Dark Star Calling

by Julia Keller

  “How did he do that?” an astonished Shura asked. “How did he get the paintings out of harm’s way and wrap them up and keep them safe like that? It all happened in seconds. Total chaos. How did he…” Her sentence trailed off.

  They all knew the answer:

  Because he was Mickey, and because he was their friend, and because he understood how important the paintings were to them.

  Rez still had a hand on the AstroRob’s ruined torso. With a gentleness that Violet had never seen before from him—a gentleness, in fact, that she did not even know he possessed, except when talking about Rachel—Rez slowly peeled back a flap of mangled plastic sheathing and reached inside the portion of Mickey’s anatomy roughly analogous to a human chest.

  He slowly and delicately pulled out a small triangular hunk of a hard bluish-gray material. The edges were singed, and the surfaces were pitted and gouged.

  “It’s his heart,” Rez explained. “The melting point of silicon is 2,577 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat from the explosion must’ve stopped just before reaching that temperature, and so it didn’t completely destroy it.”

  “So they use silicon for the heart?” Violet asked. “I don’t know a thing about how robots are put together.”

  “Yeah,” Rez said. Then he realized that he needed to modify his answer. “Well, let me put it this way. Every robot has a heart made of silicon. But not every robot has a heart like Mickey’s.”

  17

  Requiem for a Robot

  Violet awoke to a beautiful sunrise. The color was a beguiling blend of honey gold and soft peach, with shimmery white tendrils dancing at the edges. Some sunrises were too harsh—the yellow was greasy-looking and congealed, like a fried egg in a ReadyMeal left on the heat too long—but the best ones were light and airy. The Color Blenders had to be extra delicate to achieve this kind of effect. Sometimes they didn’t bother; they just dumped the requisite colors in the Color Wheel and activated the computer and—presto: There’s your sunrise. Enjoy it, okay?

  But this one—this one was a keeper. The windows in Violet’s apartment gradually absorbed the sunrise like a gracious person accepting a compliment.

  Yet she hardly noticed. When she opened her eyes and saw that morning had arrived, right on schedule, she wanted to cry. Not even a sunrise as casually magnificent as this one could help.

  Nothing helped.

  She’d fallen asleep in her living room, fully clothed. She was lying on her stomach, halfway on the couch, but mostly on the floor; at some point during the night, she’d shifted her position, probably turned or kicked or flailed, and slid part of the way off the couch. She either hadn’t been aware of it or she just didn’t give a damn.

  Mickey’s dead.

  The fact hit her in the center of her soul. She knew, of course, that robots technically couldn’t die; they were recycled and repurposed, but they didn’t “die,” not the way humans did.

  Screw that. Mickey was dead.

  She checked her console. No messages. That was unusual; on a typical morning, she had at least three dozen, from fellow senators or constituents or her friends.

  Then she remembered. She’d turned off the notifications. She had been so bereft last night that she didn’t want to talk to anyone. About anything. She didn’t want any messages, and she didn’t even want to know that she had any messages, either, because that meant she’d have to deal later with the people who’d left them. Better to shut the whole thing down.

  But now it was time to return to the world, no matter how bad she felt. There was no escape.

  Especially because today was Mickey’s funeral.

  * * *

  Through the crowd in the observatory lobby, she spotted Rez. He was frowning at his console.

  “Hey,” she said. “Anybody else here yet?”

  There were plenty of other people present, of course. But Violet didn’t mean people in general. She meant Shura and Kendall and Tin Man.

  “I don’t know,” Rez answered. “Haven’t been looking. Not even sure I want to be here myself. I’d rather be in the lab, but there’s a lot of repair work to do before we can try to access the signal again.” He peered around the lobby that churned with scruffy-looking astronomers who worked at the observatory, preoccupied-looking scientists from other labs, and an impressive number of shiny AstroRobs and BioRobs and TechRobs.

  Only a handful of these creatures, human and robot, could have known Mickey firsthand. The others were here because the word had spread that an extraordinary AstroRob had suffered an accident and had to be repurposed. They were here to honor an ideal, if not a specific machine. While Rez had kept his use of the AstroRob a secret, once Mickey passed away, he had to report it; the recycling protocols on New Earth were absolute. Mickey’s parameters had changed, and the size and energy requirement of every object had to be accounted for.

  A chime sounded. Time to move into the observatory auditorium for the ceremony.

  Just as Violet and Rez crossed the arched threshold into the thousand-seat arena with the brightly lit stage, they were joined by a breathless Shura and, just behind her, an apologetic Kendall.

  “Hey. Sorry. Lost track of time. I was working in my lab,” Shura said.

  “You were supposed to be resting,” Violet admonished her. They chose a row and filed toward a line of seats, first Violet and Rez and then Shura and Kendall.

  “Couldn’t sit still. I had this terrific idea,” Shura answered, her voice rising with excitement, “about how we might be able to use the paintings to interpret…” She stopped speaking. She suddenly seemed to remember where they were and why they were there. “Oh my God. Sorry. I just—I’ve been trying to put it out of my mind. That’s why I worked this morning.”

  “Me too,” Kendall said. “I did the same thing. I’ve been in the police forensics lab since before sunrise.”

  Violet nodded. She’d dealt with her sadness over Mickey’s passing in her own way, a way that had nothing to do with labs or experiments: She’d had a pint of chocolate-chip ice cream for breakfast. Her last act before leaving her apartment was to check her chin for smears of chocolate.

  Geniuses have their way of getting over grief, she thought, and I’ve got mine.

  “Tin Man’s still not feeling well,” Kendall added. “I told him to stay home.”

  And then they turned their attention to the stage.

  Funeral services for robots were rare but not unheard of. When New Earth first was settled, they had been regarded as shady, bizarre rituals, and most of them were conducted underground. Rumors of a particular service for a certain beloved robot would arise, and people would gather quietly in obscure places to pay their respects. The resistance to such ceremonies died down as the truth gradually came to be acknowledged: The line between machine and human was a porous border. Robots had been selecting their own genders since 2247, even before the founding of New Earth, and after that, rogue programmers began to add small dashes of personality. It was still a controversial practice—older citizens insisted that uniformity was the entire point of robots—but that hadn’t stopped creative programmers from sneaking in snippets of individuality.

  Violet had been to two robot funerals—one for a very old BioRob that had been with Shura from high school through medical school, and another for a young ReadyRob who was destroyed in an asteroid strike on Higgsville.

  But she hadn’t known those robots the way she knew Mickey.

  Her attention was drawn to the stage. A stir swept across the vast auditorium as two ReadyRobs rolled in, balancing a silver tube between them. That tube, Violet realized, was all that was left of Mickey after he’d been prepped for recycling.

  The two robots set it down with great care and then whisked off to the other side of the stage.

  “Hey.”

  A very tall, exceptionally disheveled young man had appeared at the edge of the stage, nearly tripping on the gathered drape. He walked to the center and repeated the greeting, looking out acro
ss the rows of myriad women and men and robots, shading his eyes against the stage lights with a flattened hand.

  “Hey.”

  A murmur ran around and around the auditorium: Dave Parkhurst.

  Rez leaned over and whispered to Violet, “That’s Dumb-Ass Dave.”

  He was older than she had expected. Given Mickey’s energetic spirit, she had assumed that the man who’d made him would be close to her age. But this guy had to be at least thirty. In other ways, though, he was exactly what she expected: skinny, awkward, with a greasy complexion and hair that hung down in his eyes and stuck out from the sides of his head.

  Dave gripped the lectern with the bony, dead-white fingers of one hand. He was exceedingly nervous. He dipped his head and shuffled his feet and scratched the back of his neck and straightened his spine and then hunched over again. The whispers that had greeted his arrival had died down now. There was not so much as a stray cough. Everyone waited to hear what he had to say.

  “We’re here today…” He gulped. “We’re here…”

  Still he struggled. “We’re here today to…”

  He shook his head. That head, Violet observed, looked a little like a dust mop being shaken out by a ReadyRob.

  “Okay.” Now he seemed to gather himself. “Look, I’m no good at this. No good at all. But if anybody was going to talk about Mickey, I figured it oughta be me.” He shrugged. “To begin with, I never called him Mickey. He was named later. By somebody else. I didn’t like that name when I heard about it. It was short for Mickey Mouse. And it sounded kind of disrespectful, I guess I’d call it. Like he was being ridiculed. Well, Mickey knew that. He knew the truth behind his name. But he didn’t care. He knew who he was.”

  Violet was aware of Rez shifting around uncomfortably in the seat beside hers.

  “But I’ll call him that today,” Dave continued, “because that’s the name he was known by. What did I call him, when I created him? Nothing. I didn’t give him a name. I never do. If you work in robot programming, you learn pretty quickly that it’s better not to name them. Naming them makes them too much like friends. Or sisters or brothers. And then it hurts too much—way, way too much—when you have to say goodbye. Let them go.”

  He licked his lips. “I knew Mickey was different. I could tell from the moment he first came online. And so I asked for permission to give him a personality. I saw something in him—a spark, a talent, a special spirit. And they said, ‘Okay.’ I could add a few lines of code in his production specs and I wouldn’t lose my job. Mickey would be unique.” Dave took a breath. “The bad jokes. The puns. The limericks. The riddles. Sure, people complained about all that. And the belches. And the farts.”

  Chuckles gusted across the auditorium.

  “Yeah, I said the word,” Dave went on. A grin replaced his somber expression. “At a funeral. I said the word farts. You see, I wanted Mickey to be this annoying, irritating guy. So people could focus on how irked they were instead of focusing on the fact that the earth where we lived for so many centuries is dying right below us.” The grin vanished. “Yeah. That was the idea. Because it can seem pretty bleak sometimes, you know. Pretty dark. We had to leave our own friggin’ planet. And now we’re trapped up here. We’re like kids on a homemade raft. It seems like a really cool adventure, right? Good times? But the truth is, unlike those kids on that raft, we can’t go back home. We don’t have a home. Not anymore. So here we are.”

  The crowd began to grow restless. Violet heard mutterings, the shifting of feet, some chain-reaction throat-clearings, a few random, perplexed hmmmms. They’d come here for a robot funeral, not a political lecture.

  “Dumb-Ass Dave strikes again,” Rez muttered.

  Violet smacked his arm.

  “Okay, I get it,” Dave said. He took a long, sad look at the silver tube beside him. “Mickey. What a guy. I had to make his jokes really bad so that everybody could get them. They couldn’t be cynical or sarcastic. They had to be the cheapest, lowest, rudest jokes you could think of.” He squared his shoulders. “His first job was in the cyclotron over in Franklinton. They loved him there. Right, guys?” He looked down at a gathering of older-model robots in the first row. They buzzed and chirped. “Yeah. I know. When the knock-knock jokes got out of hand, that’s when I knew Mickey was a hit.”

  Dave paused. “A few months ago, I heard that Mickey had been sent to repurposing. He had some issues. His CPU was getting up there in years. I was hoping he could maybe become a swing set or some climbing bars. He loved kids. But it turns out”—Dave’s face darkened—“somebody grabbed him from the recycle bin and used him for a while. That’s when he got the name Mickey. Well, something happened to him. I don’t know what it was. It’s all a big secret, I guess. But whatever it was, I’m sure he was trying to help somebody. Because that’s the kind of robot he was.”

  One more look at the silver tube. “Godspeed, buddy,” Dave said. “Do you remember the joke you used to tell about Old Earth cemeteries? ‘People are just dying to get in there.’ Well, you don’t have to worry about that; you won’t go to any cemetery. They’re going to make you into something useful. Count on it.” Dave raised his right arm in a brief wave. Then he shuffled off the stage.

  And with that, Mickey’s time as an AstroRob had come to an end. However he might be used next—as the undercarriage of a tram car, or a component in one of the wind turbines that powered New Earth, or a part of the framework of a Uni or console—the job would not include consciousness, because the hardware required for artificial consciousness had been destroyed by the fire and could not be repurposed. Robots, like people, were given one life.

  Whatever he was now, he wasn’t Mickey anymore.

  * * *

  Violet stepped to one side of the lobby. Now that the service was over, a great wedge of mourners swept past, a mix of humans and robots funneled toward the big double doors, but she didn’t want to leave quite so quickly. She needed a moment to think about Mickey, here in this place where he’d worked, here where his bad jokes and silly sound effects still seemed to reverberate.

  She felt a hand on her elbow. She turned.

  Kendall.

  “Oh, hey,” she said. “Pretty crowded, right? Mickey would’ve loved it.”

  “Got a minute to talk?”

  He led her outside and down the stone steps and into the courtyard on one side of the observatory. In the center of the courtyard was a mobile statue. It was a holographic projection of Carl Sagan holding a book and pointing at the sky. Every few minutes, the image shifted, and Sagan was reading the book, or writing in it, or handing it to a small child.

  “Is everything okay?” Violet asked. “I mean, I know we just came from a funeral and all, but you look a little grim.”

  Kendall didn’t answer. He seemed to have something very important to say to her—so important that he couldn’t find a way to begin.

  When he did speak, it came slowly at first. “Sitting there, listening to Dave Parkhurst talk about Mickey, I just—” He stopped.

  “What is it, Kendall? What’s wrong?”

  In a rush, he said, “Life’s uncertain. For everybody. Even robots. And I just started remembering how much I love you. I know things didn’t start out right between us—I had to lie to you, and I know how much that hurt you—but now, well, here we are.” He looked into her eyes. “Do you think there’s any chance that you and I could ever be together again? As more than friends, I mean.”

  Not this again.

  “Oh, Kendall.” She hoped he would glean her answer from the way she said his name. She said it with affection, yes, but not that kind of affection. Not romantic passion. She loved him, but they would never be lovers. She just didn’t feel that way about him. She had once, but not now. She didn’t know where the passion had gone, any more than she knew where Mickey’s spirit had fled.

  The universe, she reflected, abounded in mysteries large and small and in between.

  “Okay,” he said. He understood.
The hopefulness in his face had melted away. There was sadness in his eyes.

  Knowing she was the reason for that sadness deeply distressed Violet, but there was nothing she could do about it. Not unless she was willing to lie and pretend. And she wasn’t.

  Even if it meant she was alone forever, she wouldn’t do that.

  “I guess we’d better go,” she said. “Catch up with the others. Shura wants to take everybody to lunch and then get back to the lab and pick up the pieces and figure out how to go forward.”

  “Yeah.” Kendall glanced at his console. She could sense his discomfort, his desire to be anywhere but next to her. “Actually, I need to get back to the station. Tell Shura thanks, though. See you later. At the lab.” And then he was gone, ducking through the throng of robots and people.

  He wouldn’t ask her again. She was certain of it. He had given it his best shot, and she had turned him down, and that was that.

  Violet caught one last glimpse of him through a brief break in the shifting, murmuring multitude as he strode across the plaza in that purposeful way he had, head down, hands thrust in his tunic pockets. She remembered how many times she’d watched him cross the courtyard in front of Protocol Hall, back when she was in love with him. She could never have envisioned a time when the sight of Kendall Mayhew did not make her shiver all over, dreaming of his touch, of his kiss.

  But that time had come.

  Feelings changed. They were, she thought, like lightning in the summer dusk—real lightning, that is, like the kind on Old Earth that her father had told her about, not the artificial kind manufactured by the Environmental Control Center and slotted into the sky at regular intervals.

  Feelings were like lightning that comes from out of nowhere, flashing and crashing and illuminating the sky for a brief moment and then disappearing, and all the wishing in the world couldn’t bring them back again.