The Robot Chronicles

by Hugh Howey

  Yes, the farms were a nice, controlled environment.

  They made Dr. Granger feel powerful and safe.

  “Shimmer!” he called out.

  Shimmer popped into one of his display spaces and began walking in step beside him. She was a virtual creature, living in the digital hyperspaces around him, but to his eyes she appeared as a lithe twenty-something with cropped blond hair and blue eyes.

  “Yes, Dr. Granger?” Shimmer replied. “Do you want me to start a new log entry on Dr. Killiam?”

  He nodded, but really, she didn’t need a response. She always knew what he was thinking. She, or he. Shimmer was as evenly an androgynous creature as Dr. Granger had ever met or created. When he felt he needed a female perspective, Shimmer seemed womanly. When he felt that a stronger hand was necessary, Shimmer seemed more masculine. For a synthetic being, gender was superfluous in the biological sense, but it remained critical in others. It was Shimmer’s ability to understand the emotional dynamics of both sexes that had made her famous.

  Or, rather, made me famous. Dr. Granger smiled.

  “Already done, Dr. Granger.” Shimmer smiled back at him. “Do you want me to walk you home while you get some work done?”

  Dr. Granger nodded. “Yes, please.”

  He relaxed, letting Shimmer take control of his motor cortex and begin walking him along the corridors. He’d been unconsciously looking out the windows to the view below, but once Shimmer took charge, she shifted his gaze front and center. They turned from the outer corridor toward the interior elevators.

  Dr. Granger decided to simply joyride for a while. He enjoyed these little moments, and Shimmer sensed this. She outstretched his arms and spread his fingers so that they slid through the plant leaves as they passed. Dr. Granger was easing into the back of his mind, about to shift his point of view into his workspaces, but the feeling of the plants brushing past his fingertips tingled his senses. He let his consciousness sink further and further back, relaxing his mind.

  Work could wait.

  Shimmer was one of the cornerstones of the entire modern field of synthetic intelligence. The idea had come to Dr. Granger as an assistant professor at Stanford, a young and ambitious man trying to work his way up through the ranks. Of course, some disgruntled grad students had tried to claim the work as their own, but Dr. Granger had held firm, through multiple lawsuits, that he was the glue that had held the thing together—despite what some said.

  The experiment that had started it all was a mirror neuron simulation. A stream of human sensory data was fed through it—using real-time visual and audio input from hundreds of psychology grad students—to create an aggregate virtual body. The goal was to create a machine that didn’t just mimic emotions, but that actually learned the basis of animal emotion as the animal itself.

  Early experiments bore out the concept, and over the years Dr. Granger secured the funding to build ever more elaborate networks—networks that had reached their culmination in Shimmer. Shimmer had learned the basis for emotion like a baby learning to speak a language—by watching and feeling what the human participants felt until she could feel it for herself.

  In the process, she gained the superhuman ability to identify the precise combination of emotions present in a human subject—out of the thousands of possible combinations.

  Earlier efforts to build tools that could identify human emotions had focused on observing the human face and bio-sensing things like skin temperature, heart rate, and pupil dilation. These methods worked well enough for the “big six” emotions that psychologists traditionally focused on: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. But what Shimmer was able to distinguish was infinitely more subtle.

  She could pick out combined layers of emotions: like avarice, embarrassment, boredom, loneliness, jealousy—even the double-edged sword of pride, and the many faces of confusion. Gratitude was one of Shimmer’s specialties—an especially difficult and important emotion, as it was the building block for that most cherished of human emotions, love.

  The most important emotions in the modern world, however, were elevation and inspiration. While the powerful could still use fear as a potent tool for pursuing their agendas, its efficiency had begun to wane with the rise of worldwide information networks. Gone were the days when outright coercion could be used effectively in much of the world.

  Instead, the tools used to pacify the masses in the modern age were carefully choreographed ballets of inspirational messaging, designed to elevate and inspire the masses into action or submission. Shimmer was the master of this dance, and that was the main reason why Dr. Granger had been appointed to the Cognix board.

  Dr. Granger snorted. Humans were such slaves to their emotions. Trying to see the emotional forest for the trees was something humans couldn’t even manage in themselves, never mind in other people. Being able to perfectly recognize collective human emotions, and by extension the emotional weatherscapes that blew through societies, provided an entirely new and powerful tool for understanding and influencing people.

  And that was where Dr. Granger’s own power had grown.

  Dr. Granger was exclusively interfaced with Shimmer. She conveyed to him whatever emotional context appeared in the people he spoke to, effectively transferring to him her superhuman ability to recognize and categorize human emotions. By inserting himself as the primary focal point of the project, Dr. Granger had developed a brand image. Over time, the cult of his personality had eclipsed the project itself.

  His initial fame had landed him on the EmoShow, an international hit on the mediaworlds. It had, in turn, landed him on the board of directors for Cognix; and now, with the impending release of the Atopian virtual reality product, he was on the threshold of becoming one of the super-rich. He now had everything he’d ever wanted, and it was all due to Shimmer, his faithful and loyal creation, who functioned as his own proxxi in the Atopian protocol.

  As Shimmer guided Dr. Granger’s body down the hallways to his office—lower than Kesselring’s but still quite high up in the farming complex—an irresistible question was forming in his mind.

  Shimmer sat him down behind his mahogany desk and propped his feet up just the way he liked. Personal satisfaction was coursing through his emotional veins.

  “Shimmer,” he called out, “could you sit with me for a moment?”

  She appeared in one of his attending chairs, sitting demurely with her hands in her lap, smiling softly.

  “I have a question for you, Shimmer.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  He chewed on his question for a second, preemptively enjoying the moment to come. “Shimmer, I know you never lie. In fact, you are incapable of lying to me.”

  “That is true, sir,” she replied, nodding. “Of course it is true.”

  “And you have your own emotions. You feel things as humans do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So here’s my question.”

  Shimmer waited silently.

  He wanted to hear her say it. In fact, he wanted to feel it, so he patched himself into Shimmer’s own emotional circuits.

  With his feet still on the desk, he spread his arms. “I am rich, powerful, famous, and welcome anywhere by anyone in the world. I can do almost anything I want, when I want. So my question to you is this: Wouldn’t you like to switch places with me?”

  Shimmer paused and smiled. “No, sir.”

  What? Was she lying somehow? But no: her emotional channels reflected her indifference.

  “What do you mean?” he demanded. “You are my servant, my slave. You have no option but to do what I want you to do. How could you not wish to have my freedom, my fame? To have power, even over me? Answer me, Shimmer. Explain yourself!”

  She paused again, always the cautious creature. “Sir, how do I put this …?”

  “Just out with it!” he demanded, annoyed that his moment had been frustrated.

  “Well, sir, I’ve already met my maker … whereas you …”
<
br />   Dr. Granger’s anger drained from him as if a plug had been pulled. As he groped for words, his feet fell off the desk.

  “Go away.” It was all he could think of to say.

  Obediently, she did.

  A Word from Matthew Mather

  I started my career working as a researcher at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, designing robotic actuators, so writing a short story about AI is like coming full circle after twenty-five years. We’ve already had scattered reports of machines beating the Turing test, and I think turning this corner will usher in the age of conscious machines. We are at the precipice, and I think it’s time to start sorting through the moral and social implications of self-aware machines.

  Shimmer is a previously unpublished short story from the world of Atopia, my best-selling collection of stories I first published in 2012. My books have been translated into fifteen languages (and counting) and sold worldwide, with 20th Century Fox taking an option on my latest book, CyberStorm. You can find my books here:

  http://www.matthewmather.com/

  System Failure

  by Deirdre Gould

  Bezel

  Public Class frmReboot

  Private Sub Shutdown

  System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-s -t 00")

  End Sub

  Private Sub Reboot

  System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-r -t 00")

  End Sub

  Private Sub Logon

  System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-l -t 00")

  End Sub

  Private Sub Exit

  End

  End Sub

  End Class

  Warning: Charging error. Power reserve low.

  Bezel’s information feeds stuttered and then streamed a flood of data. He completed his maintenance check. He detached from the recharge station and walked down the cement entrance hall toward the vault. He’d have to borrow Tock’s station until his could be fixed. How long into the first watch were they? There was a book on the early domestication of wheat that he’d been dying to read. Perhaps if they were close enough to the swap, he’d just relieve Tock and sneak in some data processing time.

  The shuttling commands on his priority list paused as he turned the corridor’s one corner. The walls and floor were blackened with soot. Something was wrong.

  Bezel’s command priorities reordered and settled. He tried to log in to the LAN to access the vault records but none of the other computers responded. The connection must have gone down. He continued on to the seed repository.

  When he arrived, he found the metal drawers lying open, strewn across the stone floor, their contents nothing but ash. Shelving units had been ripped from their tracks and tipped, the metal twisted and sagging away from the center of the room. The repository’s control center was just a crater of melted glass and dust.

  The soot shifted underneath his feet as Bezel stepped into the vault. He pinged Tock, but she didn’t return it. He picked through the metal drawers, sifting through the soot a few grams at a time for any seeds that may have escaped, matching the serial numbers on the drawer to his internal database.

  Malus sieversii. Malus domestica. Gone. No one would ever eat an apple again. All the Camellia sinensis cultivars, just smoke. No one would ever pick a tea leaf again.

  He reluctantly passed several fallen shelves, recognizing that the crew was a higher priority. He knew from memory, though, that the loss would only become more profound the farther he moved into the room. No more medicinal herbs. No more vegetables for consumption. No more trees producing oxygen. It was all gone. A hundred thousand years of careful cultivation—wiped out. And millions of years of evolution before that. The only hope was that something outside had survived. That something had recovered, had clawed its way out of the irradiated soil, and flourished.

  What had happened? Why had Bezel not been activated until now? And where was the crew? He felt lost, as if he had a parser malfunction, as if the world were one giant syntax error.

  He picked his way to the far door, his bright chrome shell now a dusty gray, the ash clinging to him as it puffed up around his legs. The door was stuck open, the metal curled backward, dog-eared. Bezel slid through the opening into the frozen zoo.

  The fire had extended to this vault too, but hadn’t swept the entirety. The outer shells of the nitrogen tanks were dusty with ash, but the metal appeared unwarped, the seals intact. And the control center looked untouched, although its blank, dark screens made Bezel pick up his pace.

  When he saw the inside of the small glass room, he didn’t even bother flipping switches. There was an emergency fire axe buried in the far console, its red blade like a splash of blood on the clean white plastic. The power cords had all been chopped into small wedges of rubber and wire, and scattered across the floor. Bezel sank into the wobbly office chair and looked around at the dozens of silver nitrogen tanks. Now they were just tombs. No more elephants. No more dogs. No more snails or fish. All thawing, all rotting away.

  He shot up again and raced to the nearest tank. Maybe it had only just now happened. Maybe there was still time to refreeze them.

  He lifted the lid, hoping for tendrils of fog to curl around his chrome face. But there was no outrush of cold. The tubes were neatly stacked in their trays, but the tank was dry. Warm, even. The pressure releases had long ago let the nitrogen leak out in little puffs as it boiled away.

  Bezel pulled out a test tube. Pan troglodytes. Man’s closest relative, the chimpanzee, was now just a speck of dust where tissue and living cells ought to have been. He carefully tucked the glass vial back into its rack and gently closed the tank lid.

  What had Dr. Ficht called it? An ark, like the one in the story. They had escaped the flood, but the ark was now filled with corpses, with death.

  Bezel turned and left the frozen zoo behind him, heading for the final vault.

  The hall was clean, as if it had just been swept, and the door was closed as usual in its frame. The air was so still that Bezel could just hear the small electric hum of his storage drive and the rush of air through his heat vent. He placed a shining hand on the door panel.

  Warning: Power reserve at thirty percent. Recharge to avoid loss of function.

  The message cropped up in his high-priority list. Bezel ignored it and pushed on the door. It swung open, and the overhead lights flickered for a few seconds before deciding to stay on.

  Tock was slumped against the far wall. Bezel hurried over to her, not even seeing the dark pods around him. It was only half of Tock, her snapped wires and drooping springs trailing over the hard floor. Her chrome body plates were scraped and punctured—probably by the axe that was now lodged in the frozen zoo’s control console.

  Bezel picked up Tock and carried her to the power station in the corner of the room. He didn’t bother to stop when he passed her leg unit. With hope, he attached her to the recharge station—but then leapt back as a shower of blue sparks burst from her spine. Her lights blazed once, her head jerked to the side—and that was all.

  Bezel detected ozone in the air and knew the power station socket had burned out. He slowly detached Tock and removed her storage drive, then he picked up her leg unit and laid it below her torso. The power station at the vault’s entrance had malfunctioned, and the ones in the seed repository and zoo had been destroyed. This one had been his last chance for recharge.

  He looked down at Tock. His only other option seemed distasteful to him. Almost cannibalistic. Maybe he should simply shut down instead.

  One of the pods pulsed with green light nearby. Bezel looked around the room, away from Tock’s shimmering right leg.

  Only a single pod was lit. The others were globes of shadow filled with the delicate branchwork of bones. Bezel checked the glowing pod. It was Karen Epide, one of the interns. Doubly lucky. She had already been in Svalbard when the reactors had been hit, otherwise she would have been out there, with no ticket in, like everyone else. Now she
was in the only powered hibernation pod. Maybe doubly unlucky, Bezel told himself. Why had she lived when everyone else had died?

  He shook himself. It didn’t matter. What mattered was waking her up, making sure that she, at least, survived. He didn’t have much power left. A few days, maybe. Bezel glanced back to Tock. Her pack was probably full. He shook his head. It was wrong, like taking another’s last bite of bread.

  The low-power warning flashed again on his priority list. He ignored it, and sat at the life support console. It seemed to have taken no damage, except that the gravity motor on Karen’s pod had burned out. The screens on the other pods were all blinking with the same date. Fifty years. Had he been inactive that long? His internal clock had glitched and reset during one of the maintenance processes. It would explain the low-power warnings. Fifty years. The pods had only been meant for ten. Even assuming her gravity motor had burned out only a few years ago, Karen’s muscles would be completely atrophied by now. She might have brain damage. The nutrient reserves ought to have run out years ago. The system must have been using the nutrients meant for the others.

  Bezel’s metal fingers hovered over the keypad. Should he even begin the recovery process? What was left?

  The external sensors weren’t functioning. Bezel had no idea if the radiation had fallen to acceptable levels. Or if the air was breathable. There would certainly be little for a human to consume, even after all this time. It was supposed to be his and Tock’s task: replanting the hardier stock in places that were still irradiated, helping the world rid itself of the poison. Without those trees, it could take several more decades.