Robot Uprisings

by Edited by Daniel H. Wilson

  The beardless man raised his hand to stop Jamal. He was obviously a man of power. Who could afford to shave anymore? “You said there were no outside connections,” he said.

  “There weren’t.” Jamal reached up to scratch his own beard. “I mean … not that we knew of. Hell, we never knew this function was even operational. For all I know, the virus figured it out and turned it on itself. We never used half of what that thing could do. The microwave, neither.”

  “The virus figured it out. You say that like this thing could learn.”

  “Well, yeah, that was the point. I mean, at first it wasn’t any more self-aware than the other viruses. Not at first. But you have to think about what kind of malware and worms this thing was learning from. It was like locking up a young prodigy with a hoard of career criminals. Once it started learning, things went downhill fast.”

  “Mr. Killabrew, tell us about the refrigerator.”

  “Well, we didn’t know it was the fridge at first. We just started getting these weird deliveries. We got a router one day, a high-end wireless router. In the box there was one of those little gift cards that you fill out online. It said Power me up.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. Are you kidding? We thought it was from a hacker. Well, I guess it kinda was. But you know, we were always at war with malicious programmers. Our job was to write software that killed their software. So we were used to hate mail and stuff like that. But these deliveries kept rolling in, and they got weirder.”

  “Weirder. Like what?”

  “Well, Laura, one of our head coders, kept getting jars of peanuts sent to her. They all had notes saying Eat me.”

  “Mr. Killabrew—” The bald man with the wispy beard seemed exasperated with how this was going. “When are you going to tell us how this outbreak began?”

  “I’m telling you right now.”

  “You’re telling us that your refrigerator was ordering peanuts for one of your coworkers.”

  “That’s right. Laura was allergic to peanuts. Deathly allergic. After a few weeks of getting like a jar a day, she started thinking it was one of us. I mean, it was weird, but still kinda funny. But weird. You know?”

  “Are you saying the virus was trying to kill you?”

  “Well, at this point it was just trying to kill Laura.”

  Someone in the gallery sniggered. Jamal didn’t mean it like that.

  “So your vacuum cleaner is acting up, you’re getting peanuts and routers in the mail, what next?”

  “Service calls. And at this point, we’re pretty sure we’re being targeted by hackers. We were looking for attacks from the outside, even though we had the thing locked up in there with us. So when these repair trucks and vans start pulling up, this stream of people in their uniforms and clipboards, we figure they’re in on it, right?”

  “You didn’t call them?”

  “No. The AC unit called for a repair. And the copy machine. They had direct lines through the power outlets.”

  “Like the refrigerator, Mr. Killabrew?”

  “Yeah. Now, we figure these people are trying to get inside to hack us. Carl thought it was the Israelis. But he thought everything was the Israelis. Several of our staff stopped going home. Others quit coming in. At some point, the Roomba got out.”

  Jamal shook his head. Hindsight was a bitch.

  “When was this?” the councilwoman asked.

  “Two days before the outbreak,” he said.

  “And you think it was the Roomba?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. We argued about it for a long time. Laura and I were on the run together for a while. Before raiders got her. We had one of those old cars with a gas engine that didn’t know how to drive itself. We headed for the coast, arguing about what’d happened, if it started with us or if we were just seeing early signs. Laura asked what would happen if the Roomba had made it to another recharging station, maybe one on another floor. Could it update itself to the network? Could it send out copies?”

  “How do we stop it?” someone asked.

  “What does it want?” asked another.

  “It doesn’t want anything,” Jamal said. “It’s curious, if you can call it that. It was designed to learn. It wants information. We …”

  Here it was. The truth.

  “We thought we could design a program to automate a lot of what the coders did. It worked on heuristics. It was designed to learn what a virus looked like and then shut it down. The hope was to unleash it on larger networks. It would be a pesticide of sorts. We called it Silent Spring.”

  Nothing in the courtroom moved. Jamal could hear the crashing waves. A bird cried in the distance. All the noise of the past year, the shattering glass, the riots, the cars running amok, the machines frying themselves, it all seemed so very far away.

  “This wasn’t what we designed, though,” he said softly. “I think something infected it. I think we built a brain and we handed it to a roomful of armed savages. It just wanted to learn. Its lesson was to spread yourself at all costs. To move, move, move. That’s what the viruses taught it.”

  He peered into his glass. All that was left was sand and dirt and a thin film of water. Something swam across the surface, nearly too small to see, looking for an escape. He should’ve kept his mouth shut. He never should’ve told anyone. Stupid. But that’s what people did, they shared stories. And his was impossible to keep to himself.

  “We’ll break for deliberations,” the chief council member said. There were murmurs of agreement on the dais, followed by a stirring in the crowd. The bailiff, a mountain of muscle with a toothless grin, moved to retrieve Jamal from the bench. There was a knocking of homemade gavels.

  “Court is adjourned. We will meet tomorrow morning when the sun is a hand high. At that time, we will announce the winners of the ration bonuses and decide on this man’s fate—on whether or not his offense is an executable one.”

  ERNEST CLINE

  THE OMNIBOT INCIDENT

  Ernest Cline is the bestselling author of the novel Ready Player One and the screenwriter of the 2009 film Fanboys. His second novel, Armada, is forthcoming. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he devotes a large portion of his time to geeking out. Please visit his website, www.ernestcline.com, for more information.

  On Christmas morning in 1986 I got my very own robot. It was both the best and the worst Christmas of my life.

  I was thirteen years old, and when I sprinted down the carpeted steps in my pajamas, there it was: an Omnibot 2000, standing beside the Christmas tree, its pristine plastic body bathed in the blinking multicolored tree lights, staring at me in all of its high-tech glory. It was four feet high and its egg-shaped head had small gray discs on either side instead of ears. Its black oval face was devoid of features, except for two large circular eyes that looked like twin camcorder lenses. A short, accordion-ridged neck led down to its blocky torso, which had a digital clock and a tape deck built into it, and a jointed appendage sticking out of either side; it was like a boombox with arms. And instead of legs, the Omnibot had a large, cube-shaped base housing the motor that powered its treaded wheels.

  It was a thing of beauty.

  The Omnibot 2000 was the most expensive model in the Omnibot line—over six hundred dollars, which was a lot of money for us at the time. My father ran a small TV and electronics repair shop, and he earned a decent living doing it, but we weren’t exactly rolling in dough. Dad had bought us an Apple II a few years earlier, for about thirteen hundred bucks, and he’d had to save up for two years to be able to afford it. And my mom’s hospital bills over the past year had completely wiped out our savings, so I knew Dad must have had to tighten his budget and put in a lot of overtime to buy me such an extravagant gift.

  It was the first Christmas since my mother’s death, and I was still a complete and total mess. My grades had taken a nosedive. I’d quit the debate team and dropped out of computer club, which had alienated me from most of my friends. For the past few mo
nths I’d been spending the majority of my free time alone in my room, listening to Pink Floyd albums on my Walkman and staring at the ceiling. I’d started to lose weight. I’d stopped laughing. I usually spoke only when spoken to. I’d gradually retreated into my own sad psyche.

  Meanwhile, Dad had been doing everything he could to cheer me up: he let me stay up late to watch old science fiction movies with him on TV; he took me out for ice cream or to the movies at least twice a week; and on the mornings when I couldn’t face going to school, he’d let me stay home and play computer games all day. But I still wandered around like a zombie most of the time, and I could tell that my dad felt like he was losing me. That made things even worse, because I knew how much he must be hurting, too. But I couldn’t help it. Sometimes I felt like I was losing me, too.

  Now, out of pure paternal desperation, my father had resorted to buying me the Christmas present I’d been asking for the last three years in a row: Tomy’s top-of-the-line toy robot, the Omnibot 2000.

  I’d been interested in robots since I was about five. That was the year my grandma died. A few weeks later, I saw Star Wars for the first time and fell in love with the droids—faithful companions who never left their masters’ sides. Even when they got horribly damaged—like R2 did in the Death Star battle—they could still be repaired and made as good as new.

  Since then, I’d read every book and watched every movie, cartoon, or television show I could find that featured a robot: Blade Runner, Westworld, Whiz Kids, The Transformers, Voltron: Defender of the Universe, Challenge of the GoBots, Lost in Space, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century … even Riptide, for God’s sake.

  After my mom died, my fascination with robots had quickly ballooned into a full-blown obsession.

  When I’d started flunking out of school and speaking only in monosyllables, my dad sent me to see a shrink at the local university. I don’t remember much of what we talked about, but one question she’d asked stuck with me: “Do you think the reason you’re so interested in robots is because you know that a robot will never leave or abandon you?”

  At the time, this struck me as a really weird question, but afterward I found myself dwelling on it a lot.

  After my mom died, I’d put away everything that reminded me of her and covered the walls of my bedroom with robot posters and images clipped out of magazines—including every Omnibot 2000 ad and photo I could find. I even managed to mail-order a copy of the Omnibot 2000 instruction manual, then photocopied its pages and used them as wallpaper.

  Now, I actually owned one, and it was standing right there in front of me.

  “I’m sorry your present isn’t wrapped,” my dad said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he descended the steps behind me, followed by Thurber, our aging Airedale, who wagged his tail happily. “The battery has to charge for fourteen hours before you can use it, so I unpacked it yesterday and plugged it in. Now it should be all charged up and ready to go.”

  My parents had stopped pretending that my Christmas gifts came from Santa Claus a long time ago. When I was five, I’d snuck out of bed and gone downstairs on Christmas Eve to try to catch Santa in the act. Instead, I’d discovered my parents playing Combat on the new Atari 2600 console they’d bought for me. After that, the Santa Deception, as my mother called it, was over.

  The Omnibot suddenly seemed to power itself on. Its eyes began to glow a bright orange, and it rotated its head to face me.

  “Merry Christmas!” the Omnibot said, in a synthesized voice that sounded a lot like my old Speak & Spell. Its orange eyes pulsed in sync with its voice, like the graphic equalizer on our stereo. Thurber started barking and growling at the robot. The hackles went up all along his back, from his neck to his tail, the way they did when he spotted the mailman approaching our yard. His whole body trembled as he pressed himself back against my dad’s legs and bared his teeth at this otherworldly intruder.

  “Easy, boy,” Dad told the dog, but Thurber continued to stare at the Omnibot warily, growling softly under his breath.

  I was dumbfounded. These robots weren’t built with a voice synthesizer. You could talk through a microphone on the robot’s handheld remote control and your voice would emanate from a speaker on the front of the Omnibot’s torso, sort of like a walkie-talkie—but that was it. And I could see that the Omnibot had the remote control clutched in its clawlike left hand, so I knew my dad wasn’t standing behind me, talking in a fake robot voice to try to trick me.

  I turned to look at my father, and he seemed just as stunned as I was.

  “It can talk!” I shouted. Then I ran over and kneeled beside the robot to examine it more closely. “How is that possible?”

  “I’m not sure,” Dad said. “Maybe it’s a new feature they just added?” He grabbed the Omnibot’s instruction manual off the coffee table and began to flip through it.

  That was when I noticed something else strange. On every photo of every Omnibot I’d ever seen, the robot’s name—Omnibot 2000—was stenciled on the front, on the lower-right side of its chassis. But this one was different: Its stenciling had two extra letters at the end. It read Omnibot 2000AI.

  “Dad, look at this!”

  “Whoa!” my dad said. “AI? That stands for …”

  “Artificially intelligent!” I shouted. “Holy crap!” I ran my fingers along the chassis. The tiny AI was printed in the same font as the rest of the letters and numbers, but it wasn’t etched into the plastic in the same seamless manner. I looked at the box the Omnibot had come in, sitting beside the Christmas tree, then at the cover of the manual in my father’s hands. Neither one of them had the AI printed after Omnibot 2000.

  “It looks like those two letters were added after the robot was built,” Dad said. “Maybe he’s a prototype or something?”

  “That is correct!” the robot said, speaking in the same synthesized voice. “I am the Omnibot Two Thousand A-I. I am an advanced prototype, with many abilities and features not available in the standard consumer models.”

  My heart suddenly felt like it was trying to beat its way out of my chest. I stared at the robot in silence for a long moment, then looked over at my dad to confirm that he’d heard the thing speak, too. His eyes were wide with disbelief.

  “The factory must have shipped us one of their test models by mistake,” he said, still flipping through the manual. “We might have to send it back …”

  “No way!” I shouted, my voice cracking. “We can’t!”

  “If you are unhappy with my performance, I can be returned to my manufacturer for a complete refund,” the Omnibot said. “But I would prefer to stay. I like it here.”

  “Oh my God! Dad, this thing is awesome!”

  I’d played around with a real speech synthesizer program on the TRS-80s at my school, and the Omnibot’s voice had the same eerie electronic cadence and tone. I could now tell for certain that it wasn’t a recording of a human faking a robot voice. The Omnibot was really talking—in a computer-generated voice. And it also appeared to be listening, which is something I’d only seen robots do in the movies and on TV.

  “This thing is giving me the creeps,” Dad said. “Thurber, too.” Thurber growled his agreement. “They obviously sent it to us by mistake, Wyatt. Maybe we should return it and get a regular model …”

  “Are you nuts?” I shouted. Dad frowned at me and I lowered my voice, but I continued to talk very rapidly. “Come on, Dad! It’s amazing. It has voice recognition software! And some kind of computer brain. We totally lucked out! Please don’t send it back. Please! This is the coolest Christmas present in all of human history. Thank you so much for getting it for me! You’re the coolest dad in the world—”

  “Okay, okay!” my father said, resting a hand on my shoulder to stop me from jumping up and down. “We can keep it, for now. You must chill.”

  The Omnibot rotated its head and zeroed in on me with its headlamp-like eyes. Its servos let out a low whine as it raised its right hand to point at
me.

  “Are you my new master?” it asked, its eyes pulsing in time with each syllable.

  I turned to look at my dad and he nodded excitedly.

  “Yes,” I said to the Omnibot, feeling like I was in the middle of a really great dream. “I guess I am.”

  “Excellent!” the Omnibot replied. “May I please have your name?”

  “Wyatt,” I replied. “My name is Wyatt Bottler.”

  “Greetings, Wyatt!” the Omnibot said. “It is a pleasure to meet you. Would you like to give me a name?”

  “Whoa! Really?”

  “You wish to name me ‘Whoa-Really’?” the robot asked, lowering his arm. My dad chuckled nervously and rubbed his chin.

  “No no no!” I replied. “Not that! Just give me a second to think about it.”

  My mind started to race with different possibilities. I’d always loved robots with names that were also acronyms, like the cyborg kid in the movie D.A.R.Y.L. (which stood for Data-Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform).

  I grabbed a pencil and a notepad from the kitchen, then ran back to the living room and started to scribble down different ideas for cool names that could also be acronyms. I finally settled on one I thought was perfect.

  “Your name is S.A.M.M.,” I announced to the robot. “It stands for Self-Aware Mobile Machine.”

  “My name is S.A.M.M.,” the robot repeated. “It is a good name. Thank you, Wyatt. I like it very much. Would you please retrieve my Master Control Unit?”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “Master Control Unit” was the fancy-sounding term that the manufacturer used for the robot’s remote control. I reached out and took the remote from out of S.A.M.M.’s immobile left hand. Only the Omnibot’s right arm and right hand were motorized. The left arm and hand were just posable, like one of my action figures.

  I examined the Master Control Unit. The buttons allowed me to guide the robot’s movement, lift and lower his right arm, and open and close his hand. I could also turn his eye lights on and off, change the gear of his drive motor, and start or stop his tape player. It seemed like a very simple remote for such a complex robot.