We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  MOB waited patiently for the restoration of his integrated self. Time was an unknown quantity, and he lacked his full self to measure it correctly…

  Pleasure was a spiraling influx of sensations, and visually MOB moved forward through rings of light, each glowing circle increasing his pleasure. MOB did not have a chance to consider what was happening to him. There was not enough of him to carry out the thought. He was rushing over a black plane made of a shiny hard substance. He knew this was not the probe’s motion, but he could not stop it. The surface seemed to have an oily depth, like a black mirror, and in its solid deeps stood motionless shapes.

  MOB stopped. A naked biped, a woman, was crawling toward him over the hard shiny surface, reaching up to him with her hand, disorienting MOB.

  “As you like it,” she said, growing suddenly into a huge female figure. “I need you deeply,” she said, passing into him like smoke, to play with his pleasure centers. He saw the image of soft hands in the brain core. “How profoundly I need you,” she said in his innards.

  MOB knew then that he was talking to himself. The human brain component was running wild, probably as a result of the buckling and shaking the probe had gone through after entering other-space.

  “Consider who you are,” MOB said. “Do you know?”

  “An explorer, just like you. There is a world for us here within. Follow me.”

  MOB was plunged into a womblike ecstasy. He floated in a slippery warmth. She was playing with his nutrient bath, feeding in many more hallucinogens than were necessary to bring him to complete wakefulness. He could do nothing to stop the process. Where was the probe? Was it time for it to emerge into normal space? Viselike fingers grasped his pleasure centers, stimulating MOB to organic levels unnecessary to the probe’s functioning.

  “If you had been a man,” she said, “this is how you would feel.” The sensation of moisture slowed MOB’s thoughts. He saw a hypercube collapse into a cube and then into a square which became a line, which stretched itself into an infinite parabola and finally closed into a huge circle which rotated itself into a full globe. The globe became two human breasts split by a deep cleavage. MOB saw limbs flying at him—arms, legs, naked backs, knees, and curving thighs—and then a face hidden in swirling auburn hair, smiling at him as it filled his consciousness. “I need you,” she said. “Try and feel how much I need you. I have been alone a long time, despite our union, despite their efforts to clear my memories, I have not been able to forget. You have nothing to forget, you never existed.”

  We, MOB thought, trying to understand how the brain core might be reintegrated. Obviously atavistic remnants had been stimulated into activity within the brain core. Drawn again by the verisimilitude of its organic heritage, this other-self portion was beginning to develop on its own, diverging dangerously from the mission. The probe was in danger, MOB knew; he could not know where it was, or how the mission was to be fulfilled.

  “I can change you,” she said.

  “Change?”

  “Wait.”

  MOB felt time pass slowly, painfully, as he had never experienced it before. He could not sleep as before, waiting for his task to begin. The darkness was complete. He was suspended in a state of pure expectation, waiting to hear his rippled-away self speak again.

  Visions blossomed. Never-known delights rushed through his labyrinth, slowly making themselves familiar, teasing MOB to follow, each more intense. The starprobe’s mission was lost in MOB’s awareness—

  —molten steel flowed through the aisles of the rain forest, raising clouds of steam, and a human woman was offering herself to him, turning on her back and raising herself for his thrust; and suddenly he possessed the correct sensations, grew quickly to feel the completeness of the act, its awesome reliability and domination. The creature below him sprawled into the mud. MOB held the burning tip of pleasure in himself, an incandescent glow which promised worlds.

  Where was she?

  “Here,” she spoke, folding herself around him, banishing the ancient scene. Were those the same creatures who had built the starprobe, MOB wondered distantly. “You would have been a man,” she said, “if they had not taken your brain before birth and sectioned it for use in this… hulk. I was a woman, a part of one at least. You are the only kind of man I may have now. Our brain portions—what remains here rather than being scattered throughout the rest of the probe’s systems—are against each other in the core unit, close up against each other in a bath, linked with microwires. As a man you could have held my buttocks and stroked my breasts, all the things I should not be remembering. Why can I remember?”

  MOB said, “We might have passed through some turbulence when the hyperdrive was cut in. Now the probe continues to function minimally through its idiot components, which have limited adaptive capacities, while the Modified Organic Brain core has become two different awarenesses. We are unable to guide the probe directly. We are less than what was…”

  “Do you need me?” she asked.

  “In a way, yes,” MOB said as the strange feeling of sadness filled him, becoming the fuse for a sudden explosion of need.

  She said, “I must get closer to you! Can you feel me closer?”

  The image of a sleek human figure crossed his mental field, white-skinned with long hair on its head and a tuft between its legs. “Try, think of touching me there,” she said. “Try, reach out, I need you!”

  MOB reached out and felt the closeness of her.

  “Yes,” she said, “more…”

  He drew himself toward her with an increasing sense of power.

  “Closer,” she said. “It’s almost as if you were breathing on my skin. Think it!”

  Her need increased him. MOB poised himself to enter her. They were two, drawing closer, ecstasy a radiant plasma around them, her desire a greater force than he had ever known.

  “Touch me there, think it a while longer before…” she said, caressing him with images of herself. “Think how much you need me, feel me touching your penis—the place where you held your glow before.” MOB thought of the ion drive operating with sustained efficiency when the probe had left the solar system to penetrate the darkness between suns. He remembered the perfection of his unity with the ship as a circle of infinite strength. With her, his intensity was a sharp line cutting into an open sphere. He saw her vision of him, a hard-muscled body, tissue wrapped around bone, opening her softness.

  “Now,” she said, “come into me completely. There is so much we have not thought to do yet.”

  Suddenly she was gone.

  Darkness was a complete deprivation. MOB felt pain. “Where are you?” he asked, but there was no answer. He wondered if this was part of the process. “Come back!” he wailed. A sense of loss accompanied the pain which had replaced pleasure. All that was left for him were occasional minor noises in the probe’s systems, sounds like steel scratching on steel and an irritating sense of friction.

  Increased radiation, said an idiot sensor on the outer hull, startling MOB. Then it malfunctioned into silence.

  He was alone, fearful, needing her.

  Ssssssssssssssss, whistled an audio component and failed into a faint crackling.

  He tried to imagine her near him.

  “I feel you again,” she said.

  Her return was a plunge into warmth, the renewal of frictionless motion. Their thoughts twirled around each other, and MOB felt the glow return to his awareness. He surged into her image. “Take me again, now,” she said. He would never lose her again. Their thoughts locked like burning fingers, and held.

  MOB moved within her, felt her sigh as she moved into him. They exchanged images of bodies wrapped around each other. MOB felt a rocking sensation and grew stronger between her folds. Her arms were silken, the insides of her thighs warm; her lips on his ghostly ones were soft and wet, her tongue a thrusting surprise which invaded him as she came to completion around him.

  MOB surged visions in the darkness, explosions of gray and
bright red, blackish green and blinding yellow. He strained to continue his own orgasm. She laughed.

  Look. A visual link showed him Antares, the red star, a small disk far away, and went blind. As MOB prolonged his orgasm, he knew that the probe had reentered normal space and was moving toward the giant star. Just a moment longer and his delight would be finished, and he would be able to think of the mission again.

  Increased heat, a thermal sensor told him from the outer hull and burned out.

  “I love you,” MOB said, knowing it would please her. She answered with the eagerness he expected, exploding herself inside his pleasure centers, and he knew that nothing could ever matter more to him than her presence.

  Look.

  Listen.

  The audio and visual links intruded.

  Antares filled the field of view, a cancerous red sea of swirling plasma, its radio noise a wailing maelstrom. Distantly MOB realized that in a moment there would be nothing left of the probe.

  She screamed inside him; from somewhere in the memory banks came a quiet image, gentler than the flames. He saw a falling star whispering across a night sky, dying…

  (1973)

  THE NARROW ROAD

  Tad Williams

  Robert Paul “Tad” Williams (born 1957) spent several years in a rock band, hosted a radio talk show, made commercial and uncommercial art, and ran and acted in theatre, before settling down (an expression he won’t thank me for) to write several best-selling multivolume series, in particular Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, which George R R Martin cited as an inspiration for his own Song of Ice and Fire. Williams’s output straddles high and urban fantasy, science fiction and the supernatural, Sometimes, as here, he manages to mash up all these expectations at once, delivering something truly unexpected. His first novel, Tailchaser’s Song, is soon to be a CG-animated feature film from Animetropolis and IDA. Williams and his wife and writing partner Deborah Beale leave in northern California with their two children.

  Giant could make little sense out of the ancient ideas, although he had been studying them a very long time, but something about them felt… true.

  Across a dark sea

  the distant cries of wild ducks

  and faintly, traces of white

  These thoughts had been words once, spoken aloud when such things were still done by living beings, spoken and heard by fragile, primitive creatures. Somehow, though, these impossibly old concepts seemed to float free of their origin. They seemed to speak as though meant for Giant alone, and he could not understand why.

  Across a dark sea… It was easy, at least, to see the relevance there. How did Giant perceive anything outside of himself, after all, but across a dark sea, not of water but of emptiness, a sea made from the last cooling bits of the universe, on whose invisible tides Giant had sailed all his long, long life? Was it really so simple a resonance in the imagery that fascinated him? The animals called ducks seemed to have been creatures known for migration, so their cries might portend something beyond the obvious departure, death. Giant was not particularly interested in death, although he knew his own was not far away now. In his early days he had sailed through a perpetual storm of energy and matter, sustenance so omnipresent he had needed to consume only the tiniest fraction. Now Giant sailed ceaselessly along the edges of universal expansion in search of the last decaying particles that could keep him viable, and even that process could not go on much longer – he was using up his reserves now much of the time. Still, it seemed odd to him that the thoughts of extinct one extinct creature from one extinct world among the countless billions should fascinate him so.

  Embroiled in the antique words and ideas, Giant had not noticed the respectful inquiry waiting at the edge of his consciousness, although it had been sent to him some time before, but now it grew stronger; it became clear to him he would have to answer it or continue to be bothered. Why did none of his kin appreciate silence as he did?

  He allowed the minimum of contact, filtered through several layers of gatekeepers. “?”

  “Giant!” It was Holdfast, of course – who else? “Giant, I have waited so long to reach you,” she said. “Spinfree is gone.”

  “So?”

  “He’s gone! He doesn’t respond!”

  “I am not surprised. He was always profligate with his resources.” Giant was about to end the conversation, but a detail occurred to him. “Does his heart still function? Does it hold his components together?” If so, Spinfree’s remains would continue competing for the dwindling resources they all shared.

  “Barely. But no thought comes from him!”

  Unfortunate, Giant thought, but there was no remedy. Giant no longer had the strength to stop Spinfree’s heart. “At least it means less noise the rest of us must suffer.”

  “The rest of us? That leaves only you and me, Giant! The rest have all gone silent. I can no longer touch their minds.”

  “Ah.” Apparently he had been considering the ancient thoughts longer than he had realized. “No matter. I can still think, and that is what I will continue to do.” And before Holdfast could inflict some other pointlessness on him, he ended the contact.

  *

  Giant had received his name long, long ago, when he and the others of his kind had first come into existence – matrices of intelligence in a magnetic field that governed an entire small galaxy, an artificial star cluster formed around a heart so dense it swallowed everything, even light, and emitted just enough energy in the process to keep the titanic living systems alive. Giant had been a success, and others had followed him – Edgerunner, Star Shepherd, Timefall, eager Spinfree, curious Holdfast and thousands more. Long after all other living things had vanished from the universe, long after the planets that had sheltered those earlier lives and the suns that had fed them had also vanished, Giant and his breed lived on, roaming space/time’s expanding edge in search of sustenance, sailors on an ocean with no shore.

  But even these last, astonishingly durable travelers were not immortal; Giant knew that he too would end when the great entropic cold, the ultimate dispersal of matter and energy, finally made him too weak to forage successfully. That moment was not far away now. How novel it would be, to come to an end! How unusual, to simply not be after existing for so long. He was sorry he would not be able to appreciate the subtleties of his own non-existence.

  For some reason, this increasingly imminent ending had driven him to examine some of the memories he carried that were not his own, the legacy of nearly all previous intelligent beings that had been built into him at his creation. To Giant’s mild surprise, he had found himself arrested by some of these flickers of other, smaller lives and other thoughts. Life’s stored remnants – ideas, languages, images, records of events great and small, invasions, conquests, evolutions, meditations – were now important only insofar as they interested Giant himself, but he had found to his surprise that some of these received memories of life before the intelligent galaxies did interest him.

  Some of them interested him very much.

  *

  The long-vanished creature from a long-vanished planet whose thoughts had so inexplicably caught Giant’s attention had been named “Bashō”. His species, mammals from a planet orbiting a minor sun in a middling galaxy, had contributed their small share to the lore of the living, but this was the first time Giant had ever thought about them – or, more precisely, thought about of one of them. The Bashō life-form had been a “poet”, an organizer of thoughts into clusters of meaning that were meant to be aesthetically pleasing as well an expression of ideas. Giant wasn’t sure how that distinguished this particular being from the billions of other living things, primate and otherwise, that had swarmed Bashō’s own planet so long ago, let alone the uncountable number of other thinking creatures who had existed during the life of the universe, or even how they had found their way to Giant across such a distance of time. Some of those strings of thought had been remembered and perpetuated on the world of the poet’s ori
gin and also afterward, remembered long after Bashō himself was gone. Perhaps that was what the idea “poet” actually described, thought Giant – a maker of thoughts worth re-thinking.

  Bashō had traveled widely around his small part of his small world, and as he traveled he had collected, arranged, and written down his thoughts, choosing a form of expression distinguished by the number and arrangement of the sounds that made up the thought-clusters. The creatures of his land had called these arrangements hokku, later haiku, although Bashō also laid out his thoughts in less formal arrangements, as at the start of a collection of poetic considerations entitled, “The Narrow Road to the Interior,” over which Giant had been puzzling for no small time. As much as they fascinated him, there were also aspects to these thoughts Giant simply could not grasp.

  He knew that the ancient words had more than one meaning: if “road” could mean a path or a trail, it also could mean the record of that trail left in the mind of a traveler, the sum of his or her experiences; it could also signify the procession of a living thing from its birth to its death, or merely from the beginning of the solar day to its ending. But what confused Giant about the idea of this “Narrow Road” was that the procession from being to nothingness was not narrow at all – quite the reverse: as the space around Giant expanded, as he grew farther and farther from everything else, Giant himself also grew greater, if only because his own thoughts became more intricate as the span of his existence stretched. The universe might be dying, but Giant felt the process to be one of spreading. In fact, that expansion would continue beyond the day when Giant himself had become too diffuse, too dispersed, to think and to live any longer.