Robots vs. Fairies

by Dominik Parisien

  He’d seen Gramps close them at sunset, the way he always did. There were no farmhands left, and his grandparents were downstairs. He could hear Gramps trying to comfort Grandma.

  So why were the doors open?

  Why?

  He heard the sound before he saw anything move. Not a cow or pig. Not a horse. It was faint, metallic. Slow.

  Familiar in a way that made no sense at all, and Duke strained to hear.

  Clankity-clank.

  A machine? But which machine? They were all piles of junk. Like him. Broken and dead, or a short step away from being dead. Just like him.

  Clankity-clank.

  Duke pushed himself up so he could see better. Moving his body was like trying to move a truck with his bare hands. His body was a bundle of sticks, but it was also improbably heavy. Dead weight, he thought, and almost laughed.

  Clankity-clank.

  Duke saw something, and he froze and squinted to try and understand what he was seeing.

  A figure moved in the shadows just inside the barn doorway. Tall. Big.

  Gleaming.

  “What . . . ?” asked Duke, but his voice was a whisper. Almost gone. A ghost’s voice.

  The figure took a step forward.

  Clankity-clank.

  Duke saw the metal leg step out into the moonlight. Then a swinging arm. A chest. A head with a metal hat welded on. Two black eyes seeming to look up at him.

  Clankity-clank.

  Farmboy stepped out of the barn. The metal plate was back in place over the control panel, but bright light escaped from around its edges. The barrel chest of the robot was as bright as polished silver.

  Except for some black smears on its chest.

  Even from that distance, Duke was sure he saw those smears. Black as oil.

  Duke knew that they weren’t black.

  He knew.

  And he smiled.

  Then Farmboy turned slowly to face the big, dark fields. There were hundreds of hours of work that Duke couldn’t do, and that his grandparents were too old to do alone. The robot began walking toward the field.

  He turned once to look up at the farmhouse, but by then there was no one to look back. Then the robot turned back to the field and began to walk. Clankity-clank, clankity-clank.

  Going to work.

  TEAM ROBOT

  * * *

  BY JONATHAN MABERRY

  I’m Team Robot. All the way. Team Robot for the win.

  Not that I have anything against faeries. Nope. I have faeries in my middle-grade novel series, The Nightsiders. I’m good with all the realms of faerie, and I enjoyed fairy tales in all of their many forms.

  But . . . robots.

  C’mon.

  Robots?

  I was introduced to science fiction through the writings of Ray Bradbury (who was a friend and writing mentor when I was a teenager), Isaac Asimov, and the wonderful Adam Link stories by Eando Binder. I was Team Robot from the jump. I loved Robbie from Forbidden Planet and Robot from Lost in Space. I loved the Space Giants TV show, which was about a family of robots. I have statues of robots—stationary and windup—on my bookshelves. And about the only dance moves I can manage are sad approximations of the Robot.

  Besides, robots are cool. They bring with them a sense of mystery. Especially in this modern era, where artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and robotics are heading toward the very real possibility of mechanical constructs who can legitimately think. Not programmed responses, but self-awareness. Now, I know, you’re thinking Skynet and about a zillion cautionary tales of the technological singularity. I don’t buy that part of it. Why would self-awareness instantly lead to hostility? Maybe what we’d get is a kind of benign, powerful, well-informed innocence. That’s where I’m placing my wildly optimistic bet.

  Right now the most I can do is have decidedly one-sided conversations with my Roomba, but that could change.

  Any ol’ day now.

  So, sure. Team Robot.

  JUST ANOTHER LOVE SONG

  by Kat Howard

  The first time I tried to sing a man’s death, he laughed. Then he asked me out.

  I was busking downtown. It can make for long days, standing outside in the ebb and flow of people, none of whom are actually there to see you, but I can also make pretty decent money, and even the longest day busking is better than a short one spent locked in an office, or working retail.

  Plus, I do have a bit of an extra advantage. Being a banshee means my voice is a tool—I can harmonize with myself, run vocal loops, all sorts of stuff that has people looking around for cords and reverb pedals and a laptop where I must be programming things. Sorry, folks. No electronics. Just me. And my fairy blood.

  Things had gotten a little weird that summer. Fae had gone missing, and without any obvious reason. No bodies had turned up, there were no rumors that unpleasant humans were making life difficult for those of us who didn’t quite fit in, no hints as to what was happening. Just Fae, gone. Four so far, and in the span of under a month. Completely creepy, and moving toward terrifying. So I noticed things, more than I normally would have.

  And I noticed the guy, who pushed his way from the back of the crowd around to the front. I noticed, and then my magic did.

  Before I saw him, I’d never felt the call to use the darker side of my inheritance and be an omen or sing a death, which, honestly, I had been fine with. It wasn’t a part of my power I wanted to use. I mean, we live in a society: I don’t need to be breaking out the wailing and watching people drop dead in my wake to be happy. But as he came closer, I felt as if my blood had turned to fog. Magic rose up in my throat, so full and fast that I wondered that I could still sing at all, around the lump of it.

  Then, in the middle of singing all of Carly Rae Jepsen’s harmonies at once, I let out a wail. One that should have stopped his heart in his chest, and his breath in his lungs.

  It didn’t work.

  He laughed. “Forget the lyrics?”

  No, I had not.

  “Well, look, do you take requests? I want you to sing me a love song. One that’s just for me.”

  “No,” I said.

  “If you won’t do that, then maybe you’ll go out with me? I’m Trent, by the way.” He looked expectant, as if his dimples ought to be enough to make me give up my name. They weren’t.

  “Very no,” I said.

  “Come on, just one cup of coffee—I’m a musician too.”

  Of course he was.

  He was good-looking, I’ll give him that, but he had the kind of attitude that suggested he knew to the ounce precisely how good-looking he was, and expected the world to make his life easier because of it. “I’m busy tonight, sorry.” I stared, waiting for him to turn pale and faint. Or for blood to leak like tears from his eyes. For something. Anything.

  “Your number. Could I at least get your number?” A smile and a step closer, his eyes twinkling at me. “I promise I’ll only use it for business purposes—I’m putting together a band, and I think you’d be perfect.”

  “Still no.” He looked disgustingly healthy and sounded like he was having no problems breathing. The magic hadn’t worked. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I gathered up the Wonder Woman lunch box I used to collect money in, and left.

  His voice followed me. “What? Do you have a boyfriend or something? I promise I’m more fun.”

  “Drop dead,” I said. I waited until I got to the corner to glance back and see if that had worked any better than the singing. Nope. Still alive. “Shit.”

  As I walked home, I thought I heard someone singing. A love song—desire and longing. I shook my head and walked faster.

  * * *

  “You sang what you were supposed to?” my roommate, Sarah, asked. Sarah is a brownie, which is the best possible thing for a roommate to be. She’s a brilliant cook, keeps the apartment both spotless and roach free, and actually likes doing the laundry.

  “I mean, I think so. I’ve never done it before, but
the wail welled right up when I saw him.” I could still feel the sensation of fog, cold air, and loneliness lingering in my throat, like it wasn’t finished, like it might come back.

  “Maybe he didn’t realize what you were doing,” Sarah said.

  “What, he figured I spontaneously burst into howls while singing, and that turned him on so much he had to ask me out?”

  “Guys have liked stranger things, Mairead, you know this,” she said.

  “True. But it shouldn’t matter whether he realized or not. That’s not how the magic is supposed to work. Ugh, maybe I’m broken.” I rubbed my throat. Part of me was glad it hadn’t worked. I liked the part of my magic that let me sing. I didn’t even mind having a voice that could be a weapon. But if it was, I wanted to be in control of it, to be able to decide how and when I used that part of my magic. Bad enough the magic wasn’t working when I wanted it to, I didn’t want to have to worry that I’d reach for a high note and wind up with someone keeling over mid-chorus.

  I shook my head, and shook the thought aside. “Speaking of singing, there’s a new band at Purple Reign tonight. Want to come?”

  Sarah shook her head. Like a lot of brownies, with their tight ties to the house they dwell in and care for, Sarah is agoraphobic. She’s not totally housebound, and she’s told me that she appreciates it when I invite her places. So I do—she’s my friend. And it doesn’t bother me when she says no, like she usually does. “Not this time, thanks. There’s this new recipe I want to try, one of those fifty-layer cakes, and it takes a long time.”

  I let out a sound that was less of a wail and more of a groan of sugar-filled anticipation. “Sounds amazing. I look forward to taste-testing it for you.”

  “I knew I could count on your help,” she said.

  I grinned.

  “Maybe take a cab tonight, though. There was another disappearance today.”

  “Another?” I asked. “Who this time?”

  “The púca that lives in Central Park.”

  “Seriously?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Still no hint as to what’s going on?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.” The Fae were good at gossip—you get that way if you have a hide in plain sight sort of lifestyle—and Sarah was a wiz at social media. “Mostly, people are worried.”

  The walk to the club was short, not even a mile. And it was supposed to be a nice evening. But the púca was bigger and fiercer than I was by a long shot. Plus, he could turn into a horse. If someone could kidnap him, I doubted I’d be a challenge. I was worried too. “Okay. I’ll take a cab.”

  * * *

  Purple Reign was a Fae club. Not that we banned humans from coming in or anything like that; it was just really hard to find if you didn’t know about it. You might, if you hadn’t been invited, walk past and think that it was actually a run-down diner that looked like it had failed its last health inspection and smelled like it had just had a garbage fire.

  Which is why I was surprised to walk in and see Trent up onstage. He was as smarmy and good-looking as ever. Also, as apparently alive as ever. Singing, in fact. Alone in the spotlight, solo guitar. Surrounded by seriously adoring fans—a wide variety of Fae crowding the stage, bodies in various stages of what might best be described as “swoon.”

  Not swoon like the reaction when you think someone is hot, not even like the reaction when you want to get in someone’s pants so bad that your brain sort of short-circuits. More like when you see people literally lose their powers of speech, where their eyes go unfocused and yearning, when you suspect that the walls could be burning down around them and they wouldn’t even notice. That sort of swoon.

  And that explained why he was here. He was Fae. A gancanagh—a love talker. Able to use his voice as a tool of seduction. And when I say tool, I mean basically a hammer. If you heard it, if he spoke his words to you, you’d fall in love with him. Well, not “love” so much as “significant sexual infatuation.” Whether he was your normal type or not, if he told you that you wanted him, it would be very, very hard—maybe even impossible—for you to resist. You would do whatever he wanted to make him happy.

  The gancanagh was not a type of Fae I was fond of.

  I watched through narrowed eyes as he sang. His voice was pleasant enough, the songs covers, all sugary-sweet pop. Love songs of one variety or another, surprise, surprise. He wasn’t, as far as I could tell, directing his singing to one person in particular, but rather blasting the room with the force of his voice, dispersing the lust generally. I still wasn’t a fan, but feeding off the love of the audience I could let slide.

  Still, I had no desire to hear the rest of his set, so I slipped back out the door to wait, to make sure he went home alone. As I waited, that fog-feeling rose up in my throat again like a doom. When I saw him step outside, I wailed. Even though I was certain there’d be no effect, I felt like I’d drown if I didn’t let the cry shriek from my throat.

  Once again, nothing happened. Shit, maybe I really was broken. This was possibly ungood.

  “You,” he said, still all charm in tight T-shirt and worn denim. “Decided to get that cup of coffee after all?”

  “Not even a little bit,” I said.

  “I’d ask if you came by to hear me play, but I didn’t see you at the show.”

  “I was there. Briefly. Long enough to see you,” I said. “You’ve got some . . . interesting arrangements to your songs. The crowd seemed to really love them.” I kept my eyes on his face, trying to see if he’d react. We’re not forbidden from using our powers on each other or anything like that, but something about what he’d been doing struck me as sort of tacky. I wanted him to know that I knew.

  But there was no change in his expression. Just that smile. “You should come back. Do a song with me tomorrow—I’m here one more night. I’ll even have a full band, one I’m really excited about, and I’d love to hear how you sound with them. I bet the audience would just die to hear you sing.”

  He knew what I was too, then. I kept my face blank. “Sounds interesting. Maybe I will.”

  A cab slowed, and I raised my arm to flag the driver.

  “It’s still early. Do you have to leave now?” Trent asked.

  “Yes.” I opened the car door.

  Then he sang a line from one of his earlier songs—something about longing and staying together. He looked at me intensely as he did, and paused at the end, as if he was waiting for something else to happen. Like he was hoping it would make me change my mind. It didn’t. I got into the cab and went home.

  * * *

  “So he knows what I am, obviously,” I said, through a mouthful of a cake made out of layers of chocolate crepes, with some sort of glorious pistachio filling between them. “This is maybe the best thing you’ve ever made, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” Sarah said. “And if he knows, then you should definitely stay home. Don’t sing.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He won’t have asked for any good reason. Think about it. If he knows what you are, then it’s because he knows you’ve been trying to use your wail to kill him. Why would he ever invite you to sing after that?”

  “Because he also knows it isn’t working,” I said. “Maybe at this point he thinks hearing me fail is funny. Although—I think he failed too. He sang some crap about staying together all night as I was leaving.”

  “No desire to change your mind?” Sarah asked.

  “None at all—if I hadn’t known he was a gancanagh, I would have thought it was a really cheesy attempt at flirting.”

  “Maybe you two cancel each other out,” Sarah said. “Love and death could be opposites.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that happening.”

  “Neither have I, but I’ve also never heard of something like what’s going on with your voice.” She tucked the cake into a container, tapped the top. I could see the shimmer in the air as the spell that would keep the cake from going stale settled around it. “The whole t
hing seems weird to me. Bad weird, not entertaining weird.”

  “You have a point. But.” I took another bite, considered.

  “How can there be a ‘but’?” she asked.

  “I can still feel it. The call. The omen. Whatever it is, that wants me to sing. And to sing to him.” Fog, quiet, waiting in the back of my throat. “I don’t think this is finished.”

  “I don’t like this,” Sarah said.

  I didn’t either.

  * * *

  I went out busking the next day, as usual. I half expected Trent to show up again, but things were—with the exception of the guy in the suit who used the cash I had collected to make change for a twenty without asking, and then dropped a quarter back in the lunchbox with an enormous flourish—uneventful. No banshee wails rising in my throat, no half-heard songs following me on my way home, no disappeared Fae.

  And then I got home, and Sarah was gone.

  Which was weird, but not impossible. What was impossible was that she had left the oven on, the bread that she had been baking now bricked into charcoal, and the smoke alarm was wailing louder even than I could.

  There were no good circumstances under which that would have happened. But the burned bread was the only thing out of place. It was as if Sarah had just . . . left. As if something had lured her out, had wooed her from within the safety of our walls.

  That was when I knew.

  I had met someone, very recently, with a voice that could lure. He wouldn’t have even needed to be in the apartment, wouldn’t have even needed to know it was Sarah he was luring out—a song sung below an open window, and that would be enough.

  I ran to Purple Reign.

  “Trent’s sound-checking, but he said if someone like you showed up, to let her in,” the woman working security said.

  Inside, I was greeted by a sight I never expected to see—Sarah, onstage, playing the drums. Playing the drums well. I was so shocked that it took me at least a verse and a chorus to register what else I was seeing. There was the púca, in his human form, playing bass. A redcap on keyboards. A trio of flower Fae singing backup. All the missing Fae here, in support of the gancanagh.