Robots vs. Fairies

by Dominik Parisien

  “Yes,” he said calmly. “It would give them a thrill and increase attendance figures. You’ll have to lose a few of these . . . twee little make-believe attractions, but the number of people who see the remaining attractions should skyrocket. I’d expect you to be pleased.”

  Clover stared at him, mouth opening and closing like that of a beached fish. Finally she did the only thing she could think of: pulling the large wrench from her tool belt, she swung it in a hard arc, catching the efficiency expert just behind the ear. His glasses were knocked askew by the blow. He had time to give her a baffled, betrayed look, and then he was falling, hitting the rubber-enhanced concrete path before she had time to consider the consequences of her actions.

  Clover clapped her hands over her mouth, the wrench hitting the path next to the body of the efficiency expert. The efficiency expert, for his part, lay there silently bleeding.

  “Oh no,” she whispered, voice muffled by her fingers. “What did I do?”

  A group of pixies flew by, wings chiming like tiny bells. Clover’s expression hardened. She’d done exactly what she had to do, and she would do it again. She stooped, picking up her wrench and shoving it back into her belt. Then she grabbed Mr. Tillman by the ankles and began dragging him toward the entrance to the maintenance tunnels.

  The park was more important than attendance figures. The park was their hope for the future. It was time for the “efficiency expert” to learn that for himself.

  * * *

  Adam jumped to his feet when she dragged Mr. Tillman’s body into the maintenance lounge. Mr. Franklin was asleep at one of the open workstations, snoring gently. There was a tumbler half-full of dark-purple mermaid wine still clutched loosely in his hand.

  “Good,” said Clover, dropping Tillman’s feet and blowing her hair out of her eyes. “He should be out for hours. We need to take this fool apart.”

  “Clover.” Adam stopped in his tracks, waving his hands helplessly. “When I told you to show him around, I meant . . . show him around. Not kill him.”

  “He’s not dead,” she said dismissively, and kicked him in the leg. “Though he might as well be. He has no sense of wonder. Do you know what he said to me? He said we needed more roller coasters. Roller coasters! He called the Mother Tree a ‘twee little make-believe attraction’! He wasn’t even impressed by the mermaids! We need to make him go away.”

  “We can’t make him go away,” said Violet, moving to stand next to Adam. “Mr. Franklin will notice.”

  “So we replace him!” Clover looked around frantically, finally grabbing a hammer. “We’ve replaced security guards with animatronics. Why not an efficiency expert?”

  “Well, first, the security guards don’t need to do anything—the unicorns handle security fine by themselves,” said Adam. “Second, we had weeks to follow and study them before we did anything. We don’t know whether he has a family. We don’t know whether anyone would notice.”

  “We don’t know whether he’s human.”

  Clover and Adam both turned to gape at Violet. She was kneeling next to Mr. Tillman, apparently trying to check the severity of his head wound. She had succeeded in removing his wig, revealing a flesh-colored wig cap held down with bobby pins . . . and the sharp, previously concealed points of his ears.

  Clover gasped. Adam paled.

  “The elves have found us,” he said. “That’s it. We’re done. We might as well pack it in right now.”

  The look on Tillman’s face when he’d seen the mermaids . . . Clover took a deep breath and put her hand on Adam’s arm. “No,” she said. “He didn’t know.”

  “What?”

  “When he first started seeing things he couldn’t explain, he was surprised. He tried to cover it, but I saw. He didn’t know. He’s here for the same reason we are.” She looked at Tillman again, trying to see him not as a human invader, but as a fellow refugee from the crumbling moonlit palaces of another world. “He’s running.”

  “He’s also waking up,” said Violet, straightening and stepping back, Tillman’s wig still clutched in her hand. “Adam?”

  “Let’s see what he says,” said Adam.

  They waited, listening to Mr. Franklin’s snoring, as Tillman opened his eyes and sat up, reaching groggily to touch the back of his head. He froze when his fingers hit the plastic wig cap instead of his artificial hair. He looked up.

  “Hello, elf,” said Adam.

  Tillman gaped for a few seconds before pulling himself regally upright, looking down his nose, and saying, “Kobolds. I should have recognized your work the moment I stepped into these tunnels. Does Franklin know?”

  “Nah,” said Clover easily. “He thinks we’re a family of mechanical geniuses who’ll work for peanuts as long as he’s willing to let us handle our own HR paperwork. He thinks he has forty of us working here. He has a hundred and sixteen. How’s your head?”

  “Sore.” Tillman glared at her. “No thanks to you.”

  “Hey, all the thanks to me. I could’ve killed you.”

  “We’re still discussing it,” said Adam. He crouched down, glaring at Tillman. “Why are you here? Who sent you? Did you tell anyone about us? We’re not going back.”

  “We wondered where you’d gone, you know.” There was a defeated note in Tillman’s voice, like he was confessing something shameful. “You all vanished in a single afternoon. That must have taken planning. Preparation. Cooperation. Not the sort of thing we expected from you.”

  “Maybe you should have,” said Adam.

  “Clearly,” said Tillman.

  Violet, who was too young to remember what it had been like beneath the Hill, frowned. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “We used to work for the elves,” said Adam, not taking his eyes off Tillman. “They thought they were better than us, when all they really were was tall.”

  “We’re still tall,” said Tillman wryly. “We never understood why you left.”

  “Then you’re not just tall; you’re blind,” said Clover. “We left because you wouldn’t listen when we said we needed a better plan than ‘huddle under the Hill and hope humanity will go away.’ The mermaids couldn’t leave the oceans. The unicorns were dying. Don’t even get me started on the manticores. We needed to move, and so we moved, and left you behind.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” said Adam. “Who knows you’re here?”

  “Everyone,” said Tillman. “I’m here with full authority from the Queen.”

  Clover threw her hands up. “I told you that you should have let me kill him.”

  “She doesn’t know you’re here.”

  All three kobolds turned to look at Tillman. He shook his head.

  “I wasn’t looking for you. To be honest, no one is. We haven’t the resources anymore. I’m here because we’d heard that the management was wasting all their time on low, simple places, animatronics and machines. We thought we could show them something better.”

  “Roller coasters,” sneered Clover.

  “Yes, supported by elf magic, capable of ignoring the laws of physics. We thought that might be enough to buy us a new home.”

  “A new home?” asked Adam.

  “Our palaces are collapsing.” Nothing in Tillman’s words sounded like a lie: they were spoken quietly, calmly, and with an utter lack of haughty pride. He was telling the truth. Whatever good it might do him. “The first one fell a year ago. Long after you’d gone. I suppose, in part, we could blame you; you’d always done the maintenance, and we didn’t have any idea how to keep the foundations strong in your absence. But really, it was our fault. We should have learned how to maintain our own infrastructure.”

  “That sounds almost like humility, elf,” said Clover.

  Tillman looked at her blandly. “Maybe it is,” he said. “The collapse is coming faster all the time. I’m here because we hoped that this might be a place where palaces could be built.”

  “Most of our attractions are biological at this point,
” said Adam. “We’re replacing the mechanical pieces with the real thing a little more every quarter. The last animatronic unicorn will be retired this winter, when the herd from Scandinavia finally gets here. All the mermaids are real. About half the pixies.”

  “The other half are probably on fire right now,” said Clover. “We’re wasting time we don’t have. We need to get rid of him.”

  “Please,” said Tillman.

  The kobolds stopped. Even Clover.

  “What did you say?” asked Adam.

  “Please,” repeated Tillman. “We need you. We need a place to go. There’s room for us all here, and we can help. We know where the dragons sleep, where the last of the yeti are hiding. We can bring them to you, and we can all be safe and protected, hidden by a veneer of plausible deniability. Please.”

  Adam and Clover exchanged a look.

  “We’re not going back to doing whatever you say,” said Clover. “We’re free now. Independent. We have health insurance.”

  “At this point, all we want to do is survive,” said Tillman.

  Adam smiled.

  “All right,” he said. “This is what we’re going to do. . . .”

  * * *

  “This new staffing agency Mr. Tillman found for us is amazing,” said Mr. Franklin, radiating contentment as the pixies swirled around him. “They fit right into our culture, and they work without complaint. I can’t begin to say how happy I am. I told you an efficiency expert could help us.”

  “I guess so,” said Clover.

  “Thank you again for being willing to show him around. I’ll think of a suitable reward.”

  “Just keep the doors open,” said Clover. “That’s all any of us could possibly ask for.”

  Mr. Franklin smiled at her benevolently. “My dear, this park is going to last forever, and you’re going to build me a wonderland.”

  “Good,” she said.

  In the tree behind them, another pixie burst into flame.

  TEAM FAIRY

  * * *

  BY SEANAN MCGUIRE

  Robots are great and all, but we have to build them. Robots don’t and can’t exist without human intervention (unless they are alien robots, and then all bets are off). Fairies, on the other hand, probably don’t exist, but my family comes from Ireland, and we’ve been playing the “probably” for generations. Oh, it’s probably okay to go play in the mysterious mushroom ring down by the forest’s edge, but maybe don’t? Unless you want to disappear? So I’m Team Fairy on the off chance that they exist and might otherwise get pissed at me.

  I am also and forever Team Theme Park. I spend more time than is strictly healthy at Disneyland, and I adore the way the Park engineers can and do shape the environment to control what the guests see, hear, and experience. It’s like entering a fairy hill in a lot of ways, and I wanted to spend some time with a group of engineers who took that aspect of park design very, very seriously. Enter my fairy smiths, who’ve turned their eyes toward a different, somewhat more candy-colored future. . . .

  QUALITY TIME

  by Ken Liu

  “Welcome to weRobot,” said the chipper HR representative. “Jake and Ron and the rest of us are all so looking forward to your contributions!”

  “Are you a true believer?” the woman next to me asked in a low, conspiratorial voice. I looked at her, puzzled; her name tag said AMY.

  She took a sip of her coffee, frowned, and then rapped her knuckles against the conference room table. The little coffeemaker in the middle of the table, a retro-looking, squat black cylinder with a chromed dome top, spun around until its single camera was aimed at Amy, who smiled and beckoned to it.

  “A true believer in what?”

  I whispered. I couldn’t help it. I knew I should be paying attention to the benefits presentation—Mom had emphasized no less than five times on the phone last night the importance of contributing to the 401(k) at my first job out of college. But I was feeling nervous (the slide on-screen at the moment actually said Our Impossible Mission), and Amy—forties, short-cropped hair, a tattoo of two fairies playing Nintendo on her left arm—looked like she had wisdom to share.

  “The Myth of the Valley,” she said.

  The coffeemaker rolled toward Amy, its motor humming softly. It stopped a few inches away and flashed the ring around its camera eye. Amy leaned forward to dump out the contents of her mug in the waste disposal chute at the side of the robot.

  Then, instead of discreetly tapping out her new order on the touch screen, Amy leaned back in her seat and said aloud, “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”

  Some of the other new hires—almost all of them my age—looked at Amy disapprovingly for this interruption; a few others chuckled. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” said Amy, a satisfied grin on her face as the coffeemaker filled her mug with the new beverage.

  Instead of acting annoyed, the HR rep smiled indulgently. “I was a fan too. This is actually a perfect segue to the next slide.” She pressed the button on her clicker.

  The new slide showed an old photograph of weRobot’s two founders, geeky college boys in their dorm room, surrounded by a mess of mechanical and electronic components as well as stacks of spiral-bound notebooks. “We believe that there’s no continuing mission more important than improving the lives of the human race through advancing robotics. We want every one of you to feel that you can make a difference, achieve what you thought was impossible, act like Jake and Ron when they started this company with a notebook full of diagrams that no one believed would work and eighty-five dollars between the two of them. . . .”

  Amy leaned over to me. “Either that’s a terribly staged photograph, or one of the duo is no good at programming.”

  “Oh?”

  “Look at that snippet of Perl on their computer. Reading all lines into an array? No chomp?”

  I looked at the photograph and then back at her, my face blank.

  “Not a coder then?”

  I shook my head. “I majored in folklore and mythology.”

  Amy gazed at me with interest. “I like this; we should talk more.”

  Great, I don’t even get the engineering jokes. I suppressed a rising wave of panic and sought refuge in some homemade chicken soup for the soul.

  One of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley wouldn’t have hired a liberal arts major without having seen something in me, right?

  The HR rep took out a stack of notebooks and handed them out. “Your first and most important benefit!”

  The notebooks turned out to be pads of graph paper. I flipped open mine. Instead of the standard square grid, the sheets were imprinted with unorthodox patterns like spirals, honeycombs, tessellations of animal shapes, a scattering of random dots.

  “Don’t follow conventional wisdom,” said the HR rep. “If a problem hasn’t been solved, that means you are meant to solve it! Think impossible . . . and then make it happen!”

  “As corporate one-liners go, this one isn’t too bad,” whispered Amy. “Not as ripe for parody as Centillion’s ‘We arrange the world’s information to ennoble the human race,’ and certainly better than Bazaar’s shtick of having new employees build their own desks out of two-by-fours while chanting, ‘There should be nothing you can’t buy from us!’ Look at all the eager beavers!”

  I looked around at the others in my cohort. Some stared at their notepads, unsure what to do with the strange gift; others looked inspired and drew in them with intense concentration as though they were already designing weRobot’s next great hit.

  Amy took another sip of her tea. “Youngsters are so fun to watch. They love to be inspired.”

  “Do you think we’re just being fed some lines?” I asked. Amy’s wry tone had me concerned that I had made a mistake. “Glassdoor has really good reviews of this place’s culture.”

  Amy chuckled. “Like all their competitors in the Valley, they’ve got the shuttle buses and free nuts and fruits and ToDoGenie credits, and I’m sure they’ll give you as much re
sponsibility as you can handle, plus the stock options to keep you here. But no one really succeeds here without believing the One True Myth.”

  “Making more money?” I was a little disappointed, to be honest. Amy sounded like a jaded cynic who believed all corporations were evil, and even I knew that wasn’t wisdom.

  “Oh, the money is not what drives people like Jake and Ron,” Amy said. “The credo of the Valley is that all the world’s problems can be solved by a really smart geek with a keyboard and a soldering iron.”

  I looked at Amy more critically: ShareAll backpack with a date from a decade ago, Centillion version 1.5 launch T-shirt, Abricot cell phone holder with their old logo. I had seen these as badges of honor, of her tours of service in the trenches of the greatest companies in the Valley, but maybe they were signs of something less admirable, a cynicism that was corrupting and made it impossible for her to fit in anywhere.

  “What’s wrong with wanting to change the world?” I asked.

  “Nothing, except a lack of humility,” Amy said.

  “Well, I think it’s pretty cool that we’re finally making the future instead of just dreaming about it.”

  I deliberately leaned a bit away from Amy. I didn’t need her negativity dragging me down on my first day. Besides, the HR rep was finally talking about the 401(k).

  * * *

  The team I was assigned to, Advanced Home Automation, had a vague mandate to create breakthrough products for the home, distinct from weRobot’s mainstay moneymakers: vacuum cleaners, laundry folders, and home security devices. Most of the engineers were veterans from other teams, and I got the distinct sense that many of them were here because they wanted to spend more time with their families and didn’t want to compete with the hungry twentysomethings.

  To my dismay, I found Amy assigned to my team as well.

  “I’ve never worked with a folklore PM before,” she said.