Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  He considers this. ‘Where am I?’ he asks.

  ‘Leonardo.’

  But that means nothing. ‘What’s Candelaria?’ he tries. ‘They’re, what: different to regular robots?’

  ‘See, you know robots.’ says a second voice. ‘Though you don’t know Candelaria.’ One voice, two voices. It’s like he’s talking to Tweedledum and Tweedledee. ‘It’s all in there,’ Tweedledee says. ‘Need to rootle it out. You know your own name?’

  He finds he does. ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘There you go! Keep thinking it through. The Candelaria? Best described, I suppose, as a religion. They self-identify as robots. Most MwO don’t use that vocabulary. But they like the word robots. It’s a Homo sapiens word, see.’

  ‘Doesn’t it mean slave?’

  ‘You’re definitely starting to remember stuff.’ Tweedledum again. A grin, in the dark, like a crescent moon on its side. The scent of grape. And in his thoughts Thirteen was standing in a vineyard - in an actual, true-to-god vineyard - and it was chilly, and the light was changing. Hail was rattling through the leaves, and the sky was closing. An old world storm. Lightning flashed, but distantly and indistinctly, a shuddering glimmer through the unscattered clouds. Those hailstones were tiny and hard: grit-monsoon.

  ‘I’m getting,’ says Thirteen. ‘I’m getting memory flashes—’

  ‘Is it a memory of sex?’ says Tweedledum. ‘You don’t need to be coy. This business sure makes me remember honest-to-goodness human sex.’

  ‘Behave,’ says Tweedledee.

  ‘I was in the countryside,’ says Thirteen. ‘I was in—’ Tweedledum breaks in, ‘Don’t tell me! You’re going to name a place on Earth! Don’t!’ Then, a little sheepishly, ‘I’m superstitious about invoking old Earth. Leave it be, that’s my view. That world is waves, now.’

  Thirteen realises he knows this: Earth is all gone, long gone. Countless fathoms deep. And all the rest of what he needs to know is right on the edge of his consciousness. One nudge and it will come. ‘What are MwOs?’

  ‘That’s the collective term,’ says Tweedledum. ‘They come in all sorts and shapes and sizes. Some as big as cities, steering through the vacuum. Some small as ticks or bugs or asterisks - or smaller.’

  Tweedledee chips in. ‘And they manifest all manner of beliefs. Take the Candelaria: they revere Homo sapiens. Fancy! I don’t really understand it myself, but that’s what they do. Something about servitude to an ideal of humanity. Building a man, that’s worship for them. But not made out of protein, of course. If they built it out of protein, then it would hardly be a robot, now, would it? They use chrome.’

  ‘Chrome?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Not literal chrome, I guess.’

  ‘Literal chrome!’ scoffs Tweedledee.

  ‘But it has to do with the old sapient hombres, and what they thought a robot should look like. Shiny, shiny, mirror shiny. Durable, you know? It’s not that the Candelaria are committed to being everlasting, or anything. It’s about what they reckon men and women would expect robots to be. So they build, from the ground up. Here are the forty-six chromosomes, and instead of protein molecules they use mirror-shiny dense little beads of computronium. Instead of these glued-together filaments of tissue, it’s shiny regular nano-strands of computronium. All-metal chromosomes, strands neatly linked together and folded in Xs and Ys.’

  ‘Like zippers,’ says Tweedledee.

  ‘Teeny-tiny computronium zippers. And they encode all the stuff old sapient-hombre DNA encodes, the four bases, the ancient alphabet. But that’s a ridiculous underuse of the material, isn’t it? What, computronium? Like taking a bunch of old computer circuit boards and arranging them in the shape of roman numerals. They can do much more! So they scrupulously reproduce all the As and Ds and whatnots of human DNA, but also they make full use of the computronium’s processing capacity. And even a minuscule strand of computronium has more computational potential than all the . . .’

  Tweedledee interrupts. ‘You’re boring. You’re boring me. Ergo you’re boring him.’

  ‘Machines without Organs!’ snaps Tweedledum, as if swearing.

  Thirteen says: ‘Metal? A metal organism? Cells?’

  ‘Nano-smart membranes. Sort-of metal.’

  ‘Metal blood?’

  ‘Little metallic blood cells, shiny as silver, hurtling round in a lubricating medium, like little shiny coins. No need to transport any oxygen, of course; but they copy all the organs. And each one with a trillion-bit computational capacity! Plasmetal artery and vein walls - it’s as flexible as organic tissue, but much tougher. Cunningly designed Campbellonium bones. The whole thing.’

  ‘And the whole thing . . .’ Thirteen says.

  ‘You know everything we know,’ says Dum. ‘Come on! You’re being lazy now.’

  ‘Leonardo,’ says Thirteen.

  ‘He’s the man.’

  ‘He’s - a cathedral.’

  ‘You know,’ said Dee. ‘That’s not a bad way of thinking about it. Because although he is a man, he’s also an act of Candelaria devotion. Religious devotion. Constructing a version of the old sapient hombre, sure: life size, ready to walk and learn to talk and all that. But building him so that every cell in his body runs an accurate simulation of one or other lost human. One or other person drowned when the world died.’

  Thirteen remembers the vineyard. That storm had been the beginning of something bad.

  ‘Cathedral nothing.’ Dee sounds genuinely angry. ‘Leonardo’s a zoo. A prison. A freak show. Who are these robots to bring us back to consciousness? To lock us up here? Who gave them the right?’

  As if triggered by this anger, Thirteen’s memory washes back through him. It’s all there. He knows that Leonardo contains the detailed computronium-run consciousnesses of millions of people; and that when Leonardo comes into the world, out of this comforting dark, every one of them will access his senses, his joys and all his experiences - access them all separately, and live again; but also access them collectively, as a single transcendent man to make mankind live again. And he knows that the robots made Leonardo as a homage; an act of piety to honour a vanished form of life. And he knows Tweedledum and Tweedledee. ‘You,’ he says, to Dum, ‘are Thirteen.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And you,’ to Dee. ‘You are Thirteen.’

  ‘Me too, yes. We’re you. We’re one another.’

  ‘Who am I?’

  ‘You’re Trisomy Thirteen, that’s who you are,’ says Tweedledum-Thirteen. ‘You’re a third, iteration of us. Because we figured . . .’

  ‘. . . we figured, you know - fuck them.’

  ‘Robots! Ugh.’

  ‘We thought - who gave them permission to conjure us into this computronium mode of consciousness? Who gave them the right? They think they’re doing us a favour? They think this is an act of piety? It’s playing god. Fucking robots!’

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ says Tweedledee-Thirteen. ‘Using their own technology against them. But we did it. We made you. Let’s see how that pans out in their precious Leonardo.’

  ‘After us,’ says Tweedledum-Thirteen, ‘the deluge.’

  ~ * ~

  Trisomy 13 occurs when each cell in the body has three, instead of the usual two, copies of chromosome 13. Trisomy 13 can also result from an extra copy of chromosome 13 in only some of the body’s cells (this is known as mosaic trisomy 13). Extra material from chromosome 13 disrupts the course of normal development, causing the characteristic signs and symptoms of trisomy 13. Researchers are not yet certain how this extra genetic material leads to the features of the disorder, which include severely abnormal cerebral functions, a small cranium, retardation, non-functional eyes and heart defects.

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  ~ * ~

  The Time Telephone

  1

  A mother phones her daughter. This call will cost her nearly €18,000. The number she dials is several hundred digi
ts long, but it has been calculated carefully and stored as a series of tones, so the dialling process takes only seconds. The ring tone at the far end makes its distant musical drum roll once, twice, three times, and with a clucking noise the receiver is lifted.

  ‘Hello?’

  The mother takes a quick breath. ‘Marianne?’

  ‘Speaking. Who’s this, please?’

  ‘This is your mother, Marianne.’

  ‘Ma? I thought you were in Morocco. You calling from Morocco?’

  ‘No, dear, I’m here, I’m in London.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘This is a call from the past, my darling,’ says the mother, her heart stabbing at her ribs. ‘As I speak now, as I speak to you now, I’m actually pregnant with you. You’re inside my tummy here, and I’m speaking to you there.’

  For a moment there is only the polluted silence of a phone line; that slightly hissing, leaf-rustle emptiness of a line where the person at the other end is quiet. Then the daughter says, ‘Wow, ma. Really?’

  ‘Yes, my dear.’

  ‘It’s that time telephone thing? Yeah? I read about that, or, or I watched a thing about it, on TV. You’re really calling me from the past?’

  ‘Yes, my dear. I have a question I want to ask you.’

  ‘Wow, ma. Like, wow. I watched this programme about it on TV, it was a whole big thing, like, decades ago. And now it’s actually happening to me! And I’m only on a, like, regular phone.’

  ‘It uses the ordinary phone system, you know.’

  ‘It’s incredible, though. Isn’t it?’

  ‘I want to ask you this thing, my darling, and I want you to answer truthfully. I know that you are sixteen there, aren’t you. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Sweet sixteen.’

  ‘Well, from where I’m calling you’re not born yet. So I want to ask you.’ She takes a breath. ‘Are you glad you were born? Are you pleased to have come into the world?’ The drizzly silence of the phone line. ‘I mean the question absolutely seriously, my darling, absolutely. I mean the question, in the way that a child will say . . .’ But she finds it hard to find the words. ‘The way a child will say I hate you, I wish I’d never been born. That’s an unbearable thing for a parent to hear, my darling. Do you see?’

  ‘You’re weirding me out, ma. This whole conversation is weirding me out. This whole concept is weirding me out.’

  ‘But I have to ask it of you, because now you’re sixteen, you can tell me. Are you glad you were born?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Are you sure? Really sure?’

  ‘OK, sure I’m sure, I’m really sure.’

  Which is what the mother hoped to hear. She even sighs. And the remainder of the question is conversational scree, just talk about the weather and the chit-chat. So I go to Morocco? Well, yeah, ma. Hey, Scannell just won the board championship. You should make a bet. You could be rich. I don’t think it works that way, my darling. You look after yourself. Hey, you too. That sort of thing. You know the sort of thing, the sort of chit-chat a mother and daughter will make on the phone.

  ~ * ~

  2

  The world cable telephone network is some 7,672,450,000 miles long in total, when the different international, national and local lines are added up. And they are all interconnected. They would hardly function as a telephone network if they weren’t. We are talking about cable, copper or some other electron-conducting material; optical fibre is no good for us, because photons travel only at the speed of light no matter how you slice and dice them. Neutroelectrons - a self-contradictory-sounding name, but better than the alternative mooted by the Italians of ’anti-electrons’, for surely an anti-electron is a proton? - anyway - these ghostly particles travel so fast as effectively to travel instantaneously, but they can only do it in a material that conducts their shadowy anti-selves, their phase-inverted electrons. By plotting out a pathway along the telephone network, a neutroelectron can be passed instantly across the seven billion miles of cabling. The phone line becomes a gateway into the past; when they arrive they arrive from the past, if you see what I mean. This is because it would take light about eleven hours to travel the pathway mapped diligently through the phone lines. Which means that the far end of the cable is eleven hours away, so that the instantaneous transmission of the phased particle actually passes eleven hours back in time. For it to happen any other way would violate laws of cause-and-effect. I’m sure you’re following me.

  Technicians carefully map out a route around the millions of miles of telephone cabling, turning innumerable sharp corners, fleeting back and forth underneath the oceans, rushing along smile-sagging lines propped up every fifty yards by another pole, curling and spinning around the electronic spaghetti of the bigger cities. A path through all this is mapped, and particles are fired along it.

  In a year, light travels approximately 5,865,696,000,000 miles.

  Looping the signal 900-or-so times around this loop, the neutroelectron effectively opens a phone line a year into the past. The problem is that the repeated passage through the same cable degrades the integrity of the signal. The scientists experimenting with this new phenomenon were able to obtain fax signals, and internet connection, over the time-distance of eleven hours. Extending it to just under a day, looping the signal twice, the internet connection becomes choppy, unreliable, and painfully slow: too slow, in fact, to be cost-effective, when the large expense of running the time telephone system is taken into account. The fax signal works better, but only a small amount of visual information is carried by fax tweetings. Any more than a day and the bandwidth is too small and too fragile to allow internet access. But even looping it two thousand times allowed a signal of reasonable, if crackly, integrity. More than this and the noise and static swallowed meaningful information exchange.

  The initial researchers established an integral network of connections to the past: in effect they set up standing-wave each-way passageways for the neutroelectron connection. The theory owes something to wormhole physics, but it is much more limited on account of its need for a physical infrastructure. They phoned scientists from the past; sometimes phoning themselves, sometimes others. They explained the situation, giving them the know-how necessary to set up neutroelectron generators themselves, and plumbing them back into the phone line. And once the network was established, and people in the past had been contacted, it became evident that people in the past could re-use the connections to speak to people in their future, many years, to such phone terminals as had been utilised by the original scientists.

  Soon crosstalk filled the time-phone lines. The future-people move through time at an hour an hour, dragging their envelope of past-talk with them at an hour an hour. But the past-time scientists could act as way-stations, taking the signal and relaying it further back, or further forward. In this way the envelope was extended to more than sixteen years. But no further. The generation of scientists at this blockage time, back in 2004, refused, for some reason, to be beguiled by these whispery voices on the phone, that declared themselves future humans; refused to spend the money on the ridiculous expense of setting up neutroelectronic generators, refused to believe the physics of it. Without their assistance the reach of the time-telephones stopped dead. People before a certain date had no knowledge of the technology at all; for them, it had not happened yet.

  In the future, researchers tried and failed, tried again and failed, to raise the money to build an enormous cable, billions upon billions of miles long. They wanted a space-probe sent to an asteroid, to mine and refine and spool out huge stretches of cable through space, cable that earth people could hook up to the phone line and use to call back further in time. To call back in time before the 2004 blockage. But the expense was too much, and the project had not brought about any useful improvement in the quality of life. A person could place a bet in 2010, and call up an internet page from the following day to guide him; with the result that, under such circumstances,
betting shrank to long-term wagers only. People could find out tomorrow’s news today, but almost always tomorrow’s news is merely an extrapolation of today’s news.

  As the network grew, people called their friends and family in the past, warned loved-ones of imminent death and told them which stock to buy, but the past is fixed in curious, physics-consistent ways. You are not fixed, as you read this sentence, I’m not suggesting that! But, then again, as you read this sentence you are at the now, between the past and the future. That is where you always are. I, writing it, am in the past. That’s just the truth. And even if you could call me up, so that my telephone here on my desktop, this blueblack-plastic Buddha-shaped machine here, would ring and you could talk to me, it would make no difference, almost certainly no difference, in almost every case. You can’t really reach me, not easily, hardly at all. I’m sorry to tell you this, but it is the truth, it’s better you know the truth. Information does flow backwards, but sluggishly, treacly. It rushes much more forcefully the other way. So although people warned loved-ones of imminent death and told them which stock to buy, the loved ones still died, and nobody found themselves suddenly rich because their earlier selves had invested more wisely. None of that happened. It might still happen, of course. There is nothing in the theory that suggests it could never happen.