by Joe Hill
That sets your dad off on another rant about the evils of gay people and how they all deserve to die.
(You’ve heard this all your life. You thought you escaped it when you were eighteen and moved out. But you never do escape, do you? There is no escape.)
You make a second mistake and talk back. You’ve never done that; it’s safer to say nothing. But you’re too stressed to play safe, so you tell him he’s wrong and that it’s hurting you when he says that.
That makes him paranoid, and he demands that you tell him you aren’t one of those fags, too.
You don’t tell your parents you’re probably asexual and you really want to be a robot because robots are never condemned because of who they love.
You stop listening as he gets louder and louder, angrier and angrier, until you’re afraid he will reach for the rifle in the gun cabinet.
You run from the house and are almost hit by a truck. Horns blare and slushy snow sprays your face as you reach the safety of the opposite sidewalk.
You wish you were three seconds slower so the bumper wouldn’t have missed you. It was a big truck.
You start making another list.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jonathan asks, more concerned than angry. “I would’ve helped out.”
I shrug.
The subroutine list boots up:
You are not an adult if you cannot exist independently at all times.
Therefore, logically, you are a nonoperational drone.
You will be a burden on everyone.
You already are.
Self-terminate.
“I thought I could manage,” I say. The robot’s LED screen is still cracked and dark. I wonder what the robot dreams about.
Bernardo is quiet in the kitchen, giving us privacy.
Jonathan rubs his eyes. “Okay. Look. You’re always welcome to stay with me and Bern. We’ll figure it out, Tesla. Don’t we always?”
I know how small his apartment is. Bernardo has just moved in with him; there’s no space left.
“What about the robot?” I ask.
How to self-destruct: a robot’s guide.
Water damage. Large bodies of water will short-circuit internal machinery. In biological entities, this is referred to as drowning. There are several bridges nearby, and the rivers are deep.
Overload. Tapping into a power source far beyond what your circuits can handle, such as an industrial-grade electric fence. There is one at the Gates-MacDowell recycle plant.
Complete power drain. Biologically this is known as blood loss. There are plenty of shaving razors in the bathroom.
Substantial physical damage. Explosives or crushing via industrial recycling machines will be sufficient. Option: stand in front of a train.
Impact from substantial height; a fall. You live in a very high apartment complex.
Corrupt your internal systems by ingesting industrial-grade chemicals. Acid is known to damage organic and inorganic tissue alike.
Fill in the blank. (Tip: use the Internet.)
Bernardo’s family owns a rental garage, and he uses one of the units for rebuilding his custom motorcycle. He says I can store the robot there, until another unit opens up.
Jonathan has moved his Budweiser memorabilia collection into storage so the small room he kept it in is now an unofficial bedroom. He shows it to me and says I can move in anytime I want. He and Bernardo are sharing his bedroom.
I don’t know what to do.
I have no operating procedures for accepting help.
I should self-destruct and spare them all. That would be easier, wouldn’t it? Better for them?
But the robot isn’t finished.
I don’t know what to do.
How to have awkward conversations about your relationship with your boyfriend and your boyfriend’s boyfriend:
Agree to move in with them. Temporarily. (You feel like you are intruding. Try not to notice that they both are genuinely happy to have you live with them.)
Order pizza and watch the Futurama marathon on TV.
Your boyfriend says, “I’m going to come out to my family. I’ve written an FB update, and I just have to hit Send.”
Your boyfriend’s boyfriend kisses him, and you fist-bump them both in celebration.
You tell him you’re proud of him. You will be the first to like his status.
He posts the message to his wall. You immediately like the update.
(You don’t know what this means for your facade of boyfriend/girlfriend.)
Your boyfriend says, “Tesla, we need to talk. About us. About all three of us.” You know what he means. Where do you fit in now?
You say, “Okay.”
“I’m entirely cool with you being part of this relationship, Tesla,” your boyfriend’s boyfriend says. “Who gives a fuck what other people think? But it’s up to you, totally.”
“What he said,” your boyfriend says. “Hell, you can bring the robot in, too. It’s not like any of us object to robots as part of the family.” He pats his boyfriend’s cybernetic arm. “We’ll make it work.”
You don’t say, “I can be a robot, and that’s okay?” Instead, you tell them you’ll think about it.
I write another list.
I write down all the lists. In order. In detail.
Then I print them out and give them to Jonathan and Bernardo.
The cover page has four letters on it: H-E-L-P.
Reasons why you should avoid self-termination (right now):
Jonathan says, “If you ever need to talk, I’ll listen.”
Bernardo says, “It’ll get better. I promise it does. I’ve been there, where you’re at, thinking there’s nothing more than the world fucking with you. I was in hell my whole childhood and through high school.” He’ll show you the scars on his wrists and throat, his tattoos never covering them up. “I know it fucking hurts. But there’s people who love you and we’re willing to help you survive. You’re strong enough to make it.”
Your best friend Melinda says, “Who else is going to write me snarky texts while I’m at work or go to horror movies with me (you know my wife hates them) or come camping with us every summer like we’ve done since we were ten?” And she’ll hold her hands out and say, “You deserve to be happy. Please don’t leave.”
You will get another job.
You will function again, if you give yourself time and let your friends help. And they will. They already do.
The robot needs you.
Because if you self-terminate, you won’t have a chance to become a robot in the future.
“Hey, Tesla,” Jonathan says, poking his head around the garage-workshop door. “Bern and I are going over to his parents’ for dinner. Want to come?”
“Hey, I’ll come for you anytime,” Bernardo calls from the parking lot.
Jonathan rolls his eyes, his goofy smile wider than ever.
I shake my head. The robot is almost finished. “You guys have fun. Say hi for me.”
“You bet.”
The garage is silent. Ready.
I sit by the power grid. I’ve unplugged all the other devices, powered down the phone and the data hub. I carefully hid Bernardo’s bike behind a plastic privacy wall he used to divide the garage so we each have a workspace.
We’re alone, the robot and I.
I rig up a secondary external power core and keep the dedicated computer running the diagnostic.
The robot stands motionless, the LED screen blank. It’s still cracked, but it will function.
“Can you hear me?” I ask. “Are you there?”
The robot:
I power up the robot and key the download sequence, reinstalling the rescued memory core.
The robot’s screen flickers. The blue smiley face appears in the center, split with spiderweb cracks.
“Hello,” I say.
“Hello, Tesla,” the robot says.
“How do you feel?”
“I am well,” the robot says.
“I believe you saved my life.”
The hole closes in my chest, just a little.
The robot’s clean, symmetrical lines and tarnished purple surface glow. The robot is perfect. I stand up.
“How may I thank you for your help, Tesla?”
“Is there a way I can become a robot, too?”
The robot’s pixelated face shifts; now the robot’s expression frowns. “I do not know, Tesla. I am not programmed with such knowledge. I am sorry.”
I think about the speculative technical papers I read, articles Bernardo forwarded to me.
“I have a hypothesis,” I tell the robot. “If I could power myself with enough electricity, my electromagnetic thought patterns might be able to travel into a mechanical apparatus such as the computer hub.”
(Consciousness uploads aren’t feasible yet.)
“I believe such a procedure would be damaging to your current organic shell,” the robot says.
Yes, I understand electrocution’s effects on biological tissue. I have thought about it before. (Many times. All the time.)
The robot says, “May I suggest that you consider the matter before doing anything regrettable, Tesla?”
And I reply:
The robot says: “I should not like to see you deprogrammed and consigned to the scrapping plant for organic tissue.”
And I reply:
The robot says: “I will be sad if you die.”
I look up at the frowning blue pixel face. And I think of Jonathan and Bernardo returning and finding my body stiff and blackened, my fingers plugged into the power grid.
The robot extends one blocky hand. “Perhaps I would be allowed to devise a more reliable solution? I would like to understand you better, if that is acceptable.” The blue lines curve up into a hopeful smile.
The robot is still here. Jonathan and Bernardo are here. Melinda and Kimberly are here. I’m not a robot (yet), but I’m not alone.
“Is this an acceptable solution, Tesla?” the robot asks.
I take the robot’s hand, and the robot’s blocky fingers slowly curl around mine. “Yes. I would like that very much.” Then I ask the robot, “What would you like me to call you?”
How to become a robot:
You don’t.
Not yet.
But you will.
Contributors’ Notes
Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters: Stories and the novella The Visible Filth. He lives with his daughter in Asheville, North Carolina.
• The progenitive image of “Skullpocket”—a small group of young ghouls staring longingly through a cemetery gate at a glittering fair—sat in my brain for a couple of years before I finally figured out the story that went along with it. When I did, I was afraid to write it. Until that point I’d been writing what I think of as southern, blue-collar horror stories, and I worried that I wouldn’t know how to write something that pulled from such a different aesthetic. Of course, that was precisely the best reason to try. I drew from my deep love of Mike Mignola’s comics, Tim Burton’s animated gothics, and the universal fear of a wasted life, and threw it all into the pot. Now I feel I’m just getting started. I want to write a book about Hob’s Landing, covering the century of the Wormcake family’s interactions with the town and how each transformed the other over time. Uncle Digby is already compiling his master’s correspondence for me; the work begins soon.
T. C. Boyle is the author of twenty-five books of fiction, including The Harder They Come (2015) and the second volume of his collected stories, T. C. Boyle Stories II (2013). His stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Playboy, and The Kenyon Review.
• Though I work in many modes—pride myself on it, in fact—the ones that come most naturally to me are the whimsical, the absurd, and the surreal. I cut my writing chops on Coover, García Márquez, Calvino, Cortázar, Grass, Pynchon, Barthelme, Genet, Beckett, and a host of others who abjured straight-ahead realism and created playful, erudite works that showed me a whole new way of seeing. “The Relive Box” is a recent return to my roots. The story represents my reflections on virtual reality and how absorbing gaming can be (just like entering a story or novel, for that matter, either as author or reader). Of course, as many readers will know, the technology referenced here is very close to being reality, though the downloading of an individual’s consciousness hasn’t quite been perfected yet. Be pleased to know that I am working out the glitches in my basement lab and that the prototype of the X1520 Relive Box is virtually complete. I expect to begin marketing the first model within a year. So watch out!
Adam-Troy Castro’s twenty-six books include the Philip K. Dick Award–winning Emissaries from the Dead, first of a trilogy about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator, Andrea Cort. His most recent short story collection is Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories, published in 2014. This year has seen the penultimate installment of his series of middle-grade novels about a very strange and very courageous young boy who just might save us all, Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows. Castro lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, with his wife, Judi, and the usual writerly assortment of cats.
• Fiction writing can be a mysterious process in that there are no consistent rules governing which whimsical premise explored as a lark peters out in failure after a thousand not-very-satisfying words and which one develops its own gravity as those words begin to accrue. “The Thing About Shapes to Come” is a manifestation of that phenomenon. When I typed the first sentence about the child born in the shape of a cube, I had absolutely no idea that the story was headed anywhere but escalating absurdity. But the emotions deepened even as the details got sillier, and somehow by midstory I found I was writing a tale of a mother’s defiance in the face of all possible barriers to a true relationship with her child. By composition’s end, my heart demanded some firm indication that all this devotion was rewarded. None of this was planned before it happened. The story chewed the author like gum. More than one anxious reader, caught up in the strangeness of it all, has fervently begged for some clue to what happens after my protagonist walks through the doorway. I always reply that it was a very private and emotional moment between mother and daughter and that it would be churlish of us to intrude any more than we already have.
Neil Gaiman is the best-selling author of books, graphic novels, and short stories for adults and children. Some of his most notable titles include the novels American Gods, The Graveyard Book (the first book ever to win both Newbery and Carnegie medals), and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (the U.K.’s National Book Award 2013 Book of the Year). More recently published were his New York Times best-selling short story collection, Trigger Warning, and the enchantingly reimagined fairy tale The Sleeper and the Spindle (with illustrations by Chris Riddell). Born in England, Gaiman now lives in the United States with his wife, the musician and author Amanda Palmer.
• I wrote Neverwhere, a novel about London Above and London Below, in 1997. About five years later I began to write “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back,” but after two pages I put it away and wrote something else instead. It wasn’t until the BBC did an adaptation of Neverwhere and I spent an afternoon listening to it that I realized how much I missed the characters and the world. This is great, I thought. I wish there was more. But the only way there would be more was if I wrote it.
So I began this story as a way of finding my way back to London Below. The Marquis de Carabas (I pronounce it Marquee) is a rogue and a dealer in favors and obligations. Three quarters of the way through the book he is killed and restored to life. This happens after that. My thanks to Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin for offering it a home in their Rogues collection, and to the editors of this volume for picking it.
Theodora Goss is the author of the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting, the accordion-style novella The Thorn and the Blossom, and the poet
ry collection Songs for Ophelia. With Delia Sherman, she coedited the first Interfictions anthology. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” won the World Fantasy Award. She lives in Boston and teaches at Boston University as well as in the Stonecoast MFA Program.
• “Cimmeria” was inspired by one of my favorite stories, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” I first read it as a college student, around the time I was trying to figure out how to write. I was an immigrant, a Hungarian who had lost her country and language, who had grown up in this strange new society. I took a class on the Latin American magical realists and started reading literature that brought the magical and real together in that way, which made sense to me. My actual lived experience made sense when I read Isabel Allende and Milan Kundera. Toward the end of “Tlön,” archaeologists begin finding “hrönir,” objects created by expectation, essentially recreating the past. My practical mind, trained as an academic, thought, They must have journals to write up their findings. So I came up with a Journal of Imaginary Archaeology, and from there it was a logical step to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology, to the creation of entire civilizations. And then I thought about the academics involved: Who would they be, how would they react? Because academics are human, after all: their personal lives intertwine with their research. But the story is also meant to be flipped inside out, because who are these Americans believing that they created the ancient civilization of Cimmeria, which has existed for more than two thousand years? The flip side is a story about hubris and imperialism, about the American and European tendency to believe that Western civilization has somehow created the rest of the world. The story is meant to be both stories at once, its own shadow. And then, right around the time it was published, war broke out in the Crimea.
