We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  The sun warm on his face.

  The feel of the wind, and the smell of the lawn, and everything the white room was not.

  A man’s voice came then, but the words were missing—the meaning expunged. And how can that be? To hear a voice clearly and not hear the words? It might be a name. Yes, calling a name.

  *

  “Look at me,” she said.

  She sat across the table from him.

  “There have been changes made.”

  “What changes?”

  “Changes to you,” she said. “When you were sleeping. Changes to your fusiform gyrus,” she said. “Can you read me now?”

  And gone was the porcelain mask. The boy saw it clearly and wondered how he hadn’t noticed it until that moment—her face a divine architecture. A beautiful origami—emotions unfolding out of the smallest movements of her eyes, lips, brow. A stream of subtle micro expressions. And the child understood that her face had not changed at all since the last time he’d seen her, but only his understanding of it.

  “The facial recognition part of the mind is highly specialized,” the woman said. “Problems with that area are often also associated with achromotosia.”

  “Chroma-what?”

  “The part of the brain that perceives color. It’s also related to issues with environmental orientation, landmark analysis, location.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You can only see what your mind lets you see.”

  “Like this place… the place where are we?” he asked her.

  “You can look for yourself,” she said, gesturing to the window. “I’m going to give you a task to complete while I’m not here.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to look outside, and I want you to think about what you see, and I want you to draw it on the paper. Can you do that?”

  He glanced toward the window. A pane of clear glass.

  “Can you do that?” she repeated. “It’s very important.”

  “Yeah, I think I can.”

  When the woman left, he tried. He tried to see beyond the glass. He could hold it in his mind for a moment, but when he went to draw it, the images evaporated like mist.

  He tried again and again, but failed each time. He tried moving quickly, putting pencil to paper before he could forget, but no matter what, he could not move quick enough.

  Then he came up with an idea.

  He pushed the table across the room to the window.

  He lay on top of the table, with the paper before him, and he tried to draw what he saw, but even then he failed. It was only when he tried purposefully not to see it that he could suddenly make the pencil move. He drew without understanding what he drew—just a series of marks on a page.

  When he finally looked down at what he’d drawn, he could only stare.

  *

  Function/Query: Can you tell what the defect is? {

  /File response: Neurons are just a series of gates. An arrangement of firings. {

  Function/Query: Consciousness is more than that. There are cases of brain damage that have shown similar patterns. AIs always have this problem. {

  /File response: Not always. {

  *

  The next time the woman came, the boy was much worse. Something had broken in him. TIAs, he thought. Tiny strokes. But it was more than that. Worse than that.

  Sometimes he imagined that he could see through the walls, or that he could see through the floor. He was sure by then that he existed when the woman wasn’t in the room with him, and this was a comfort at least. He was autonomous from her, and from the room itself. He could drop to his knees on the floor and place his face on the cool tile and look under the door. A long hall disappeared into the distance. He saw her feet approaching, and that was the first time he noticed her shoes. White. The soles were dark.

  He showed her the picture he’d drawn.

  She held the paper in her hand. “Is that what you see?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  A series of lines. It might have been an abstract landscape, or something else.

  He told her about his hallucinations, about seeing through the walls and floor. “I am getting worse, aren’t I?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  In her face, he saw a thousand emotions. Mourning. Rage. Fear. Things he didn’t want to see. He wished for the mask again. A face he couldn’t read.

  The woman sat by him on the bed. After a while, she said, “Do you know what dying is?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you know what it will mean for you?”

  “It will mean I am no more.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The stories you told aren’t true, are they?”

  “The truth is like a word with no translation. Can blue be green, if there’s no word for it? Can green be blue? Are those colors lies?”

  “Tell me a new story.”

  “A new lie?”

  “Tell me a truth. Tell me about the man.” He thought of the swing and the summer day. The man’s voice saying his name.

  “So you remember him.” The woman shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “Please,” the child said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I remember his voice. A tree. Berries on the ground.”

  She seemed to gather herself up. “There was once a man,” she said. “A very powerful man. A professor, perhaps. And one day the professor was seduced by a student, or seduced a student, it’s not really clear, but they were together, do you understand?”

  He nodded.

  “But this professor also had a wife. Another professor at the university. He told her what had happened, and that he’d ended it, and probably he meant to, but still it went on, until, in the way of things, the young woman was with child. A decision was made to solve the problem, and so they did. And six months went by, and the affair continued, and though she was careful, she was not careful enough, and she felt so stupid, but it happened again.”

  “Again.”

  She nodded. “And again he pressured her. Get rid of it, he said, and so she did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she loved him, probably. Until the following year, her senior year at the college, she stopped being careful, and it happened again, and he told her to take care of it, and this time she said no, and she defied him.”

  “Then what?”

  “People found out, and his teaching career was ruined—everything was ruined.”

  “And that’s the end?”

  She shook her head. “The two stayed together. The man left the wife, and he and his former student raised their boy.”

  “So it was a boy?”

  “Yes, a boy. And then the wife, who’d had no children who survived, was alone. And loneliness does strange things. It lets one focus on one’s work.”

  “And what was her work?”

  “Can you not guess?” The woman gestured around her. “Neuroscience, AIs.”

  The woman was quiet for a long while before she continued. “And the years passed and the new couple stayed together, until one day the man and the boy were at the ex-wife’s house, because they all had to meet to sign papers regarding some property—and the boy was with him. And the man left the boy unattended for just a moment, and it was a simple thing for the woman to put the ring around the boy’s head.”

  “What ring?”

  “A special ring to record his pattern. You only need a minute—like a catchment system for electrical activity. Every synapse. A perfect representation of his mind, like a snapshot transposed into VR. She stole him. Or a copy of him.”

  “Why?”

  The woman was quiet for a long time. “Because she wanted to steal from the man what he’d stolen from her. Even if he didn’t know it.” She was silent again. “That’s not true.”

  “Then what is true?”

  “She was lonely. Desperately lonely. It was a small thing to take, she thou
ght, just a pattern of synapses, the shadow of a personality, and he’d never know. The wife had wanted so badly to be a mother.”

  The woman stopped. Her face a porcelain mask again.

  “But there was a problem,” the child said.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “Patterns are unstable. They last only for so long. Every thought changes it, you see. That is the problem. That is the fatal flaw. Biological systems can adapt—physical alterations to the synaptic network to help adjust. But in VR, it’s not the same.”

  “VR?”

  “A location,” she said. “The place where the pattern finds expression. The place where we are now.”

  The boy looked around the room. The white walls. The white floor.

  “The patterns of older people are stable,” the woman said. “They’ve already thought most of the thoughts that made them who they are. But it’s not the same for children. The pattern drifts, caught midway in the process of becoming. It’s possible to think the thought that makes you unfit for your pattern. The mind loses coherency. As the pattern drifts, it destabilizes and dies.”

  “Dies.”

  “Again and again.”

  How many times?

  The woman would not answer.

  “How many times?” the boy repeated.

  “Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same.”

  “How could that be?”

  “The system reloads the pattern.”

  “So I will die?”

  “You will die. And you will never die.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I am always here.”

  The child stood and walked over to the window and looked outside. He still couldn’t see what lay beyond. Still couldn’t process it. Had no words, because he had no experience of it.

  He only knew what he’d drawn on the paper. Lines sloping away. A child’s drawing of a flat plain that spread out below them, as if they looked down from a great height. It might have been that. Or it might have been something else.

  “So I am an AI?”

  Even as he spoke the words, he felt his thoughts lurch. A great rift forming in his consciousness. In knowing what he was, there emerged the greatest rift of all—the thing that could not be integrated without changing who he was.

  And so he turned toward the woman to speak, to tell her what he knew, and in that moment thought the thought that killed him.

  *

  The woman cried out as she watched him die. He crumpled to the floor and lay on his side.

  She crouched and shook his shoulder, but it was no use. He was gone.

  “This child means nothing to me,” she said as tears welled in her eyes.

  A few moments later, there was a buzz—a sizzling hum. A flash like pain across the boy’s face.

  And then he raised his head.

  He blinked and glanced around the room. He looked at her.

  She allowed herself a moment of hope, but it was dashed when the boy spoke.

  “Who are you?” the child asked.

  I am I. The one who is not you.

  She watched him, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to read her face. Wouldn’t even see her, really—just an opaque mask that he wouldn’t be able to understand.

  She thought of the ring descending around her head. The strange feeling she’d had as she’d found herself here so long ago. Here in this place, which she’d never really left. Not in years and years. She and the boy—locked in a pattern that would repeat itself forever.

  One day she’d find the right words, though. She’d whisper in the boy’s ear, and shape him for the task. She’d be strong enough to turn him into the monster he’d need to be.

  Until then, she would keep trying.

  “Come sit on my lap,” the woman said. She smiled at the boy, and he looked at her without recognition. “Let me tell you a story.”

  (2016)

  SUICIDE COAST

  M. John Harrison

  Born in Rugby, Warwickshire in 1945, Michael John Harrison was most closely identified in the 1960s with New Worlds, where he released his first sf story, “Baa Baa Blocksheep”, in November 1968. He’s since raided and set alight many odd corners of the literary world, not least with Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989. Harrison’s implacable war against escapism as a life strategy, coupled with his awareness that thinking, too, is a form of escape, informs this story, early ones like “Running Down” (1975), and virtually all of You Should Come With Me Now (2018), his most recent collection. The critic and encyclopedist John Clute has the measure of him: “For Harrison – after thirty years of fining his vision – the only difference between the lords and ladies in science fantasy and climbers clinging to a rock in the real world (as in the 1989 novel) was that the latter knew where they were.”

  Four-thirty in the afternoon in a converted warehouse near Mile End underground station. Heavy, persistent summer rain was falling on the roof. Inside, the air was still and humid, dark despite the fluorescent lights. It smelled of sweat, dust, gymnasts’ chalk. Twenty-five feet above the thick blue crash-mats, a boy with dreadlocks and baggy knee-length shorts was supporting his entire weight on two fingers of his right hand. The muscles of his upper back, black and shiny with sweat, fanned out exotically with the effort, like the hood of a cobra or the shell of a crab. One leg trailed behind him for balance. He had raised the other so that the knee was almost touching his chin. For two or three minutes he had been trying to get the ball of his foot in the same place as his fingers. Each time he moved, his center of gravity shifted and he had to go back to a resting position. Eventually he said quietly:

  “I’m coming off.”

  We all looked up. It was a slow afternoon in Mile End. Nobody bothers much with training in the middle of summer. Some teenagers were in from the local schools and colleges. A couple of men in their late thirties had sneaked out of a civil engineering contract near Cannon Street. Everyone was tired. Humidity had made the handholds slippery. Despite that, a serious atmosphere prevailed.

  “Go on,” we encouraged him. “You can do it.”

  We didn’t know him, or one another, from Adam.

  “Go on!”

  The boy on the wall laughed. He was good but not that good. He didn’t want to fall off in front of everyone. An intention tremor moved through his bent leg. Losing patience with himself, he scraped at the foothold with the toe of his boot. He lunged upward. His body pivoted away from the wall and dropped onto the mats, which, absorbing the energy of the fall, made a sound like a badly winded heavyweight boxer. Chalk and dust billowed up. He got to his feet, laughing and shaking his dreadlocks.

  “I can never do that.”

  “You’ll get it in the end,” I told him. “Me, I’m going to fall off this roof once more then fuck off home. It’s too hot in here.”

  “See you, man.”

  *

  I had spent most of that winter in London, assembling copy for MAX, a website that fronted the adventure sports software industry. They were always interested in stuff about cave diving, BASE jumping, snowboarding, hang-gliding, ATB and so on: but they didn’t want to know about rock climbing.

  “Not enough to buy,” my editor said succinctly. “And too obviously skill-based.” He leafed through my samples. “The punter needs equipment to invest in. It strengthens his self-image. With the machine parked in his hall, he believes he could disconnect from the software and still do the sport.” He tapped a shot of Isobelle Patissier seven hundred feet up some knife-edge arête in Colorado. “Where’s the hardware? These are just bodies.”

  “The boots are pretty high tech.”

  “Yeah? And how much a pair? Fifty, a hundred and fifty? Mick, we can get them to lay out three grand for the frame of an ATB.”

  He thought for a moment. Then he said: “We might do something with the women.”

  “The good ones are French.”

  “Even better.”

>   I gathered the stuff together and put it away.

  “I’m off then,” I said.

  “You still got the 190?”

  I nodded.

  “Take care in that thing,” he said.

  “I will.”

  “Focke Wolf 190,” he said. “Hey.”

  “It’s a Mercedes,” I said.

  He laughed. He shook his head.

  “Focke Wolf, Mercedes, no one drives themselves anymore,” he said. ‘You mad fucker.”

  He looked round his office—a dusty metal desk, a couple of posters with the MAX logo, a couple of PCs. He said: “No one comes in here in person anymore. You ever hear of the modem?”

  “Once or twice,” I said.

  “Well they’ve invented it now.”

  I looked around too.

  “One day,” I said, “the poor wankers are going to want back what you stole from them.”

  “Come on. They pissed it all away long before we arrived.”

  As I left the office he advised:

  “Keep walking the walk, Mick.”

  I looked at my watch. It was late and the MAX premises were in EC1. But I thought that if I got a move on and cut up through Tottenham, I could go and see a friend of mine. His name was Ed and I had known him since the 1980s.

  *

  Back then, I was trying to write a book about people like him. Ed Johnson sounded interesting. He had done everything from roped-access engineering in Telford to harvesting birds’ nests for soup in Southeast Asia. But he was hard to pin down. If I was in Birmingham, he was in Exeter. If we were both in London, he had something else to do. In the end it was Moscow Davis who made the introduction. Moscow was a short, hard, cheerful girl with big feet and bedraggled hair. She was barely out of her teens. She had come from Oldham, I think, originally, and she had an indescribable snuffling accent. She and Ed had worked as steeplejacks together before they both moved down from the north in search of work. They had once been around a lot together. She thought Johnson would enjoy talking to me if I was still interested. I was. The arrangement we made was to be on the lookout for him in one of the Suicide Coast pubs, the Harbour Lights, that Sunday afternoon.

  “Sunday afternoons are quiet, so we can have a chat,” said Moscow. “Everyone’s eating their dinner then.”