by Hugh Howey
“If there’s still too much radiation, I won’t wait to get sick.”
Bezel sat down slowly in the chair again. “If that is your choice, then we will wait until you can walk.”
He lowered the lights. His power reserve ticked to fifty-nine percent. His agitation had caused him to consume power far too quickly. He made a resolution to eliminate emotional responses going forward, to stop overtaxing his cooling system. He shuffled the priority list so that the recharge reminder would stop blinking, then entered standby mode without speaking again to Karen.
She worked hard after that. Most days she was even cheerful. As if she were preparing for an athletic contest instead of her own death. Bezel preferred not to speak about the day they would go outside, but he held his peace as she pretended it would be better than the math led him to believe.
The recharge reminder crept up the priority list more and more often, and was eventually replaced by the low-power warning he’d had upon reboot. It distracted him, pulsing in the priority list, a constant urgency with no resolution or relief. It even interrupted his standby mode now. He reduced the speed of his cooling fans so they would take less energy. The intermittent silence as the fans shut down bothered Karen, who asked repeatedly if he had a short. She seemed to have a constant need for conversation, as if she were storing up for years of silence. Bezel tried to keep his responses simple and short, knowing each syllable shortened his functioning time. He sometimes escaped to the other vault rooms to avoid her, gradually transferring the bodies of their crewmates into the useless sample tanks of the frozen zoo so that Karen wouldn’t have to see them.
The day finally came when she could walk as far as the seed vault, and they decided to spend the day sifting the ash and searching the seed drawers. He tried to warn her, but she still cried as they passed through the dead zoo, with its dry leathery smell and shattered console. When they reached the blackened seed vault she collapsed into the chair Bezel had put in the doorway. Whether from exhaustion or disappointment, he wasn’t certain. The low-power warning flashed again, disorienting him. He stared at the spot where Tock had lain. For a second he thought he had picked up a distant echo-reply and his priority list scrambled. Then Karen was standing next to him, calling his name.
“What is it?” he asked, trying to listen around the blinking recharge reminder.
“Are you okay? Did you short out? You were talking to Tock.”
“Impossible—”
He flipped through his memory files for the moment before, but found pieces of it missing. He shook his head. “Must have written to a bad sector,” he told her. She still looked worried. “I’m okay,” he added, to make her concentrate on something else. He scooped some of the ash into a sorting tray and passed it to her. “I’ve already gone through some of the shelves nearest the blast. If we have hope of anything surviving it will be here on the edges of the room.” He filled his own tray and began sifting. Karen stuck her fingertips into the charred dust but she continued to stare at Bezel.
“Do you dream?” she asked suddenly.
“No. Human dreams are their brains organizing their memories. My memory is organized as it is created.”
“Then what was that? That bad sector thing?”
“I suppose you could call that a dream. A bit of memory that has been placed in the wrong spot. Don’t worry, I’ll retrieve it during defragmentation if it is important.”
She nodded absently and spread the ash around the tray. Bezel finished his and discarded the lifeless soot before scooping up some more.
“So I guess you don’t believe in an afterlife then,” she said abruptly. Bezel wished the low-power warning would stay off for just a few more minutes between iterations.
“What do dreams have to do with the afterlife?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess I just always thought that you dream with your soul. That something still runs even when your brain is asleep. Or gone.”
Bezel looked up from the pile of gray. “If dreams were accepted as proof of having a soul, the history of your entire species would be different,” he said dryly, “and this place might not even have needed to exist.”
“Then … do you?”
Something glimmered and rolled gently in his tray. “Do I what? Have a soul?” he asked, paying far more attention to the tray than to Karen. “Or do I believe in an afterlife?”
“I guess both.”
He scraped the ash carefully away from the round clump. “I suffered a crash before I was reactivated. That might have been it for me—for us both. But something tripped and I rebooted. Without data loss or corruption, and with enough power to retrieve Tock’s energy pack.”
He plucked the clump from the tray and rolled it on his smooth hand.
“If you took my storage drive and plugged it into another empty bot body, that would be reincarnation, would it not? Anything is possible, Karen. Reboot, reincarnation, resurrection.”
He held up a dark green seed and then placed it in her hand.
“Vigna Radiata. The mung bean. Ready for propagation if we find soil that can support it.” He watched her stare at the seed. The low-power warning blared, pounding at his conscious thought. “Are you scared?” he asked her.
“You mean of going outside? Of dying?” she said.
He nodded.
She blew a warm breath over the seed. “Yes,” she admitted.
“Me too,” he said, and scooped up another trayful of dust.
He began hearing Tock’s echo-reply during standby mode. It was usually garbled, somehow twisted in with the low-power warnings, but every once in a while it called him into active mode. He almost always found Karen staring at him when this happened. He thought about doing a defragmentation, but the ping wasn’t harming anything, and it secretly made him feel less lonely.
He began going into standby even when Karen was awake now, trying to conserve his dwindling energy. He shut off his pressure and heat sensors. Karen began packing for the outside, checking the tiny store of rescued seeds almost hourly. She moved easily through the vault now, wandering often, almost becoming restless. She checked the dead video feed from the outer door over and over, expecting it to suddenly spring to life. When her worry finally exhausted her, she’d collapse into her cot and sleep for long stretches. Bezel wasn’t sure if they were waiting out the last hours of his life or of hers.
Warning: Power reserves at five percent. Shutdown imminent.
Bezel came out of standby mode. It was time. Karen was sleeping next to his chair.
Warning: Recharge to prevent data loss.
He shook her gently by the shoulder. She rubbed her eyes and sat up.
“It has to be today,” he said, and was distressed to hear that his voice had lost all inflection. It sounded like an Obsolete. Or a console. Karen nodded and gathered her gear.
“How long do we have?” she asked.
Warning: Power reserves at five percent. Shutdown imminent.
He shook his head, “My systems are trying to back their data up. The power reserve will drain more quickly now. Less than an hour. Maybe much less.”
“Is there anything you can do?”
“I can shut down most of my external sensors. You will have to lead me. Will you—will you hold my hand?”
Karen wrapped her hand around his. “Yes, but I thought you couldn’t feel it,” she said.
Bezel switched his pressure sensors on.
“Now I can,” he said, switching other sensors off. The world went blank.
Warning: Power reserves at four percent. Shutdown imminent.
He heard Karen take a deep breath beside him. She pulled him through the vault. He heard the ring of his footsteps change and he knew they were past the seed vault, climbing the long tunnel to the door.
“Do you have your oxygen tank?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, “but I’m not going to use it.”
“And if there’s radiation? Do you have what
you need?”
She squeezed his stiff hand tightly and didn’t answer. He reached his other hand in front of him and felt the vault door. “Do you see the panel next to the door?”
“Yes.”
“Punch in the code 101006.”
“It’s dead, Bezel. The wires are cut.”
“What?”
“The wires are slashed.”
Bezel tried to turn his visual sensors back on.
Command failed. Power low.
He felt for the manual override. The lever was stuck, bent, maybe from Dr. Ficht’s axe. He knew he could open it, but it was going to take a good deal of power. “Are you sure you’re ready? Do you want me to go first?” he asked.
“We’re going together.”
He wrenched the lever toward him. The door creaked. A blast of air hit his chest, but his temperature sensors were off so he didn’t know if it was cold or hot. Karen helped him up one step, then two. He took a reading.
Warning: Power reserves at two percent. Shutdown imminent.
Bezel shut down his radiation and chemical sensors as the data came through. “The air is breathable. Radiation low. What does it look like?”
He heard her footsteps crunch. “It’s all snow. But it’s supposed to be, right?”
“Yes. There is an airport nearby. The vault kept several vehicles there.”
“I’ll find them.”
He could hear the ocean.
“I don’t see any plants, or anything moving,” she said, and he could hear sadness in her voice.
“We’re in the arctic. Not much would be here, even at the best of times.”
“But what if there’s nothing, Bezel? What if I’m all that’s living anywhere?”
“Do you have your seeds?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then reincarnate it. Reboot it all.”
Warning: Power reserves at one percent. Shutdown imminent.
He fell into the snow. She pushed him up against the wall of the vault and pressed her hand against his. As the snow blew past, it slid over his metal with little tings, like tiny grains of sand. The ocean was a hollow rumble nearby.
“Can you hear me, Bezel?”
He sent out a ping, but she couldn’t hear it. His voice no longer worked. He wanted to tell her she would be all right. He wanted to hack the program and lie to her. Lie to himself about what would happen to her. But then she was the one speaking.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have blamed you for opening my pod. I shouldn’t have asked you to undo it. I’m glad I got to see the world again, even if it’s just to say goodbye. Thank you for waking me up. Thank you for letting me choose.” She was silent again for a moment. Then he heard her breath quicken. “Bezel, wake up. I see something flapping. Bezel! Turn on your sensors. It’s a bird! It’s alive, can you see it?” She let go of his hand. He heard a series of barking squawks.
Lagopus lagopus. The willow ptarmigan.
Shutdown imminent. Data loss expected.
Public Class frmForceshutdown
Private Sub Shutdown
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("forceshutdown", "-s -t 00")
End Sub
Private Sub Exit
End
End Sub
End Class
A Word from Deirdre Gould
We’ve been telling stories about automatons since before Homer’s time. Stories about “robots” cross both cultural and historical boundaries and can be found all over the world. From living statues of metal or clay to futuristic androids, it seems we have a fascination with the power to create life and the dangers and responsibilities that come with that power. Robots have occupied almost every role available in our literature. We’ve battled them, enslaved them (or been enslaved by them), been rescued by them, fallen in love with them—even cared for them like children.
Most of the time, though, when I think of robots, it’s as a foil for human characters in the stories I enjoy. They are perfect—the end of evolution. Stronger, faster, smarter, better. Even when they’re evil, robots are portrayed as perfectly evil. If they are to be defeated, it is their very perfection and inability to grow that makes the human character in the story triumph. And if they are good, the robot is still not quite good enough, because they are rigidly confined to their programming and lack the human adaptability needed to succeed.
But part of the definition of true artificial intelligence is being able to learn and adapt to exterior circumstances. Sure, maybe AIs in the future will be gifted with bodies that are strong and durable and don’t deteriorate. But they won’t be perfect. They’ll have to learn how to deal with all the complexity and confusion that we already face, and they’ll be expected to learn it faster than we do. How will the world look to someone that expects to be immortal? How will our society look to them? Will they learn to lie? Will they pity us or envy us? Will they love us?
Will we let them?
A Note to Readers
Thank you so much for reading The Robot Chronicles. If you enjoyed these stories, please keep an eye out for other titles in the Future Chronicles collection, a series of short story anthologies in speculative and science fiction.
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