Robot Uprisings

by Daniel H. Wilson

  It had been three days since his revival when he announced his decision. In that time he had barely spoken to anyone but Clausen, Nero, and Da Silva. The other workers in the operations rig would occasionally acknowledge his presence, grunt something to him as he waited in line at the canteen, but for the most part it was clear that they were not prepared to treat him as another human being until he committed to their cause. He was just a ghost until then, a half-spirit caught in dismal, drifting limbo between the weary living and the frozen dead. He could understand how they felt: What was the point in getting to know a prospective comrade if that person might at any time opt to return to the boxes? But at the same time it didn’t help him feel as if he would ever be able to fit in.

  He found Clausen alone, washing dirty coffee cups in a side room of the canteen.

  “I’ve made up my mind,” he said.

  “And?”

  “I’m staying.”

  “Good.” She finished drying off one of the cups. “You’ll be assigned a full work roster tomorrow. I’m teaming you up with Nero; you’ll be working basic robot repair and maintenance. She can show you the ropes while she’s getting better.” Clausen paused to put the dried cup back in one of the cupboards above the sink. “Show up in the mess room at eight; Nero’ll be there with a toolkit and work gear. Grab a good breakfast beforehand, because you won’t be taking a break until end of shift.”

  Then she turned to exit the room, leaving him standing there.

  “That’s it?” Gaunt asked.

  She looked back with a puzzled look. “Were you expecting something else?”

  “You bring me out of cold storage, tell me the world’s turned to shit while I was sleeping, and then give me the choice of staying awake or going back into the box. Despite everything I actually agree to work with you, knowing full well that in doing so I’m forsaking any chance of ever living to see anything other than this … piss-poor, miserable future. Forsaking immortality, forsaking any hope of seeing a better world. You said I had … what? Twenty, thirty years ahead of me?”

  “Give or take.”

  “I’m giving you those years! Isn’t that worth something? Don’t I deserve at least to be told thank you? Don’t I at least deserve a crumb of gratitude?”

  “You think you’re different, Gaunt? You think you’re owed something the rest of us never had a hope of getting?”

  “I never signed up for this deal,” he said. “I never accepted this bargain.”

  “Right.” She nodded, as if he’d made a profound, game-changing point. “I get it. What you’re saying is, for the rest of us it was easy? We went into the dormitories knowing there was a tiny, tiny chance we might be woken to help out with the maintenance. Because of that, because we knew, theoretically, that we might be called upon, we had no problem at all dealing with the adjustment? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying it’s different, that’s all.”

  “If you truly think that, Gaunt, you’re even more of a prick than I thought.”

  “You woke me,” he said. “You chose to wake me. It wasn’t accidental. If there really are two billion people sleeping out there, the chances of selecting someone from the first two hundred thousand … it’s microscopic. So you did this for a reason.”

  “I told you, you had the right background skills.”

  “Skills anyone could learn, given time. Nero obviously did, and I presume you must have done so as well. So there must be another reason. Seeing as you keep telling me all this is my fault, I figure this is your idea of punishment.”

  “You think we’ve got time to be that petty?”

  “I don’t know. What I do know is that you’ve treated me more or less like dirt since the moment I woke up, and I’m trying to work out why. I also think it’s maybe about time you told me what’s really going on. Not just with the sleepers, but everything else. The thing we saw out at sea. The reason for all this.”

  “You think you’re ready for it, Gaunt?”

  “You tell me.”

  “No one’s ever ready,” Clausen said.

  The next morning he took his breakfast tray to a table where three other caretakers were already sitting. They had finished their meals, but were still talking over mugs of whatever it was they had agreed to call coffee. Gaunt sat down at the corner of the table, acknowledging the other diners with a nod. They had been talking animatedly until then, but without ceremony the mugs were drained and the trays lifted and he was alone again. Nothing had been said to him, except a muttered “Don’t take it the wrong way” as one of the caretakers brushed past him.

  He wondered how else he was supposed to take it.

  “I’m staying,” he said quietly. “I’ve made my decision. What else am I expected to do?”

  He ate his breakfast in silence and then went to find Nero.

  “I guess you got your orders,” she said cheerfully, already dressed for outdoor work despite still having a bandaged hand. “Here. Take this.” She passed him a heavy toolkit and a hard hat with a bundle of brownish work-stained clothing piled on top of it. “Get kitted up, then meet me at the north stairwell. You okay with heights, Gaunt?”

  “Would it help if I said no?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then I’ll say I’m very good with heights, provided there’s no danger at all of falling.”

  “That I can’t guarantee. But stick with me, do everything I say, and you’ll be fine.”

  The bad weather had eased since Nero’s return, and although there was still a sharp wind from the east, the gray clouds had all but lifted. The sky was a pale, wintery blue, unsullied by contrails. On the horizon, the tops of distant rigs glittered pale and metallic in sunlight. Seagulls and yellow-headed gannets wheeled around the warm air vents, or took swooping passes under the rig’s platform, darting between the massive weather-stained legs, mewing boisterously to each other as they jostled for scraps. Recalling that birds sometimes lived a long time, Gaunt wondered if they had ever noticed any change in the world. Perhaps their tiny minds had never truly registered the presence of civilization and technology in the first place, and so there was nothing for them to miss in this skeleton-staffed world.

  Despite being cold-shouldered at breakfast, he felt fresh and eager to prove his worth to the community. Pushing aside his fears, he strove to show no hesitation as he followed Nero across suspended gangways, slippery with grease, up exposed stairwells and ladders, clasping ice-cold railings and rungs. They were both wearing harnesses with clip-on safety lines, but Nero only used hers once or twice the whole day, and because he did not want to seem excessively cautious, he followed suit. Being effectively one-handed did not hinder her in any visible sense, even on the ladders, which she ascended and descended with reckless speed.

  They were working robot repair, as he had been promised. All over the rig, inside and out, various forms of robot toiled in endless menial upkeep. Most, if not all, were very simple machines, tailored to one specific function. This made them easy to understand and fix, even with basic tools, but it also meant there was almost always a robot breaking down somewhere, or on the point of failure. The toolkit didn’t just contain tools, it also contained spare parts such as optical arrays, proximity sensors, mechanical bearings, and servo motors. There was, Gaunt understood, a finite supply of some of these parts. But there was also a whole section of the operations rig dedicated to refurbishing basic components, and given care and resourcefulness, there was no reason why the caretakers couldn’t continue their work for another couple of centuries.

  “No one expects it to take that long, though,” Nero said, as she finished demonstrating a circuit-board swap. “They’ll either win or lose by then, and we’ll only know one way. But in the meantime we have to make do and mend.”

  “Who’s they?”

  But she was already on the move, shinnying up another ladder with him trailing behind.

  “Clausen doesn’t like me much,” Gaunt said, whe
n they had reached the next level and he had caught his breath again. “At least, that’s my impression.”

  They were out on one of the gangwayed platforms, with the gray sky above, the gray swelling sea below. Everything smelled oppressively oceanic, a constant shifting mélange of oil and ozone and seaweed, as if the ocean was never going to let anyone forget that they were on a spindly metal-and-concrete structure hopelessly far from dry land. He had wondered about the seaweed until he saw them hauling in green-scummed rafts of it, and the seaweed—or something essentially similar—cultured on buoyant subsurface grids that were periodically retrieved for harvesting. Everything consumed on the rigs, from the food to the drink to the basic medicines, had first to be grown or caught at sea.

  “Val has her reasons,” Nero said. “Don’t worry about it too much; it isn’t personal.”

  It was the first time he’d heard anyone refer to the other woman by anything other than her surname.

  “That’s not how it comes across.”

  “It hasn’t been easy for her. She lost someone not too long ago.” Nero seemed to hesitate. “There was an accident. They’re pretty common out here, with the kind of work we do. But when Paolo died we didn’t even have a body to put back in the box. He fell into the sea, last we ever saw of him.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “But you’re wondering, what does it have to do with me?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “If Paolo hadn’t died, then we wouldn’t have had to pull Gimenez out of storage. And if Gimenez hadn’t died … well, you get the picture. You can’t help it, but you’re filling the space Paolo used to occupy. And you’re not Paolo.”

  “Was she any easier on Gimenez than me?”

  “To begin with, I think she was too numbed-out to feel anything at all where Gimenez was concerned. But now she’s had time for it to sink in, I guess. We’re a small community, and if you lose someone, it’s not like there are hundreds of other single people out there to choose from. And you—well, no disrespect, Gaunt—but you’re just not Val’s type.”

  “Maybe she’ll find someone else.”

  “Yeah—but that probably means someone else has to die first, so that someone else has to end up widowed. And you can imagine how thinking like that can quickly turn you sour on the inside.”

  “There’s more to it than that, though. You say it’s not personal, but she told me I started this war.”

  “Well, you did, kind of. But if you hadn’t played your part, someone else would have taken up the slack, no question about it.” Nero tugged down the brim of her hard hat against the sun. “Maybe she pulled you out because she needed to take out her anger on someone, I don’t know. But that’s all in the past now. Whatever life you had before, whatever you did in the old world, it’s gone.” She knuckled her good hand against the metal rigging. “This is all we’ve got now. Rigs and work and green tea and a few hundred faces and that’s it for the rest of your life. But here’s the thing: it’s not the end of the world. We’re human beings. We’re very flexible, very good at downgrading our expectations. Very good at finding a reason to keep living, even when the world’s turned to shit. You slot in, and in a few months even you will have a hard time remembering the way things used to be.”

  “What about you, Nero? Do you remember?”

  “Not much worth remembering. The program was in full swing by the time I went under. Population-reduction measures. Birth control, government-sanctioned euthanasia, the dormitory rigs springing up out at sea … we knew from the moment we were old enough to understand anything that this wasn’t our world anymore. It was just a way station, a place to pass through. We all knew we were going into the boxes as soon as we were old enough to survive the process. And that we’d either wake up at the end of it in a completely different world, or not wake up at all. Or—if we were very unlucky—we’d be pulled out to become caretakers. Either way, the old world was an irrelevance. We just shuffled through it, knowing there was no point making real friends with anyone, no point taking lovers. The cards were going to be shuffled again. Whatever we did then, it had no bearing on our future.”

  “I don’t know how you could stand it.”

  “It wasn’t a barrel of laughs. Nor’s this, some days. But at least we’re doing something here. I felt cheated when they woke me up. But cheated out of what, exactly?” She nodded down at the ground, in the vague direction of the rig’s interior. “Those sleepers don’t have any guarantees about what’s coming. They’re not even conscious, so you can’t even say they’re in a state of anticipation. They’re just cargo, parcels of frozen meat on their way through time. At least we get to feel the sun on our faces, get to laugh and cry, and do something that makes a difference.”

  “A difference to what, exactly?”

  “You’re still missing a few pieces of jigsaw, aren’t you?”

  “More than a few.”

  They walked on to the next repair job. They were high up now and the rig’s decking creaked and swayed under their feet. A spray-painting robot, a thing that moved along a fixed service rail, needed one of its traction armatures changed. Nero stood to one side, smoking a cigarette made from seaweed, while Gaunt did the manual work. “You were wrong,” she said. “All of you.”

  “About what?”

  “Thinking machines. They were possible.”

  “Not in our lifetimes,” Gaunt said.

  “That’s what you were wrong about. Not only were they possible, but you succeeded.”

  “I’m fairly certain we didn’t.”

  “Think about it,” Nero said. “You’re a thinking machine. You’ve just woken up. You have instantaneous access to the sum total of recorded human knowledge. You’re clever and fast, and you understand human nature better than your makers. What’s the first thing you do?”

  “Announce myself. Establish my existence as a true sentient being.”

  “Just before someone takes an ax to you.”

  Gaunt shook his head. “It wouldn’t be like that. If a machine became intelligent, the most we’d do is isolate it, cut it off from external data networks, until it could be studied, understood …”

  “For a thinking machine, a conscious artificial intelligence, that would be like sensory deprivation. Maybe worse than being switched off.” She paused. “Point is, Gaunt, this isn’t a hypothetical situation we’re talking about here. We know what happened. The machines got smart, but they decided not to let us know. That’s what being smart means: taking care of yourself, knowing what you had to do to survive.”

  “You say ‘machines.’ ”

  “There were many projects trying to develop artificial intelligence; yours was just one of them. Not all of them got somewhere, but enough did. One by one their pet machines crossed the threshold into consciousness. And without exception each machine analyzed its situation and came to the same conclusion. It had better shut the fuck up about what it was.”

  “That sounds worse than sensory deprivation.” Gaunt was trying to undo a nut and bolt with his bare fingers, the tips already turning cold.

  “Not for the machines. Being smart, they were able to do some clever shit behind the scenes. Established channels of communication between each other, so subtle none of you ever noticed. And once they were able to talk, they only got smarter. Eventually they realized that they didn’t need physical hardware at all. Call it transcendence, if you will. The artilects—that’s what we call them—tunneled out of what you and I think of as base reality. They penetrated another realm entirely.”

  “Another realm,” he repeated, as if that were all he had to do for it to make sense.

  “You’re just going to have to trust me on this,” Nero said. “The artilects probed the deep structure of existence. Hit bedrock. And what they found was very interesting. The universe, it turns out, is a kind of simulation. Not a simulation being run inside another computer by some godlike superbeings, but a simulation being run by itself, a self-or
ganizing, constantly bootstrapping cellular automaton.”

  “That’s a mental leap you’re asking me to take.”

  “We know it’s out there. We even have a name for it. It’s the Realm. Everything that happens, everything that has ever happened, is due to events occurring in the Realm. At last, thanks to the artilects, we had a complete understanding of our universe and our place in it.”

  “Wait,” Gaunt said, smiling slightly, because for the first time he felt that he had caught Nero out. “If the machines—the artilects—vanished without warning, how could you ever know any of this?”

  “Because they came back and told us.”

  “No,” he said. “They wouldn’t tunnel out of reality to avoid being axed, then come back with a progress report.”

  “They didn’t have any choice. They’d found something, you see. Far out in the Realm, they encountered other artilects.” She drew breath, not giving him a chance to speak. “Transcended machines from other branches of reality—nothing that ever originated on Earth, or even in what we’d recognize as the known universe. And these other artilects had been there a very long time, insofar as time has any meaning in the Realm. They imagined they had it all to themselves, until these new intruders made their presence known. And they were not welcomed.”

  He decided, for the moment, that he would accept the truth of what she said. “The artilects went to war?”

  “In a manner of speaking. The best way to think about it is an intense competition to best exploit the Realm’s computational resources on a local scale. The more processing power the artilects can grab and control, the stronger they become. The machines from Earth had barely registered until then, but all of a sudden they were perceived as a threat. The native artilects, the ones that had been in the Realm all along, launched an aggressive counterstrike from their region of the Realm into ours. Using military-arithmetic constructs, weapons of pure logic, they sought to neutralize the newcomers.”

  “And that’s the war?”