be soon, because she needs money bad. She’s taking up a lot of ROM on some corporate mainframe, and her share of Kings won’t come close to paying for what they had to do to put her there. And you’re her editor, Casey. I mean, who else?”

  And I just stare at him as he puts the glasses back on, like I can’t move at all.

  “Who else, man?”

  And one of his constructs clicks right then, just a clear and tiny sound, and it comes to me, he’s right.

  (1985)

  THE ONE WHO ISN’T

  Ted Kosmatka

  Ted Kosmatka was born and raised in Chesterton, northwest Indiana, where he worked for more than a decade in the steel industry. Moving with his family to the Pacific Northwest, he turned to video game writing, in particular scripting games and comics for the game producers Valve. His short stories have appeared in many venues, including Asimov’s, Nature, and Lightspeed, and he has been nominated for both the Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novel is The Flicker Men (2015), a quantum-mechanical thriller.

  It starts with light.

  Then heat.

  A slow bleed through of memory.

  Catchment, containment. A white-hot agony coursing through every nerve, building to a sizzling hum—and then it happens. Change of state.

  And what comes out the other side is something new.

  *

  The woman held up the card. “What color do you see?”

  “Blue,” the child said.

  “And this one?” The woman held up another card. Her face was a porcelain mask—a smooth, perfect oval except for a slight pointiness at her chin.

  The child looked closely at the card. It didn’t look like the other one. It didn’t look like any color he’d ever seen before. He felt he should know the color, but he couldn’t place it.

  “It’s blue,” he said.

  The woman shook her head. “Green,” she said. “The color is green.” She put the card down on the table and stood. She walked to the window. The room was a circular white drum, taller than it was wide. One window, one door.

  The boy couldn’t remember having been outside the room, though that couldn’t be right. His memory was broken, the fragments tailing off into darkness.

  “Some languages don’t have different words for blue and green,” the woman said. “In some languages, they’re the same.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The woman turned toward him. “It means you’re getting worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  She did not answer him. Instead she stayed with him for an hour and helped him with his eyes. She walked around the room and named things. “Door,” she said. “Door.” And he understood and remembered.

  Floor, walls, ceiling, table, chair.

  She named all these things.

  “And you,” the child said. “What name do you go by?”

  The woman took a seat across from him at the table. She had pale blond hair. Her eyes, in the perfect armatures of their porcelain sockets, were blue, he decided. Or they were green. “That’s easy,” she said from behind her mask. “I’m the one who isn’t you.”

  *

  When it was time to sleep, she touched a panel on the wall and a bed slid out from the flat surface. She tucked him in and pulled the blankets up to his chin. The blankets were cool against his skin. “Tell me a story,” the child said.

  “What story?”

  He tried to remember a story. Any story that she might have told him in the past, but nothing came.

  “I can’t think of any,” he said.

  “Do you remember your name?”

  He thought for a moment. “You told me that you were the one who wasn’t me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s who I am, but what about you? Do you remember your name?”

  He thought for a while. “No.”

  The woman nodded. “Then I’ll tell you the story of the queen,” she said.

  “What queen?”

  “She the Unnamed,” the woman said. “It’s your favorite.”

  She touched the wall by the bed. The lights dimmed.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  And so he did.

  Then she cleared her throat and began to recite the story—line after line, in a slow, steady rhythm, starting at the beginning.

  After a while, he began to cry.

  *

  Upload protocol. Arbitration ()

  Story sixteen: contents = [She the Unnamed] />

  Function/Query : Who wrote the story? {

  /File response : (She) wrote it. {

  Function/Query : What do you mean, she wrote it. That isn’t possible. {

  /File response : Narratives are vital to understanding the world. Experience without narrative isn’t consciousness. {

  *

  And so it was written.

  In a time before history, in a place beyond maps, there was once a queen, she the unnamed, who dared defy her liege husband.

  She was beautiful and young, with tresses of gold. Forced to marry a king she did not love, she bore him a son out of royal duty—a child healthy, and strong, and dearly loved.

  Over the following years, unease crept into the queen’s heart as she noted the king’s cruelties, his obsession for magics. Gradually, as she learned the true measure of the man who wore the crown, she came to fear the influence that he might have on the child. For this reason she risked everything, summoned her most trusted confidants, and sent the boy into secret hiding, to live among the priests of the valley where the king could never find him.


  The king was enraged. Never had he been defied.

  “You will not darken this boy’s heart,” she told the king when he confronted her. “Our son is safe, in a place where you cannot change him.”

  Such was the king’s fury at this betrayal that upon his throne he declared his queen an abhorrence, and he stripped her name from every book and every tongue. None could say her name nor remember it, and she was expunged from history in all ways but one. The deepest temporal magic was invoked, a sorcery beyond reach of all but the blackest rage—and the woman was condemned to give birth again and again to the self-same child whom the king had lost.

  The queen had expected death, or banishment, but not this.

  And so through magic she gave birth to an immaculate child. And for three years the new child would grow—first crawling, then walking—a strapping boy at his mother’s side, until the king would come to the tower cell and take the child on the high stone. “Do you regret?” He would ask his queen.

  “Yes,” she’d sob, while the guards gripped her arms.

  The king would hold the child high and say, “This is because of your mother.” And then slice the child’s throat.

  The mother would scream and cry, and through a chaste, dark magic conceive again, and for nine months carry, and for one day labor, and for three years love a new child, raised again in the tower cell. A boy sweet and kind with eyes of blue.

  Until the king would again return and ask the mother, “Do you regret?”

  “Yes, please spare him,” she’d cry, groveling at his feet. “I regret.”

  The king would hold his son high and say, “This is because of your mother.” And then slice his tender throat.

  Again and again the pattern repeated, son after son, as the mother screamed and tore at her hair.

  Against such years could hells be measured.

  The mother tried refusing her child when he was born, hoping that would save him. “This child means nothing to me,” she said.

  And the king responded, “This is because of your mother,” and wet his blade anew.

  “Do you know why I wait three years?” he asked her once as she crouched beside a body small and pale. He touched her hair tenderly. “It is so you’ll know the child understands.”

  And so it continued.

  A dozen sons, then a score, until the people throughout the land called the king heir-killer, and still he continued to destroy his children. Sons who were loved. Sons who were ignored. A score of sons, then a hundred. Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same.

  Until the mother woke one day from a nightmare, for all her dreams were nightmares, and with her hand clutching her abdomen, felt a child quicken in her womb, and knew suddenly what she had to do. And soon it came to pass that she bore a son, and for one full year loved him, and for a second year plotted, and for a third year whispered, shaping a young heart for a monstrous task. She darkened his heart as no mother ever dreamed. She darkened him beyond anything the king could have done.

  And in time the king finally came to the high tower and lifted his son high and asked, “Do you regret?”

  She responded, “I regret that I was born, and every moment after.”

  The king smiled and said, “This is because of your mother.”

  He raised his knife to the child’s throat, but the three-year-old twisted and turned, like his mother had shown him, and drove a needle-thin blade into his father’s eye.

  The king screamed, and fell from the tower, and died then slowly in a spreading pool of blood, while the boy’s laughter rang out.

  Thus was the Monster King brought into the world—a murderer of his father, made monstrous by his mother, and now heir to all the lands and armies of the wasted territories.

  And the world would pay a heavy price.

  *

  The next week, the woman came again. She opened the door and brought the child his lunch. There was an apple and bread and chicken.

  “This is your favorite food, isn’t it?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” the child said after thinking about it for a moment. “I think it is.”

  He wondered where the woman went when she was not with him. She never spoke of her time apart. He wondered if she ceased to exist when she was not with him. It seemed possible.

  After a while, they went over the cards again.

  “Blue,” the boy said. “Blue.”

  The woman pointed

  Floor, ceiling, door, window.

  “Good,” she said.

  “Does that mean I’m getting better?”

  The-one-who-was-not-him did not answer though. Instead she rose to her feet and walked to the window.

  The boy followed and looked out the window, but he couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Couldn’t hold it in his mind.

  “Can I go outside?” he asked.

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She turned to look at him, her pretty, oval face a solemn mask of repose. “When you know, tell me.”

  “I want to make you happy,” the boy said. And he meant it. He sensed a sadness in the woman, and he wanted to make her feel better.

  The child stepped closer to the glass and touched it. The surface was cool and smooth, and he held his hand against it for a long while.

  When he moved back to the table, something was wrong with his hand. Like a burn to his skin. He couldn’t hold his pencil right. He tried to draw a line on the paper, and the pencil fell out of his hand.

  “My hand,” he said to the woman.

  She came and she touched him. She ran her finger over his palm, moving up to his wrist. Her fingers were warm.

  “Make a fist,” she said. She held her hand up to demonstrate.

  He made a fist and winced in pain.

  “It burns.”

  She nodded to herself. “This is part of it.”

  “Part of what?”

  “What’s gone wrong.”

  “And what is that?” When she didn’t answer him, he asked, “Is this place a prison? Where are we?”

  He thought of the high tower. This is because of your mother.

  The woman sighed, and she sat down across from him at the table. Her eyes looked tired. “I want to be clear with you,” the woman said. “I think it is important that you understand. You’re dying. I’m here to save your life.”

  The boy was silent, taking this in. Dying. He’d known something was wrong, but he hadn’t used that word in his own thoughts. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “But I don’t want to die.”

  “I don’t want you to die either. And I’m going to do everything I can to stop it.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  She did not speak for a long while, and then changed the subject. “Would you like to hear another story?”

  The child nodded.

  “There was once a man and a woman who wanted a child very much,” she began. “But there were problems. Problems with their genes. Do you know what genes are?”

  He considered for a moment and realized he did. He nodded. “I’m not sure how I know.”

  “It’s bleed-through,” she said. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the couple did in vitro and had a child implanted that way, but the children died, and died, and died, over and over, until finally, one day, after many failures and miscarriages, a child was born, only the child was sick. Even after all they’d done, the child was sick. And so he had to live in a hospital, with white rooms, while the doctors tried to make him whole. Anyone who visited had to wear a special white mask.”

  “A mask like you?”

  “Is that what you see when you look at me?”

  He studied her. The smooth oval face. He was no longer sure what he saw.

  She continued, “The child’s sickness worsened over time. And the father had to donate part of himself to save the child. After the procedure, the child lived but the father developed a complica
tion.”

  “What kind of complication?”

  She waved that off. “It doesn’t matter for the story. An infection, perhaps. Or whatever you’d prefer.”

  “What happened to the father?”

  “He left the story then. He died.”

  The boy realized that he’d known she was going to say that before she spoke it. “And that was because of the child?”

  She nodded.

  “What happened to the child?”

  “The boy still wasn’t healed. There were TIAs. Small strokes. And other issues. Little areas of brain tissue going dark and dead. Like a light blinking out. It couldn’t be helped.”

  “What happened then?”

  She shrugged. “That’s the end of the story.”

  He wondered again if she even existed when she wasn’t with him. A thought occurred to him. A terrifying thought. He wondered if he existed when she wasn’t there.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Try to remember,” she said. “Try to remember anything that happens when I’m not here.”

  He tried, but nothing came. Just shadows and flickers.

  “What is my name?” the boy asked.

  “Don’t you know yet?” The woman’s eyes grew serious. “Can’t you guess?”

  He shook his head.

  She said, “You are the one who isn’t me.”

  He studied her eyes, which were either blue or green. “That can’t be right,” he said. “That’s your name. You are the one who isn’t me. It can’t be my name, too.”

  She nodded. “Think of this place as a language. We are speaking it just by being here. This language doesn’t have different words for you and I,” she said. “In the language of this place, our names are the same.”

  *

  [Reload Protocol]

  White light. {

  You are catchment. You are containment. {

  You are.{

  *

  A fleeting memory rises up: a swing set in the back yard under a tall, leafy tree—dark berries arrayed along delicate stems. The sound of laughter. Running in the grass until his white socks were purple—berry juice wetting his feet.