“And you, Alejandro?” I asked.
His hair was bright silver in the firelight but his face was still young. “Call me Al.”
“Okay, Al. What do you think?”
“The work I do now matters more. Today, I dug fence posts for some old people so their chickens wouldn’t disappear on them. I had a real egg yesterday. I like the food out here better and I get to talk to people. Talk to the refugees who come from far away. Talk to the old ones. They have the most amazing stories. They tell me such wonderful tales of their struggles. I am glad I am here for the stories. The City allows no stories. The Fathers and Mothers don’t like stories. They even think dreams are dangerous.”
Sofia spooned the rabbit meat and carrots into a wooden bowl. I wasn’t used to eating meat. I ate the carrots and the broth and left the rest. It was more delicious than any kale shake. Greta watched us from the mouth of her tent, curious about our lives in the towers.
“Why did the Fathers and Mothers send you away?” Greta asked Sofia. “Did you have a boyfriend, too?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Sophia said. “It was about Vivid.”
“The eye machine. We know about the eye robot.”
“Low Towners don’t really understand it, though,” Sophia said. “You don’t know what it is unless you’ve had it.”
“But it wasn’t good enough for you to behave so you could stay in the City and keep it,” Greta said.
Sofia gave a slow nod. “No…I-I guess not.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“They were working to upgrade the system so Vivid wouldn’t be user-centered, anymore.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Sofia sipped her soup and thought a moment before answering. I began to wonder if she had just come to my meeting of revolutionaries for the soup.
“The Fathers and Mothers swore Vivid would never be used as a surveillance system,” Sofia said. “That was immutable. Then they changed their minds. Vivid is used to enhance and control everything we see in the City. Now the Fathers and Mothers are using it to collect data points. Few bots have achieved sentience. It’s not clear why but part of the issue is data compression.”
I got an uneasy feeling and my soup wasn’t sitting well in my stomach.
“NI is all just circuits and algos,” Al said. “If the bots have enough capacity in their organic matrices, they can achieve Next Intelligence.”
“Is that why the Doormen aren’t sentient?” I asked. “Not enough brain capacity?”
“It does take a good-sized cranium,” Al said. “Their casings aren’t as efficient as our little skulls. The bigger the bot, the bigger the brain potential.”
“NI takes more data, neuronal pathway mimicry and stability across the machines’ neurochemical transmitters,” Sophia said. “The sentient machines are very much like us but the Fathers and Mothers want all Citizens to be programmable.”
I thought of Sy Potter. His manners were impeccable until he went into torture mode. He said he was sentient but his laughter still didn’t sound right. Humor was a problem for the drones and one of the few differences we could still claim. “I don’t understand,” I told Sophia. “Speak plain. I’m not a Maker.”
She stared into the fire. Sophia looked haunted. “The Fathers and Mothers are trying to replace humans with machines. It’s high-level bio-mimicry. I’ve seen some machines that look like us. Nobody wanted to listen when I complained.”
“We’re listening,” Al said.
“I researched advanced corneal transplants from humans to bots. Now I work in a refugee camp treating old people’s glaucoma with cannabis. I used to work inside my patients’ eyes! I was a Maker!”
“I used to work on Doormen all day,” Al said. “Boring conversations with those little guys. Smartening them up sounds okay to me.”
“No. It’s bad,” Sophia said. “Once they can compress our data into bot brains, the Fathers and Mothers will delete the parts they don’t like. They’ll replace us. Citizens will be downloaded into bots. They’ll grind up the bodies. Organics will become redundant. Vivid plus drones divided by extinction of humans equals robot planet. The Fathers and Mothers will be immortal and the deal with Low Town will be off. What will they need humans for anymore?”
“Pets?” Al suggested.
I didn’t know that word. “What’s a pet?” When Al explained it to me, I was appalled.
Sophia laughed but her tone had a tinny edge of hysteria to it. “Oh, I don’t know. It might be justice. When they all become gods, they’ll treat us like we’ve treated them since long before the Fall.”
Sophia stood and thanked Greta for her hospitality. She turned to me with a dark look. “I like the Low Towner custom of taking a new name. I used to be Mariana. Mariana did bad things for the Fathers and Mothers before she was shoved out of the City for being foolish. I felt guilty about the things I did for the Fathers and Mothers. That was good. Then I told someone about it. That was bad.”
Sophia circled the fire and squeezed our hands before leaving. “When they erase our weaknesses, they’ll rob us of a lot of what makes us interesting.”
“When it becomes apparent what they’re doing, there’s going to be war,” Al said.
“Then a bloodbath,” Sophia said.
“Does it have to be that way?” Greta asked. “What if we made our own deals with the sailors?”
“You underestimate their single-mindedness,” Sophia said. “The Fathers and Mothers want purity. If they become immortal and programmable, they will finally achieve what the holy texts require. They’ll add capacity for thought but subtract all sin.”
“What does the holy text say that could be relevant now?” I asked. “Armageddon already came and went, didn’t it?”
“Perfection,” Sophia said. “The Word says that to think of a sin and to commit a sin are the same thing. The Fathers and Mothers finally have a solution to that ancient problem. Everything bad that has ever happened to us — the Fall, the Terrors, the Rumbles that leveled the old city of Saint Francis, the Blight, the Plagues — everything. The Fathers and Mothers attribute it all to our sin.”
“Thought crime,” Al said. “They might not be too wrong.”
“Just as Vivid wipes out visions of a busy harbor full of ships, they’ll be able to erase thoughts like lust and guilt or loving the wrong person.”
“Maybe Love itself is no longer an asset,” I said. “My mother said something like that recently.”
“Nothing will hold them back,” Al said. “They will feel no fear.”
“If they live without fear, won’t they be happy?” Greta asked. “Why do they need to kill us?”
Sophia disappeared from the reach of the firelight and into darkness but she called back, “The Fathers and Mothers hate sin. That means everyone who isn’t programmable. That means us.”
19
We were all quiet for a moment. Al pulled a device from his pack. It seemed to contain water but he did not drink. Instead, he used a flaming stick from the fire to ignite the plant material in one end. He put his lips to a tube and inhaled deeply. After a moment, his eyes rolled back and he sighed heavily.
“Al?”
“Yeah?”
“How are we going to stop this?”
“We? We aren’t,” he said. “We could run, I suppose, but they got flying drones and we’ve got what? Sticks and stones and a bucket of squat.”
Greta’s tears glistened in the firelight. “Is that a helpful rhyme?”
“Sorry,” Al said. He held out the device for Greta but the girl shook her head. I refused as well.
“I saw Jim Kimbo try to stop the drones,” Greta said. “The sailors have weapons to fend off pirates but nothing strong enough to stop Percival, even with his old broken hydraulic arm.”
“Al, you worked on the bots. What are their weaknesses?”
“I just greased Doormen’s wheels all day and ran circuit tests. I wasn’t really a Maker. I
just pretended to be one and hoped to be left alone. That’s why I got kicked out of paradise. I was taking up too many resources. Wasn’t productive enough. Didn’t earn my keep. They called me redundant.” He shrugged and inhaled deeply from his device again.
“And here I thought we all got kicked out for sex crimes,” I said.
“Thought crime for me,” Al said. “I thought I was working hard enough. It was okay while it lasted.”
I watched him inhale from his device again. “Does that machine help you breathe better?”
Al smiled and nodded and, after a pause, all his words tumbled out with his breath. “You could say that. Makes breathing more tolerable.”
“Do you know anything about the bots that could help us stop them?”
He shook his head. “Who tossed you out?”
“A Maintenance drone.”
“Was it a battle drone? The big one? All ceramic black armor?”
“Sy Potter, yes.”
“Yeah, he’s the council’s face to the world these days. Old Sy takes care of trouble in the towers. Have you seen a Father or a Mother lately? I wonder if they’re all dead. Do you suppose we could be that lucky?”
I hadn’t seen a High Father or a High Mother since watching the debates with the first sentient drone. The Fathers and Mothers were all old people now. They lived high in the towers just below the greenhouse complexes. Then I remembered the woman who talked on speakers and screens throughout the City and reminded Al about her.
“Yeah, she sure doesn’t sound like a drone. She just drones on. They might have more true believers in the next generation of Citizens if they got some better music and worked on producing a more exciting message.”
“Were they mean to you when they made you leave?” Greta asked Al.
Al’s smile faded. “Sy Potter got rid of me himself. He was polite about it. They always are. It’s that veneer of civility that made me want to tear him apart when he came through my door. They always knock. I had a heavy wrench. I tried to break his cam. He had me by the wrists before I could swing it. A human can’t beat a bot. I didn’t even scratch his pretty armor. You can forget about frontal assaults. We ain’t no battle drones.”
“Where does that leave us?” Greta asked.
“Dead, if they want, when they want,” Al said. “They could send a couple of drones up so high we couldn’t even see them. We wouldn’t know they were attacking until everyone and everything around us started getting chewed up into mash with splinter and acid explosives. They used to do that all the time. Still no reason they can’t, I guess.”
“Sophia made it clear we can’t reason with the Fathers and Mothers even if we could get to them, so I guess that’s out,” I said.
“Not even if you could fly to the highest tower and have a theological and logical chat,” Al said. “They don’t need to think. The Father and Mothers got rules and muscle and a cozy worldview that finds limited experience very comforting. The City in the Sky is the Land of No Change.”
The fire was dying. It felt like we were dying with it. A cold breeze came in from the Bay and we all shivered.
“Where do they come from?” Greta asked. “The machines, I mean.”
“The bots? They were manufactured down the coast somewhere. They don’t make new ones often. They take a lot of resources.”
“Sy Potter said he came from Santa Cruz.”
“The City closed its borders to new Citizens, organics and non, when I was young,” Al said.
“Does that mean there are more out there?” Greta asked.
“Dunno for sure,” Al said. “Many more, probably, especially the solar-powered and the big atom splitters.”
I didn’t know what Al meant but said nothing and sat closer to the little campfire. In the dying light, the stars shone. They weren’t as bright or as beautiful without Vivid. I couldn’t call up a compass to tell me which way North or South lay. But I needed to know. “How far is Santa Cruz?”
Al didn’t know and neither did Greta. However, her mother knew. Iola said that, with a fast ship, it wasn’t far at all.
There was no council to appeal to. There were no leaders in Low Town to ask for help. The next day, Greta and I walked around her neighborhood and asked for donations of food, some for Greta and me and some to pay a sailor for the ride. The girl explained to her neighbors that we had to find where the bots came from to stop the Fathers and Mothers from killing us all.
A few were skeptical. Most gave what they could spare. One frail old lady asked me what I intended to do once I got to Santa Cruz. I said I didn’t know. She gave me a few slabs of salted fish anyway and patted me on the shoulder. “Go be crazy somewhere else.”
By dawn the next day, that’s what I did.
20
We hired a small sailboat. The wild-haired woman who took us was Anne, an old friend of Iola’s. For a day’s supply of food, I was allowed on the boat. For Anne’s long friendship with Greta’s mother, the girl rode for free.
“Will the warships bother us? Do we have to sneak out of the bay or something?”
Anne laughed. “They don’t bother about any ship leaving the City in the Sky. It’s coming back that’s the problem.”
“You’ve seen Santa Cruz?”
“From the water, yeah,” Anne said. “Nothing there that I ever saw. I’m headed down to the Hearst kingdom, anyway. There’s a man down there who knows plants real well. We could use him up here for a while if Hearst will do without him. We need to get that man an apprentice who will live up here. Somebody’s child ate some toadstools. The whole family got sick but the child died. We gotta work on that.”
The wind whipped in off the bay, colder than I expected for a sunny day. Anne told me to grab a blanket from below. I didn’t know anything about sailing and, at first, the rise and fall of the bow made my stomach lurch. As we pulled out of the Bay I began to relax. As long as I didn’t stare directly at the waves I felt better. After a short time I decided being on a boat was exhilarating.
Exhilarating was not a forbidden word in the City in the Sky. However, opportunities to use it did not arise often.
Greta enjoyed sailing even more. She knew the names of sails. She understood ropes and how to tie them in knots so they stay tied. Anne let her steer.
“Can’t go wrong,” Anne told Greta. “Keep the land to the left all the way to Santa Cruz and keep the rocks to the right all the way back. We’ve got a stiff wind so we’ll be there in no time. Navigating is easy, long as you don’t get too far away from the rocks nor too close.”
I stared out to the great blue expanse to the right and called back to Anne. “You ever go out there?”
“Go where I can’t see land? No. I never. Never will. I’ve heard some sailors boast of it but I think that’s more reason for shame than pride. You only got one life and you’re going to risk it for what? To say you’ve been over there instead of over here. I’ve been lots of places. May sound nice but everybody gets bored of where they are eventually.”
As I turned to watch the coastline, I missed seeing through Vivid. I wanted to telescope in to search farther back from the shore. I wanted to stick my face underwater and see what underwater kingdoms and wrecks might be revealed in the depths below.
Soon, I didn’t have to imagine a wreck. The rusted stern of a great ship stuck out of the water. It rose so high above us we passed through its cold shadow “What was that?”
Anne shrugged, inured to the sight. “Don’t know what did it in, Elizabeth. Might have been the great wave. Might have been the Terrors. All I know is what my father told me. He said that used to be a great ship. It was never meant to dock, he said. It was for Makers only. The Makers paddled around in that monstrosity until something took it down.”
“It was a city, too, wasn’t it?” Greta asked.
“Ashes to ashes, we all fall down. That was my father’s position on the matter.” Anne made a gesture with her hand I didn’t understand. She dipped her head as
she touched her forehead, her stomach and each shoulder.
I was going to ask her about it but as the stern came into view, I gasped. I could make out writing through the rust: Amazonia.
“Amazing. That was a big ship,” I said.
Anne laughed gaily. “Big, but not as great as my little one. My boat is still afloat. No leaks in this boat. That’s a grave not a boat!”
She pointed to the cliffs off to our left. “Look at that! Been there forever ago and will be there, more or less, forever ahead. Smart girls like you, I bet you’re wondering what those cliffs might have seen and what will be yet. Me? I don’t give a ripe shit what was or what war might come next. I got today. I’m going to crack some crab and have a clam boil tonight. And maybe, if my husband waiting for me down there at Hearst is lucky, I’ll let him put his blanket together with mine under the stars. I’ll let him rock the boat and I’ll sleep under my own sails.”
As we sailed on to Santa Cruz, I thought how simple and lovely Anne’s life seemed to be. It was a life worth fighting for and a life worth saving but where did she fit? I couldn’t decide if she was truly in Service, a Maker or a Taker.
If anything, Anne acted like she was a High Mother. As captain of her own ship, I suppose that’s basically what she was.
As Santa Cruz came into view, I asked Anne what she thought her role in the world was. She looked at me strangely. “I’m me.”
“Yes, but how do you relate to everyone else?”
“Reasonably friendly.”
“Yes, but — ”
“I think I know what you’re asking, girl,” Anne said. “It’s a City question. But I don’t relate to anybody but me. The word you don’t have is sovereign. It’s my father’s word. He taught me it.”
“What’s it mean?”
“It means I don’t owe anybody anything but decency and I do what I please long as it don’t hurt nobody. I never hurt nobody and meant it. And anybody hurts me don’t get a chance to do it again. Sovereign means you’re free like those robots want to be.”
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 8
