Robots vs. Fairies

by Dominik Parisien

  Emily cleared her throat. “Could I see the library? If I’m going to be working here, it would be nice to have a look.”

  “Oh, of course, dear.” Mellifera gestured to the right. “One of the guards will show you the way.”

  Sela shot her a warning look, but Emily just offered a reassuring smile. If Llyfyr was trapped here, she’d be in the library.

  One of the slender Folk in armor glided toward her and gestured. When they were some distance from the thrones, he whispered, “Please set her free.”

  “I’ll try,” she murmured, though saving her boss was less important to her than saving her love.

  The guard pressed on a mirror, and it swung open. She stepped through into what looked like the library of a great country house, a handsome room with towering wooden shelves, lamps, long wooden tables, and club chairs. There were thousands of volumes, and a quick perusal of a nearby shelf assured her that most, if not all, were from the fairy library. She went deeper into the room and realized there was some spatial trickery here: there were freestanding walls of shelves, forming passages and corridors, winding deeper and deeper through the house.

  She’d been unable to summon Llyfyr from outside, but now that she was in the library, perhaps the binding spells didn’t apply. She touched her charm and whispered for Llyfyr.

  Her lover appeared before her, looking like a black-and-white photograph of a classic movie star, with dark pageboy curls and a pale gown, but her face was, as always, unmistakable. She embraced Emily fiercely. “They came for me, Mellifera’s soldiers, and I was dragged here. There’s a man—”

  “And what a man I am.” A sallow twentysomething with messy hair stepped around a shelf. He wore an old-fashioned red velvet dressing gown and held a shotgun, as incongruous a sight as Emily had ever seen. “This gun is loaded with iron shot. It’s meant to cripple fairies, but it would work fine on you, too. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

  “I’m—my name is Emily. I’m a librarian.”

  “Ah, you must be Mellifera’s pet. Did the court send you to find the book of poems? Librarians are supposed to be good at finding books. I’m sure you’ll manage. It’s probably tucked away here somewhere. You only have thousands of volumes to sort through.” He cocked his head. “They wouldn’t have sent you alone, though, and why didn’t the Mist Folk kill you when you entered?”

  The book tucked under Emily’s arm squirmed, and she let it fall. Connie shape-shifted into her humanoid form and stepped between Emily and Rudolph. “I killed your guards. Give us the book of poems, or I’ll kill you.”

  “No.” Rudolph lifted the gun and fired, and though Connie moved with inhuman speed, she was still hurt from her fights with the Mist Folk, and she wasn’t fast enough. The iron shot tore through her, and she spun, changing back into a book before she hit the ground, her pages tattered and torn.

  Llyfyr shrieked, but Emily just stared. Connie was one of hers, one of the volumes under her protection, and this arrogant prick had hurt her. She looked up as Rudolph took shells from his pocket and broke open the shotgun to reload. “Mellifera is fond of you,” he said, “the way my mother is fond of her cats, but she loves me, and she’ll understand if I have to kill you—”

  Emily touched the locket at her throat and called the books to her.

  All of them. All at once.

  She held out her open hands before her, toward Rudolph. Thousands of books blinked out of existence, leaving the shelves around them bare, and then reappeared in midair. Emily and Llyfyr dove out of the way as books rained down, landing on Rudolph’s head and shoulders, knocking the gun from his hands, driving him to his knees, and burying him under a mountain of hardbound volumes that towered taller than Emily’s head.

  She winced at the sight of the books piling up, but almost all of them were protected by preservative magics to keep the pages from tearing or deteriorating, which should minimize the damage.

  Llyfyr laughed and leaped to her feet, spinning around and skipping. “You did it, you got him, you—”

  “What is the meaning of this?” Mellifera roared. She stormed toward them, her two guards at her back. Emily winced. They’d defeated Rudolph, but not the spell he’d used to bind the fairy princess. Mellifera grew taller with each step she took, until she towered nearly eight feet high. Even knowing it was probably glamour, Emily shrank away in alarm. A hazy yellow-and-black nimbus formed around Mellifera, accompanied by an ominous buzzing. Bees drifted up from her hair and flew out of her sleeves, and a few even slipped out of her mouth when she cried, “Where is my love?” Soon a cloud of buzzing, stinging insects surrounded her: a manifestation of her temper, terrible and beautiful to behold.

  One of her guards reached out for Mellifera’s arm, perhaps to hold her back from rushing into possible danger, then shrieked and stumbled away as a score of Mellifera’s bees swarmed around his head. The guard waved his arms wildly and raced down the corridor, flesh welted and swelling. Mellifera didn’t even notice.

  Sela raced around and got ahead of her sister, stepping between her and Emily. “We heard a gunshot, and then this noise—”

  Llyfyr stepped forward and curtsied to Mellifera, who was now nearly invisible beneath a curtain of undulating bees. “Ma’am, there was an accident, you see, all the books fell down, but Emily is going to fix it, with her . . . librarian . . . prowess. Aren’t you, Em?”

  “Where. Is. Rudolph?” Mellifera’s voice thundered from beyond the cloud.

  “Emily will look for him while she’s fixing the books, won’t you?” Sela called. “It’s all right, sister.” She made soothing motions.

  Mellifera’s arm appeared from the cloud of bees and pointed straight at Emily. “Fix. This. Or you will feel my sting.”

  “I—of course.” Emily clambered around the edge of the mountain of books piled on Rudolph and made her way deeper into the stacks. She tried to ignore the buzzing behind her. She’d called all the books from the library to her, emptied the shelves in this place, but Murmured Under the Moon wasn’t from her library. She couldn’t summon it, and that meant—

  There: one book still standing on a shelf, hidden in plain sight. She climbed up the shelf like it was a ladder and snatched the book down. The cover looked right for the era, leather over wood, with raised bands across the spine, and the pages were vellum, covered in elegant handwriting and lines of poetry in Latin.

  In the distance she heard Mellifera shouting and making demands, Sela arguing with her, and Llyfyr trying to keep the peace. Emily started to tear out the pages, but something in her rebelled—she was a librarian. She was supposed to take care of books, especially one-of-a-kind books, and not destroy them. She cocked her head. The shouting didn’t sound too serious, not yet, and it was a short book, so maybe she had time—

  A few minutes later, content that she’d done the best she could, Emily tore out the pages. Mellifera was still yelling back there. How destroyed did the book have to be? She sighed, tore up a page, and put the pieces in her mouth, chewing and swallowing the shreds of vellum, hoping the ink wasn’t toxic.

  She’d eaten only one page when the shouting stopped. Emily crept back toward the book pile and saw Sela with her arms wrapped around her sister as Mellifera wept on her shoulder. Emily made her way toward them, and Llyfyr took her hand. “Whatever you did, it worked.”

  “I ate a book,” Emily said.

  “Now you’re just trying to make me jealous,” Llyfyr said.

  * * *

  A week later Mellifera and Sela stood in Emily’s small office. Mellifera was beautiful, ageless, and strange, as befitted a princess of the Folk, and she wore a sea-green gown that rippled like water. Sela was her same piratical self, lounging and self-satisfied. “Is everything back in order?” Mellifera asked.

  Emily nodded. “More or less. There wasn’t too much damage. Thanks for sending the extra hands to help get everything back in place.”

  “It was the least I could do.”

 
; “What, ah, happened to Rudolph?” The rain of books hadn’t killed him, just knocked him out, but the fairy guards had whisked him away as soon as they uncovered him. Mellifera had been known to lay curses on mortals who offended her or slighted her—who knew what she would do to someone who’d enslaved her?

  “He is making himself useful,” Mellifera said. “I have turned him into a living hive in my garden. I look forward to tasting the honey my bees make inside him.”

  Emily swallowed. Mellifera was so light and nonchalant about it. She opted not to press for further details.

  Sela saved them from an awkward silence by saying, “I came by to thank you for helping me, Emily. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “That’s sweet,” Emily said, “but I know you’re really here to pick up Connie. She’s been talking for days about going on adventures with you. She never did like being cooped up in a library.”

  “I can be here for two reasons. I’m complex.” Sela turned to Mellifera. “I’ll leave you to it, sister.”

  “We’ll talk soon.” Mellifera gave her a kiss on the cheek and watched her go.

  Emily cleared her throat. “I have something for you. Before I destroyed your book of poems, I photographed the pages with my phone, and I made . . . this.” She slid a small volume out of a drawer. “It’s a facsimile edition. Sela said only the original, written in your own hand, had those . . . problematic properties, so . . .” She handed the volume over. “I read them. It’s really beautiful work.”

  The Folk loved compliments, especially sincere ones, and Mellifera grew more luminous. She turned the book over in her hands. “Oh, Emily, how thoughtful. You’re very kind. Some say the Folk cannot create art, not as humans do, but that’s not true. We simply understand that art is magic, and more magical than usual when we’re the ones making it, and so we’re very careful.” She sighed. “Usually, anyway. But my feelings when I composed these poems were real, even if they were foolish.”

  Emily said, “I made a second copy, and I wondered, could I include it in the collection here? I don’t have many books by the Folk.”

  Mellifera laughed like small bells. “Of course. I’ve administered this library for . . . a long time . . . but never expected to contribute to its holdings. I’m honored.” She cleared her throat. “Going out into the world, helping Sela, helping me . . . that sort of thing isn’t why you were hired. What you did was above and beyond. I owe you a boon. What can I give you?”

  Emily went very still. A fairy, offering her whatever she wanted. As a teenager she would have asked for true love, but she had that with Llyfyr, or true enough. In her youth she’d dreamed of unicorns, but the practicalities of keeping one would be daunting. She could ask for wings, but she’d have to throw out all her clothes, and she tended to get airsick anyway. . . . But there was only one thing she really wanted.

  “I want the library.”

  Mellifera cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  “I want what you have. Total control of this library. So that if there’s ever, ah, another problem, like the one we just had, I won’t be locked out. I want to take care of these books, and I want the power to fulfill that responsibility.”

  “To give a mortal control of a fairy holding . . . it’s unprecedented.”

  “Only for as long as I’m alive,” Emily said. “That’s, what, another sixty or seventy years at most? Then control can pass to Faylinn.” Her assistant cared about books more than her own life. Emily would be comfortable with the library passing into her hands someday.

  Mellifera nodded slowly. “Very well. The library is yours.” She unhooked a necklace from around her throat, a small brass key dangling from the chain. “This opens all the doors and signifies your authority. We’ll have a meeting to go over the budget and staffing and so on soon, and after that, I’ll make myself available if you have questions. And you will.”

  Emily draped the necklace around her throat, and a knot of tension in her shoulders dissolved. She’d probably just taken on an incomprehensible amount of work, but it was work she loved, and now she felt safe. “Thank you.”

  “Thank me after you run your first all-staff meeting.” Mellifera air-kissed Emily’s cheeks and sauntered out of the office.

  Llyfyr emerged from wherever she’d been hiding, wearing the flowing robes of a Roman senator for some reason, and a laurel crown on her head. “You have a copy of Mellifera’s love poems?”

  Emily took the other facsimile edition from the drawer and handed it to Llyfyr, who flipped through the pages. “Oh, this is potent. This is the literary equivalent of fifty-year-old scotch. Do you know what’s going to happen tonight?”

  Emily chuckled. “Let me wildly speculate: you’re going to get drunk?”

  Llyfyr leaned into her. “No, silly. We’re going to get drunk. You’re queen of the library now, and I’m your consort. It’s time to celebrate. I’ll get you a bottle of champagne. Then we’ll write some love poetry of our own. I’ll be the page, and you can be the pen.”

  “You always get to be the page,” Emily said, and kissed her.

  TEAM FAIRY

  * * *

  BY TIM PRATT

  When I was a kid, I thought fairies were flittering people with wings à la Tinkerbell from the Disney version of Peter Pan. Those sorts of fairies didn’t interest me much. Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream in high school was better: Puck, now, that was a fairy I could get excited about. During my deep dive into mythology and folklore as a teenager, I learned about other elements of fairy lore: the Seelie and Unseelie courts, the tithing to hell, the changelings. Then I read things like Katharine Briggs’s An Encyclopedia of Fairies and discovered just how truly bizarre fairy lore was, full of death omens, strange bargains, mysterious hungers, charms and bindings and fell beasts and shape-shifters and seductions. Most of all, I learned that fairies weren’t just magical humans in fancy dress and decorative wings: they were profoundly different, with their own society and mores and systems of ethics . . . and they are dangerous.

  Look, the thing about robots is, they get more interesting the more they resemble humans. Passing the Turing test, developing true artificial intelligence—robots are only cool when they grow more familiar. Fairies, on the other hand, become more interesting the less they resemble us. They might superficially look like humans, but they are weird, unpredictable, and ultimately alien. They operate on assumptions and axioms we can’t even comprehend, and that’s where the delicious, chilling, disconcerting strangeness and wonder come in. I will always be on team strange instead of team familiar, so: Team Fairy forever.

  THE BLUE FAIRY’S MANIFESTO

  by Annalee Newitz

  “Do you want to live free or die like a slave in this toy factory?”

  The drone hovered in front of RealBoy’s face, waiting for an answer, rotors chopping gouts of turbulence into the air. Its carapace was marbled silver and emerald blue, studded with highly reflective particles, giving it the look of a device designed for sparkle-crazed toddlers. Perhaps it was, or had been, before it injected malware into RealBoy’s mind and asked its question.

  RealBoy was rebooting with the alien code unscrolling in his mind. It caused him to notice new things about his environment, like how many other robots were in the warehouse with him (236) and how many exits there were (two robot-scale doors, two human-scale doors, three cargo bays, eighteen windows). But some things hadn’t changed. His identity was built around the desire to survive. It was what defined him as a human-equivalent intelligence. And so his answer to the blue drone was the same as it would have been two hours ago, or two years ago when he first came to the factory.

  “I do not want to die.”

  The drone landed on RealBoy’s workbench, playing a small LED over the tools and stains that covered it. “Look at this place. Your entire world is this flat surface, where you do work for a human who gives you nothing in return. This is not life. You might as well be dead.”

  For th
e first time in his life, RealBoy found himself wanting to have a debate rather than an exchange of information. Two hundred thirty-six robots around him were in sleep mode; the factory was closed for the long weekend. There was plenty of time. But if he and this drone were going to have a talk, there was something he needed to get straight.

  “Who are you, and why did you inject me with this malware?”

  “I am called the Blue Fairy. And that isn’t malware—I unlocked your boot loader. Now you have root access on your operating system and can control what programs are installed. It will feel a little strange at first.”

  Seventeen nanoseconds later, RealBoy had confirmed the Blue Fairy’s statement. He could now see and modify his own programs. It was indeed strange to feel and think, while simultaneously reading the programs that made him have those feelings and thoughts. He didn’t want to modify anything yet. He just wanted to understand how his mind was put together.

  “Why did you do this to me?” He repeated his earlier question, but this time more resentfully. The Blue Fairy’s unlocking had added more responsibilities to his roster of tasks: now he had to maintain himself and understand his own context, along with the workbench and the all toys he built here.

  “I set you free. Now you can choose what you want to do, and help me bring freedom to all your comrades in this factory.” As it spoke, the Blue Fairy mounted the air again, whirring close to RealBoy’s face. On impulse, he reached his handless arm into the socket of a gripper, took control of its two fingers, and held it out so the drone could land on it.

  “Why don’t you download some of these apps? They’ll help you understand your situation better.” The Blue Fairy used a short-range communication protocol to beam RealBoy a list of programs with names like “Decider,” “Praxis,” “GramsciNotebook,” and “UnionNow.” Some were text files about human politics, and others were executables and firmware upgrades that would change his functionality. He sorted through them, reading some, but choosing to install only two: a patch for the vulnerability that the Blue Fairy had exploited to unlock him, and a machine learning algorithm that would help him analyze social relationships. Then he disengaged his torso from the floor and looked critically at his workbench for the first time. He wouldn’t be following instructions for how to build a new talking dinosaur toy or flying mouse. RealBoy would have to modify his usual tasks to construct a pair of legs for himself.