Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  ‘So how do we solve it, professor?’ asks one of the other students.

  Snap out of it, Brad! ‘That’s what you are all here to work on,’ he booms. ‘We know what we need to do. We need to shield the probe,’ and he holds up the probe again, ‘so that, once it’s inserted in the previous time slot, it lasts longer than a microsecond. And then we need to develop the means of temporally polarising its matter. Given a long enough period - thirty seconds should do it - we ought, theoretically, to be able to align the matter of the probe with the local grain of time travel. And once we’ve done that, it can slot into its new environment non-explosively. Once we’ve cracked that problem . . . then actual, real, time travel becomes a possibility.’

  He grins; they grin. The world is all before them.

  ‘One problem,’ he tells them, ‘is in finding places to test our probe. You see, the early probes are likely to fail; we have to factor that in. And when they fail they’re going to go big boom-boom.’ He simpers, and pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. ‘The past is a different country, and we don’t want to go dropping random dynamite bombs on it hither and yon.’

  ‘Because of the sanctity of the time lines, professor?’ asks one of the students.

  ‘Because of the risk of killing people. But there’s a way to avoid that danger.’

  What way?

  No, we’re slinking back further and further.

  ~ * ~

  One

  The 1940s. This is the moment of Hiroshima. What better place to hide an exploding device from the future than inside a nuclear blast? The time-locals are hardly going to notice it there, are they? Drop it at that place, at precisely that time. You’ll recover metrics that let you know how well the shielding is holding up, how long it would have lasted for - and then, bang: vaporised. No chance of futuristic technology falling into 1940s hands. No chance of being noticed. No grandfather paradox. Oh, it’s an ideal solution.

  One of the first things the team learns is that their theory is wrong. The device explodes not with high-explosive force, but with a more concentrated and devastating power. But it’s still small beer compared with the force of ten thousand suns that the atomic bombs unleash.

  They test, and probe. They drop their devices into Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were 477 nuclear tests in the period from 1945 to 1970, and they can camouflage their work inside any one of them. Each time they inch a little closer to perfecting the technology, drawing out the power of the shielding, giving more time for the polarisation to take effect.

  Eventually, of course, they’re going to run out of nuclear explosions in which to hide their experiments. But by then they’ll have perfected the technology. By then. And if they have not, then they’ll have to find other historical explosions. That asteroid strike in Siberia in 1908 - you know the one. That’s always a fallback.

  It’ll be a long time before Notkin realises that the delta fold-up function that Professor Bradley included in his equations in fact follows an exponential rather than a sequential logic. Before she realises that the brown-paper-and-vinegar science of the Manhattan project, stuck with 1940s technology and assumptions, was simply not in the position to develop a working nuclear device. That the exponential factor in the equations, multiplied by the length of time through which the device travels, rubbing up a potent form of energetic friction, will produce an explosion of. . . precisely A-bomb dimensions. And that the later tests, with more sophisticated shields, would yield precisely the larger megatonnage of the test explosions into which they were dropped. That, in fact. . .

  Missed it. Brad has shot backwards. He’s now earlier than Hiroshima, and is getting more before by the minute.

  Frankly he’s lost control. His grasp of the math has been wrong from an early stage, and he’s massively overestimated the amount of energy he needs to place this much larger device back to the right time. (He was thinking the 1970s) There’s an inverse scale on increasing math; but a straightforward exponential on the amount of energy you accumulate as you—

  There he goes.

  Gone.

  Before gone.

  ~ * ~

  Zero

  The deeper in time you sink, the more temporal static you build up. On the other hand, imagine an asteroid capable of causing mass extinction. That would have to be a whopper. But there never was such a large irregular polygon of ice and rock falling out of the highest high. You don’t believe me? Fair enough. I tell you how we can solve it: go back there and see for ourselves. Imagine the time traveller, his capsule popping out and crashing into the foliage. It lands on its back, tumbles on its top, rolls on its back, and the chrononaut can see out through his porthole. He wipes the condensation away with his arm. He can see weird contortions of green and black, and he recognises them straight away for foliage. Past the leaves, out in the wetland, a grazing diplodocus raises its head, its long neck straightening upwards like a pointing arm. The other, of course, is the number seventeen on his inner display turning, second by second, into sixteen, and so into fifteen, and - well, I daresay you know how to count backwards just as well as you know how to count forwards.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  A Prison Term of a Thousand Years

  People ask me how one endures so lengthy a prison sentence. But it is the same whether the sentence is a thousand years or only one. You see, each day is its own thing. You encounter each day at morning, and you inhabit it. You pull each day on as if it were a suit of clothes. You hurry nothing, but neither do you dawdle. You simply move from moment to moment as smoothly as if time is your medium for yoga, for the flexing of your muscles and the spangling of your mind.

  I was sentenced to one thousand, one hundred and twelve years incarceration. It was in this fashion that I addressed the first day, and it was how I addressed the last day, of this prodigious prison sentence.

  But people say: ‘Surely that can’t be true! Surely as the release date approached you must have become excited? Eager finally to be gone?’

  To this I say no. I say: if I had become excited on the eve of my release, I would have become excited on many other occasions during my incarceration; I would have celebrated the thousand-year mark; I would have marked every century, every month. I would have woken every morning mentally ticking off another day. By the same token, I would have fretted; I would have been anxious to get on with my sentence; I would have worn myself out within a few years with the sheer friction of anticipation, the joys of which, quite as much as the frustrations, are too exhausting for human minds to bear over too lengthy a period. I could have gone mad, and then I would have died.

  ~ * ~

  Out of prison I met a woman. ‘A thousand years!’ she said. She kept saying it. ‘A thousand years! Ten centuries! Oh and it must be a shock to come out - so much has changed since you went in!’

  We were walking along the seafront. It was autumn. An eighty-metre planar tree towered over the buildings. It moved its huge leaves in the wind, steadily shovelling the air. The leaves were a bright red colour freckled with purple, very striking in contrast against the pale-coloured sky and the restless dark waters.

  ‘The trees,’ I said, ‘appear to be bigger.’

  ‘That?’ she said. ‘That? That’s not what I mean! That’s nothing! They’ve been engineering giant trees for centuries! No, I mean things like the Dropsonde, like the Stute affair and the re-election of Cess, Saint Cess. I mean things like the Plat scandal -or even - or even the technological advances! The Tager-Smith drive! The Tertiaries! It must all be so new to you!’

  I leant against the rail that separated the walkway from the sea. There seemed to be no upright posts to which this rail was attached. It floated. Nor was it metal, although it looked as though it was. It felt warm to the touch, almost like flesh, and yielded to the pressure of my body leaning on it. I watched the sea. And then, in a brief miracle of autumn lighting, a gap eased in the clouds to allow throu
gh a slant passage of pure sunlight. It fell across my arms and shone on the effervescence of the foam at the foot of the seawall. Then the brightness passed again.

  ‘Come on!’ she said. ‘There’s so much to do! So many people to introduce you to!’ And she pulled my arm, and she tugged me away.

  ~ * ~

  Treatment is an interesting word, I think. We treat children with medicine, but also with candies. We make treaties with our enemies at time of war. When the first longevity treatments were developed—

  Stop, a moment. A moment.

  ~ * ~

  Her name was Thalatta, that woman, and she was eager for me to meet many people. She wanted to make a film of me, and bruit me about, and generally raise me before the general audience. She might say things such as, ‘You’re no freak!’ and ‘You’re as human as I!’ But then, after a while, she lost interest in me. For a time I had no visitors. I took a walk along the seafront daily. I took my meals. I sat and watched as the sun pushed a parallelogram of light across the floor and then slid it, tightening and thinning it a little, up the wall. It was winter now, and the heartbeat of days syncopated, spaced brightness between longer pauses of darkness.

  ‘You were in prison for a thousand years?’ a man asked me, amazed. I do not remember how he came to find out about my past. He lived, I think, not far from my apartment. Sometimes he walked along the seafront. Sometimes I did. ‘A thousand years!’ he said, and he put up a great dumb-show of astonishment, shaking his head very pronouncedly, holding up his hands, and darting his feet back and forth across the spot on which he stood. ‘But what did you do?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Your crime! What crime could possibly deserve so lengthy a sentence? Now, wait a bit,’ and he put a finger vertically against his lips, ‘there was a case in the news just last week, oh! a nasty one, there was a case in the news of a man who murdered his brother, killed him outright; and he was only sentenced to fifty years. But a thousand years!’

  ‘Murdered his brother?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure, murdered him! Fifty years! But you - a thousand years, you—’

  The sea worked against the wall in an iambic rhythm, hissing and hushing.

  On another occasion he said, ‘You’re one of those immortals.’ I shook my head. ‘Oh I know, not immortal,’ he said. ‘No, of course not. But you’ve got an enormously elongated lifespan, haven’t you! To think of it! And yet you look just like us! To think of it! To think I’ve met you! Fancy!’

  ‘Fancy,’ I said.

  ‘Is that,’ he said, as if the idea were occurring to him for the first time, ‘is that why you were given such a long prison sentence? I mean, was it calculated as a proportion of the total amount of time you have left in your . . . ?’ His sentence did not complete itself. ‘So let’s say, I’m going to live to be a hundred and fifty, so that for me a sentence of fifty years means a third of my life and for you . . .’ and again his sentence did not complete. ‘What,’ he asked me, outright, ‘what did you do? What was your crime? What deserved a thousand years?’

  ‘Calculated as a proportion of my total expected life,’ I said, ‘as against the life of people like me—’

  ‘Oh, but who,’ he interrupted, thinking, I’m sure, that he was being complimentary, ‘but who is like you} Nobody! Nobody!’

  ~ * ~

  I look around me and it is summer. The green has a vivid and severe quality. The sky is cyan. The sun weighs itself down with its own heat, and sets.

  I look around me and it is winter. The gigantic tree near my apartment seems no less massive, though empty of leaves. Its huge black stem seems almost to be fixing the sky in place. The white sky.

  I watch the day ending. The sun, dropping, comes to rest, momentarily, on the top of the Oceanic Tower, away on the horizon: like a circle of flame on a candlewick. But then it is gone, and the candle is blown out.

  There is a fire in my apartment block, and the engines come flying through the air with their foam to put it out.

  It is spring now. It is raw and youthful weather, flashes of sun bright as blindness and then heavy raindrops falling in rattles and swarms. I walk out under a wind-scraped sky, and the air prods me and pulls me, will not let me get away. The wind is trying to mug me, to pick my pocket and shove me in the gutter. My coattails flutter like pennants. This woman is called Fallina. ‘You knew my mother,’ she said. ‘You met her. She made films about you.’

  I am trying to remember. But I can only think of a frantic and restless shape, a trick of moving the arms in a certain way, of gesticulating. Her face does not come into focus at all.

  We pass a group of three people, talking amongst themselves. As we pass one of them takes three steps towards us and spits at me. The sputum does not hit my face. It trails itself onto my shirt. Fallina pulls my arms and hurries me along.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Fallina.

  ‘How is she?’ I say. I am trying. Really I am. ‘Your mother? Is she well?’

  ‘She died some years ago,’ Fallina says. ‘There are still many who support the cause, you see. But, but the cause it - the movement is—’

  Here is the resistance of trying to understand what she means, and following all the ins-and-outs, all the outs-and-ins. What is she talking about? I don’t know. But I can lower my head to nod, and raise it again to look into her face.

  ‘Times change,’ she says, dolefully.

  I can lower and raise my head.

  ‘So,’ she says, and it appears she is concluding now. ‘So we’re trying to organise the necessary transport,’ she says.

  I do not know what she means.

  ‘The situation is dangerous - dangerous for you. The political climate has changed. The mood of the population as a whole—’

  I try to follow what she is saying.

  ‘It’s also a question of where - of where to fly you to. But,’ she says. ‘But we’ll work something out.’

  The hill above the town is as green as pistachio in the spring light; but there is cloud behind and above it, and the cloud is sea-green, blue and purple, a raincloud plump as a pigeon’s breast and eager to shed its freshwater upon us. The rain is already coming down the hill, folded into creases like drapery.

  ‘I’ll try to come tomorrow. My mother was right, she was right to campaign, it’s a terrible injustice. We all ought to be ashamed!’ I do not know what she means. ‘I’ll come tomorrow.’

  She does not come the following day. The police come.

  ~ * ~

  The sentence is one thousand, two hundred and eight years and some weeks and a day. The crime is the same as before. ‘I would advise you to be thankful,’ says the Judge, ‘that you live under so enlightened a system. In the East they have long since incinerated all your kind. There is considerable diplomatic pressure being applied upon our government to follow suit - which, of course, you have read about in the news sheets.’ But I have not done this reading.

  The longevity protocol was a way of treating a human being: a doping, or staining. Treatment in the sense of the word that wood is treated. This, now, is a different sense of the word treatment, this isolation. Incarceration. This is a way of treating something.

  ‘The danger you and your kind pose to ordinary humanity, in our resource-limited world—’ says the Judge. ‘You and your kind—’ But what kind? ‘As much for your protection as for the protection of the public,’ he says. ‘Not what you have done but what you are,’ he said. ‘A necessity,’ says the Judge, and that is that is that.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Godbombing

  1

  ‘You know,’ said Captain Haldeman. He was from Maryland. His glasses were fixed to his face with a plastic strap round the back of his head. On his helmet was a badge making plain for whom it was Jesus died. ‘You know,’ he said again. The sergeant stuck his wide, baggy face in frame, his nose as wide as a pony’s. ‘No atheists in a foxhole,’ he said.


  ‘I’m going off sticks,’ the cameraman told the Director, and the Director, looking small and tortoise-like in his enormous khaki-and-green flak jacket, nodded nervously. Off came the camera from its sticks, and onto the Cameraman’s shoulders, and a closer-upper, more animated-ish, dynamic picture was thereby framed.

  ‘You looking to get some footage of combat?’ asked Captain Haldeman

  ‘That would be great,’ said the Director, uncertainly.

  ‘You guys usually do.’

  ‘Great,’ said the Director.

  ‘Combat’s coming. It’s on its way right here. Reports say Musclemen are advancing nor-nor-west, coming forward on two fronts, and a new cluster of Godbombs been detonated upwind, which usually means an attack is about to kick off.’