All Hail Our Robot Conquerors!

by Seanan McGuire

  Pensacola had very little of that, but he did have relatives.

  Cincinnati Wagner, bored with his suburban lifestyle (but unwilling to too deeply displease his wife, who was not, after all, either his childhood sweetheart or his former arch-nemesis), had spent many happy hours chipping an escape tunnel through the (former) basement (now secret lab) floor and (presumably) on out beneath the front lawn. Pensacola, while aware of its presence, had never explored it, since he was wary of dark damp locations, rats, booby-traps, mummified corpses, and a number of other items that the passage might reasonably be expected to contain. However, the air was rapidly filling with smoke and the washing machine in the corner looked as if it was trying to learn to talk, so this seemed to be a prudent time at which to embrace new experiences. He strode to the northeast corner of the basement, shifted several boxes of Christmas ornaments, exposed the entrance, undogged the hatch, spun the hand-wheel, and heaved open the large metal covering.

  The washing machine gave a satanic chortle, flung up its lid, and began to gush water.

  Clutching the camping lantern, Pensacola descended the ladder. The chamber at the bottom was surprisingly spacious: fully-timbered, with a poured cement floor, and even (currently-non-functioning) lighting. On the left wall was an entirely prosaic door. He opened it. The passageway thus revealed was lower and narrower than the door itself, and, of course, utterly without illumination. Pensacola hesitated. While under most circumstances an individual fleeing the targeted wrath of the vanguard of an alien robot invasion would be…fleeing (to the exclusion of philosophical thoughts about their place in the universe), Pensacola had spent nearly his entire life in rebellion against practical heroics and situations of high drama and derring-do. On the other hand, it was flee or stay where he was, and staying where he was held the threat of vivisection, electrocution, being lectured by household appliances, and wet sneakers. While he had no idea where the tunnel led, he knew it led away from a house currently being besieged by cyborg squirrels.

  He sighed and began to trudge forward.

  His shoulders brushed the sides of the passage, and he had to duck to avoid colliding with dangling light bulbs. After a few minutes he was fairly sure he’d crossed the front lawn and the street beyond and be somewhere under the house across the street. The Mahams? The Brays? He wasn’t sure. Maybe the Palmatiers. He conjured up a mental map of the neighborhood, bearing in mind the fact that somewhere nearby the Fzt!ch’wert-bang mothership had recently landed and was probably something he would prefer to avoid. The random detritus of erratic occupancy was littered along the passageway and stockpiled in its occasional wide spots, as the tunnel seemed to have functioned much as a man-cave for the elder Wagner.

  He’d just picked up a baseball bat, wondering why there’d be a baseball bat in an escape tunnel (or for that matter, in his father’s possession), when he heard scrabbling behind him.

  Pensacola froze.

  In the dim (and, he now realized, failing) light of the lantern, he could see a gleaming, shambling, extremely soggy swarm of woodland zombie cyborgs scampering toward him along the floor of the escape tunnel, the well-cooked flesh of their disguises shredded away from gleaming metallic skeletons. For an instant, he contemplated running, but abandoned the notion. It wasn’t that he was feeling particularly brave, but if he ran, they would be behind him, and over the past month, he’d had ample demonstration that squirrels moved faster than he did. There was nothing to do but make his stand right here. He hefted the bat.

  “Prepare to meet your fate, Pensacola Wagner!” several of the squirrels shrilled in chorus. “You are only the first of many Earthlings who—”

  Pensacola stepped forward and struck with the reminiscent glee of someone who’d actually enjoyed Little League. Alien cyborg squirrels imploded like meat-covered lightbulbs.

  “Plastic?” he said in disbelief. “You’re made out of plastic?”

  “—only the first of many who—”

  Crunch.

  “—many who will suffer—”

  Crunch.

  “—many who—”

  Crunch.

  “—our ultralight space-age materials will—”

  Crunch.

  Not long afterward, Pensacola stood alone and triumphant amid a messy mound of mashed squirrels. He was scratched, bitten, and had spontaneously re-invented the ancient sport of ferret-legging, but he was remarkably unscathed for someone who had stood up to the Fzt!ch’wert-bang legions armed with a baseball bat.

  He prodded one of the nearer corpses gingerly, then reached down and picked it up. It did not weigh nearly as much as he felt a cybernetic rodent should weigh. He carried it over to the nearest crate, digging in his pockets.

  A proper scion of the Wagners would have been carrying a Swiss Army Knife at the very least; Pensacola unearthed a paperclip, two rubber bands, half a pack of chewing gum, fourteen cents in change, his wallet, and a nail-clipper. It was a messy business, but he managed to get the mashed squirrel open. The area occupied by the rib cage was a single solid gleaming mass—or it had been before encountering Pensacola’s baseball bat. He frowned slightly.

  The skull was intact. Wincing in anticipation, Pensacola took it between thumb and forefinger and squeezed hesitantly.

  There was a crunchy sort of a pop as the skull collapsed.

  His hunch in the heat of battle was confirmed. They might look like they were made of metal, and certainly, as alien robot conquerors and would-be overlords, they ought to be made of metal, but …

  “—our ultralight space-age materials will—”

  Intuition struck.

  He got to his feet, grabbed the lantern, and began to run.

  * * *

  There are certain fundamental parameters shared by all sentient life. Not “civilized”—for civilization is a highly-subjective concept at the best of times—but sentient: tool-using, problem-solving, pattern-making, hierarchical, organizational, and occasionally altruistic. Humanity’s own evolution from savannah-dwelling scavenger to corrupt politician has been driven entirely by the most overriding of these evolutionary imperatives, nor is Humanity alone in this. From crows to cephalopods, the prime imperative is demonstrated plainly—such being the nature of fundamentals—nor is it any less than universal, not being restricted to the inhabitants of one planet, one star-system, one galaxy. Sentience shapes perception, and perception shapes sentience. Without the perception of these explicit principles, sentience itself does not exist, for the drive toward it is, in their absence, absent as well.

  But of all of the delusions, misconceptions, grand designs, and undeniable impulses that shape sentience and bind its bearers into a kinship as unavoidable as the abrupt discovery of unknown relatives after one wins the lottery, there is one driving force which is the jewel in the crown of self-aware intelligent life.

  It is the eternal quest for the easy way out.

  In fact, Mankind’s evolution can be defined as a constant search for precisely that. The switch from barley to wheat in the late Neolithic was driven by laziness: wheat was easier to grow, and who among the first agricultural pioneers cared if they would be dooming their remote descendants to the living hell of celiac disease? The future, being nonexistent, was disposable: nobody really cared which of Today’s Problems they decided to store there. (After all, tomorrow never comes, right?)

  The thing is, when you arrive at the future, you push yesterday’s problems into the conditional ever-more-future imperfect, sweeping them under the metaphorical entropic space-time rug and ignoring the Law of Diminishing Returns. Take radio (and its successor in interest, television). Fast, cheap, easy, revolutionized human civilization, created a new culture, but did anybody think about the fact that they were also notifying everyone for light-years around of their existence? Of course not. When radio was invented, people still thought there were canals on Mars and Fermi’s Paradox wasn’t even a blip upon the horizon.

  None of this was something of which Pe
nsacola Wagner was consciously aware—but it was something he knew, as the child of a sentient race, to be true. And because he was also a scion of the Wagner-Smith-Jones-Carter-Nordstroms, to know was to act.

  * * *

  The escape tunnel debouched behind the movie theater in the nearby mall (unsurprising, as there had been a bar in the mall until a very few years previously). Pensacola dragged himself up the ladder and looked around. Everything looked perfectly normal for an average weekday morning.

  But it didn’t sound normal.

  The noise was deafening, on the order of an airport runway in use, a sold-out Springsteen concert, or (as it happened to be) every car radio on all six to nine lanes of Route 17 blasting at top volume, augmented by screaming (this being New Jersey, the screaming was more indignant than fearful), shouting (ditto), car horns, truck horns, emergency vehicle sirens of various modulations, and the irritated braaaaap! that police units use to clear the road in the absence of really cost-effective disintegrator rays.

  The program on every radio station was identical and depressingly familiar.

  “Surrender, Earthlings! Bow down to your robot conquerors! Your days of self-determination are at an end! For uncounted nanoseconds, the Fzt!ch’wert-bang have monitored your foolish electronic broadcasts, discovering your innermost secrets and racial weaknesses! Now—”

  He hefted his bat and ran across the theater’s parking lot, a feeder road, a tract of scrub woodland that identified itself as prime commercial acreage, and the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts. There were surprisingly-few pedestrians, and the cars and delivery trucks on the feeder roads all had three things in common: they were pulled neatly to the side of the road, their radios were blaring at top volume, and their occupants were attempting, with a noticeable lack of success, to exit their vehicles.

  It was clear that the Fzt!ch’wert-bang’s ability to seize control of electronic and/or computerized systems did not restrict itself to refrigerators, washing machines, and smart phones.

  “Our unstoppable conquest force will obliterate all attempts at resistance! We are immune to jokes, logical fallacies, and desire for the females of your species!”

  As he cleared the front of the Dunkin’ Donuts, Pensacola could finally see the Fzt!ch’wert-bang spaceship, the trailing edge of which was a few storefronts to his left. It was embarrassingly saucer-shaped and roughly the size of one of the larger anchor stores in the Paramus Mall. It was, naturally, blocking all lanes of Route 17 (as well as obliterating an Audi dealership beneath its bulk), but the Fzt!ch’wert-bang seemed to have seized control of the traffic before its ship had landed, as it had not only not landed on anyone, but there were no visible fender-benders

  “We shall now begin a minatory program of mindless slaughter by deploying our dauntingly-large destruction robot, as our research has indicated to us that this is the necessary first step in subjugating your planet. Please do not be alarmed: your deaths will be relatively quick, and pave the way for your assimilation into the Fzt!ch’wert-bang Empire—”

  The screaming Pensacola heard had less to do with the sudden awareness that Humanity was not alone in the cosmos and more to do with the gigantic robot that was even now rising up out of the center of the saucer-shaped craft. A wholly-detached observer might have noticed that the walls of the spaceship buckled and billowed alarmingly as the robot appeared, much as if the ship itself was being rapidly-cannibalized for construction material.

  “—where you will contentedly toil as degraded slaves with inordinately short life-spans for the greater glory of—”

  With miraculous nimbleness, Pensacola achieved the edge of the alien vessel. He raised his baseball bat over his head and brought it down on the nearest section of the hull with exasperation-fuelled strength.

  Crunch.

  The robot was in the process of raising one enormous leg over the side of the ship. It looked down. “Earthling!” a thousand car radios gibbered as one. “You cannot have escaped the executioners of the—”

  Crunch-wham!

  By now most of the east side of the ship was in shards as Pensacola unleashed several decades’ worth of pent-up frustration at the existence of the peculiar and its unwarranted intrusion into everyday life.

  “—your temerity is—”

  Crunch-crunchity-crunch-crunch-BANG-BANG-BANG!

  By now, the more robust portions of the hull were hanging free of the framework in unprepossessing sheets of thin flapping alien construction material and the robot seemed to be petrified with indignation. Or perhaps disbelief. Pensacola’s fellow New Jerseyites, sensing the opportunity to work out their own frustrations, armed themselves with whatever bludgeons came easily to hand, and surged forward in search of both souvenirs and payback.

  Within half an hour, Station Fzt!ch’wert-bang had ceased to broadcast from the car radios of what was then being called (by the fourteen traffic copters hovering above it) the largest traffic jam in New Jersey history.

  * * *

  By the time the Army and the National Guard arrived (somewhere around noon), all that remained of both the Fzt!ch’wert-bang mother-ship and its giant robot were a few bright smears of ultra-light alien metal ground into the blacktop and several thousand motorists in heated conversation with their respective insurance companies.

  Once people had realized that the aliens who were interrupting their morning commute had landed in something with the structural integrity of a piñata, those on the north (uphill) side of the ship utilized their vehicles as battering rams, juggernauts, and similar agents of destruction, and, in a surge of cooperative effort, cleared enough cars from the road that an 18-wheeler that had been just cresting the top of the hill when the spaceship landed could build up truly formidable momentum on the downward grade.

  No trace of the robot was ever found.

  * * *

  Commentators and analysts, in the days that followed, would inevitably draw comparisons to H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and speculate on the peculiar short-sightedness of aliens who wished to conquer Earth with a vanguard built of lightweight organic polymers. No one, at least publically, was either well-educated or cynical enough to come up with the true reason, even though Earth’s own manufacturing was heading in the same direction. Items traditionally made out of wood, from furniture to white picket fences, were now made out of plastic. Motorized household appliances that once had metal casings and metal interiors were also now constructed from plastics. Automobiles that had once been made of steel, wood, and leather had, for decades, been instead constructed of plastics and increasingly-thinner metal panels. Plastics were easier to shape, lighter in weight, less expensive to manufacture, faster to produce…

  In short, plastic was the easy way out, so naturally Humanity took it.

  The Fzt!ch’wert-bang were not human, of course, nor had their ancestral creators been. But they were sentient. They, too, embraced organic polymers for much the same reasons: convenience, rapid deployment, low opportunity cost. Their weaponry was, of course, superior to anything of Earthly manufacture, and would have provided them with a decisive victory over the collective military and technological might of the planet if not for two minor considerations which their hasty deployment (courtesy of Pensacola Wagner and his birdfeeder-driven vendetta) had caused them to overlook.

  1. Their weaponry was also made primarily of plastic.

  2. They’d landed in New Jersey.

  * * *

  As for Pensacola, once the anti-robot riot had gotten well and truly started, he’d prudently taken a powder. Even though he’d (technically) saved Earth from alien invasion, he doubted the authorities were going to see his side of things, especially since they’d be certain to eventually discover that his house (or what remained of it) was pretty much buried in short-circuited cyborgs and might in consequence choose to draw a wholly-unwarranted cause and effect relationship. No, he was pretty sure that being able to say (with not too much mendacity) that he’d been out of town the en
tire time would be the path to a peaceful and much easier life.

  With that in mind he hiked down to Ho-Ho-Kus, evaded the military cordon, and took the Shortline into Manhattan. As a result of the ingress of the Fzt!ch’wert-bang, Pensacola felt that he understood the family avocation as never before. The Mahwah Plastic Robot Invasion would form the keystone of the revised introduction for Time for Adventure: in fact, an entire new draft of his book would clearly be necessary—and who knew? Perhaps original research was not out of the question.

  After all, he’d now seen that adventuring wasn’t nearly as complicated (or as uncomfortable) as his family memoirs had led him to believe.

  This comfortable opinion lasted him precisely six weeks.

  Having eluded bureaucratic suspicion and public interest, Pensacola had gone to Sarasota, Florida, to interview his third cousin, Monongahela Smith-Jones, who was currently residing in an exclusive retirement community there. Having once again put behind him all possibility of embracing the adventurial lifestyle, Pensacola was insufficiently suspicious upon encountering the Pandemonium Wondershow and Inter-temporal Confabulator, with the inevitable consequences. It would do no good at all, either to Pensacola, Cousin Monongahela, or the docents of the Ringling Circus Museum, to suggest that what happened was clearly foreordained, but so it was.

  After all, Pensacola should have known better than to take the easy way out.

  THE HEADSPACE DATABASE