Robot Uprisings

by Daniel H. Wilson

  The truth was, I did feel like I’d gotten something from Dad, not inherited but learned. We were the same—our sense of humor, the way we talked (Nate still made fun of my British “either”), the way we wanted to sit and work on problems and not be distracted by anything. After he died, I wouldn’t let Mom hug me for weeks; it just reminded me of how alone I was.

  Mom gave me a kiss on the forehead as she left.

  “Lay down and rest,” she said.

  I was already lying down—what she’d said was a family catchphrase. When we were little, Mom used to sing us a song that Grandpa had sung to her after her mom died:

  Lullaby and good night,

  Go to bed and sleep tight.

  Close your eyes, start to yawn.

  Pleasant dreams until dawn.

  Lay you down now and rest,

  May your slumber be blessed.

  Lay you down now and rest,

  May your slumber be blessed.

  We were too old for singing now, but Mom still quoted from the song like her dad had done, a way of telling us we were safe and she was taking care of everything. I rolled over; I didn’t like those words anymore.

  After she left, I lay in bed with my mobile, looking out the window. The houses across the street looked like Grandpa’s house: old and boring. I imagined families of old people playing checkers in them—old mom, old dad, old kids with prematurely gray hair on their tiny heads. I set my mobile on the windowsill while it loaded the networks in the area.

  The sill was covered in silvery dust. I swiped my finger through it—coarser than baby powder, finer than sand, with a faint metallic smell. Old-house dandruff, I thought. The mobile buzzed and I could see ten private networks in addition to the public WiFi.

  I picked one at random—LopezFamily. I opened up the password-guesser app I’d built with my friends from the Vandals’ Forum. It wasn’t good enough yet for government or banking environments, but it could usually crack a private network, especially a small one. And it got better the more situations you tried it on, so I was excited to put it to work on a whole new set of networks—a tiny upside to moving. I typed in some of the specs of LopezFamily (residential, North America, English, possibly Spanish), and it got me in with about seventy seconds of waiting—a little longer than usual, but still pretty good. I poked around a bit on the Lopezes’ computers, but they didn’t have anything interesting—I ended up mirroring their TV screen just because I could—watching old episodes of The Twilight Zone with them until I fell asleep.

  “I heard someone got murdered there,” said Matilda, ashing her cigarette.

  My old school in the New Cities was three floors of a high-rise, and at lunch my friends had gone down to the loading dock to smoke. So my first lunchtime at Sunnybrook High School, I followed the smell of cigarettes. The kids I found smoking behind the band room looked a little less cool than my friends back home, and they mostly ignored me until they found out where I lived.

  “I heard a serial killer lived there and buried all his victims in the walls,” said Lucy, rubbing her black-rimmed eyes.

  “That’s John Wayne Gacy,” I said. “Nobody was murdered there. It was my grandpa’s house. He died before I was born.”

  “Your grandpa was Edward Spiner?” asked Matilda.

  “How do you know about Edward Spiner?” I asked.

  I was always careful talking about my grandpa with strangers. Robots made some people angry, even thirty years after the Wars.

  “He was a world-famous roboticist who came from our town,” she said. “Of course I know about him.”

  Lucy stubbed out her cigarette.

  “Your grandpa was a roboticist?” she asked. “Isn’t that basically like being a Nazi?”

  I started into the speech I’d heard Mom give hundreds of times.

  “He really regretted what happened with his work. The robots he invented were supposed to help people.”

  Matilda rolled her eyes.

  “Whatever,” she said. “I bet the ghosts of all the people who died in the Wars are still haunting that creepy old house.”

  “It’s not haunted,” I said. “It’s totally normal. Actually, it’s nice.”

  I couldn’t believe I was defending the house I’d never wanted to move into, but I couldn’t let Matilda’s dumb idea go unchallenged. My dad always said that ghosts were a silly superstition, and that what went on in the real world was much more interesting anyway.

  “Yeah?” asked Lucy. “Then how come the renters left?”

  “There were no renters,” I said. “It’s just been empty since he died.”

  Lucy shook her head.

  “A family lived in that house like five years ago. The boy was in my sister’s class. They stayed like two months and the man left and never came back. The boy said the house was haunted. He said the ghosts turned the lights on and off.”

  “Scary,” I said. I wasn’t impressed.

  “He said the ghosts locked the doors so they were trapped inside.”

  The bell rang. At my old school I routinely got detention for coming back late from lunch. But now I was ready to get back to class.

  “That sounds like bullshit,” I said.

  “Did you rent the house out after Grandpa died?” I asked Mom.

  We were eating pizza off paper plates, the boxes of our kitchen still stacked around us. Nate was taking all the olives off his slice and leaving them in a greasy pile.

  “For a little while,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “People at school were talking about it,” I told her. “They said the house was haunted.”

  Nate perked up.

  “Is that true, Mom?” he asked. “Are there ghosts?”

  Nate had believed in Santa until he was nine, and I had to tell him the truth so he wouldn’t get made fun of. Now, at eleven, he was convinced that dinosaurs still existed, concealed in top secret government labs.

  “No, Nate, there are no ghosts.” Mom looked at me sharply. “The renters found a better deal on another house. They just made up that crazy story so they could break their lease.”

  “And you let them?” I asked.

  Mom sighed and took a bite of pizza.

  “If they were willing to make up ghost stories,” she said, “I thought they might trash the house next. Or just stop paying. After that, we decided renting it out was just too much trouble.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I was glad to have a normal story to show Lucy and Matilda I wasn’t living in a haunted house. But I must not have seemed convinced to Mom.

  “Sweetie,” she said, “this is a good place. I really want you to feel at home here.”

  I wanted to explain that you can’t just tell someone to feel at home somewhere and expect them to do it. Instead I said, “It’s nice,” and threw my empty pizza plate in the trash.

  Upstairs, I started unpacking. I had more space in the new room, but the photo collage of all my friends from the New Cities looked lonely on the empty wall.

  I noticed the dust was gone from the windowsill; Mom must’ve swept when she came home from work. It was sad how much she wanted me to like this place, like it was going to make up for everything.

  I didn’t stay up late, but in the morning I was incredibly tired. My legs were heavy; my eyeballs throbbed. I reached out to shut off my alarm, but it hadn’t gone off. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock: 3:00 a.m. Out the window, the sky was black. But under the glare of the overhead light fixture, the room was morning-bright.

  I must’ve fallen asleep with the light on, I thought. But when I got up and flipped the switch, it wouldn’t turn off. I flipped it again, toggled it back and forth, but the light burned on.

  I thought about the renters. I wasn’t scared, but I was curious. I left the room and walked down the hallway, stepping softly so I wouldn’t wake Mom or Nate. Their rooms were dark. The hallway itself was dark. The doorway to my room was a bright hole in the black.

  In the do
wnstairs bathroom I flicked the light on and off and on again easily. My face in the mirror was still puffy with sleep.

  The kitchen smelled like pizza and the organic cleaning spray Mom always used, even though it didn’t really get things clean. I didn’t know my way around yet; I felt along the wall for the light, but my hands met only cold tile. Then, noiselessly, as my fingers searched the grout, the light came on. The light switch was all the way across the room. I stood for a second completely frozen. A baby cockroach skittered out of the trash. I listened for movement and heard only the wind. I thought of our kitchen knives, still packed away in boxes. I crossed the kitchen floor, all my muscles tensed against one another. I reached out for the light switch. But before I could flip it, the room went dark again, sudden as a punch, and I raced back up the stairs and into my room—dark now too—and pulled the covers over my head.

  “I never thought you’d be the one worrying about ghosts,” said Mom.

  The overhead light shone innocently in the morning kitchen. Mom was setting up the coffeemaker.

  “I’m not worried about ghosts,” I said. “It was just weird. Did anything like this happen when you were a kid?”

  Mom reached out and tucked a curl of hair behind my ear.

  “Yes, sweetie,” she said. “After my mom died, I was always waking up in the middle of the night. I thought if she could be gone then anything can happen. And of course after your dad died—you know for months I’d sneak into your room at night to make sure you were still breathing?”

  I hadn’t known that. After Dad died I was so silent for so long that Mom almost stopped trying to talk to me.

  “That’s not the same, Mom,” was all I said.

  “I’m just saying the world can seem like a scary place. But we have each other, and we’re going to keep each other safe. I promise.”

  I wondered if her dad had said the same, and if it seemed as hollow to her as it did to me.

  The next night I didn’t sleep. I turned the light off and hid under the covers playing games on my mobile, waiting. For hours I twitched at every sound, but each creak and rumble melted back into the night. Around two thirty, though, something changed in the quality of the dark. I looked around the room—the little red light of the burglar alarm had gone out. I waited, listening. Then I went downstairs.

  The hall, the stairway, and the dining room were dark. But in the kitchen, all four coils of the electric stove blazed red-hot in the black. I turned the knob, but they were already set to OFF. The air all around the stove was hot and smelled like metal. A panic seemed to come into my body from outside, like when a tornado came to the New Cities and the sky was low and green, and the wind smelled like ozone.

  Then the kitchen faucet turned on, all by itself, emitting a thick stream of water like someone was doing dishes, but no one was there. Before I could try to turn it off, I heard a crisp mechanical click and raced to the front door. Nothing I did to the knob or the deadbolt would open it; the automatic lock held it in place. I punched at the central control panel in the front hall; still nothing.

  I ran to the back, threw the bolt, and plunged out of the house. In the backyard I turned back to look, and all the lights in the whole house flashed once, then went dark.

  I ran. The yard turned to brambles, then to trees, and I plunged through them, tearing my sweats and skin on thorns and branches, panting, racing on.

  Where the woods broke open into someone else’s backyard, I stopped and dropped to my knees. My legs were scratched and my lungs were ragged; in the New Cities I never had to run. I could hear dogs barking in the neighbors’ houses; they must’ve seen ours light up like it was on fire. And it might be; if the stove stayed on, it might set all the cardboard and newspaper in the kitchen ablaze. And if the house could lock its own door, what could it do to my mom and brother still sleeping inside? I took three deep, preparatory breaths and ran as fast as I could on my wobbly legs back through the gnarled trees and the thick bushes I didn’t want to learn the names of, back through our silent backyard, back through the door and into the horrible house.

  The stove was off; the faucet was off. The kitchen was dark. I unbolted the front door and it swung open easily. I ran up the stairs and shook Mom awake.

  “Tessa,” she said, rubbing her eyes and blinking, “why are you crying?”

  “These kinds of night terrors are very common,” said the therapist, “especially in people your age.”

  She was old and soft-looking, and I thought I would like her if I weren’t so mad at my mom for making me see her.

  “They aren’t night terrors,” I said. “I’m not an idiot. I can tell when I’m dreaming.”

  “The dreams can feel incredibly real. And sleepwalking is a common feature also.”

  “I’ve never sleepwalked in my life,” I said.

  The therapist nodded. She had a way of looking calm and accepting even when she was about to contradict me.

  “We often see symptoms begin in times of stress, and you’ve been dealing with a lot lately. You’re still coping with the loss of a parent, and you just moved into the house where your grandfather passed away.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “It’s not like he died in the house,” I said.

  The therapist opened her mouth and shut it. Her face looked less warm and more careful.

  “Well, that’s something you can discuss with your mom.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Do you think he actually died there?”

  “It was such a long time ago,” she said, looking at the clock. “Your mom is really the person to talk to.”

  “Did you know him?” I asked.

  She was old enough. I realized I’d never talked to anyone who knew my grandfather, except my mom and dad.

  “He was a lovely man,” said the therapist. “The way everyone here treated him was just terrible.”

  “Where did Grandpa die?” I asked Mom.

  She was driving me back from therapy. The leaves were turning; the town looked golden in the autumn light. I hated it. In the New Cities, fall meant sneaking into Halloween parties at the clubs downtown when we were supposed to be studying. I never had to stop long enough there to think about anything I didn’t want to.

  “Oh, honey,” said Mom. “Do you really want to talk about this now?”

  “Where did he die, Mom? Did he die in the house?”

  When she was sad, Mom sometimes made her voice very dry and matter-of-fact. I think she thought it would comfort us, by hiding her feelings, but I always found it much scarier than tears.

  “He died in the bathroom of the house,” she said. “He was about to take a shower.”

  “And how did he die?”

  “He had a heart attack.”

  Still that dry voice. I wondered if she’d learned it from him.

  “Are you sure? Did they do an autopsy?”

  “There were two coroners,” she said. “One of them said he had a heart attack.”

  “And the other?”

  We had reached the driveway. Mom was still looking straight ahead.

  “She thought there were signs of electrocution. We had all the wiring checked, but there were no shorts or anything. I don’t think he was electrocuted. She was really young; I don’t think she knew what she was talking about.”

  I thought of the stove, glowing in the night.

  “What was he working on when he died?”

  Mom’s voice softened a little. She gripped the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, something we both did when we were tired.

  “Oh, he was always puttering around, making computer simulations. But after the Wars he could never build anything. It was illegal.”

  “What was he simulating?”

  “Microbots,” she said. “Tiny little robots that would work together to do tasks. He thought if he could make robots really small, they’d be safe again.”

  “What would those look like, if he had made them?”

&nb
sp; “Like nothing, probably. Or maybe like really fine dust.”

  I walked her through the whole house, trying to explain. But the dust was gone from the floor and the windowsill, the doors swung easily open and shut, and the stove remained obediently off until we turned the dial.

  “See,” said Mom, like I was a little kid she was trying to reassure, “everything’s safe.”

  “It’s not safe. Don’t you get it? This house killed Grandpa.”

  Just then the new carpool dropped Nate off from soccer practice. He came running in, smelling like grass and kid sweat.

  “What?” he asked, looking at our faces. “What happened?”

  “Your sister and I are just having a discussion,” said Mom. “Nate, why don’t you go take a shower and change your clothes before dinner.”

  “Are you having a fight?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No,” said Mom, drowning me out. “We’re just talking about a female issue.”

  “Ew ew ew,” Nate yelled, clapping his hands over his ears and running up the stairs to keep from hearing about periods.

  I rolled my eyes at my mom’s cheap trick.

  “Sweetie,” she said, “I know this move has been hard for you. But we’re here now, and I need your help. For Nate, but also just for me. I need to feel like you’re behind me.”

  “I’m trying to keep us from getting killed,” I said. “How can I be more behind you than that?”

  Mom sighed. Orange light filtered in through the kitchen windows now, turning the sink and fridge autumn gold. The stove slept ominously in the corner. I shut my eyes. I could feel something crawling below the surface of everything, smarter and more dangerous than bugs.

  “At the end of his life,” said Mom, “my dad went a little crazy. He thought all kinds of people were after him. He was taking three different antipsychotic drugs. His hands shook constantly. He could barely make his own breakfast, let alone microscopic robots.”

  “So, what—you think I’m crazy too? You think I got it from him?”

  My voice came out of my throat so harsh and nasty that it shocked me. Mom’s eyes went bright with tears.