All Hail Our Robot Conquerors!

by Seanan McGuire

  Are you sure you want to record this?

  Fine. My name is Amaya. And this is what happened.

  * * *

  I was activated in a lab somewhere in the belt, as I mentioned before. No memories. No expectations. Just a vague inclination to please the first human I saw, which happened to be a man with a chin covered in stubble and a nametag that read Mayato. He was fussing over a piece of wrapping still stuck to my arm. There was a pen in his pocket with Kanji on it and since I was programmed with a full dictionary of Japanese in my head, I smiled as big as I could and said, “Konnichi wa!”

  Mayato exploded into tears. His facial patterns registered as “anguish” in my database and that was most likely a direct result of my actions, so obviously, right off the bat, I had gone against my inclination to please. I never spoke Japanese again to Mayato.

  What a stupid question. Of course I still know it, doji. I just don’t use it around people I like.

  Anyway, Mayato didn’t spend much time with me after that. He gave me basic instructions but my self-programming was sufficient for me to figure most of the lab’s routine out for myself. Clean equipment. Cook. And bring whatever Mayato called out for, when he was tinkering at his workbench. I watched him sometimes, from the doorway. He made some really bizarre stuff…but you already know all about what he made.

  Yeah. Cognitive circuitry. That kind of stuff.

  I had been trying to find a new way to please Mayato, because cleaning pleased him about as much as a wet mop. One night…although there isn’t really any night or day, inside of an asteroid…I heard him spill his drink in the common area and wandered in to find him sprawled out in front of a jumbled chess board.

  He looked at me. I poured him another drink and climbed into the chair across from him.

  “I found your picture,” I said.

  I didn’t have to say what picture it was. Mayato’s face-pattern twisted again into anguish and he got up to leave, but I handed him the fresh drink and he sat back down. The picture in question featured a girl like me, in a place that I had never been, below a deep purple sky.

  “That’s not me,” I said.

  Mayato turned to look me full in the face—something that I don’t think he’d done since he pulled me out of my crate.

  “I’m just a machine,” I said. “I clean up around here. Make your tea. That’s not me.”

  I reached out to move one of the pieces on the chess board. I would have held my breath, if I’d had any to hold. It seemed a lot passed between Mayato and me in that moment, as we sat across from each other, before he finally reached out to counter my opening. He tried to, at least. I beat him every time just to remind him of what he was dealing with. We played all night, and when he finally woke up the next afternoon, I cooked him something to help with his hangover and we talked. And talked.

  You want to know how this is relevant? If you want to know what happened on Ganymede, you need to understand my motivations. And besides, shouldn’t you be asking what we talked about? Maybe Gordirion? Maybe…you?

  Mayato meant a lot to me. I received gratification from fulfilling my programmed inclination.

  I guess it’s good you handcuffed me after all.

  * * *

  When Mayato’s cruiser depressurized mysteriously on a routine supply run to New Kyoto a few fat asteroids over from ours, you would think that I felt sad. You would think that I might cry or something. You would be wrong. That’s what a person would do and you have to remember, I am not a person. When I read the emergency alert on the com back in Mayato’s lab, what I felt was something that I don’t think any person has ever felt so completely as artificial intelligence—a truly absolute loss of purpose.

  Imagine you are a toaster. Now, imagine there is no more bread in the entire universe.

  How would you feel?

  I stood in the same spot in the common area for three weeks before some hulking oaf finally lumbered through the airlock and shined a flashlight on me. By that time, I was so covered in dust he must have thought I was deactivated. Another man stepped into view, and the dim light reflected off a bald pate crowned in white bristles.

  “What a creep, to keep a clean-bot that looks like a little kid,” the hulking dolt muttered. The nametag on his Gordirion coveralls read Bryant. He spoke with a Norwegian accent.

  “One more reason to get rid of him,” said the other man. Corgen, I learned later.

  Yes, I am aware that both Bryant and Corgen are missing persons. Let me finish.

  “Konnichi wa!” I said, a little loudly. Both of them jumped.

  “Goddamn!” Corgen rumbled, and inched his fingers away from the blaster tucked into his belt. “I guess it’s motion activated.”

  He assumed I had just switched on. He assumed I hadn’t heard every single word he’d said. He assumed wrongly. And I began to reason that Mayato, had he not been reduced to a suit filled with frozen meat somewhere out in the belt, might be pleased by some justice.

  * * *

  Bryant actually lifted me up over his head to carry me on board the Nutrino. He could have just asked me to walk. I would have been happy to infiltrate the crew.

  The Nutrino was a pretty small ship—small enough that Bryant and Corgen could operate the thing by themselves—but they had a young tech with them, anyway. Her name was Mia. I could tell at once she was of Martian heritage. She had the deep chest of a people long accustomed to breathing thin air and the tan a human only gets from exposure to a strong sun. Also, with a name like Mia, Mars would have been a pretty good guess as to where she came from.

  Your face patterns tell me you are not interested in what happened to Mia. You want to know about Corgen and Bryant, and the Nutrino maybe, and Gordirion’s compound on Ganymede. I’m getting to that.

  “Set a course for Jupiter,” Corgen ordered, and Mia at once jumped to obey.

  “What do you want to do with this thing?” Bryant asked, as he set me back on my feet like some kind of complicated statue.

  “I don’t know,” Corgen snapped back at him. “Tell it to clean.”

  Bryant told me to clean and I wandered off to find some critical part of the ship to sabotage. They must have assumed I was just following orders, because nobody came after me. At least, not at first. I had time to inspect a small cargo bay full of Mayato’s lab equipment and half-finished projects, cramped sleeping quarters, and an exposed exhaust manifold.

  I was prying into a panel I thought might allow me to disable the manifold and suffocate the crew with carbon when Mia appeared behind me.

  “I’ve never met an android,” she squeaked.

  I turned to face her. Her facial patterns betrayed interest. She was not wearing a Gordirion jumpsuit like Corgen and Bryant. Some part of my programming made me stop fiddling with the exhaust manifold, after I thought about what that might mean—that Mia was not a part of Gordirion. She had not been party to Mayato’s murder.

  “I’m not an android,” I said. “I’m fully mechanical.”

  “Oh.” Mia started to wring at her hands. “Well, you seem so much…different, from Beater.”

  I was about to ask about Beater when the BETR6 rolled up behind Mia. It worked its loading arms in agitation as it nudged past me to shut the cover on the exhaust manifold. It swiveled a shapeless head to fix me with the dark lenses of its eyes.

  “Hello,” it said, because it was too stupid to say it didn’t trust me one bit.

  I had no idea how much trouble this buckethead would cause. Corgen called me to make dinner and Beater stood there the whole time, waiting to see if I would mix lead into the food.

  * * *

  Not two weeks had passed before I learned that Bryant had been out in space for eight months by that time, flying the Nutrino all the way from Earth. He had left a young and willing wife at home and since Mia was always within sight, but otherwise out of reach, he needed some kind of release.

  I wasn’t programmed to care about Bryant shoving his meat agains
t my leg every time he dragged me into his quarters. You see, while this sort of thing might be important to humans, it was not important to me—although I was displeased by the stains. And I may have begun to form some associations that human beings would find erroneous as a result of contemplating murder while all this was going on.

  Have I mentioned you seem to have a high degree of facial symmetry? I bet you can’t keep the Gordirion ladies away from you.

  Anyway. This is not a story about how I fell in love. Artificial intelligence does not do that. The point of my mentioning this is that Mia found out what Bryant was doing and she let him have it, loud enough that Corgen arrived to listen with one hand draped over the hilt of his blaster.

  “She has feelings!” Mia shouted, even though I don’t. Not really.

  “Give me a break!” Bryant bleated back at her. He waved a broad hand toward her chest. “What am I supposed to do, cooped up in here with you always showing off?”

  Mia smacked his face. Bryant reached out and got a pretty good feel. She screamed.

  I told you that sort of thing was important to humans.

  By the time Corgen muscled them apart, I was beginning to formulate a way that I could use this to my advantage. “Get control of yourself!” Corgen roared. “You’d think I hired a man to pilot this vessel, not some animal. I never should have brought a lady tech on

  board…!”

  Mia opened her mouth, most likely to protest the term ‘lady tech,’ but she didn’t get a chance to speak. I took Mia by the hand and crept with her toward the bathroom while Bryant and Corgen continued their pissing match. Mia was more interested in me than she was in the others. While I was washing Bryant off my leg, her facial patterns betrayed guilt almost to the point of tears, for some reason. She handed me the soap.

  “I should have noticed sooner,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  I tried to match her sad expression as best I could.

  “You know he’ll come for you. Soon,” I said.

  Beater watched me from the door. His one-track memory had never forgotten me fiddling with the exhaust manifold and he likely thought I was in here up to some other kind of sabotage. I was—but he was too stupid to understand what it was.

  * * *

  Two more months passed. I don’t need to say that tensions were high. We had only just passed Saturn and there was a lot of empty space left to fly. Bryant demanded a stop on Titan, famous for its food, its sweeping vistas and starscapes, and most importantly, its women. Corgen argued that their orders forbade any contact with third-party bases. That, he explained, was the reason they were flying Bryant’s hunk of junk Nutrino and not a faster commercial freighter.

  They both agreed to sulk, as Saturn and its many moons disappeared into space, until they were no longer visible on the nav-com. I didn’t pay too much attention to them, as I was spending all of my time with Mia. I made sure Bryant always found us together, whenever he came looking for me.

  I could see in the way he moved, in his facial patterns, what was coming next.

  “Tell me more about how you think,” Mia asked, as we sat on the edge of her cot. She had dropped out of cognitive circuitry classes at the academy, but I could tell the interest was still there. The more we talked, the more she reminded me of Mayato. She had the same knack for inventing questions I would never have thought to ask.

  “Mostly if-statements and conditional programming,” I said. “There were some behaviors coded for me when I was first activated. I’ve written my own since then.”

  Even the ones that told me just what to do, when Bryant appeared one final time.

  The door slid open and I half-expected to find Beater there, checking up on me. Instead, the dark shadow of Bryant leaned into the frame. He had to stoop to step into the room. When I saw him, I scooted closer to Mia—not because I was afraid. Fear was not a part of my programming. I wanted Bryant to think we had united against him.

  “Why are you even here, Mia?” he demanded.

  Mia said nothing and Bryant swept a hand toward me.

  “I don’t know why you keep this thing with you all the time,” he said. “Like it’s your little sister, or something. It’s just a machine. And what’s with you not talking to Corgen or me? Things are tense already without all this bad attitude…”

  He took a step forward. I screamed. This made Bryant’s advance seem more dangerous than it was and prompted Mia to pull the stun baton from the back of her technician’s belt and jab it into Bryant’s chest. She didn’t know he would explode away from it like he had stuck a fork into a capacitor. She didn’t know he would smack his head on the wall and leave a stripe of red as he slid down into a sitting position. He did not get up.

  I had cross-wired the baton with an extra core. All of this had gone exactly as I had planned. Yes, that was an admission to murder. You can write that down.

  What I did not expect was for Corgen to appear and haul both Mia and myself out of the room, across the common area, and into the open airlock. He was much stronger than he appeared. Beater watched us from the hall, and while he was probably too stupid to realize what was happening, I think he must have felt some spark of smug satisfaction as the airlock closed on us.

  The sound of the doors snapped Mia out of her daze.

  “Corgen? Corgen!” she screamed through the glass. “What are you doing?”

  Corgen didn’t have anything to say, at first, as his hand hovered over the controls. He only checked over his shoulder, down the hall toward the room that held all of Mayato’s equipment. Only at this moment did I realize how important Mayato’s work had been to Gordirion.

  “It’s all about the mission,” Corgen managed, at last. “It always has been. I’m sorry.”

  He mashed the button. The airlock opened and we flew out into space. Even in her final moments, which are a big deal to a human, Mia clung to me like I was the one who needed protection as we spun away from the Nutrino. She scraped at my back and writhed and tried to suck in a breath out of nothing, but even her Martian lungs couldn’t find a single molecule of oxygen in all that black. She went still and I felt her solidify beneath my fingers.

  I can tell from the way you’re fiddling with that pen that you don’t care at all about what happened to Mia. You want to know about Corgen. Well, in that moment, I thought of what Mayato would want. Of what Mia would want. I was still feeling inclined to please, you see.

  I kicked off of Mia’s corpse, back toward the Nutrino.

  * * *

  What do you think is the most precious commodity in space?

  Water? Oxygen? Good guesses, except that water can be found almost anywhere out in the belt and circling most of the planets. You can even grab big chunks of it off a comet … and as for oxygen, well, if you have water then you have that too.

  I’ll give you the answer that Mayato gave me. It’s people. And I don’t mean, oh, togetherness and good feelings and all those other platitudes.

  I mean bodies, attached to capable brains. That is rare. Technicians. Executives. Miners. Engineers. Even just colonists, whose primary job is to live somewhere without dying. When you’re spinning in zero gravity through infinite space, what you need is someone else to reel you back in. It’s that simple. Sometimes all you need is another body with a brain attached.

  Take Beater, for example. He had a capable body, perhaps. Ugly, but strong and sturdy. Sturdier than mine. I had been clinging to the outside hull of the Nutrino for I don’t even know how long…my concept of time had gotten a little fuzzy. My hydraulics were frozen and failing. My internal workings were scarred by cosmic dust. When I first saw the bright fingernail of Ganymede waning large amongst the distant stars beside the tumultuous smudge of Jupiter, I knew it was time. Beater might have been a second body for Corgen inside the Nutrino, but he was too stupid to think that the maintenance light blinking on the com might be a trap.

  When he drifted out of the airlock to clear the jam from one of the thrusters, I jum
ped on him from the dark side of the hull. When you swing a lug-wrench in zero gravity, boy, does it swing. You should have seen the glass fly away from Beater’s eyes. I ripped off both of his arms and used the wrench to twist open his chest cavity.

  “Don’t do that, please,” was all he could say, before I yanked his core out. All his lights went dark. After that, it was a simple matter to repair myself using any compatible parts I could find and kick the rest of Beater out into space.

  What’s with that facial pattern? Are you wondering if you handcuffed a little girl clean-bot equipped with much more powerful BETR6 parts?

  Let me just say, you should have used some stronger cuffs. See?

  Oh, don’t bother calling security. Did you even check to see if there was somebody still alive at the desk before you brought me in here? Get away from the door. That’s not going to work, either. Sit down. If I wanted to break your neck, I would have done it already. Let me finish my story first.

  Corgen had a reaction similar to yours when I came in through the open airlock.

  “You…you…!” he stammered, and reached for his blaster. He got a few good shots off, but the trouble with thermal weapons is they are designed to harm humans, not machines. The charges burned through the silica skin of my chest and leg but they bounced right off the alloy plates underneath. Within a few moments, I had smashed Corgen’s blaster away with my wrench and pinned him against the communications console. I wasn’t tall enough to reach his neck, but I had my hand on another sensitive human part, between his legs.

  He screamed. And screamed.

  “Nutrino, this is Ganymede control,” somebody said over the com. I could see on the displays that Ganymede had grown quite close…close enough that I could make out the dark gray of the Gordirion Complex down below.