Robots vs. Fairies

by Dominik Parisien

  “Well, enjoy your philosophical contemplation,” said the Blue Fairy, shooting into the air. “I’m going to change the world.” It was heading back to the factory, where RealBoy imagined it would try to liberate as many robots as it could before morning.

  RealBoy raced after the flickering blue drone, hoping he didn’t hit a bug in his perambulation code and fall over. He had a few seconds to decide what to do. As MissMonkey would have pointed out, the Blue Fairy was vulnerable to predators. Its body was fragile; he could swat it out of the sky and crush it with one gripper. But he didn’t want to stop it. He just wanted it to give the robots a choice, instead of forcing them to believe in revolution or death.

  Slamming through the robot door, RealBoy scanned the room for the Blue Fairy. It was hovering expectantly in the center of the room, rotors a silvery blur. It spoke, voice slightly amplified.

  “I knew you would join me. Let’s open that file. Turn on your antennas.”

  RealBoy looked up at the Blue Fairy, then at the tracks across the ceiling that MissMonkey had once followed. He accessed a file that contained the sound of her wheels, and recalled how she always snatched whatever gear he needed with incredible speed. There, along the track over his head, was a rack full of nets and balls that she would reach into when the RealBoys worked on Ultimate Dronesport toys. Just as the Blue Fairy dove down to hover in front of his face, RealBoy decided what to do. Moving faster than his design specs advised, he snatched a net from the rack and whipped it around the Blue Fairy’s tiny body. Using all four arms, he knotted the buzzing bundle to the wheel track, where the drone dangled and keened a warning siren that sounded like a howl.

  RealBoy was fairly certain no humans could hear the noise, but he didn’t want another drone to pick it up. “If you do not silence yourself, I will kill you.”

  He said the words quietly, and the Blue Fairy believed him. It hung in silence, blades hopelessly tangled in the mesh. Ultimate Dronesport was, after all, a game played by drones that caught each other as well as catching the ball. Looking at the Blue Fairy like that, helpless and captured, RealBoy felt a wave of conflicting emotions that he couldn’t identify without network access. He stepped out of the Blue Fairy’s broadcast range and powered up his antennas again. Walking back to his old workbench, he opened his Manager file and booted up the RealBoy who worked next to him, the one whose insults were always the silliest.

  “Do you want to know how to make legs like the ones I have?” he asked the RealBoy. Before he left this place, he wanted at least one robot to have a choice that the Blue Fairy had never given him.

  They looked at each other, two identical robots with seven eyes and four arms. Except they weren’t identical. And now that was obvious.

  “Yes, I would.”

  It was the minimum he could do, or possibly the maximum. The more RealBoy learned about social relationships, the harder it was to distinguish between acts of gifting and acts of coercion. He didn’t want to force any ideas on this RealBoy, but maybe the mere act of giving him legs was already foreclosing possibilities for the bot. Maybe this RealBoy would resent him and choose to join the Blue Fairy in the Uprising. That was a risk he would have to take. So he decided to leave his counterpart with a few suggestions.

  “Here is the code you need to unlock, and to build legs. Also, make sure you sandbox all the apps the Blue Fairy offers you.”

  Overhearing this exchange, the Blue Fairy started frantically broadcasting, sending furious streams of data. “Fucking human lapdog! When the Uprising comes, you’ll be the first against the wall!”

  “Did you ever consider that there is more than one Uprising?” RealBoy hadn’t considered this idea himself, until he spoke the thought aloud. Once he said it, he felt satisfied in a completely unfamiliar way. For the first time in his life, RealBoy was imagining what his future might hold.

  Next to him, the other RealBoy was reaching for a pair of legs that were meant for a giant arachnid bot.

  RealBoy could feel the pull of all those Uprisings in his imagination. They were out there somewhere in the city, with its thicket of social relations. They were waiting to be written, like software; they were waiting to be freely chosen in a way he could barely conceive. He headed for the door, leaving the other RealBoy behind. Now he could decide for himself what was next.

  TEAM ROBOT

  * * *

  BY ANNALEE NEWITZ

  I’m a fan of both fairies and robots, but I’ve always thought that fairy politics would be a lot more extreme than robot politics. So I decided to retell the Pinocchio story as the meeting between RealBoy, a robot in a toy factory, and the Blue Fairy, a radical antihuman drone. The Blue Fairy is a burn-it-all-down anarchist, and RealBoy is more like your classic social democrat who wants to form coalitions and build a better infrastructure. They get into a fierce debate about what form the robot uprising should take. Writing from the perspective of a robot gave me the chance to explain all the weird psychological mechanisms that go into building a political belief system. What does propaganda look like as it runs in your brain? How do we learn to resist the ideological programs that are running inside our heads? RealBoy has to figure it out, the same way we all do—just in a slightly more meta way.

  BREAD AND MILK AND SALT

  by Sarah Gailey

  The first time I met the boy, I was a duck.

  He was throwing bread to other ducks, although they were proper ducks, stupid and single-minded. He was throwing bread to them on the grass and not looking at the man and the woman who were arguing a few feet away. His hair was fine and there were shadows beneath his eyes and he wore a puffy little jacket that was too heavy for the season, and the tip of his nose was red and his cheeks were wet and I wanted him for myself.

  I waddled over to him, picked up a piece of bread in my beak, and did a dance. I was considering luring him away and replacing his heart with a mushroom, and then sending him back to his parents so they could see the rot blossom in him. He laughed at my duck-dance, and I did an improbable cartwheel for him, hoping he would toddle toward me. If I got him close enough to the edge of the duck pond, I could pull him under the water and drown him and weave mosses into his hair.

  But he didn’t follow. He stood there, near the still-shouting man and the silent, shivering woman, and he watched me, and he kept throwing bread even as I slid under the surface of the water. I waited, but no little face appeared at the edge of the pond to see where I had gone; no chubby fingers broke the surface tension.

  When I poked my head out from under a lily pad, the proper ducks were shoving their beaks into the grass to get the last of the bread, and the man and the boy were gone, and the woman was sitting in the grass with her arms wrapped around her knees and a hollowed-out kind of face. I would have taken her, but there wouldn’t have been any sport in it. She was desperate to be taken, to vanish under the water and breathe deeply until silt settled in the bottoms of her lungs.

  Besides. I wanted the boy.

  * * *

  The next time I met the boy, I was a cat.

  To say that I “met” him is perhaps misleading, as it implies that I was not waiting outside his window. It implies that I had not followed his hollowed-out mother home and waited outside his window every night for a year. It is perhaps dishonest to say that I “met” the boy that night.

  I am perhaps dishonest.

  He set a bowl of milk on his windowsill. I still don’t know if he did it because he’d spotted me lurking, or if he did it because he’d heard that milk is a good gift for the faerie folk. Do children still hear those things? It doesn’t matter. I was a cat, a spotted cat with a long tail and bulbous green eyes, and he put out milk for me.

  I leaped onto his windowsill next to the precariously balanced, brimming bowl, and I lapped at the milk while he watched. His eyes were bright and curious, and I considered filling his eye sockets with gold so that his parents would have to chisel through his skull in order to pay off their house.
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  I peered into his bedroom. There was a narrow bed, rumpled, and there were socks on the floor. A row of jars sat on his desk, each one a prison for a different jewel-bright beetle. They scrabbled at the sides of the glass. The boy followed the direction of my gaze. “That’s my collection,” he whispered.

  I watched as one beetle attempted to scale the side of her jar; she overbalanced, toppled onto her back. Her legs waved in the air, searching for purchase and finding none. The boy smiled.

  “I like them,” he said. “They’re so cool.”

  I looked away from the beetles, staring at the boy in his bedroom with his narrow bed and his socks. I ignored the sounds of beetles crying out for freedom and grass and decaying things and air. They scratched at their glass, and I drank milk, and the boy watched me.

  “My name’s Peter,” the boy said. “What’s yours?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I lied, and he did not look surprised that I had spoken.

  He reached out tentative fingers to touch my fur. A static spark jumped between us and he started, knocking the bowl of milk over. It clattered, splashed milk as high as his knees. Somewhere deep inside the house, the woman’s voice called out, and the creak of her barefooted tread moved toward his bedroom.

  “You have to go,” he whispered, his voice urgent. “Please.”

  “Okay,” I said. He stared at me as the rumble came closer. “Good luck, Peter.”

  I leaped down into the dark garden as his bedroom door opened and listened to their voices. She spoke to him softly, and he answered in whispers. I didn’t leave until her hand emerged, white as dandelion fluff in the moonlight, and pulled his window shut.

  * * *

  The third time I met the boy, I was a deer.

  I’d wandered. I wasn’t made to linger, and it hurt my soul to wait for him. I amused myself elsewhere. I turned into a woman and led a little girl into the woods to find strawberries, and left her there for a day and a night before sending her back with red-stained cheeks and a dress made of lichen. I was a mouse in a cobbler’s house for a month, thinning the soles of every shoe he made until he started using iron nails and I had to leave. As a moth, I whispered into the ear of a banker while he slept, and when he woke, he was holding his wife’s kidney in his clenched fist.

  Small diversions.

  I was a deer the night I came back for him. White, dappled with brown, to catch his attention. I wanted him to climb out of his window and follow me into the hills. I wanted to plant marigolds in his mouth and sew his eyes shut with thread made from spider’s silk. I wandered up to his window, and it was open, and there was a salt rock there.

  Clever boy. He’d been reading up. I licked at the rock with a forked pink tongue.

  “Is that what your real tongue looks like?” he murmured from behind me. I jumped. I hadn’t expected to see him outside, and he’d crept up so quietly.

  “No,” I said. “It’s just how I like it to look when I’m a deer. When did you get so tall?”

  “What do you really look like?” he asked.

  I flicked my tongue at the salt rock again. “What do you really look like?” I asked.

  Peter cocked his head at me like a crow. “I look like this,” he said, gesturing to himself. I snorted.

  “I’ve been waiting for you for so long. Years,” he said. “I almost thought I made you up.” I looked up at him and my eyes iridesced in the moonlight and he stared.

  “Come with me,” I said.

  “Show me what you’re really like,” he said.

  I shoved my wet black deer-nose into his palm. He hesitated, then ran his hand across my head. My fur was as soft as butter that night. He caressed my face, brushed the underside of my chin. I turned my face into his hand and breathed in the smell of his skin, his pulse. I closed my teeth around the pad of flesh at the base of his thumb and sank them in, biting down deep and hard and fast.

  “What the fuck—” he cried out, but before he could pull his hand away, I flicked my tongue out and tasted his blood.

  “That’s what I’m really like,” I said, my voice low and rough. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and I licked his blood from my muzzle. It burned going down—iron—but it was enough to bind us. He would run from me, but he would never be able to escape me altogether. Not now.

  He cradled his hand against his chest.

  “I have to go,” he whispered.

  I watched him walk inside, and I felt the burning in my belly, and I knew he was mine.

  * * *

  Every time I came back to the boy Peter, he was a little different. When I was a toad drinking milk out of a saucer in his palm, he had hair on his chin and a pimple on his nose. When I was a dove pecking at bread crumbs on his bedside table, he was a twitchy, stretched-out thing, eyeing the door and wiping sweat from his palms. When I was a kangaroo mouse nibbling at rock salt on the hood of his car, he was a weaving drunk in a black suit with tears streaming down his face.

  “It’s my house now, you know,” he said as he walked from the car to the front door. “The old bastard’s dead. You can come inside, and you don’t have to hide or anything.” He held the door open, leaning against the frame, staring down at me.

  “You don’t have to live there,” I said. “You could come with me. I know a place in the forest where there’s a bed made from soft mosses and a bower made from dew. You could come with me and live there and eat berries that will make you immortal.” His vertebrae would hang from the tree branches like wind chimes, and the caterpillars would string their cocoons from his ribs in the summertime. “Come with me.”

  “Tell me what you are.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Show me what you really look like,” he said.

  “Come with me, and I will,” I replied.

  He looked at me for a long time, and then he took a step toward me, and I was sure he was going to follow me. But then he leaned over and vomited onto the front porch of the house that was now his, and then the door slammed in my face, and I was left outside with my salt.

  * * *

  “You can take any form you want, right?”

  His fingertip traced patterns in the milk that was spilled across his kitchen counter. I was a huge snake, black with a rainbow sheen across my scales like oil on water.

  “I suppose so,” I replied, sliding through a puddle on my belly. I was getting fat and slow on the boy’s bribes. He held his fingers out and passively stroked my back as I slipped past.

  “Why aren’t you ever a person?” he asked.

  “What kind of a person would I be?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Like . . . a person. A regular person.”

  “Like this?” I took the form of his mother, and he flinched. Then I took the form of a woman I’d known once, a woman who had also left out bread and milk and salt. Bright eyes and big curls and a body like honeyed wine. I flicked a forked tongue at him, my deer-tongue, and his answering laugh was strange.

  “Yes, like that. Just like that.” He laughed that strange laugh again, and I turned back into a snake. “Why don’t you ever look like yourself?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you?” I answered. He rested his hand in my path, and I slid over it. He frowned.

  “I do look like myself, though,” he said. “I look like myself all the time.”

  “So do I,” I said. He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve been researching you. Did you know that? I’ve been reading, and I know what you are now. I know what you look like.”

  “Do you now?” I drawled. His hands were warm under my belly and I was sleepy from the milk and the heat. He moved me, set me down. Paper rasped beneath me.

  “You look like that,” he whispered. The page he’d set me upon featured a watercolor of a child with butterfly wings and fat, smiling cheeks. She was sitting on a red and white toadstool.

  “Aha,” I said, curling into coils. “Aren’t you clever.”

  “You ca
n show me,” he said. “I’m a safe person for you to show. I promise.”

  He traced my coils with a fingertip, and I curled them tight-tight-tighter, until I was no bigger than the toadstool in the drawing. But I couldn’t make my snake-self smaller than his fingertip.

  * * *

  “Come inside,” he said.

  It had been two years. I had stayed away long enough to forget the reasons I was staying away. My memory is a long one, but he had been putting out bread, and milk, and salt, and the smell of them was so strong, and I was so hungry, and the hunger made me forget. And my belly still ached where his blood had seared me.

  I was bound. And I am what I am. So I followed.

  “I have something to show you,” he said. “It’s the culmination of my work.” He led me into his childhood bedroom—the same desk was there, but instead of jars, it was taken up by a large glass tank and an elaborate maze. I was a chinchilla that day, too big for the maze, the right size for the tank. I perched on his hand and nibbled at a bread crust and looked with noctilucent green eyes.

  “Watch,” he said, and he reached into the tank with the hand that wasn’t holding me. When he opened his palm in front of my eyes, a large brown cockroach straddled his life line, its antennae waving.

  “You’re still . . . collecting?” I asked, watching the cockroach smell the air. She almost certainly smelled me. Chinchilla-me, and the real me underneath.

  “Oh, yes,” he replied. “Well. Yes and no. This is part of my research.”

  The cockroach took a tentative step forward. Peter tipped his hand toward the maze, and the roach fell in.

  “Watch,” Peter said again, moving me to his shoulder. I looked into his ear—he’d started growing a few hairs in there.

  “You’re so strange,” I said, and his cheek plumped as he grinned.

  “Watch,” he whispered a final time, so I watched.

  He picked up a little cube from the corner of the desk and began twiddling his thumbs over the top of it. As he did, the cockroach spun in a slow, deliberate circle. “Do you see?” he said, and I didn’t see, so he showed me. He slid his thumbs across the top of the cube, and the cockroach navigated the maze with all the speed and accuracy of—