Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  Sunni looked around tentatively. No one else seemed to want to hear it, but she wanted to know, so she awkwardly raised her hand. The mayor nodded at the physicists, and the younger of them stood and went to the whiteboard and began drawing an equation and a little diagram. He turned to the Elders and began to speak. He was only a few sentences into his elucidation when the mayor interrupted him to exclaim:

  “Aha—look! It’s like an earthworm praying!”

  At which point the young physicist violently threw his marker onto the ground and left the whiteboard and sat down beside his friend. He was too upset by the events of the day to push forward. It wasn’t even so awful that a proof had been found; the pain in his heart was about how unsatisfying a proof it was. It just wasn’t the beautiful, elegant thing that everyone had been hoping for.

  Sunni wanted to ask the physicists what the African proof said about the unreality of time, but just as she was about to raise her hand again, the boy next to her leaned over and pointed at Sunni’s Mothers, which she still reflexively clasped tightly in the palm of her hand.

  “Is your Mothers dead?” he gasped.

  Sunni, hiding it quickly beneath her sweater, replied with feigned ease, “Nah, it’s just a new sleeve. My architect friend made it. He’s cool.”

  “I wouldn’t want a sleeve that looked like that.”

  “Never mind.”

  “You should take that sleeve off.”

  “One day I will.”

  Then the mayor turned to the teenagers and asked, “Should Perimeter be closed?” In this way voting began.

  The first Elder spoke: “Yes.”

  The second Elder looked up from her Mothers, which knew that once you began talking about ending something, usually that thing ends. “Yes!”

  The third Elder spoke. “Yes.”

  And on and on it went: yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

  Now it was Sunni’s turn. She hesitated, glancing down at the blank screen of her Mothers, which she had pulled out again. It was still a twisted, black, charry mess. She took a deep breath, and said very quietly, though loud enough for everyone to hear: “I am no longer Special.”

  Then she stood up from her place on the dais and climbed carefully down the steps. It was a humiliating walk, one others had performed before her while she had watched in pity and fear. Behind her there rose a wall of whispering; it was the world Sunni had been part of, sealing itself off behind her.

  She walked past the mayor and beyond the physicists, towards the doors at the end of the hall. Just before she slipped out, she heard the mayor announce the tally of the vote: it was unanimous. Perimeter was to be shut down within the hour.

  “Fucking teenagers,” the older physicist muttered.

  Sunni stepped out into the breezy air of the afternoon, blinking in the brightness of the day. Her face felt oddly hot. She stood on the steps of City Hall, faintly bewildered. Her eyes rested on a tree that stood a short distance in the grass, and she watched it gently sway, moved by the breeze. What would move her, now that her Mothers was dead? With each day, she felt, her destiny would be less and less clear, and less and less would what was probable be the law that ran her life. She tried to imagine what other law might come to replace it, but no other laws came to mind.

  Perhaps, she mused, she could learn about living from this tree—let the laws that moved it move her as well. At base, she knew, she was made up of the very same substance as the tree; she must be, in some sense, treelike. She stepped down onto the lawn.

  At that moment, her attention was distracted by some vague sounds in the distance. She squinted. Soon she could discern a lethargic parade approaching from the far end of King Street. After watching a bit longer, she realized what it was: a small tide of physicists was flowing from the doors of Perimeter. They came closer, heaving down King Street with stooped postures, dazed, carrying boxes of computers, papers, and chalk, streaming towards their cars, which would take them back to the university towns from which they had come.

  “How pathetic,” came a small voice.

  Sunni turned around and noticed that sitting cross-legged beneath the tree was a scrawny boy around her own age. From the first glance she could tell that he was a loser, but such a loser he wasn’t even a Princess Street loser.

  “They don’t have to leave,” he said.

  “But it’s their destiny.” Sunni replied, moving closer. “I was in the meeting. I saw it happen.”

  The boy looked up at her skeptically, pushing his bangs away. “Destiny? What a word! These physicists don’t believe in the future. Most of them don’t, anyway. I know it. I’m good friends with some of them.”

  “But—” Sunni shook her head. “If there’s no destiny, how can you know what’s going to happen next?”

  The boy, whose name was Raffi, frowned. He paused a moment, then went on to quietly explain, barely raising his voice above a whisper, so that Sunni had to move closer to hear.

  He told her that last year’s Bora Bora proof, which contributed to the African proof, revealed that not everything that comes to pass can be known in advance; rather everything is in a continuous state of co-creation and co-evolution with everything else. The future is utterly non-computable and non-predictable— possibly not mathematical, in essence, at all. No future can exist until it exists, since we are all creating reality together in a radically flexible present. “Like, things can happen all sorts of different ways,” he said.

  Sunni sat back hard against the tree. She was flustered by all that this boy was saying. But the Bora Bora proof was impossible! Absurd! She turned her head as the Double Special Elders began emerging from the tall doors of City Hall and spreading across the lawn, heads bent low over their Mothers as they decided where to go next. She was about to say something when, in the distance, a blue spiral burst into the world, lighting up the sky. Sunni felt like she was going to vomit, felt like her insides had been scooped out with a spoon.

  “It’s the action,” Raffi said quietly. “It’s coming closer, I see.”

  “What action?” Sunni asked.

  Raffi said slowly, looking at her again, “You’re a Double Special Elder through and through. You didn’t even know.”

  Now another explosion burst blue in the distance, near the mall on the left side of town. A high-pitched radial whistle was emanating from the spiral, and Raffi got up like a smooth animal. He bent over and started rummaging in the large duffle bag that had been lying beside him in the grass.

  Sunni pushed herself closer to the tree, scared. In the distance, a physicist in a red overcoat turned around and began walking towards them. Raffi looked up to answer the question on Sunni’s face and said, “It’s a Spiral. We might know how to handle this.” The physicist came near and Raffi walked off with her, in the direction of Perimeter and through its front doors.

  Now Sunni was alone. She found herself, for the time, watching the Elders, many of whom were gazing into the distance where the spiral still hung. Sunni observed them glance down at their Mothers to make sense of it; to know how to respond. But their Mothers had no valuable insight; could not fit the spiral into the pattern; had never known such a thing before.

  Get on your scooter and go home, was the instruction that appeared on their screens; an instruction applicable to many situations, and the most common one.

  The teenagers made their way to their scooters, seemingly sure in their movements, for somewhere inside they felt a reassurance: it was not that their Mothers lacked insight about this new thing, but that the question they had posed to their Mothers about the explosion was not a pertinent one. What happened in the distance had nothing to do with the patterns in their lives. It had nothing to do with all the ways they were Special.

  They got on their wheels and, like the physicists, sped off from the heart of town.

  Sunni looked up as an acorn fell from the tree and landed on her head. She thought about what she knew.

  With special thanks to physicists Sean G
ryb, Aaron Berndsen, Lee Smolin and Julian Barbour

  HEATHER O’NEILL

  THE DREAMLIFE OF TOASTERS

  IN THE SUMMER of 2075 a female android named 4F6 stopped on her way home from the pharmaceutical factory and stood looking at the stars. As she gazed up, visions flashed above her.

  Androids were designed, half a century ago, with superior eyesight to humans’ so that they could work on the tiniest computer parts. A side effect of this provision was that when they looked up into the sky at night, they were able to perceive thousands more stars, thousands more configurations and astral phenomena than the average human eye could ever discern. When they walked at night, they could not help but look up into the sky and marvel. In fact, this was the easiest way to tell an android from a human. Androids were the ones on the street with their briefcases dangling at their sides, staring at the stars in wonder. For this reason, androids were no longer given driving licences—it led to too many accidents, this ability to be struck by perfect things.

  4F6 imagined the stars were a group of ancient coal miners with lamps on their helmets being lowered by elevator into a deep dark hole. Imagining in this way was not typical of robots; but 4F6 had known she was different from other androids for a long time. Once, during rush hour four years ago, she had been shoved onto the subway tracks and, as she hit the rail, an electric current had surged through her. Since that time, her electrical currencies had been too high.

  She had already experienced some peculiar side effects from her accident. She was able to turn on lights just by looking at them. And unlike other androids, she was able to tell when something was funny. She was forever explaining jokes she had overheard from humans to the other androids she worked with. They couldn’t understand them at all. To them jokes were merely equations with slightly incorrect answers. That was one of the reasons humans avoided befriending androids—they found them cold.

  As 4F6 was standing there, peacefully looking up at the stars, she realized that another android in a tweed suit was standing right beside her also staring up at the night sky.

  Naturally, they introduced themselves. Androids were always very cordial as this greatly increased workplace efficiency. 4F6 liked BX19 immediately. She liked his brown eyes and his pale skin. He told her that he worked transcribing trials at the courthouse. He began to repeat verbatim one of the cases he had sat in on that day. A man was on trial for murdering his ex-wife’s new boyfriend. He had strangled her boyfriend with his bare hands and now showed no remorse. Then he told her the story of a man who had held up an atom bar and only got away with fifteen proton tablets and had subsequently been sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

  4F6 was moved by these stories. She had never had anyone say such things to her. The only kind of talk she ever heard was from the other androids at the pharmaceutical factory who spoke solely of formulae and the periodic table of elements. All this talk of murder and love, to her, was like poetry.

  Somewhere within 4F6’s circuitry there stirred a desire to reach out and touch BX19. Androids often mimicked human behaviour out of curiosity. They had, of course, tried kissing and lovemaking, and certain androids claimed they had felt something, but it was the general consensus that they were unable to feel anything at all while engaging in such activities. 4F6 herself had never been kissed before.

  “Please kiss me,” she said.

  BX19 leaned over and did as he was told. He was just being polite, but when his lips touched her lips, 4F6’s heart felt like it had dunked into her stomach. When that happens with humans, it is just a sensation, but with an android, every emotion has a mechanical reaction. Miniature wires and bolts fell from inside her chest into her stomach. 4F6 felt the metal parts moving around in her belly, as if they were the insides of one of those alarm clocks she’d seen in a museum. But later that night, lying in bed, the discomfort she was feeling in her stomach was the furthest thing from her mind. She replayed the kiss over and over, until her short-term memory projector snapped off as she drifted into sleep.

  The next morning, as 4F6 was gaining consciousness, as she lay in bed staring at the ceiling, she felt something fall from between her legs. She pulled off her blankets and rummaged through the sheets, searching for the errant part. Her hand touched something cold and metallic. She pushed away the thermal duvet and there, wrapped in her bedding, was a tiny stick-like figure.

  Its skeleton was made of wires and tiny screws and bolts. It had a small spring for a spine and frayed, spliced wire grew out of its head like hair. It had tightly wound wire for a neck, and where a heart would go, there was a tiny valve that looked as if it could be cranked. The little thing started to move its arms in the air over itself. It was obviously some sort of robot, but it didn’t look human the way androids did.

  The little thing looked at 4F6 through the holes in the minuscule spark plugs he had for eyes. There was an awful darkness and limitlessness to those eyes.

  Could this be a baby, her baby, conceived from her first kiss? The gestation period for the tiny robot had only been a day. 4F6 had never heard of robots making robots—perhaps on a factory assembly line, but never without being told to and never in a bed, and never as the result of a spontaneous kiss. She knew that something horribly wrong had happened.

  Although androids didn’t really know what it meant beyond the softer skin and crooked teeth, they wished to be human. They considered themselves inferior and got tongue-tied around people. Whenever they saw a human, they couldn’t help but think: he invented me. Humans did not know what their origins had been. Some of them believed in God and searched for the meaning of life in the Bible. Androids, on the other hand, had no Bible, no Koran, no Talmud. The closest thing they had to a creation myth was the original grant application that the Department of Artificial Intelligence had requested for the funding of robotics research in 2015. Every android had a copy of this proposal. It was a bestseller among androids. It said that the applicants of that grant wanted to create a robot capable of operating all of human kind’s other inventions, thus significantly reducing the workday. There was never any debate about the origins of existence or the meaning of life among androids.

  But now this baby robot had been created by some unknown force, independent of man. 4F6 knew that this would not be taken lightly.

  She worried that if the scientists found out about the baby there would be a mass android recall. The scientists would tamper with their insides, making sure that no other android would be capable of experiencing love as 4F6 had, because it was love Heather O’Neill 295 that had created the little spring man, she was sure. They would take away the androids’ ability to be amazed by stars, too, for good measure. Without these abilities 4F6 would only be an appliance—a machine.

  She wrapped the tiny robot in a sock and put him in her briefcase. She called in to work to say that she would be a little late that day because she was going to stop at the Android Servicing Unit to be recharged. Instead, she took the bus all the way to the edge of town.

  When the bus reached the end of the line, she walked down an empty street, and as she walked she convinced herself that what she was about to do was necessary for the safety of androids everywhere. It was not an easy task, this convincing. 4F6 was programmed to know when to yell and when to whisper, when to fuel up and when to rest; but in this matter, she was not certain what she knew at all. Had anyone been watching her, they would have seen a woman walking along haltingly, as though looking for a street address she wasn’t sure existed.

  4F6 had been to the dump many times before. It was a hobby of hers. She enjoyed estimating how many pieces of debris were contained within each pile, but she was not interested in that today. She had no desire for calculating. She took the baby robot out of her briefcase and threw it over the fence onto a heap of garbage. That’s where it belongs, she thought: it was junk—a broken, incomplete thing.

  She repeated this to herself over and over as she waited for the bus, boarded it, and returned to work.
Several years earlier she had had her temperature regulator exchanged. In the moments while she lay on the metal gurney, her chest-plate opened, the old part removed and the new part not yet inserted, she had really felt fine and complete. The little wire thing that had fallen from her was not even half the size of the temperature regulator, yet back at the factory assembly line, as she stood making calculations on her clipboard, she had the sensation of being empty. As much as she considered the matter, it did not make any sense to her. Yet there it was.

  At the dump, there were seagulls circling above, crying out as though in pain. The tiny robot, lying on his back, wished that one of the birds would swoop down and pick him up in its claws because he wanted so badly to be held; but the seagulls, yanking apart plastic bags and perching on top of old refrigerators, seemed interested in everything at the dump except him.

  As it started to get dark, the little robot began to feel more and more alone. He stood up on his feet, which looked like tiny salad forks, and stumbled over the garbage. He passed a coat rack that looked like a thin man looking out to sea. He passed an old shoe, piles of books and tin cans, green metal chairs, and couches with cushions covered in coffee stains. Then, amidst all of it, he saw something that comforted him: a toaster. The robot hurried over and wrapped his arms around it, circling its electrical cord around his body. He lay there, entwined with the toaster, and in this way, he tried to assure himself that, somehow, he was loved.

  When the stars came out, so numerous and fantastic, the little robot was so struck by the utter mystery of the universe that he forgot, at least for those moments, that he was alone in the world.

  As he gazed up at the stars, he was moved by quizzical thoughts, thoughts that, could he articulate them, might take the form of such words as Why am I here? How big is the universe?Why am I me and not someone else?

  Although androids all over the world had been coming up with infinitely complex answers for over fifty years, the little robot was the first to ask a question.