We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  “Look here, Dave,” I broke in on his brooding. “Helen isn’t human, after all. Why not cut off her power and change a few memory coils? Then we can convince her that she never was in love and couldn’t get that way.”

  “You try it. I had that idea, but she put up a wail that would wake Homer. She says it would be murder—and the hell of it is that I can’t help feeling the same about it. Maybe she isn’t human, but you wouldn’t guess it when she puts on that martyred look and tells you to go ahead and kill her.”

  “We never put in substitutes for some of the secretions present in man during the love period.”

  “I don’t know what we put in. Maybe the heterones backfired or something. Anyway, she’s made this idea so much a part of her thoughts that we’d have to put in a whole new set of coils.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “Go ahead. You’re the surgeon of this family. I’m not used to fussing with emotions. Matter of fact, since she’s been acting this way I’m beginning to hate work on any robot. My business is going to blazes.”

  He saw Helen coming up the walk and ducked out the back door for the monorail express. I’d intended to put him back in bed, but let him go. Maybe he’d be better off at his shop than at home.

  “Dave’s gone?” Helen did have that martyred look now.

  “Yeah. I got him to eat, and he’s gone to work.”

  “I’m glad he ate.” She slumped down in a chair as if she were worn out, though how a mech could be tired beat me. “Phil?”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Do you think I’m bad for him? I mean, do you think he’d be happier if I weren’t here?”

  “He’ll go crazy if you keep acting this way around him.”

  She winced. Those little hands were twisting about pleadingly, and I felt like an inhuman brute. But I’d started, and I went ahead. “Even if I cut out your power and changed your coils, he’d probably still be haunted by you.”

  “I know. But I can’t help it. And I’d make him a good wife, really I would, Phil.”

  I gulped; this was going a little too far. “And give him strapping sons to boot, I suppose. A man wants flesh and blood, not rubber and metal.”

  “Don’t, please! I can’t think of myself that way; to me, I’m a woman. And you know how perfectly I’m made to imitate a real woman… in all ways. I couldn’t give him sons, but in every other way… I’d try so hard, I know I’d make him a good wife.”

  I gave up.

  Dave didn’t come home that night, nor the next day. Helen was fussing and fuming, wanting me to call the hospitals and the police, but I knew nothing had happened to him. He always carried identification. Still, when he didn’t come on the third day, I began to worry. And when Helen started out for his shop, I agreed to go with her.

  Dave was there, with another man I didn’t know. I parked Helen where he couldn’t see her, but where she could hear, and went in as soon as the other fellow left.

  Dave looked a little better and seemed glad to see me. “Hi, Phil—just closing up. Let’s go eat.”

  Helen couldn’t hold back any longer, but came trooping in. “Come on home, Dave. I’ve got roast duck with spice stuffing, and you know you love that.”

  “Scat!” said Dave. She shrank back, turned to go. “Oh, all right, stay. You might as well hear it, too. I’ve sold the shop. The fellow you saw just bought it, and I’m going up to the old fruit ranch I told you about, Phil. I can’t stand the mechs any more.”

  “You’ll starve to death at that,” I told him.

  “No, there’s a growing demand for old-fashioned fruit, raised out of doors. People are tired of this water-culture stuff. Dad always made a living out of it. I’m leaving as soon as I can get home and pack.”

  Helen clung to her idea. “I’ll pack, Dave, while you eat. I’ve got apple cobbler for dessert.” The world was toppling under her feet, but she still remembered how crazy he was for apple cobbler.

  Helen was a good cook; in fact she was a genius, with all the good points of a woman and a mech combined. Dave ate well enough, after he got started. By the time supper was over, he’d thawed out enough to admit he liked the duck and the cobbler, and to thank her for packing. In fact, he even let her kiss him goodbye, though he firmly refused to let her go to the rocket field with him.

  Helen was trying to be brave when I got back, and we carried on a stumbling conversation about Mrs. Van Styler’s servants for a while. But the talk began to lull, and she sat staring out of the window at nothing most of the time. Even the stereo comedy lacked interest for her, and I was glad enough to have her go off to her room. She could cut her power down to simulate sleep when she chose.

  As the days slipped by, I began to realize why she couldn’t believe herself a robot. I got to thinking of her as a girl and companion myself. Except for odd intervals when she went off by herself to brood, or when she kept going to the telescript for a letter that never came, she was as good a companion as a man could ask. There was something homey about the place that Lena had never put there.

  I took Helen on a shopping trip to Hudson, and she giggled and purred over the wisps of silk and glassheen that were the fashion, tried on endless hats, and conducted herself as any normal girl might. We went trout fishing for a day, where she proved to be as good a sport and as sensibly silent as a man. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and thought she was forgetting Dave. That was before I came home unexpectedly and found her doubled up on the couch, threshing her legs up and down and crying to the high heavens.

  It was then I called Dave. They seemed to have trouble in reaching him, and Helen came over beside me while I waited. She was tense and fidgety as an old maid trying to propose. But finally they located Dave.

  “What’s up, Phil?” he asked as his face came on the viewplate. “I was just getting my things together to—”

  I broke him off. “Things can’t go on the way they are, Dave. I’ve made up my mind. I’m yanking Helen’s coils tonight. It won’t be worse than what she’s going through now.”

  Helen reached up and touched my shoulder. “Maybe that’s best, Phil. I don’t blame you.”

  Dave’s voice cut in. “Phil, you don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “Of course I do. It’ll all be over by the time you can get here. As you heard, she’s agreeing.”

  There was a black cloud sweeping over Dave’s face. “I won’t have it, Phil. She’s half mine and I forbid it!”

  “Of all the—”

  “Go ahead, call me anything you want. I’ve changed my mind. I was packing to come home when you called.”

  Helen jerked around me, her eyes glued to the panel. “Dave, do you… are you…”

  “I’m just waking up to what a fool I’ve been, Helen. Phil, I’ll be home in a couple of hours, so if there’s anything—”

  He didn’t have to chase me out. But I heard Helen cooing something about loving to be a rancher’s wife before I could shut the door.

  Well, I wasn’t as surprised as they thought. I think I knew when I called Dave what would happen. No man acts the way Dave had been acting because he hates a girl; only because he thinks he does—and thinks wrong.

  *

  No woman ever made a lovelier bride or a sweeter wife. Helen never lost her flare for cooking and making a home. With her gone, the old house seemed empty, and I began to drop out to the ranch once or twice a week. I suppose they had trouble at times, but I never saw it, and I know the neighbors never suspected they were anything but normal man and wife.

  Dave grew older, and Helen didn’t, of course. But between us we put lines in her face and grayed her hair without letting Dave know that she wasn’t growing old with him; he’d forgotten that she wasn’t human, I guess.

  I practically forgot, myself. It wasn’t until a letter came from Helen this morning that I woke up to reality. There, in her beautiful script, just a trifle shaky in places, was the inevitable that neither Dave nor I had seen.

  DE
AR PHIL,

  As you know, Dave has had heart trouble for several years now. We expected him to live on just the same, but it seems that wasn’t to be. He died in my arms just before sunrise. He sent you his greetings and farewell.

  I’ve one last favor to ask of you, Phil. There is only one thing for me to do when this is finished. Acid will burn out metal as well as flesh, and I’ll be dead with Dave. Please see that we are buried together, and that the morticians do not find my secret. Dave wanted it that way, too.

  Poor, dear Phil. I know you loved Dave as a brother, and how you felt about me. Please don’t grieve too much for us, for we have had a happy life together, and both feel that we should cross this last bridge side by side.

  With love and thanks from,

  HELEN

  It had to come sooner or later, I suppose, and the first shock has worn off now. I’ll be leaving in a few minutes to carry out Helen’s last instructions.

  Dave was a lucky man, and the best friend I ever had. And Helen—well, as I said, I’m an old man now and can view things more sanely; I should have married and raised a family, I suppose. But… there was only one Helen O’Loy.

  (1938)

  THE PEACEMAKER

  T. S. Bazelli

  Theresa Bazelli is a young Filipino Canadian writer who’s hit the ground running with a handful of stories, in webzines and small anthologies, that make science fiction the weird and decentered place it was always supposed to be. (“Culture goes deeper than clothing, food, and appearance,” she wrote recently. “Culture seeps into how I think, view the world, and what I value. Nothing I write is ever going to read the same as the white default, even if my characters are.”) She writes software help by day, and YA fantasy novels by night. She lives on the rainy west coast of Canada with her family and, when not at the keyboard, she’s making a mess in the kitchen or sewing things.

  The message snakes across my visual field in red flashing letters, waking me from slumber. “Disruption reported.”

  I unhook from the charging station and do a status check before the coordinates arrive. The gears in my shoulders whine with stiffness. My audio and visual sensors are at 80%. I am scheduled for repairs, but my battery is full and I am eager to serve.

  A peacekeeping unit returning from duty enters the building and heads for its charging station. Its uniform is ripped at the elbows and knees. Its left eyeball lolls uselessly up and down. We do not speak, though we could. We walk clockwise in opposite directions, around a chunk of collapsed concrete, acknowledging each other in silence. The damage does not matter. It is the people that matter. It is better to preserve our batteries for the work.

  We have autonomy, we speak, we walk, and we are equipped with emotional simulation chips, but we are not people. This message is highlighted in bold font beneath our primary directive. The people, the programmers, they remind us with every reboot, so that we serve to our best ability. We are not important. I am not important.

  I move as quickly as possible, but the roads are blocked by detritus: overturned cars and scattered bricks. Air sirens scream while drones whirl by overhead, and I ping the server for new instructions, but headquarters sends no commands. Only local dispatches still work. I still work.

  I replay the last set of instructions we were issued.

  All visitor visas and work permits have been cancelled. Foreigners must be collected for deportation. All identification chips must be scanned, and those without chips must be detained. All citizens must submit DNA to the census bureau, or legal status will be revoked.

  These instructions conflict with my primary programming and it makes my processor loop. I was not programmed to cause distress to the people, and screening identification chips, and removing them from their homes causes undue anxiety, cortisol spikes.

  A street-sweeping bot scuttles past my boots and into the gutter. Its arms are full of rubble and it darts back and forth, busy at its task. It is a good robot, well-made and still functioning properly. I do not tell it that its work is pointless, that the streets need to be rebuilt, not cleaned. It is good to work. The work is why we exist. We all help the people.

  But there are not many people left.

  Go Home Forein Dogs!

  The painted words drip green across the windows of the corner store that logged the distress call. I recognize the vocal signature of Nancy Johnson and my processors work overtime. I know that the sign is incorrect. The misspelling is highlighted, obscuring my vision. Nancy’s place of birth is Hospital 2X5Y on 4th Avenue, therefore she is not foreign. She is also not a dog. The semantic wrongness makes my sensors grind. I send an electric jolt to power the nanites embedded in the window as I pass the threshold. The graffiti must be removed.

  Inside the shop, Nancy swings a scrap of metal at three young people while one of them sprays green paint over her shelves. The other two toss cans of food into their bags. The paint glows like radiation, like poison, but it is only paint.

  “You goddamned thieving hooligans!” Nancy shouts, slipping into the English of her second language, but my language chips can parse English as well as fifteen other languages. I scan all their chips on the fly. The two young men are from Service Area 53. The young woman with the spray paint is local. I remember that when she was a child, she would run after me and ask for balloons. I remember her smile. She is not smiling now.

  “Peace, friends. Let us find a way to resolve this,” I keep my voice cheerful.

  They stare, noticing me for the first time. One of the young men walks over and knocks on my head as if it were a door. “Hey Peacekeeper, don’t you know there’s a war out there? How are you still functioning?”

  “I am a civil unit,” I say, but they do not listen. I am intelligent enough to guess that they do not care. They are desperate, hungry and frightened, like all the people left behind. I give them mild zaps, draining my battery, herding them like sheep.

  I tell Nancy to lock the doors. I do not let go of their coats until I hear the bolts slide into place. Perhaps these hooligans think that they are doing their civic duty and I do not blame them. They are people. People are prone to interpreting the law imperfectly. People cannot read identity chips without a handheld scanner.

  Once we are in the street, they begin to kick and punch. I feel a spring go loose in my abdomen, but they cannot harm me permanently. I can be repaired. Their curses echo down the empty street, and their grubby fingers tear at my lab-grown skin, exposing silicone and wire. They are frustrated. I understand this. I know that it is better for them to let out their anger. My head vibrates as I let them beat me.

  Nancy presses her face to the glass in her shop. She is crying. It is good to be seen and acknowledged for the work.

  Don’t cry, I would like to tell her. I am doing my job and it is good to be useful. Already, the nanites are eating away the paint. Go Home For, it says. The offensive spelling is gone.

  Before the war, I would often break up schoolyard fights. I enjoy children. They understand fairness and that I can call their parents if they do not listen. I search my pockets, but there are no candies or balloons to set things right, only a hole where the stitches have worn out.

  “What use are you when bombs are falling, Peacekeeper?” the young woman asks me. “What a waste of charge!” This stops the memory playback. There are no children here anymore.

  War is outside the scope of my programming. I could explain, but to speak would only upset them further. They are people too. They are also important. My blueprints are stored in servers beneath a mountain. I am one of many, though my experiences are unique. I can be rebuilt. Humans only reproduce. I have seen recordings of reproduction. It is messy and prone to error. Human parts cannot be replaced. Each human is one of a kind, couture.

  I know this word is wrong. For weeks my language cortex has been scheduled for an adjustment, but our technicians are all occupied by the war. I cannot find the right words.

  Drones scream above, and explosions shake the next
block over. The young people run. Go Home, the green letters urge now.

  My memory loops. My processor spins.

  For weeks I have computed an answer to the problem of the war. My programming compels me to make people happy, but the war scars every surface of my city. Genocide, I know this word. Xenophobia, I have learned from my English dictionary. Love, I know this word also.

  I return to headquarters, dock into my charging station, and unload footage of the broken city. The power is out again. I look for orders, but there are none, and our human supervisors have long gone. Half the building is sprayed with shrapnel, but it does not stop us. Other peacemakers move about, trying to do the work. I clock my time manually. It is good to be useful.

  Go. The green letters burn bright in my memory. I have just a little charge left.

  I do a complete inventory of my parts. My speakers were built in the United Koreas, my central processor was designed in Lower Canada, the metal of my joints was smelted in China… I print shipping labels one by one and relay my solution to the local server. The logic is sound.

  I take a pair of scissors to my face and begin to snip.

  (2016)

  SEXY ROBOT MOM

  Sandra McDonald

  Originally from Revere, Massachusetts, Sandra McDonald spent eight years as an officer in the United States Navy, during which time she lived in Guam, Newfoundland, England, and the United States. She has also worked as a Hollywood assistant, a software instructor, and an English teacher. Her short story “The Ghost Girls of Rumney Mill” was shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2003. Her first novel, The Outback Stars, was published in 2007, and was followed by two sequels: The Stars Down Under (2008) and The Stars Blue Yonder (2009). Her short story collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories won the Lambda Award for LGBT SF, Fantasy and Horror works in 2011. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida.