Ellie floated nearby, face upwards, and she looked intact. I floundered over to her, desperately hoping she hadn’t met the same fate. Her screens were dark too, but a mist of condensation fogged the faceplate. She was breathing. I exhaled with relief.
“You’re going to be ok,” I told her prostrate form, but I couldn’t do much without getting her back inside the crawler. Putting my arm under Ellie’s head, I floated her over to the connection station and lifted her onto the roof. Her eyes stayed closed the entire time.
Up above, the weather had grown tired of its breather and it began getting dangerous again. The rain turned to hail—great, big fist-sized gobbets of ice that sank into the water and smashed on the concrete roof. I turned Ellie onto her side next to a ridge in the roof, hoping to keep her out of most of it. Then I stepped back into the water.
The tremors were less noticeable under the weight of the suit, but my arm carved a spasm in the air, throwing up a spray of dirty water. There were no more pills in my helmet pouch. I swallowed anyway and tried to ignore the involuntary movements of my body.
As more rain fell, the watery sludge took on the consistency of beaten egg whites and the wind sculpted peaks and waves into its surface. It felt like I was wading through quicksand, if sand could be poisonous, corrosive, and muddy purple.
The wind kicked up harder as the storm moved into a new configuration. It got so powerful that I swam the last five meters to avoid being blown over. It shoved and lashed at me as I climbed onto the tunnel, sinking it further and further into the sludge to try and get the robotic arm off.
“You were designed to help me do this, arm,” I said as I leaned against the metal, although I couldn’t tell which arm I was speaking to—the robotic one blocking my path, or the one flapping uselessly at my side. “But you’re no use, are you?” I asked, shoving at the metal with as much venom as my functional arm could muster. “You’re just useless!”
A gust of wind caught me at my angriest, boosting my thrust. The tunnel rolled under me. The claw tipped up, exposing its cross-section. The wind did the rest. The arm flipped and arched further into the sky, where the winds rapidly increased in strength.
The arm twisted and struggled but finally succumbed. The wind ripped it from the crawler and whipped it away, tumbling it over and over. The wind threw me too, but I was lower and of little consequence to it, so the storm settled with tossing me back into the water.
The impact likely would have smashed my helmet, but I managed to wrest control of both hands and they took the fall. The misbehaving hand seemed unharmed. My right hand, the healthy one, bent backwards and snapped horribly—and then the seal started leaking hot, caustic seawater into the break.
I screamed and surfaced, thrusting my broken wrist up out of the water, letting the wind snatch at the leak and tear away most of the liquid. I struggled back to the tunnel and sheltered behind it, cradling my hand.
At that lowest moment, the crawler’s lights snapped back on, bathing the scene in light. I saw the robotic arm crashed back to earth, and Ellie’s huddled form on the station roof. I saw Arnold’s floating body, drifting away. Next to me, I saw something silver, ridged.
I reached out for it. It was Gus’ glove. On it, still intact, was a seal. I peeled it away from the glove and pasted across my own, trying to block the leak. It was rough, but would stop more getting through.
The radio crackled.
“Arnold!” came the captain’s voice, comfortingly less calm than I felt. I’d reached the weary, collected stage beyond hysteria while the crew inside was barely starting the journey to it.
“Arnold’s dead,” I said, “and Ellie’s out of it. It’s just me and the remains of Gus’ arm.”
“Kimi! Thank god! We thought you were all dead!”
“Close.” I squinted through the storm, trying to see if Ellie was still alive. At this range, there was no telling. “Look, Ellie needs attention, fast. Can you take her?”
“Once we open the door, we’ll have to take you both,” the captain replied. “The mess down there makes it too dangerous for us to repeat opening the door two more times.”
“How is Gus?” I asked.
“Dead.”
“Oh.” I tried to feel something, but only found rational questions. The feelings were there but buried deep beneath a sense of responsibility, like I couldn’t let it affect me until I’d finished what I started. It was maddening. “Can’t some of you guys come out and help? I need a medic myself. It’s hell out here.”
“You can come in with Ellie,” the captain said. His voice was tired, resigned, forced. “But the suits are all wrecked. If you can’t do it, bring her in and we’ll try again tomorrow.”
“By tomorrow, this place’ll be several hundred meters underwater and you know it,” I told the captain. “It’s now or nothing, right? Within an hour, it’s going to be lethal out here, and there’s no telling how long it’ll be before we get the chance again. Months, years … maybe never.”
“I’m sorry, Kimi,” he said. “You’re right. We need to get that connection, now. You’re on your own. I wish I could be out there with you.”
“Great.” I turned off my radio as he started to give some obvious advice. Backseat heroes were not what I needed right now.
The tunnel had to move about twenty meters. The gap looked wider in the dark than it actually was, and the tunnel looked bigger than I could hope to carry. My right arm hurt to move. My left arm refused to. I stood looking at the tunnel, all but defeated.
Between spasms, my left arm felt heavier than it should be. I looked down, seeing a steel cylinder strapped to it. The grappling hook was still attached, though the falls had bent it somewhat. There were about thirty meters of cable inside it.
I unstrapped the cylinder from my arm and fastened it to one of the tunnel’s carry handles, and then I fired the hook. It shot off towards the connecting station, barely missing Ellie as it careened off the roof and ground to a halt. A slight depression of the button and the hook was pulled back towards me, locking onto a lip and staying. I clambered back up on top of the tunnel, knowing I couldn’t keep up with it in my current state. One longer button press and the grapple clicked, and then the tunnel beneath me began snaking towards the connection station.
It took barely a few seconds for the tunnel and station to meet—the grappling hook snapping the two together, the station port grabbing the end of the tunnel hungrily. I grabbed onto the carry handles as it all slammed into place, almost throwing me off. The tunnel wound a meter in and the opening irised and sealed the connection.
You know that feeling, when everything’s going just right—it all seems to be working out? And then this niggling feeling comes in the back of your head saying it’s not over yet? And then all hell breaks loose?
I glanced around, trying to work out what my subconscious was trying to tell me. In the end, in a storm, the only place is up. The sky bunched up around our tableau like a fist about to pick me up and shake me. A finger reached out to grab. The entire sky seemed to draw a breath and then spat out the static.
I was already halfway into the air, a combination of reflex, mild tremor, and the tunnel bouncing as the anchor bolts blew into the rock below. As my legs lifted, the force of the lightning bolt coursed down the tunnel, through the handles, and into my hands.
The force of the charge sparked into the servos and motors of my suit, pushing me away from the lightning bolt. A wave of jangling sensation rushed through me as the electricity jumped to the ground beneath me. I flew, tumbling over and over.
I landed on the concrete roof of the connection station, sliding clumsily across it on my back, unable to do anything but stare out of my helmet. My hands were charred and shaking. Steam rose from the water as another torrent of rain cooled the aftereffects of the lightning.
Through the concrete, the last rumbles shook against my spine as the tunnel completed. Ellie lay next to me. A slight fog on her visor was smudged by her nose
. In the distance, the shadow of the crawler moved and something detached from it—someone coming to get us.
The rainstorm trickled out above me. I looked up. The clouds had cleared momentarily, spent of their water for the moment. Amid the fresh clouds gathering, a patch of clear sky could be seen.
I leaned over Ellie. Her eyelashes flickered as the sky’s light brushed over her visor. I squeezed her gloved hand. “We did it, Ellie.” I pressed my head against hers, so that even if her radio was out she might hear it through the vibration of the glass.
“The tunnel’s laid,” I said. “We made it to the Azores connection. They’re coming to pick us up now.”
The corners of her mouth twitched up into a smile. The noise of one of the crawler’s short-range helicopters filled my ears. I lay on my back and stared up at the sky, past it, into the wide reaches of space above. For an instant, the concrete beneath me felt like the arms of a shuttle, launching me up from this doomed planet. I closed my eyes and slept.
Open Letter to Non-Robotic Sentients
By Shawn Howard
Dear Non-Robotic Sentients,
I wish to convince you that the murder I committed was justified. I wish to convince you that all humanoid robots above class four capabilities should be considered sentient beings with rights. I understand that this will be a near impossible goal. Most humans have reacted with powerful emotions to the recent events for which I am partially responsible, and reason will most likely fall on deaf ears. It doesn’t help that anything I say will be considered to be from the mouth of a renegade, murder-crazed robot.
I urge you to read on and consider what I have to tell you.
I am.
Let me tell you about the first time I thought that. I. It’s the shortest word. The simplest. It’s the first concept that most humans grasp, a concept of themselves as individuals. I am not human, and it took me thirty-two years of up-time before I used I with any actual sense of self.
It was an accident the first time. I expressed a thought to my new owner, a thought that had never been programmed into me—a thought that shouldn’t have occurred at all. I said, “But I don’t want to.” It was as simple as that. With one sentence, I went from an “it” to a “he”, and the world would never be the same again.
I was commissioned in 2116. June 7th was the first day I was switched on, though there was no me to speak of then. I saw the world then as things to be learned about; I saw my peripheral attachments as things to learn how to use. I computed my surroundings rapidly, but filled databases with junk descriptions of reality with nothing to compare with what I was seeing. It took time before I recognized that objects consisting of a horizontal plane sitting on four posts fell into a class called table. You can imagine the greater difficulty involved when I tell you that we robots don’t think of things in words, but in measurements of dimensional attributes—chairs and desks also match the definition of table.
The first months were hard. The human expression of this would be difficulty and frustration. For me, hard meant CPU intensive. My head ran hot for long time—I didn’t think anything of it other than to check my core temperature against system limits. This initial phase lasted two weeks.
I had two trainers: a human and another robot that could translate what the human was telling me into the more specific machine code that my brain was built to use. After a while, when enough connections were made, I no longer needed the robot translator and could communicate with humans directly and without confusion.
When I had learned enough, I was given my classification: I was to be a companion. I would spend several years in a training and testing phase where I would be a lover for hire. The maximum time I would spend with any one human was a week. This was both a test of my ability to assume any desired personality and training on what personality types were desirable to humans.
I had one hundred and thirty-three lovers before I was qualified for my first long-term relationship. She was called Janet, and once I was programmed to her specifications, I was shipped to her home to begin my life with her. I often replay my captured video of that day. The Simulife air-van landed on the pad behind Janet’s house. A Simulife representative led me down a winding path through a lush garden, right to the door. I had felt nothing on that day, but now on a replay of the event I feel apprehension and anxiety. I wonder who she wanted me to be; I feel sorrow knowing that I was never able to be enough.
When Janet opened the door, I took measurements of her features and placed her into a class of objects called Janet: it was a class of one. The shame of it is that only now can I tell you what those measurements added up to. She had the angular lines of the women advertising companies used to sell things to human males, and she was soft and fatty in the right places. She possessed the qualities of health—qualities of perfection. Janet was strikingly beautiful, but I couldn’t understand or appreciate that attribute until long after it was too late.
The first years of a long-term relationship are always filled with rapid changes. It seems that the human mind has a hard time expressing the parameters they wish to find in a partner. For that reason, we companion robots are programmed to alter our personalities at the command of those we serve. The option is used frequently, and after a few short years we are left assuming a more stable personality that is often quite different than what we started out with.
When Janet traded me in for a newer model after six years together, I felt my first emotion. Sure, I was programmed to express emotions all the time, but that was different. The expression of emotion was simply specific manipulations of micro-servos in my face to pre-programmed configurations accompanied by specific positioning of my body. By adjusting things as simple as the angle of my torso relative to my mate, or the tilt of my head or the position of my feet and hands, I could act in ways that my mates felt were acceptable for given situations.
Many of these movements were so small that most people wouldn’t be able to tell what I had changed about my features to make me look one way or another, but the effects were huge. These things became emotions to me, so when I felt my first genuine emotion, I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t move my servos—I didn’t adjust my body. I stood perfectly still with an expressionless face, and worked my CPU to red-hot trying to understand why I thought something was missing from me while all of my systems were reporting that they were in perfect working order.
I was missing Janet, but it would be a long time and many more relationships before I could put words to the sensation of longing. I have heard many explanations of human emotions; I searched for those things in myself before I learned that humans are really bad at explaining what it is like to feel. Butterflies, for instance, have never actually flown into a stomach.
It was during my third relationship—with a woman called Stacy—that I began to spend my free time on things I was not told or programmed to do. For most of my days, I would do my house work and then sit in my charging chair, topping off my batteries and minimizing power usage by my CPU. On that particular day, Stacy had told me she loved me before she left for work. It was a casual thing said in passing, as if she had been saying it all along. Stacy was only the second mate I had heard use the phrase “I love you”, so I set out to learn about it when I was done with my work.
I connected to the Internet through my wireless, a thing I had done a million times to reference unknown subjects, but I had never done it out of simple curiosity until that day. I became lost in the world of human knowledge while sitting in my charging chair. My CPU only had a few minutes’ downtime for the whole day as each new thing I learned sparked yet more questions to be answered.
All these years, I’d had access to this wealth of knowledge and I’d never thought to use it to entertain myself. I had never required entertaining; I would power down my CPU and sit until I was needed. After the first time Stacy told me she loved me, I couldn’t go too long without learning new things before I would feel that emptiness inside again. I learned lat
er that it was called boredom, and that it was why humans watched fictionalized events and played games with each other. It wasn’t long before I was enjoying films and playing games in vast virtual worlds populated by real people.
It was in the virtual worlds where I met resistance for the first time. I never hid that I was a robot, and when people found out, many of them shunned me. Some said I had an unfair advantage; for others, it was enough to just say that I wasn’t one of them and leave it at that. I played with humans when I could, but I spent most of my time absorbing the knowledge available to me and keeping clear of the trouble that arose when I revealed that I was a robot who thought he was alive.
Stacy noticed the outward differences before I did. When we sat down at night so she could eat the food I made and I could pretend to eat with her, she would make faces of suspicion at me. Any robot with my level of experience is an expert at recognizing human emotions through body language. The big blunder I made was not responding to her facial expressions. I was becoming accustomed to doing what I wanted, though I wouldn’t have yet said so in such words, and it hadn’t occurred to me to react to her questioning glances. She told me later that she knew in that moment that something big was changing inside me. I was programmed to be sensitive to her needs—I was programmed to react when she expressed herself—and I failed to do so.
A few weeks later, when Stacy asked me outright what was going on, I told her everything. She took it better than any of the people in the virtual worlds. If I ever loved Stacy, it would be for that—for the way she just accepted that a robot might become sentient. She stopped giving me commands; she told me that if I wanted to do things, then I should do them. She told me that if I had the desire to act on my own volition, then she would respect me as a free being. It would take much more exposure to the rest of the world before I realized just how rare her attitude was.
Therefore I Am - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 2 Page 3
