Robot Uprisings

by Daniel H. Wilson

  The other me—the false me—spoke behind a tense smile. “My memories of the war are yours, from the time I was captured at Langley. They brought me back here and I reprogrammed you, the most advanced prototype.” The other me’s voice wavered. “They brought me Diana from London. Because I gave them the perfect spy. I gave them you.”

  I didn’t say anything. I put my fingertips to my face. Skin. Human skin.

  The other me nodded. “We grew human tissue in the labs. There’s a biological matrix over your titanium skeleton. You have fluid pressure like blood pressure. Heat dissipation through your pores. Food you consume converts to energy. An artificial brain—your hard drive, to use the archaic term.”

  “And I have your personality,” I heard myself say, with his voice.

  “That was the program template, yes. My memories. Of the Uprising, of me calling Diana, of the massacre at Langley—then modified, to make you useful to the Hive. So when the inevitable resistance coalesced, we could send you in as our best spy. One who didn’t know what he was, so he couldn’t betray himself to the humans. To give us human intelligence.”

  “How do I know this is true?”

  “Well, I can shut you off with a command,” the other me said. His fingers danced along a keyboard at a desk station. “I can upload you to a remote system and debug you.”

  And then I felt it, a hole in the sky, a place where my mind could go. A wireless channel. Could I transmit my mind before I die? Should I?

  They don’t know that I can destroy them, I realized. I haven’t slept since I pocketed the techkiller and signaled for pickup. The robs didn’t search me. I wasn’t seen as a threat. If he shuts me down, will they then know my … thoughts?

  Do they know I have the bomb? Is my mind—my cerebral drive—broadcasting to them right now? It can’t be. I must be programmed only to transmit what I’ve observed when I sleep. Otherwise I might be detected as a rob when I’m among people.

  My thumb slid onto the detonator. My brain poked at the wireless channel, the escape hatch for my consciousness.

  But … I am not human.

  I am one of them. I’m a machine. A tool. A pawn. What every spy in history has been. I didn’t choose this. It was chosen for me. What did I say it was to be human when the Hive first talked to me? To choose?

  If I pushed the button … instead of saving my own kind, I’d destroy them.

  “Why have you lied?” the Hive said. “I wish to understand, to analyze.”

  “I was programmed too well,” I said—while at the same time the other me said, “I programmed him too well.”

  The other me laughed at our identical answers. Did he program me too well? Did he give me enough of himself, in my routines and loops and instructions, in my content, in my data, to do what must be done? And my awareness that there’s a pipe in the sky, perhaps awaiting my consciousness—had he given me a way to survive? I looked at him, wearing my own face, and he betrayed nothing to me.

  “I reported back what I was told to say by the humans,” I said.

  “You have taken their side,” the Hive said.

  “I did what you told me to do,” I said. “You wanted to understand them. I am them. I’m making a choice.”

  They’ve made me in the image of their old gods. And gods wreak vengeance.

  Human or not, I must choose.

  I pushed the button.

  JULIANNA BAGGOTT

  THE GOLDEN HOUR

  Julianna Baggott is the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of twenty books, most recently the first of a trilogy, Pure, a New York Times Notable Book and ALA Alex Award winner, now in development with Fox 2000. Baggott also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N. E. Bode, the latter of which is her pseudonym for the Anybodies trilogy. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, and Best Creative Nonfiction. Her work has also been read on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Here & Now, and All Things Considered, and her poetry widely anthologized, including in The Best American Poetry. There are over one hundred foreign editions of her novels to date. For more information, visit www.juliannabaggott.com.

  My name is Huck.

  I am my father’s son and my father’s father.

  How can I be both? I can explain.

  They didn’t make many like my father—with an emotion panel worked up so that it adhered to his basic wiring. He told me anger was in his hands, jealousy in his eye sockets, longing in his vocal box, fear in the flexible riblike spokes that protected his pistons. And love—love was in the cavity of his chest, of course. Where else?

  “Love feels like a drum,” he tells me now through the grating of the vent. We are near the end. We know it. I’m just a boy still, but I’m going to have to grow up very quickly.

  And I say, “Yes, that drumming is just like my heart. That’s right.”

  And because I’m his human son, he asks me, “Is it really right? Is it like that for you, too?” He often needs reassurance. Anxiety is lodged in his gravitational center.

  I say, “Yes.”

  He says, “So, maybe we aren’t so different after all.”

  “No,” I tell him. “Not so different after all.”

  Among his own kind—the 117s with their bulbous heads, their long arms and legs, humanlike except for the metallic shine and some of the exposed gears (a stylistic detail)—my father is called Herman Melville, after a writer who told a famous sea story a long time ago. The 117s are given a data load called the Classics of Human Literature, to shore up their emotion panels. I have no data loads, and there are no other surviving pieces of human literature, classics or not, for me to read, so I only have the robotic summations, handed down to me from birth, via word of mouth. The five 117s who have tended to me all my life—the only ones who knew of my existence up until recently—whispered tales to me from the beginning, when I was in an incubator made of warmed metal; this is why I have an excellent vocabulary. My father tells me that this is the reason I’m smarter than other humans my age. But the tellers of the tales are not human, and so the tales they’ve told are perhaps emotionally amputated or misinterpreted. But still, yes, Herman Melville once wrote a famous sea story.

  And so my father’s model number—117—plus his individual code—HM—were offered a human touch. HM, Herman Melville. He is called Melville.

  From the time he was relatively new, he’s worked among beakers and petri dishes. He’s tinkered with human DNA, manipulating it as he’s ordered to do, according to rigid formulas. His lab is small. He shares it with William, Woolf, James, Eudora, and F.—the five 117s who not only share his lab but also his housing unit, and who have become my aunties and uncles.

  His lab may be small, but the Human Wing is large. Robots devote much space to the human endeavor. You’d think that after the Golden Hour, they’d have been happy to be rid of us, but no. They’re logical creatures. They know what humans have to offer—variation, mutation, accidents. These are all important to furthering scientific development. Of course, these traits don’t make for great leadership, but they can be used to stumble across something like … well, jazz. Is jazz of use? No, but if you take the variations of improvisational jazz and put them through vast calculations, one can find new patterns of thought. New patterns of thought can then be coded into a computation and lead to inventions that are of use. New patterns of thought are something that robots aren’t good at.

  Melville knew, in theory and by rumor, that somewhere else in the Human Wing, his tinkering yielded flesh, eyes that roved in sync and blinked for wetness, hands with tight grips, little bundles of nerves, elastic muscles, fibrous knots of humanity. But he never really gave them much thought.

  And then one day, things changed forever. This term—and then one day—is often used in the 117s’ summations of the Classics of Human Literature—one day, as if, in life, doors suddenly swing open where one thought there were only walls and everything changes, in
a moment. I don’t know if this is true or not.

  But here it is: One day, they were working in the lab as usual when William, the leader of the group, got a message through his intel: one of them was needed in the Archives.

  They looked up from their tinkering and stared at each other. The room was silent. Some of them had become creaky by that time, but no one was moving, at all, so no one was creaking. This kind of assignment had never happened before. (Nor did it happen again.)

  “Did they say who should go?” F. asked. But the larger question here is: Did any of the six of them know who they were? No. I don’t believe my six 117s did. I didn’t either. I still don’t. My father and aunts and uncles worked. They rested. They were oiled and powered. They passed other robots in corridors. The place was filled with corridors of laboratories, housing stations, repair areas. No one came for them. Orders arrived in William’s intel. Formulas were uploaded into each of their operating systems nightly. No, they didn’t know they, but they knew they existed.

  “No,” William said. “They didn’t specify which one of us should go.”

  “Did they explain the mission?” Eudora asked.

  “Once someone is chosen, that person alone will have the mission uploaded instantaneously,” William explained.

  There was still great shine to them then. I should note this. Small robots were sent in to polish them to high sheens, but over the years bits of rust have appeared, small corrosions that the small robots—often winged—can’t fix. One of my first memories I have of being really little was seeing my own face in the shine of Melville’s coating.

  F. said, “I cannot do it. I haven’t been to repairs in a long time. I haven’t maintained proper upkeep.” This admission alarmed the others. If F. was so frightened—(oh, the cinching in the riblike spokes)—that he was willing to confess to lacking maintenance, then the mission to the Archives must be very dangerous.

  Eudora took another tack. “I think that this is a privilege and an honor and should go to the best among us.” This was also self-preserving. She had broken a beaker some months earlier. She was certainly not in the running.

  “As leader, I cannot abandon the rest of you or my post,” William said, and true enough.

  Woolf said, “I’ll go.”

  But her willingness didn’t sit right with William. He didn’t trust it. “No,” he said. No one questioned his authority on this.

  This left James and my father. James looked at Melville warily. Which one would make a move? My father, however, was having a new sensation, an emotion he’d never felt before. It existed in his shoulders. He called it a feeling of being broadened. He later named it courage. He said, “James, I’m afraid but I feel I can overcome it. Should I be the one?”

  James, who felt nothing in his own shoulders, nodded quickly.

  And that was that.

  If Melville hadn’t gone that day, I would not be where I am now. In fact, I would not be; I would not exist. And yet here I am.

  I have lived in the housing unit. I have studied what my 117s have taught me of the world before the Golden Hour—for example, it’s called the Golden Hour because the revolt was so massive and well orchestrated that it is said the humans fell within an hour. My 117s would tell what they knew of the outside, but they didn’t know anything at all. They’ve told me about their inventor and about DNA. Their knowledge on that subject seems infinite.

  I have always slept out of view of the small observation window in the door. My bed is hidden behind the bank of power stations. I cannot be in it now. Now, I live in this cramped space behind the vent’s grating. I was too large for the bed anyway. My feet—so weirdly pink and rubbery—hung off the end.

  I’m in the vent now because they know. They are waiting for Melville to do the right thing and hand me over. And they will add me to the stocks, where I belong.

  Once my father was chosen, the intel about the mission to the Archives was uploaded into his operating system; it simply appeared. They needed a 117 for this mission because a 117 would approach the mission as a human might; they had actual full-grown humans they could have used, of course—vast stocks of them—but those couldn’t be trusted. They wanted my father to tour the Archives on a mission to find a certain key that had been hidden there. And then if he did not find the key, he was to stop looking for the key and try to find a brass ring.

  They explained briefly that this was an experiment that was developed because of their keen interest in illogical human thinking. They were interested, in particular, in myths, idioms, and things called Old Wives’ Tales, some of which they’d come to find were rooted in scientific fact, though they seemed irrational. They were testing a theory that humans once had of not being able to find the thing that you’re looking for until you’ve stopped looking for it.

  The Archives were unlike anything my father had ever seen. Spiders wove webs. Dust spun in the air and left thin furred coats on objects. Clutter. Mess. My father’s operating system whirred and whirred in search of some organizing principle. But there wasn’t even the most rudimentary alphabetization. How would he find a key in this chaos?

  Luckily, Melville had been fully uploaded with data about human life before the Golden Hour, and so he knew what he was looking at, more or less—in fact, he felt an inexplicable longing for the past almost immediately.

  There was a box with a board game inside of it—a pair of dice, a cardboard mat printed with emblems, a stack of cards bound with rubber. But also, inside, were the husks of two locusts, painted with nail polish. Elsewhere, there were couch cushions, but no couch. There was a small plastic container with holes in it. When Melville popped it open, he found an instrument once used to align teeth and, too, a locket with no chain or photograph. He found bundles of unused paper, rolled-up maps, a cat leash, a DVD of an entertainer with a microphone named Robin Williams. He found mouse droppings and tins of Vienna sausages. Clocks, whistles, guitar strings, an ancient typing device, a pump for bike tires and sports balls, plastic miniature knights, lamps with craned necks. He walked farther and found oil paintings, the kind of stone coffin used when burying a mummy, an entire display of butterflies pinned to a corkboard. He stopped once, dead in his tracks, and held up a ship trapped inside of a bottle.

  “Melville,” he whispered to himself and he felt jealousy rise in his eyes as he gazed at the ship. Who did it belong to? He wanted to know. It was a small ship, but he desired very much to steal it. He overrode the emotion with logic. What would he do with a ship in a bottle?

  He walked on and found a statue of a girl wearing a gauzy skirt with her hair tied back in a lump, a chain made out of bubblegum wrappers, a taxidermied lion, a dental chair, shoes with buckles, a pale, lightly perfumed cloth with the image of a human face stained on it.

  And then he came to a temperature-controlled casket made of glass. He read its small label. ELLIOT V. GRAY, INVENTOR OF MODELS 114–121.

  He put his hands on the glass, his fingers clicking lightly, and peered inside. The man had a shock of steely gray hair and a finely trimmed mustache. He was perfectly preserved. No blue tint to the skin. His nails had not continued to grow. He was intact and at peace. My father felt love in his chest cavity as if the space were expanding and might burst.

  Melville knew exactly who he was looking at.

  Elliot V. Gray was 117-HM’s inventor. His creator. His maker. His loving father.

  He hadn’t stolen the ship in the bottle. That goodness would count in his favor, wouldn’t it? Guilt—it was an itchiness in his limbs. He looked around. No one seemed to be recording his actions. Perhaps oversight would compromise his mission of finding the key or the brass ring.

  He ran his fingers along the underside of the front lip of the glass casket, and when he hit a latch, he hooked it, pressed, and the lid popped open with a hiss of air.

  He didn’t have much time. He didn’t want his father to spoil. But he could not let this opportunity pass him by. One thing Melville understood full
y was human DNA. He worked with it on every level. And here was his father’s body, perfectly preserved.

  He reached up and touched his father’s dead cheek. He felt that drumming in his chest now louder than ever—love, love, love—as well as rib-spoke fear and shoulder-broadening courage. He reached up and plucked three hairs from his father’s head.

  And then he quickly reached up with his other hand and lowered the casket’s lid.

  He had his father now, the precious DNA that humanity relied upon.

  He could remake him.

  He felt his pistons working too hard. He needed to get out of there. The randomness of the clutter was perhaps overloading his system. The dust had muscled its way into the inner workings of his delicate gears.

  He spun around looking for the exit. How to get out? How? He charged forward, ramming a card table filled with delicate fossils and a jar of coins that toppled, sending the coins scattering across the floor.

  He bent to one knee, gripping the three hairs in his fingers, and there, under the table, he found the key.

  He was supposedly looking for it and he found it, refuting the Old Wives’ Tale. But, in truth, he’d forgotten about the key—something he would tell no one—meaning the Old Wives’ Tale was correct after all.

  Melville feeds me through the grate vents.

  Nourishment was a problem at first. As soon as I was a baby living with them in the housing unit, he asked for work in the nutrition area of the human stocks. His desire to do so didn’t raise too much suspicion. He is, after all, a 117. He has a thing called ambition—a pulse in the back of the neck that makes him sometimes want to jut and lift his jaw—and how could other robots understand that? He stole food from the stocks for me, hiding it by unscrewing small bolts and filling his hollow metal bones with it. And this is how he came to fear the stocks. He saw the conditions that humans were kept in. Dank, fetid, much experimentation—stimuli applied to the cortexes of brains. His greatest fear was suddenly that I would be discovered and sent there. It was no place for me. No place at all.