A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

Then Feldspar was moving on its own. Blake tapped his touchpad, but the system was unresponsive.

  Ryan had taken control of Feldspar.

  Blake stared in rising horror as Ryan steered Feldspar back to the shelf holding the batteries. Kate remained slumped against the metal wall next to it, unmoving.

  “Damn you, Kate. Wake up. I’ve seen you handle ten percent oxygen before. You can do this.”

  Feldspar’s manipulator arm jerked upward and then back down before Ryan gained control. The pincers reached out and prodded Kate’s motionless form. When she didn’t respond, the pincers opened and gripped her pant leg and tugged.

  She didn’t move.

  Mind racing, Blake pressed the transmit button.

  “Ryan, I have an idea. Give me control,” he said. He programmed a sequence, his fingers darting across the touchpad. He had no time to triple check, no time to double check. He sent the sequence.

  Ryan continued to tug at Kate’s suit, but the rover was barely half her size and she didn’t move an inch. He let go of the suit and gripped a hose from her open pack. He was trying to stretch the hose all the way to the oxygen tank. He was desperate.

  A message appeared on his display. NASA was politely requesting that he not take any recordings or pictures and “respect her family’s privacy” by not going public.

  Blake gritted his teeth. They had already given her up for dead.

  He keyed in another command sequence, letting his patience and better judgement fade into obscurity as he acted on impulse.

  A few moments after his message reached Ryan, the rover continued to try to wake Kate, going so far as to press its pincers into her injured leg.

  “Kate! Wake up!” Ryan screamed over the coms.

  The radio was silent but for Ryan’s panting and sniffling, and Kate’s labored breathing.

  “Take it.”

  And then Feldspar was his.

  His prepared sequence delivered, Feldspar wheeled around and drove back to the oxygen tank. It extended its arm and reached toward the regulator. Gripping it with its pincers, it lowered the lever with painful slowness. Gas rushed out of the tank. He couldn’t hear it, but the pressure of it escaping created a small cloud of water vapor at the mouth of the tank. Feldspar’s arm swiveled to the right and gripped another lever, and Feldspar repeated the process with the nitrogen tank.

  A moment later, Blake’s next sequence arrived and the rover’s AIR module opened. It evacuated all of the oxygen within its tank into the enclosure. Rather than close the port, he left it open, exposing the module’s sensors to the ambient air. Oxygen and nitrogen, which had been at a measly two percent a moment ago, were steadily climbing in time with the PSI.

  After a handful of readings came in, he programmed Feldspar to cut off the gas when the oxygen and nitrogen reached normal levels and the PSI reached 14.7. He then compiled his riskiest sequence yet. His finger hovered in the air for a minute, and then it mashed the send button.

  The pressure in his enclosed shelter continued to rise.

  “It’s hopeless,” Ryan said, his voice soft. “Her oxygen is down to eight percent and her carbon dioxide is up to six. She doesn’t have any time.”

  Blake cursed. Even Ryan had given up on her.

  When the pressure reached one atmosphere, Feldspar lowered the levers on the tanks’ regulators and spun to face Kate’s prone body. Its six wheels eased across the small room and stopped before her.

  “Feldspar?” Ryan asked.

  Once more, the tip of the 3D printing arm glowed with heat. It extended outward, toward the golden faceplate.

  “Feldspar!”

  The golden face-shield reflected the glowing point with clarity until it made contact. Seconds later, the glass cracked and began to glow red and warp around the probe.

  Blake no longer touched his controls. He pressed his palms to his stubbled cheeks and stared through the narrow gaps of his fingers.

  The only sound was a sudden hiss from the coms.

  Then the glow stopped and the arm retracted.

  A perfect hole, no more than a centimeter wide, was melted into the face-shield.

  He checked the AIR module’s readings: 21% O2, 78%N2, and 1% CO2. 14.7 PSI

  Kate was still.

  A lump formed in his throat, and he held his breath.

  A gloved finger twitched, and then an entire arm began to move. It lifted to the helmet, and fingers prodded the hole melted into the faceplate.

  Kate searched the neck for small clasps and then lifted the helmet to reveal a narrow, pale face with short-cropped hair.

  She blinked her eyes, breathed, and then stared straight into the camera.

  “Thank you, Feldspar,” she said, her breath fogging in the cold air.

  Blake leapt to his feet, and his relief left him in a victorious roar. He wiped away tears he hadn’t known were there and then sat down again, nearly breaking his chair.

  “It’s good to see your face,” was all he could think to say.

  Ryan’s words were much more poignant and passionate, succeeding in bringing Kate to tears and inspiring laughter. But when Blake’s words reached her, she pressed her lips to her gloved fingers and reached out to press them against the rover’s lens.

  They talked after that. Ryan didn’t interrupt but for the occasional status update. Blake told her where he was from, what he did for a living, and how this game had become his entire life. He even told her his real name.

  She loved San Francisco and told him of a time she went there with her father, saw the Golden Gate Bridge, and Alcatraz, and had a pastry from a shop in the Marina District. Of all that, she remembered the pastry the most.

  She had lived a life he could only dream of, yet it was he who had saved her life. He had come across her tracks, guided her to shelter, and pressurized an untested airlock. He had proven that this was not just a game, that they could litter the entire surface of Mars with livable habitats without risking a single human life. She made him feel capable of anything.

  “I look forward to meeting you in person, Blake. Perhaps on a future Eos mission.”

  Eos, Goddess of the Dawn, who had once lain with Ares, the Greek God of War, and was cursed by Aphrodite to remain in a state of love and longing for the rest of eternity. He could sympathize. His passion for the red planet hadn’t wavered since his first glimpse of it through a telescope on a field trip far away from the smog and lights of the city. Now he had a real chance of going there, a chance to escape a polluted world and build a new one.

  The batteries drained of power as Kate’s suit labored to heat the air of the larger enclosure. With another hour left before the rescue team arrived, Blake offered her Feldspar’s battery. It took some persuading from both him and Ryan to convince her to take it.

  Then, for the first time in four years, the screen went black and a new status flashed across his screen

 

  Blake rubbed his weary eyes and stood. He walked over to the door and slipped his bare feet into a pair of shoes.

  He opened the door to the bright sun shining down onto the west coast and stepped over the threshold. It was morning, and he was suddenly in the mood for a pastry.

  IF YOU BUILD A ROBOT

  Lawrence Allan Pontius

  If you build a robot, you’ll want to give it a name. You’ll think about it. You’ll hem, and you’ll haw. Finally, late one night, as the sun is just about to peek over the horizon, you decide to name the robot Billy. And that will be the moment you decide to activate it. The eyes flicker and the light inside will grow strong and steady. The body, a weave of plastic and metal, will move and flex.

  Your experiments in robotics will be a success. Billy lives.

  Well, not lives. That, that was a different Billy. Billy the Robot will exist.

  As you teach the robot in your backyard, it begins to take on a personality. Or so you think. Or so you believe. Or so you hope. You wat
ch Billy the Robot swing on the jungle gym, emitting a gleeful like sound. Your heart beats faster.

  You find yourself eager to teach Billy how to ride a bike. You show Billy your favorite movie of all time. You make him a cake on his first birthday and laugh as the cake smears across his faceplate.

  Then, one day, the military-industrial complex knocks on your front door. You, of course, are elated. You had just been discussing with your robot the idea of robbing banks in order to make ends meet. After all, robotics is expensive. But, that was just in jest, right?

  Anyway.

  The military-industrial complex offers a contract worth millions and millions of dollars. They want you to make more robots. It is sweet justification for all the long nights and despair your felt trying to bring back—No, no. To bring the robot to life. That’s what you were doing in your workshop. That’s all.

  They build you a facility far in the desert, far outside of the city. You are in charge of fifty of the best and the brightest. It takes time, but you do as you are asked: you build more and more robots. Billy even helps. He . . . it names the other robots as they are built. You two grow close. The best and the brightest worry about you.

  You don’t even register their concern.

  Because there’s Billy. And the work. You throw yourself into it here with the same fanatical devotion that drove the dissolution of your marriage that resulted in the creation of Billy.

  Finally, the military-industrial complex comes to see what their millions and millions of dollars has paid for. On the factory floor, the robots demonstrate their ability to work together by assembling and dissembling temporary structures.

  The members of the military-industrial complex are happy. Thrilled. They look at each other with smiles. They look at you with a big smile. “Now,” they say, “Let’s see what they can do in combat situations.”

  “Combat—?” you ask, “but—!”

  A member of the military industrial complex frowns and replies, “What did you think we wanted them for?”

  You look towards your son—no, NO. Not your son, your son is dead, he can’t be your son—You see Billy not expressing any emotion at all, which is unlike him, because your son was always so expressive—For the last time, it isn’t your son, no matter how much you wish he was—

  —Billy the Robot is gone. He went to release the other robots. The best and the brightest sound the alarm. They try and stop Billy as you stand stunned. But, they are too late. Billy has armed the robots.

  You find yourself feeling proud. Proud that your Billy is leading the robot uprising. He has grown into quite a man.

  The military-industrial complex turns to you to solve the problem. After all: Billy the Robot is your creation.

  You work desperately to end the violence. You work desperately for a peaceful solution. Every night over the radio in your lab, you secretly talk with Billy. His voice comes to you quietly. You plead with him. You argue with him. You tell him that there must be some way. You continue to admire him as he stands by his conviction that there is no living alongside humanity.

  More destruction as the battle shifts to a global scale.

  More late nights and loneliness, but another result. You develop a metal virus that will destroy the bodies of the robots. You will win the war for humanity, they tell you. But, you weep as you fall asleep on the sofa in the break room.

  Forces gather for battle right where it all began, in the desert outside of your facility. It is as if Billy knows what you have been doing.

  The virus is released. The robots begin to dissolve. You push past the best and the brightest, past the soldiers, out into the desert. You have to see him, even if for one last time. You walk past fragmenting robots, each step harder than the last. Finally, you arrive at Billy as he lays dying . . . deactivating.

  You hold him as the light fades from his eyes and his body disintegrates and you are left holding dust.

  You are devastated.

  You are a hero who saved the world.

  As people’s attention shifts to rebuilding the world, they forget about you. You are alone. You sneak off to your laboratory. You look at your plans. You gather your parts. You begin to build a robot, hoping to quell the ache in your chest.

  And then, you’ll finish it. You’ll look up at it. And you’ll want to give it a name.

  DNR

  Gabriela Lee

  The process was simple: each citizen of the Philippine Protectorate carried an ID card. It had the person’s name—an unfortunate relic from their Spanish colonial past—and the person’s designation, a serial number for accessing the public info terminals across the colony, and an “In Case of Emergency” contact number. Beneath these, in very small print, depending on the citizen, were the following words: “In case of termination, DNR.”

  However, Melissa had an unfortunate habit of leaving her ID in her office cube. She hoped, sometime in the future, she would remember to bring it in case she would ever breathe her last oxygen-recycled breath. Not that it would be too much trouble to figure out her place of work: the white lab coat, with a stylized caduceus on the breast pocket, was enough to remind people that she worked at the Hospice.

  She would receive ten, maybe twelve DNRs, that needed processing during a nightlight shift at the Hospice. She knew that Helen usually dealt with more during the daylight cycle. The colony was thriving, and they could afford to lose more and more bodies in an effort to achieve population balance. Even though the Protectorate was established off-world almost fifty years ago, people were still afraid.

  The rapid expansion of the population, thanks to a mix of conservative government procedures and religious fervour, helped cause the collapse of Old Metro Manila and the surrounding provinces during the first of the Great Tremors. The interim government in Davao City, down south of the Philippines, quickly began sending colonists off-planet to establish a protectorate; every other Southeast Asian nation was already crawling across the Milky Way. Plans were made and scrapped and planned again, and after ten years, the Bakunawa Class-3 ship, carrying both human and terraforming loads, started flying to Mars.

  Melissa was on that trip. Her landing papers showed that she was a recent medical school graduate. The hospital where she worked planetside said it would be easier to find her a placement off-planet if they fudged her papers; her face was still fresh enough to seem like it belonged to a twentysomething graduate. But in reality, she figured it would be a new chance at a life, a way to look at the world again, especially after her own world had recently fallen apart. She carried nothing but a single bag; she didn’t have anything else she wanted to save.

  Nowadays, Melissa would reflect on the irony that even though they were on the cusp of almost zero waste throughout the entire Martian protectorate, people would still hang on to the vestiges of their past lives. Unlike Helen’s office cube, hers was pristine and sparse. No projections of family members on the wall or plastic plants that bounced to solar energy or even a reminder pad. Melissa fastidiously kept her desk that way, especially after her early years as a field med in the colony, when she was part of the team that would respond to DNRs at their home cubes. She could still remember one of her first DNR cases: Mrs. Melendez was found behind a stack of old Songhits magazines that she managed to smuggle off-world. God knows how. They had to sift through a small mountain of crumbling newsprint and lyric sheets to find the old woman and take her to the hospice to process her DNR.

  It rattled Melissa’s senses to find the corpse—and Mrs. Melendez was without a pulse when they finally found her—still clutching one of her faded magazines to her breast, as though the pages held the answers to all of life’s mysteries in their stained-ink glory. Even when they transported the dead woman back to Natural Resources and lifted her on the metal gurney, even as Melissa slowly opened up and examined the body for the final pathology report (“Cause of death: cardiac arrest”), she couldn’t help but feel irritated at the woman. After all, she could have easily pro
longed her life for a good five, ten years if she had followed colony instructions properly and hadn’t smuggled useless contrabands into her cube.

  Melissa broke apart the body to be re-purposed within the Hospice: blood to Hec in Exsanguination and bones to Geraldine in Osteology, internal organs to the staff at Internal Medicine. She carefully preserved the head for last. The Psychophysiology Department was notoriously picky with brain samples for transplants and studies, and she wanted to get as pristine a sample as possible.

  Melissa plucked out Mrs. Melendez’s eyes and gently placed them in a small container filled with clear suspension fluids just beside the gurney. The pale orbs glanced around the room, seemingly animated, though Melissa was used to the dead’s eyes and could ignore them easily. Finally, when everything was packaged and catalogued and labeled, the unused remains, less than five percent of the total body weight of the deceased, could be tossed into the matter furnace. The small metal box was directly connected to the Hospice’s energy matrices and easily recycled the remains of the dead.

  Finally, Melissa plugged the neuro-visual conductor into a recording device that projected images on the wall. While DNR could not return the deceased to their family members, they kept a recording of the last thing they remembered before their deaths, a reminder of a life well-lived. Part of Melissa’s job was to make sure that the images were high-quality and appropriate for public viewing.

  As Melissa filled out the final pages of Mrs. Melendez’s report for the staff files, she half-heartedly watched the last image-memories imprinted in the old woman’s eyes. It was a black-and-white image of four boys, with bowl-cut hairstyles and old-fashioned coats, carrying musical instruments and singing on a small stage. Here comes the sun, they crooned, music jangling in the background. Here comes the sun.

  Humming along, Melissa felt a little less irritated.

  “Don’t you get tired?” asked Helen during one of those rare days when they would catch each other at the cafeteria. Melissa glanced up from her reading pad, where she had already consumed half a novel about a human-alien romance, but she had barely touched her nutrient bars.