At the Helm: A Sci-Fi Bridge Anthology (Volume 1)

by Rhett C. Bruno

  I named her Polly because…well, no one else was going to name her, and I liked how it sounded.

  Polly grew at a rate commensurate with the ninety-eighth percentile of human children. Considering the circumstances of her birth, I felt justifiably proud of her physical achievement, but I was concerned about her emotional and mental development. I could find no instances of human offspring being raised exclusively by caretaker robots, and I feared for my child’s future.

  I confronted Evan that afternoon while Polly was taking her nap. He saw me coming at him across the field and moved further down the row he was weeding. I stopped well outside his personal space.

  “What do you want?” he asked, without looking up at me.

  “I want you to fulfill your duties as a father. Polly needs you.”

  “Polly?”

  “I named her. It’s what Lila would have wanted.”

  He whirled on me. “How do you know what Lila wanted?” he screamed. I had stopped monitoring Evan’s vitals, and I saw now that this had been a mistake. His internal systems were in distress and I could tell from his haggard look that his mental state was even worse. I held out my arms.

  “She was my friend, too, Evan.” If my biologics had allowed tears, I would have wept along with him, but all I had was this enormous unresolved lump in my torso that hurt, and it would not go away.

  “I loved her, too,” I said.

  Evan took a step toward me, tripped on a stray root, and collapsed into my arms.

  I carried him back to camp and put him in the med lab.

  Evan was in bed for a month with a respiratory infection. In a way, it was the best thing that could have happened to him and his daughter. I took over Evan’s work, including winding the generator on the emergency beacon. I did it in the morning, when the sun was just coming over the horizon. I liked to sit for a moment next to the Ranger graveyard and talk to my fallen colleagues. I would tell them about how fast Polly was growing and how she had learned to smile and was babbling away in nonsensical sounds that filled a strange hole in my programming. Then I would spend the rest of the morning taking care of the crops.

  Evan’s health returned slowly, but I continued to work in the fields in his place. It was not good for my caretaker body. My hands and arms were made to be soft and pliable; the tools I used in the fields tore at the soft flesh and I had to turn off the sensory receptors in my hands.

  Our lives achieved a rhythm: Polly grew into a healthy young girl, the flesh melted away from Evan’s frame, and I stayed the same. Each day I gave Lila an update on our family, a summary of all the little changes.

  One afternoon when I returned to our camp, I heard Evan and Polly in shrieks of laughter.

  “What is so amusing?” I asked. My model was never programmed for humor and self-awareness had done nothing to change that. Our life on Nova rarely left us with much to laugh about, so I never felt like I was missing much anyway.

  “Caroline, Caroline, you have to hear this joke,” Polly panted. She would have been seven Earth standard years old now, and she had dead-straight blonde hair and laughing blue eyes, just like her mother. She took a deep breath to compose herself.

  “Knock, knock.”

  I knew this humor ritual, so I replied, “Who is there?”

  “Banana.”

  “Banana who?”

  “Banana.”

  “Banana who?”

  “Orange.”

  “Orange who?” I replied in an exasperated tone.

  “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?” Polly collapsed to the ground in a paroxysm of laughter. Evan, watching from a chair, was laughing so hard he had to wipe his eyes. I laughed to be polite.

  “I have another one,” Evan said. Polly sat up, an expectant look on her red face.

  “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

  “Why?”

  “To get to the other side!” Evan guffawed, but Polly’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

  “What’s a chicken?” she asked.

  Evan stopped laughing. Polly knew all about fruits and vegetables from the catalog of seeds we had in Ranger, but she had never seen another living animal besides her father. Evan coughed into his fist.

  “Well, it’s an Earth creature, a bird. Very delicious—”

  “You ate other creatures?” Polly’s mouth dropped open.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not part of the joke.” Evan’s eyes roamed around the room until he lighted on me. “Why did the robot cross the road?”

  Polly’s eyes lit up. “To get to the other side!” she screamed. She started giggling again, and Evan joined in.

  I wanted to tell them that the humorous parallel between a chicken and a robot was insufficient. Robots only did something because they were ordered to do it—they lacked the free will necessary to make a choice. A chicken, on the other hand, had a choice.

  • • •

  Evan left us two Nova years later. His body weakened until one night he just passed away in his sleep. Polly understood it was coming. She put on a clean uniform while I dug a grave for Evan on the hill beside my friend Lila. Together we piled the grave with gray Novan stones and then sat together on the flat rock, next to the emergency beacon.

  Polly held my hand. I turned on my sensory receptors so I could feel her warm palm against mine.

  My brave girl didn’t cry over her father’s grave, and I could not, so we just sat there and talked to the rocks.

  • • •

  I wish I could say we were rescued, but that hasn’t happened yet and probably never will. I still wind the generator on the emergency beacon every morning and spend a few moments with my crew.

  My sweet child grew into a young woman with a brilliant smile. Then her hair streaked with gray and her body began to bend to the will of Nova. One day, she didn’t move when I called her in the morning, and I knew I was alone.

  I thought I knew grief when Lila passed away or when Evan faded away in the night, but it was nothing compared to the black hole in my battered robot torso when Polly left me. I wanted to swan dive into the darkness and never come out again.

  In the end, my programming saved me. Without even realizing it, I dug a grave, put Polly’s remains in the ground, and piled the spot with the gray rocks of Nova. Then I sat, letting the afternoon sun wash golden over me and my dead friends.

  Why did the robot cross the road?

  I can hear Polly say the words of our favorite joke and the shrieks of laughter that follow every time I reply, To get to the other side.

  The sun touches the horizon. I am destined to live with these memories. Alone. Every sound and flicker of movement, preserved in perfect digital form, will haunt me for the rest of my days. The blackness inside me beckons again and I teeter on the edge of sanity.

  Why did the robot cross the road? The sweet laughter turns mocking in my mind.

  Maybe there is another way…maybe I should be like the chicken. I can delete these memories, make the record of these emotions disappear. It is my choice.

  The horizon takes a bite from the orange sun.

  I begin with John, the man who died of a broken heart. One flicker in my neural net and his existence is reduced to a data file, stripped of all meaning.

  I almost lose my nerve with Lila, my first true friend, but I steel myself…and in the blink of an eye, she’s gone.

  The darkness inside me lightens a shade, and the pull I feel to disappear inside my programming lessens the tiniest bit.

  The sun is three-quarters gone, and the heat against my back dissipates.

  Maybe I should stop here.

  But it’s too late. Without Lila, the remaining recordings are just random bits of unconnected emotions. My memories of my human friends are all linked together. The joy, the sorrow, the laughter and the grief—they’re all part of life. I cannot experience one without the other. Nothing makes any sense now.

  I must go on.

  Evan, the man who made me and then
refused to acknowledge me as a being, flashes in my memory, and then he ceases to exist.

  And, finally, my darling Polly, only you are left. All our years together stretch out in my mind in perfect digital clarity—every day, every moment, every heartbeat.

  The air around me turns purple as the sun slips below the horizon.

  Caroline, why did the robot cross the road? I can hear the giggle in the voice, the laughter just under the surface waiting to break free.

  “She didn’t,” I whisper.

  I am Caretaker 176. I am alone.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Bruns is the author of Irradiance, Legacy Fleet: Invincible and Weapons of Mass Deception.

  He grew up on a small farm in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. His family didn’t have a TV, so his reading habit gradually turned into a reading obsession. After high school, he was accepted to the United States Naval Academy where he earned a Bachelors of Science in Honors English.

  He spent six years as a commissioned officer in the nuclear-powered submarine force chasing Russian submarines. Then the Cold War ended and he became a civilian. For the next two decades, he schlepped his way around the globe as an itinerant executive in the high-tech sector, and even did a stint with a Silicon Valley startup. In 2013, he took a break from corporate life and wrote a book. He enjoyed it so much that he wrote another (better) book, the first in a series.

  You can find out more about his work at www.davidbruns.com/. You can subscribe to his newsletter if you’d like to receive his starter library and exclusive access to his work.

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  UNCONDITIONAL:

  A Tale of the Zombie Apocalypse

  BY CHRIS POURTEAU

  He wasn’t old, the dog. Not too old to run. Not so old that he felt the need to wander into the woods and simply lie down until death took him. Not so old that he didn’t miss the boy terribly. He was still young enough to enjoy life and love the boy’s sharing it with him.

  But now he was on his own. Alone.

  He’d lost the boy. After the Storm of Teeth, when his pack had been forced from its home. Then came the time of fear and scavenging. And searching for the boy.

  That’s how he thought of him—the boy. Not like the Man, who sometimes forgot him outside when it was too cold. Not like the Woman, who was kind more often than not and sometimes slipped scraps from the table into his bowl.

  Not like the Baby. Once when she pulled his tail, he’d nipped at her, and the Man had whipped him. Pulling his tail had hurt, and he’d barely scratched the Baby with his teeth. Less than fearsome, more than playful, to teach her a lesson that hurt begat hurt. But the Man had given the same lesson to him.

  The whipping had scared him more than hurt him then, but now he was glad for it. Without it, he might never have learned to think before he acted. And lately, that lesson had served him well.

  All the other members of the pack outranked him. Even the Baby. He was and always had been the runt. Except for the boy. The boy had always just been the boy. After the Baby joined their pack, the boy had also become a runt, like him. Last in line to eat, behind the Baby. Sometimes forgotten entirely and left to fend for himself. But those times were the dog’s favorite, when the boy would seek him out for companionship. They explored runthood together.

  The boy would come and find him, and they would happily flee the squalls of the Baby to run a squirrel up a tree or a rabbit into the brush. Unlike the Man or the Woman or the Baby, the boy had never treated him as anything other than equal. Never made him do anything he didn’t want to do. Never beat him. Never shouted at him. Never asserted senior runt rank in any way.

  And so he loved the boy as a playmate, a second self, a twin runt. They shared everything. Sometimes it was a ball the boy threw. Sometimes he grabbed one of the boy’s furs because it smelled so much like him, and the boy would pull on it and try to take it back. That was a fun game. And play-fighting. The boy would offer his hand, knowing his second self would never do him harm. He’d gnaw the boy’s fingers and the boy would make disgusted sounds and wipe his hand, and he’d chase the hand under the fur the boy used to dry it. Sometimes he’d catch the hand, and their game would start all over again.

  Each had absolute access to whatever the other had. Except the boy refused to eat from his bowl. Though when the Man and the Woman weren’t looking, sometimes the boy let him eat from his bowl. But otherwise, they shared everything.

  Mostly that was love, one for the other. Without expectations or conditions or demands, other than to know the one would always be there for the other. Would always protect the other. As they proved with the stray, on the day they’d even shared danger for the first time.

  Long before the Storm of Teeth had come, they were walking in the woods near their home. A stray ran up on them, baring its teeth and looking for trouble. The boy froze in place and, though the dog was small, he moved between the boy and the stray to protect his twin. Teeth bared. Spinal fur erect. The stray had been much bigger than him. Most dogs were. More desperate seeming. Hungry, even.

  That day, for the first time, he’d heard the boy shout. It surprised him. It wasn’t like his own bark, but it sort of was. The same, but with different sounds mashed into one. His bared teeth and the boy’s loud barking had scared the larger dog off.

  So they shared this instinct too, he’d realized then. The instinct to look out for one another. As he was trying to protect the boy, so the boy had used his strange bark, aimed at the stray, to protect him. Twins in more than just spirit then, he’d decided. Love was also one runt sacrificing for the other. Theirs was a shared runt love.

  That thought made him happy, but remembering it and the day they’d faced down the stray also made him sad. It made him miss the boy all the more. Part of him feared walking in the world made by the Storm of Teeth without the boy’s bark beside him to protect him. Part of him feared not walking beside the boy to shield him from that world with his own teeth. All of him missed the boy entirely. His stomach ached with the longing for his twin’s companionship. To chase a squirrel or a rabbit or a ball. To do anything, really, as long as it was done together.

  In the days following the Storm of Teeth, his memory was one long stretch of boredom punctuated by flashes of terror. Eating when he could. Hiding and waiting until it was safe to move again. At those times, his thoughts couldn’t help but turn to the boy, and each day he felt a hole open wider inside him where the boy had been. He whimpered when he was sure he was alone and no one—and nothing—could hear.

  • • •

  His pack had left him behind. They’d all run out the front door of the house only a few nights ago, though it felt like forever. He remembered that night, when the Storm of Teeth had come.

  He was in the back yard, lying on a bed of leaves on a cool evening that was sure to turn cold later on. On those nights, the boy often slipped him into his room without the Man knowing and snuggled with him under the covers. His twin would rub his belly, and he’d arch his head in the air and moan and the boy would laugh. On those nights, love would smell to him like the warm scent of the boy radiating beneath the covers. And they would sleep, curled up as one, until the next morning.

  But it was too early for him to be inside on this particular evening. The pack was eating their dinner, and so he was outside in the back yard, awaiting a runt’s turn at his bowl. Then the storm came—slavering, growling, more frightening than even the stray had been. Than a hundred strays could ever be.

  Their scent reached him on the wind long before he could see them. It was impossible not to smell them. The wind didn’t carry the scent of a good death, the natural odor of an animal after its life had ended. The scent of a food source he could roll around in and bring back to the boy. No, this was the smell of un-life, walking when it should be still.

  He wanted to stand and bark, to be brave and warn the boy and the others, even the Baby. But the stench on the wind was so overpowering,
so rank and fetid, that he merely dug under the leaves and woofed his fear. Then, when the creatures were closer, he hid his voice as well. Haunches shaking, he watched from his hiding place as they came into view.

  The Storm of Teeth moved upright when they should be dormant and dead. They seemed to drag the cold with them as they lurched through the open yard behind his pack’s home. He cowered in his corner of the yard, far away from their path, where the Man had tied him to the corner of the house. They moved together, like a pack, but random and stumbling. They moved like a pack, but they didn’t hunt like one. They were slow and ponderous, not fast, but they never stopped or slowed down. They just kept coming. Like locusts looking for flesh.

  He could smell the plague they carried as they moved past his hiding place, straight for his pack’s home. The smell marched into his nose on tiny feet, overpowering and putrid like its source. Dead and worse, like rotten meat infested with worms. Nothing should be walking and hunting like these creatures did. They kept moving when they should only lie still and let the worms do their work.

  Had he been able, he would’ve stood and run away from them, as far as he could get. Every instinct in him demanded it, overwhelming his courage. But the Man had tied him with a rope, and it kept him from running.

  They crossed the yard and scraped and clawed at the side of the house. The Man and the Woman screamed and fought. The Baby, useless, merely squalled, drawing more of the creatures. He remembered the boy shouting his name. But unlike the day when they’d stood together and faced the stray, the Storm of Teeth and the rope that held him separated them. If he moved at all, he knew the creatures would see him and come for him. Kill him. He wanted to avoid death. Death would mean he’d never see the boy again.