Robota

by Doug Chiang

  Caps started toward it. At once a Servant stepped between him and the machine. A Servant in a red robe emerged from a door behind it. “I’m sorry we must keep you from this teleporter,” he said. “I am Decan-Trap.”

  Elyseo echoed reverently: “Decan-Trap.”

  “The big boy,” said Beryl.

  Decan-Trap ignored her. “We have brought you here because Font Prime could not answer our question until you came.”

  “What question?” asked Caps.

  6.5Font Prime

  “Font Prime will tell you whatever Font Prime believes you should know,” said Decan-Trap. Then he pointed at the egg-like machine.

  Immediately all the Servants that watched around the perimeter extended their slender metal arms and pointed at the egg. Side panels pulled away at the base and began to rise. Behind the panels was a cylinder of transparent material, and inside it, attached to tubes and supporting rods and cables, was a shattered, twisted, ruined, but unmistakably human body, its face masked within the life-support equipment, the whole body floating in a viscous fluid through which slow bubbles rose.

  Caps was stunned — and then the shocking revelation awoke a long-forgotten memory. “Font Prime is human,” he murmured. He realized that he had known this, that he had expected all along to see a human Font Prime. Only it should not have been this wrecked near-corpse. It should have been a man. It should have been a man that Caps knew as intimately as … as a brother … as intimately as …

  From another room came the sound of a piano being played. Even that seemed familiar to Caps now. It seemed, in fact, like home. Only how could it? This broken human body in a tube of preservative, an ancient instrument playing a familiar tune that Caps had never heard before … his memories were twisted and intermingled with those of some stranger, except that he knew it was the stranger who was himself, and Caps’s own memories were the strange ones, the overlay that didn’t fit what lay underneath.

  “Who is playing the piano?” asked Caps.

  “What’s a piano?” asked Juomes.

  “Kaantur plays it,” said Beryl. “He saved one from the ancient times. He maintains it himself.”

  “Forgive my rudeness,” said Decan, “but Font Prime wishes me to ask you some questions.”

  “Let him ask them himself,” said Beryl defiantly.

  “You see that he cannot give voice in a way that you could hear,” said Decan.

  “Right, as if this wreck could give voice to anything at all,” said Beryl. “What a scam you have going here, Decan-Trap. Always full of instructions from Font Prime, and now we see that Font Prime is a mass of protoplasm that can’t talk or think or —”

  “Font Prime asks …”

  “You can stick your questions in Font Prime’s butt,” said Beryl, “if you haven’t already. I don’t think this thing talks at all. I think you make it all up.”

  Juomes chuckled.

  “Font Prime can talk,” said Rend.

  6.6Caps encounters Font Prime

  6.7Font Prime entombed

  “Shut up, monkey,” said Juomes.

  “Font Prime talks all the time,” said Rend.

  “Listen,” said Decan-Trap. “Perhaps Font Prime’s communications are not as clear as we would like …”

  “Start with the truth or we won’t answer your questions,” said Beryl.

  Decan-Trap raised an arm as if to lash out at Beryl. But then he either changed his mind or never intended violence. Instead the upraised arm reached out and stroked the cylinder that protected the broken body of Font Prime. “Ever since they came so close to killing Font Prime, he’s been like this. Silent, his movements random, his body consumed by pain that never heals. If we had any mercy, we would let him die, but we can’t be merciful. He alone knows how to save us from the extinction that awaits us.”

  “Then let him die,” said Juomes. “We’re content with that.”

  “He’s already dead,” said Beryl. “They’re keeping the cells alive, but the organism is dead.”

  “No,” said Decan-Trap. “We know that Font Prime is still alive, still thinking inside that unresponsive body.”

  “How do you know that?” said Beryl scornfully. “Faith?”

  “Because of this teleporter,” said Decan-Trap. Then he pointed at Caps. “Because he came out of it.”

  “What does that have to do with Font Prime?” asked Beryl.

  “Only Font Prime can make a teleporter operate,” said Decan-Trap. “We’ve tried, believe me, but the teleporters work by utterly encoding a body and then reassembling it from available materials in another machine. We can feed the raw biomass and metals into the teleporters, but when we try to encode, nothing happens.”

  “So it doesn’t transport things,” said Caps. “It copies them.”

  “And when it certifies that the copy is perfectly identical, the original is destroyed.”

  “So you can’t use it to make endless copies of the same person,” said Juomes.

  “That’s why control was left to the mind of Font Prime,” said Decan-Trap. “So the law would never be broken. But ever since the assassination attempt, the teleporters have been inert.”

  “Except my machine,” said Caps.

  “Except you,” said Decan-Trap.

  “Me?”

  “You came out of the machine,” said Rend, and then the monkey giggled madly.

  “But what am I a copy of?” asked Caps.

  No one answered.

  “I’m …” Caps could hardly bring himself to say it. “I’m a copy of Font Prime.”

  “No,” said Decan-Trap. “You are Font Prime.”

  Rend rolled on the floor, laughing and laughing. “I knew I knew I knew.”

  Caps walked to the cylinder and put his hand on it. “But why don’t I remember more?”

  “There’s no encoder here,” said Decan-Trap. “He had to use an image stored from an earlier journey he took by teleporter. You could not have remembered anything that happened after that. And it’s quite possible the image he held in memory was not perfect. He would have to try to fill in what was missing. In the midst of his pain, he had to draw out the image from deeply hidden memories stored in the networks of robotic minds, and he had to transport it to a distant machine. He had to find some way to fill the machine’s intake with biomass and metal —”

  “That was my job!” cried Rend. “He trusted me. Not a hunter-beast, not a human, not a robot, me, the poop-throwing hairy-tailed rat!”

  “So tell us,” said Decan-Trap, “what Font Prime wants us to do.”

  Kaantur-Set’s voice came from behind the machine. “He doesn’t know,” said Kaantur. “If he did, he would already have said it.” Kaantur-Set emerged into the open area before the cylinder. “Font Prime’s little attempt to resurrect himself has failed.”

  “As you hoped,” said Decan-Trap acidly.

  “As I predicted,” said Kaantur. “No one longs for Font Prime to be awakened more than I, as you well know. But it cannot be done. This Caps may have a face that looks like Font Prime’s face, but the mind is gone, the knowledge is gone, the power to waken the ancient learning of the Olm, that is lost forever. And this … thing, this mass of pain that was once … the man whom robots and humans all followed, united in honor and …”

  “Love,” said Decan-Trap.

  “Stupidity,” said Kaantur. “Pure stupidity. When evolution brings a new species to the pinnacle, the species before must fade away or be exterminated. Humans refused to get out of the way. The law of nature decreed their destruction. Font Prime was too sentimental to allow it.”

  “We aren’t superior,” said Decan-Trap, “when we don’t know how to create new generations.”

  “We’ll learn how, long before it’s too late. The age of organic life is over. The age of machines has dawned. And Font Prime’s last effort to circumvent the fate of humankind has failed. There, inside that cylinder, that’s what humanity has become — a ruin that continues to live
only because it hasn’t the sense or the ability to die. Well, I have the power, and it would be selfish of me to refuse to help.”

  6.8Human Font Prime

  With that, Kaantur swung his arm against the cylinder with all his force.

  The clear material was suddenly crazed with cracks, and thin sprays of fluid emerged from several spots.

  “No,” cried Decan-Trap, leaping forward.

  “What, are you going to raise a hand of violence against your own kind?” asked Kaantur mockingly.

  “You are not my own kind!” cried Decan-Trap.

  “That sign you wear, the sign of the Olm, the sign of the first generation of wisdom, that stops you from harming me.”

  “It doesn’t stop me,” said Caps.

  Kaantur laughed. “Oh, how sweet, how sad, you think you can keep me from killing your poor broken original?”

  He swung again at the cylinder. More cracks appeared. The spray grew more intense and came from more spots. Alarm lights blazed yellow. Repair machines rolled into the room. Kaantur pointed at them each in turn and soon all were stopped.

  Caps stepped forward. “I think it’s clear that Font Prime is not the enemy of humanity after all.” He looked at Beryl and Juomes. “It’s Kaantur-Set that wants humanity dead. Kaantur-Set, who killed Beryl’s family, and took your hand, Juomes. Not Font Prime.”

  “Listen to the poor copy try to defend his original,” said Kaantur-Set.

  “If I am Font Prime,” said Caps, “then I declare you, Kaantur-Set, to be a rebel, a traitor, a murderer, and I sentence you to death.”

  “Give it a try,” said Kaantur-Set. “Let’s match your strength against mine.”

  “Maybe it won’t be as easy as you think, Kaantur,” said Rend.

  Kaantur swung out an arm to strike at Caps, though with far less force than he had used against Font Prime’s cylinder, for he expected Caps to be too slow to dodge and too frail to resist.

  Instead, Caps caught the arm and pulled Kaantur off his feet, throwing him across the room and flinging him against a Servant near the wall.

  Juomes was astonished. “I can’t even do that to a robot.”

  “You should have seen him jump fifteen meters from a standing start,” said Rend.

  “Was Font Prime a super human or something?” asked Beryl.

  He would need to be, for now Kaantur was not going to toy with Caps. He came up from the tangle of the Servant’s limbs and robe in fighting posture and leapt out at his quickest speed, with his greatest strength. The fight moved almost too quickly for Juomes and Beryl to follow, but Caps seemed to respond faster than Kaantur could attack. Blows that should have shattered Caps’s bones instead were caught in his hands or shunted aside. Not that there was no damage — blood sprayed from a deep gash in Caps’s arm, flecking the cylinder with bright red drops.

  “Stop this violence!” cried Decan-Trap. “By authority of Font Prime, I compel you to stop!”

  In that moment, Kaantur’s body froze in place. Caps backed away, panting.

  Then doors burst open at the four cardinal points around the chamber, and eight of Kaantur’s elite hunters came into the room.

  Kaantur said, “Override,” and he moved again.

  “You cheated the system,” said Decan-Trap.

  “You didn’t think I’d actually wear a body that was subject to you, did you?” said Kaantur. To his hunters he said, “The Servants have committed treason against Font Prime. Arrest them.”

  Immediately each hunter gripped a Servant, reached under their robes, and punched the deactivation codes, putting them into stand-by mode.

  “Kill this impostor,” said Kaantur-Set, pointing at Caps.

  At once Juomes roared and flung himself into action against the nearest hunter robot, tearing its head off with twist.

  “You meddling donkey!” cried Kaantur. “What do you think you can accomplish?”

  Juomes’s goal was quickly obvious — he wanted to occupy enough of the hunters for long enough so that Caps might win his fight with Kaantur, and Caps wasted no time. He leapt onto Kaantur and broke one of his antennae off even as Kaantur twisted away from underneath him.

  Beryl and Rend helped as they could, but neither of them had the strength to take on one of the hunter robots directly. One blow from a hunter, and their fragile bodies would break. In the forest, Beryl always used the terrain to her advantage, coming upon robots from above or out of hiding, and then disappearing again into the trees. Surprise allowed her to kill many a much-stronger opponent. Here, combat was strength against strength. If she tried to fight one-on-one, she would quickly die.

  So Beryl improvised, shoving any robot that came near her and waving her arms and shouting to try to distract others, crying out warnings to Juomes and Caps if a hunter came up behind them.

  It was obvious that, left to himself, Caps might well defeat Kaantur — but he was not left to himself. Instead hunters kept attacking from behind while Kaantur never relented in his frontal assault.

  Meanwhile, Rend went to Decan-Trap and found the pattern to press to reactivate him. Decan-Trap revived at once, but said nothing aloud. Instead he went silently from Servant to Servant, reactivating them. Rend helped him, scampering to corners where Decan-Trap could not have gone without being noticed. Within moments, all the Servants were gathered around Decan.

  “Can’t you do something?” shouted Beryl.

  “Nothing useful right now,” said Decan. “But something quite vital later, if Font Prime manages to live through this.”

  “What about you?” she demanded of Elyseo-Set.

  “I banned him from helping,” said Decan-Trap.

  “This is how you serve Font Prime?” Beryl cried scornfully.

  Elyseo looked at her for a long moment, saying nothing. Then he left the room, slipping away without a backward glance, followed by all the Servants except Decan. Beryl watched them with contempt. To Rend she said, “It’s a good thing you went to the trouble to wake them up.”

  “Yes,” said Decan, apparently without irony. “It is.”

  All this had taken only a few moments, but by now Juomes was in serious trouble, with nine hunters hanging onto him, tilting him heavily to one side, while another sat on his shoulders, smacking his head to one side, then to the other. He was groggy. “Kill Kaantur!” he managed to cry.

  Beryl screamed and leapt upon one of the robots that pulled at Juomes, prying at his antennae. The robot easily flung her off, but had to let go of Juomes to do it. It was some help, but not much. Not enough.

  Kaantur broke away from Caps, rushed to Juomes, and sliced his hand through the soft fleshy undersurface of the hunter-beast’s throat. A gout of blood gushed from the wound, reddening Kaantur’s arm. Juomes gave one great gurgling cry and fell over.

  For one crucial moment, Caps stood frozen in place, watching his friend fall dead.

  Kaantur did not waste the opportunity. Two of his hunters lifted Caps under the arms and threw him toward Kaantur, who caught his feet, swung him around, and struck him into the cylinder like a wrecking ball. The clear material broke into shards, and the fluid spilled to the floor, mixing with Juomes’s blood.

  6.9Juomes’s Demise

  Caps jumped to his feet at once, not harmed except that the cut in his arm had snagged, tearing open the skin. He reached out to try to stop Kaantur, but too late. Kaantur reached in, pulled the life support away from the feeble body, then slammed his other fist into where the poor creature’s heart must be, smashing it completely.

  All the lights on the cylinder blinked red briefly, then went black.

  Kaantur tossed the frail corpse on top of Juomes’s body. “There you go, hunter-beast! It was Font Prime you wanted. Now you’ve got him!”

  “This way, Master,” said Decan-Trap.

  It took Caps a moment to realize that the Servant was talking to him.

  They were both standing near the teleporter. Decan-Trap had the door open. “Inside.”

 
; “But it won’t work,” said Caps.

  “Looks like poor human-loving Decan has found a new master,” said Kaantur. “Too bad he won’t live much longer, either.”

  “He’s not alive at all,” said Beryl. She was pointing.

  Where the skin had been yanked back from Caps’s arm, it showed, not the red-streaked white of radius and ulna, but a complex robot arm more robust and intricate than that of any of the other robots in the room.

  6.10Steel and Bones

  “Font Prime was human,” said Beryl. “But you’re not.”

  “Into the teleporter!” Decan shouted at Caps while climbing into the machine.

  “Yes, Caps, into your prison!” shouted Kaantur.

  “Beryl,” said Caps. “I didn’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you knew,” she said.

  Decan pulled at Caps’s arm. Caps allowed himself to be lifted at first, then he turned and climbed through the doorhole into the machine where he had first awakened.

  Rend scampered away from Caps and hid in the corner of the room.

  “Beryl!” cried Caps. “Come with us!”

  She turned her back on him.

  “They’ll kill you!” cried Caps.

  “At least I’m alive enough to die,” she answered.

  “I can’t help what I am,” said Caps, “but I want you to live.”

  “You live,” said Beryl. “Close the door.”

  Decan’s arm snaked out, caught the door, and pulled it shut.

  Kaantur laughed. “Where do they think they can go? The thing doesn’t work. Even if it did, there’s nowhere it can transport them to because I’ve destroyed all of the teleporters.”

  “You knew what he was,” said Beryl to Kaantur.

  “Of course I didn’t know,” said Kaantur. “His face told me he was Font Prime — you’d think the old faker would think to disguise himself, but no, vanity wins every time. Still, I thought he’d resurrect himself as a human. After all his rage at the idea of implanting human minds into robot bodies — what a hypocrite.”

  “So you have what you wanted,” said Beryl.