Robots vs. Fairies

by Dominik Parisien

  “Stop it,” the boy Peter said, and I laughed, and I kissed him, and when he shoved me away my blood was on his teeth.

  He couldn’t look at me, but I wouldn’t let him look away. I would never let him look away. That night, with dried blood still flaking off my lips, I pressed my cheek to his. He flinched and tried to roll over.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered into his ear, my lips stirring his hair that was my hair that was his hair. “You wanted to see my true form, boy. Peter-boy.” He shook a little, maybe crying, and I grinned against his neck. “It’s only fair that you should see yours, too.”

  I had not a scrap of magic left in me, it’s true. The boy Peter wept in our bed next to the perfect image of himself, from whom he could never escape, and from whom he could never look away—and it felt so good. It felt so perfect, to know that he would be constantly faced with the self that he had tried so hard to bury in accomplishments and explanations and excuses. In that moment, as I pressed my lips against his sob-clenched throat, I realized that there are more kinds of magic than the spark that had been stored in my little spur of bone and gossamer. That night he began a slow descent into darkness, and I felt a satisfaction deeper than that of a bellyful of bread or a fistful of salt.

  “Good night, Peter,” I said. I let my head fall back onto my pillow, and that night, I slept the dreamless sleep of victory.

  TEAM FAIRY

  * * *

  BY SARAH GAILEY

  Fairies represent everything that robots can never be. While robots are the result of humans’ hubristic striving for power beyond what their (I mean, uh, “our”) feeble flesh can manage, fairies simply are better, just by being what they are. While robots inevitably fail and decay as the result of human inadequacy, fairies thrive and flourish as a result of their very inhumanity. Robots, as created things, are constantly trying to become what fairies already are: friggin’ awesome. But no amount of wires and tubes can give a robot the sheer unbridled power of a fairy. That’s why I wrote “Bread and Milk and Salt,” which is ultimately a story of one roboticist’s overreach. Humans are used to being able to create and control things that are different from them; that’s part of the importance of fairy lore, which insists that gifts of bread and milk and salt will be enough to buy a fairy’s obedience (or at least her mercy). But humans who are used to being in charge forget quickly that not all things are built to obey. While a robot is ultimately at the mercy of the humans who built it, a fairy is beholden to no one but herself. In this story, one particular human learns that the hard way.

  IRONHEART

  by Jonathan Maberry

  -1-

  * * *

  Duke took his pills one at a time, the way he always did. If he took more than two of them, they caught in his throat. That made him feel old, because it was the sort of thing his grandma complained about and he was too young to feel that old. He sat at the kitchen table with them lined up across his plate. Thirty-six pills. Every day. Thirty-six every freaking morning; thirty-six every freaking night.

  He hated taking them. All that water sloshed in his stomach and made him have to piss. But he took them anyway.

  The ones for the pain. The ones for the infections. And the ones to keep his body from rejecting his robot heart.

  He knew the pills were expensive, too. The VA was supposed to cover part of the cost, and his insurance was supposed to cover another part. But they covered about as much as a string bikini covered a hot girl on the beach. Technically it was coverage, but there was still a lot left over. And unlike a bikini, what was left wasn’t fun.

  Duke loved robots, but he hated his new heart. Unlike the housebots and the farmbots, this didn’t fit in. It was a machine made of plastic and metal, but his own flesh and bone didn’t want it. It was a constant fight, and like many heart-replacement patients, it was not a fight he was going to win. Some people did. The happy, healthy-looking, tanned and fit people on the posters at the doctor’s office and on websites for the manufacturer. And that golfer who had a transplant five years ago was back on the PGA tour. So, sure, some folks won the transplant lottery.

  A lot more didn’t, and Duke was pretty sure he was getting close to his sell-by date. Maybe Christmas this year. Maybe Valentine’s Day next. In that zone. His family kept calling him a warrior, a fighter. His nephew Ollie made him a key chain in metal shop in the shape of nine letters hard-welded together. Ironheart. Duke carried it with his keys, and on good days he’d hold it in his fist and yell, “Kiss my ass!” to the world. On most days, though, it hurt him to look at it.

  The line of pills on the kitchen table seemed to mock him and the challenge of that steel-welded nickname.

  Duke heard a clanking sound and turned to look out the window. Gramps was riding the small tractor and pulling one of the robots back to the barn on a flatbed trailer. Duke couldn’t see which one because it was covered in a tarp, but he figured it was Farmboy. That would be just about right for the way things were going. But no matter which one it was, it was bad news. The bots were all falling apart. Every damn thing around here was falling apart. He sure as hell was.

  “Duke,” called Grandma from upstairs.

  “Yeah?”

  “You take your pills?”

  “Yeah,” he said, then hastily swallowed another one. “Yeah, I took ’em.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he lied. He would take them, but it always required effort. Like bracing to pull off a bandage. There was nothing fun about it and the only power he had in the moment was his ability to stall, to make the pills wait a little longer.

  “You sure?”

  It was the same conversation every day. Sometimes she’d yell from the living room, where she had her sewing stuff, sometimes from upstairs where she had her workbench. Grandma made corn dollies and kitchen witches and sold them at the roadside stand.

  “I took them all,” called Duke.

  A pause. The house was old and its bones ached. Duke could hear it groan whenever the wind shoved it or the rain fell too hard. It smelled nice, though. Grandma always had a pot of something simmering. Soup, because soup was cheap and you could put anything in it, or game stew if Gramps was lucky with his gun. On Social Security day there would be a roast in the oven. Sometimes Grandma would just put herbs in a pot and let it simmer all afternoon. Nutmeg and cloves, cinnamon and ginger. Sometimes the house smelled like apple pie and sometimes it smelled like Christmas.

  Like Christmases used to be before the Troubles.

  The Troubles.

  They started before he went off to the army. A couple of bad seasons on the farm. Drought followed by leaf blight. Then more drought and the plant diseases born of dryness. Some years they barely made enough to pay the bank loans on the machines and seed stock. So it wasn’t all him. But then he was on foot patrol with a rifle squad in Afghanistan when the man in front of him stepped on the IED. Blew that guy back to Jesus and filled Duke with shrapnel. The medics and field docs later told him that he died five times and they brought him back each time. They grinned like football champs when they said this. And, sure, they were heroes. Good for them. But screw them, too.

  As Duke swallowed another damn pill, he wondered how much of a favor those medics did when they saved him. The army paid for the first round of surgeries, and they even kicked in a chunk toward the heart replacement Duke got a year after he was discharged. But now that he was out, Duke discovered one of the ugly secrets of the military—they’ll do a crap-ton for you while you’re carrying a gun and fifty pounds of battle rattle through hot foreign sands, but once you’re a civilian, you’re nothing more than a nuisance. A drain on the society. That was what one of the congressmen said in an interview. Veterans were a drain on the society. Every year the benefits were cut and the red tape doubled.

  Gramps called it a damned disgrace. But he didn’t give one of his patented “in my day” speeches, because it really wasn’t all that much better during the wars that fol
lowed 9/11, back when Gramps was nineteen. And they weren’t really better when Dad wore sergeant stripes in the second Deash War. War was war, and politicians needed soldiers in uniform and didn’t want the hassle of dealing with those who lived, crippled or not, once they were discharged.

  That was when the real troubles started. After Duke’s discharge, because the actual transplant happened when he was a civilian. A short, ugly year later.

  He couldn’t work the farm like everyone had hoped. Five years ago Duke was a bull. Tall as Gramps and as broad-shouldered as Dad. Well, as tall as Gramps had been, once upon a time. And Dad was dead now. Smashed along with Mom when their autonomous drive pickup went offline and sent them through a guardrail on Berkholder Ridge.

  Troubles. Nothing but troubles.

  When Dad died while Duke was overseas, the farm had started to die. Anyone could see it. Dad had the knack of keeping even the oldest and clunkiest of the machines running. Mom called him the bot whisperer. She wasn’t far wrong, either. Dad said it was all a matter of relating to them, and applying some blood, sweat, and tears. He said it wasn’t always about knowing the repair manuals cover to cover, but knowing the machines.

  “They want to work,” Dad told him once when Duke was little. “Every single one of them machines wants to work. They want to work all day and night.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Duke. “They’re just machines. They’re just circuit boards and gears. How can they want anything?”

  Dad had smiled a strange little smile. The conversation had taken place out in the barn, and Dad was tinkering around inside the chest of a burly stump-remover bot. He’d painted the machine to look like the Incredible Hulk from those old comics. Big and green, with a scowly face. Dad spat on the corner of a cloth and then reached inside to clean some carbon dust from a rotor.

  “You got to think like them, kiddo,” Dad said as he worked. “They’re built for farming and they got no other uses. This is why they exist. Like you and me. We’re farmers. We’re here to work the land and feed people with what we grow. If we stop being farmers, then what are we?” He shook his head. “The bots are no different. They work the land and get to know the land. It’s theirs every bit as it’s ours. You just have to know how to look at it. Some folks see oil leaking from a broke-down bot and they think it’s a useless pile of junk. Me? I see a hardworking farm machine who’s sweating oil and bleeding grease and who is just tired from all them long hours. It doesn’t mean the bot’s done or that it’s junk. You have to look inside, touch it, let it know that you feel the same, that if we bleed black or red it’s all the same. We’re farmers, Duke. Flesh and steel, breather and exhaust.”

  The dark lights on the stump-puller bot suddenly flicked on and Dad leaned back, nodding, satisfied. He patted the green metal chest.

  “Never forget, son, it’s his farm, too. And he wants to work for us because we’re his family. Just like he’s ours.”

  That was almost the last conversation Duke ever had with his father before that bad night on Berkholder Ridge.

  After that, Duke had taken over the maintenance of the bots. It took him a while to move through and past his grief and get to a clearer place; but once he did, he found that he understood some of what Dad had said. The robots and the family and the farm. It made sense to him.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to understand why he had ever left the farm to go to war.

  Duke lifted another pill to his lips and gagged at the thought of taking it. He closed his eyes, took a breath, took a sip of water, and almost slapped the pill to the back of his throat, then drank more to wash it down. It went down like a brick.

  Grandma handled the farm accounts, and she did a good job of intercepting the bills before Duke ever got a chance to see them. But he knew. He was sick, not stupid or blind. Grandma always looked so worried when Gramps went into town to refill his prescriptions. Since he’d been taking those pills, there had been fewer Christmas and birthday presents for the kids. Duke had seven nephews and nieces. None of his own. Grandma canceled the cable TV. There wasn’t meat on the table every night the way there used to be. Sometimes he heard Grandma on the phone with someone, asking for more time. And heard her crying afterward.

  He knew and he understood. It was expensive to keep him alive.

  It was how it was.

  * * *

  It was so twisted that he had once raised a hand to God and sworn an oath to protect America from all threats, foreign and domestic—and now he was here, losing a fight to sickness and bills. In a way he was the enemy, because his bills were dragging everyone else down.

  The only thing that made Duke feel better was knowing that pretty soon he wouldn’t be there to hurt anyone.

  Outside the first birds of spring sang in the trees.

  Duke swallowed the last pill and washed it down with a gulp of water. Christmas, he thought. Or maybe a little after.

  Sooner, if God wasn’t going to be a total dick.

  -2-

  * * *

  “Duke,” she called, “you feel up to chores today?”

  He smiled at that. Grandma never came right out and asked him if he felt sick or weak. She asked if he felt up to doing chores. As if he was ten years old.

  If he said no, she’d come down and take his vitals and brew a special tea and set him on the couch with a blanket and a book. If he said yes, she’d actually give him something to do. Nothing heavy. He couldn’t drag the trash can outside anymore, and he couldn’t chop wood or milk cows. Most of his chores were things he could do sitting down. Rewiring one of the nutrient sensors they used to test the soil, or rebuilding the little feederbot that took seeds out to the henhouse. Duke liked fixing things, so that was all right. He loved machines of all kinds, and according to Grandma, they loved him. More times than he could count, Duke had repaired something Gramps had given up on. Before the last surgery Duke had even fixed the solar cells on Gramps’s car, which saved them all about two thousand dollars. Grandma had cried and Gramps hugged him until he couldn’t breathe.

  “Sure, I can do some chores,” said Duke. He was only half telling the truth, because he didn’t feel great. The cough had come back, and twice he’d spit up a little blood. Not much, just a couple of drops. Enough, though, so that he didn’t dare tell his grandparents, because they would take him straight to the hospital.

  Apart from the cough, though, he felt okay. Good enough to walk around the farm if he didn’t go too far. Good enough to use some tools. He’d been working on Farmboy off and on and still felt he could fix the big old bugger.

  “Come to the stairs,” called Grandma, and Duke got up and walked into the living room. Grandma stood at the top of the long flight of stairs and peered down through the gloom at Duke. He held his arms out to the side and turned around, keeping a grin on his face the whole time.

  “See?” he said. “Right as rain.”

  He couldn’t see her eyes from that distance, but her mouth was pursed and puckered the way it was when she was thinking hard.

  “What was your blood pressure this morning?”

  He told her. And his weight, blood sugar, and temperature. They’d all be entered into the med-pad, which meant she could access them from her tablet upstairs, but Grandma seemed to like it better when he told her the numbers.

  “The lawn mower stopped working again,” she said.

  He shrugged. “The drive circuit pops loose if it hits a rock. I can fix it.”

  Grandma nodded. “It’s in the barn.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your grandfather just took Farmboy in, too.”

  “I saw.”

  “Don’t mess with it if you’re too tired.”

  “Okay.” He actually wanted to open the old bot up and take a look. Maybe he could conjure up some of Dad’s old bot whisperer mojo and get it on its feet again. That would be nice. That would make him feel like he was contributing something around here. Apply a little blood, sweat, and tears, Dad us
ed to say. And wishful thinking, too, mused Duke.

  “Wear a sweater,” she said. “It’s still cold.”

  He smiled. “I will.”

  He turned to go, but Grandma said, “I love you, Lyle.”

  She was the only one who ever called him by his real name. He was Duke to everyone. He used to be Big Duke, but the “big” kind of fell off with the weight he’d shed since the transplant. Duke hated his name. Lyle.

  Grandma had a special pass, though. On that and everything else. If there was a real “ironheart” in their family, it was her. Powerful in the way some women are. Not with muscle or knuckles, but with wisdom and heart and tolerance.

  There was so much sadness in her voice that Duke didn’t dare look up at her. “Love you, too.”

  He put on a sweater and went outside.

  -3-

  * * *

  The barn was a big, red monstrosity. The paint was peeling and the boards looked weary. It was taller and longer than the house and nearly twice as wide. Back when it was built, nearly a hundred and forty years ago, it housed four tractors, a combine harvester, a cultivator, a chisel plow, a harrower, and other old-fashioned farm equipment. Over the years, Duke knew, those machines had been gradually replaced by newer models. Gas engines gave way to solar power, drivers had been replaced by autonomous drive systems and GPS, and then those had been replaced by robots. Farmboy, Plowboy, Tillerman, SeedMonkey. Even the old VetMech, which could do anything from delivering a breeched calf to repairing a ruptured bowel on a mule. All kinds. Duke always loved to hear them all going clankity-clank out in the fields. Giants of metal and graphene, wires and flashing lights. Clankity-clank as they tilled the fields, clankity-clank as they harvested the crops. Sometimes, when he was little, he’d lie awake at night and hear them clanking out in the field, working around the clock because they didn’t need to sleep and they didn’t need daylight.