We, Robots

by Simon Ings

A tower guard stood in the doorway. “You are awaited, sir. Do you bear weapons, sir?”

  “None,” said Martel, grateful that he was relying on his own strength. The guard led him past the check-screen. Martel noticed the quick flight of a warning across the screen as his instruments registered and identified him as a scanner. But the guard had not noticed it.

  The guard stopped at a door. “Adam Stone is armed. He is lawfully armed by authority of the Instrumentality and by the liberty of this city. All those who enter are given warning.”

  Martel nodded in understanding at the man and went in. Adam Stone was a short man, stout and benign. His gray hair rose stiffly from a low forehead. His whole face was red and merry-looking. He looked like a jolly guide from the Pleasure Gallery, not like a man who had been at the edge of the up-and-out, fighting the great pain without haberman protection. He stared at Martel. His look was puzzled, perhaps a little annoyed, but not hostile.

  Martel came to the point. “You do not know me. I lied. My name is Martel, and I mean you no harm. But I lied. I beg the honorable gift of your hospitality. Remain armed. Direct your weapon against me—”

  Stone smiled: “I am doing so,” and Martel noticed the small wire-point in Stone’s capable, plump hand.

  “Good. Keep on guard against me. It will give you confidence in what I shall say. But do, I beg you, give us a screen of privacy. I want no casual lookers. This is a matter of life and death.”

  “First: whose life and death?” Stone’s face remained calm, his voice even.

  “Yours, and mine, and the worlds’.”

  “You are cryptic but I agree.” Stone called through the doorway:

  “Privacy please.” There was a sudden hum, and all the little noises of the night quickly vanished from the air of the room.

  Said Adam Stone: “Sir, who are you? What brings you here?”

  “I am Scanner 34.”

  “You, a scanner? I don’t believe it.”

  For answer, Martel pulled his jacket open, showing his chestbox. Stone looked up at him, amazed. Martel explained:

  “I am cranched. Have you never seen it before?”

  “Not with men. On animals. Amazing! But—what do you want?”

  “The truth. Do you fear me?”

  “Not with this,” said Stone, grasping the wirepoint. “But I shall tell you the truth.”

  “Is it true that you have conquered the great pain?”

  Stone hesitated, seeking words for an answer.

  “Quick, can you tell me how you have done it, so that I may believe you?”

  “I have loaded the ships with life.”

  “Life?”

  “Life. I don’t know what the great pain is, but I did find that in the experiments, when I sent out masses of animals or plants, the life in the center of the mass lived longest. I built ships—small ones, of course—and sent them out with rabbits, with monkeys—”

  “Those are Beasts?”

  “Yes. With small Beasts. And the Beasts came back unhurt. They came back because the walls of the ships were filled with life. I tried many kinds, and finally found a sort of life which lives in the waters. Oysters. Oyster-beds. The outermost oysters died in the great pain. The inner ones lived. The passengers were unhurt.”

  “But they were Beasts?”

  “Not only Beasts. Myself.”

  “You!”

  “I came through space alone. Through what you call the up-and-out, alone. Awake and sleeping. I am unhurt. If you do not believe me, ask your brother scanners. Come and see my ship in the morning. I will be glad to see you then, along with your brother scanners. I am going to demonstrate before the chiefs of the Instrumentality.”

  Martel repeated his question: “You came here alone?”

  Adam Stone grew testy: “Yes, alone. Go back and check your scanner’s register if you do not believe me. You never put me in a bottle to cross Space.”

  Martel’s face was radiant. “I believe you now. It is true. No more scanners. No more habermans. No more cranching.”

  Stone looked significantly toward the door.

  Martel did not take the hint. “I must tell you that—”

  “Sir, tell me in the morning. Go enjoy your cranch. Isn’t it supposed to be pleasure? Medically I know it well. But not in practice.”

  “It is pleasure. It’s normality—for a while. But listen. The scanners have sworn to destroy you, and your work.”

  “What!”

  “They have met and have voted and sworn. You will make scanners unnecessary, they say. You will bring the ancient wars back to the world, if scanning is lost and the scanners live in vain!”

  Adam Stone was nervous but kept his wits about him: “You’re a scanner. Are you going to kill me—or try?”

  “No, you fool. I have betrayed the Confraternity. Call guards the moment I escape. Keep guards around you. I will try to intercept the killer.”

  Martel saw a blur in the window. Before Stone could turn, the wirepoint was whipped out of his hand. The blur solidified and took form as Parizianski.

  Martel recognized what Parizianski was doing: High speed. Without thinking of his cranch, he thrust his hand to his chest, set himself up to High speed too. Waves of fire, like the great pain, but hotter, flooded over him. He fought to keep his face readable as he stepped in front of Parizianski and gave the sign,

  Top emergency.

  Parizianski spoke, while the normally moving body of Stone stepped away from them as slowly as a drifting cloud: “Get out of my way. I am on a mission.”

  “I know it. I stop you here and now. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stone is right.”

  Parizianski’s lips were barely readable in the haze of pain which flooded Martel. (He thought: God, God, God of the ancients! Let me hold on! Let me live under Overload just long enough!) Parizianski was saying: “Get out of my way. By order of the Confraternity, get out of my way!” And Parizianski gave the sign, Help I demand in the name of my duty!

  Martel choked for breath in the syruplike air. He tried one last time:

  “Parizianski, friend, friend, my friend. Stop. Stop.” (No scanner had ever murdered scanner before.)

  Parizianski made the sign: You are unfit for duty, and I will take over.

  Martel thought, For the first time in the world! as he reached over and twisted Parizianski’s brainbox up to Overload. Parizianski’s eyes glittered in terror and understanding. His body began to drift down toward the floor. Martel had just strength to reach his own chestbox. As he faded into haberman or death, he knew not which, he felt his fingers turning on the control of speed, turning down. He tried to speak, to say, “Get a scanner, I need help, get a scanner…”

  But the darkness rose about him, and the numb silence clasped him.

  *

  Martel awakened to see the face of Luci near his own.

  He opened his eyes wider, and found that he was hearing—hearing the sound of her happy weeping, the sound of her chest as she caught the air back into her throat.

  He spoke weakly: “Still cranched? Alive?”

  Another face swam into the blur beside Luci’s. It was Adam Stone. His deep voice rang across immensities of space before coming to Martel’s hearing. Martel tried to read Stone’s lips, but could not make them out. He went back to listening to the voice:

  “—not cranched. Do you understand me? Not cranched!”

  Martel tried to say: “But I can hear! I can feel!” The others got his sense if not his words.

  Adam Stone spoke again:

  “You have gone back through the haberman. I put you back first. I didn’t know how it would work in practice, but I had the theory all worked out. You don’t think the Instrumentality would waste the scanners, do you? You go back to normality. We are letting the habermans die as fast as the ships come in. They don’t need to live any more. But we are restoring the scanners. You are the first. Do you understand? You are the first. Take it easy, now.”

  Adam Stone smiled. Dimly behin
d Stone, Martel thought that he saw the face of one of the chiefs of the Instrumentality. That face, too, smiled at him, and then both faces disappeared upward and away.

  Martel tried to lift his head, to scan himself. He could not. Luci stared at him, calming herself, but with an expression of loving perplexity. She said,

  “My darling husband! You’re back again, to stay!”

  Still, Martel tried to see his box. Finally he swept his hand across his chest with a clumsy motion. There was nothing there. The instruments were gone. He was back to normality but still alive.

  In the deep weak peacefulness of his mind, another troubling thought took shape. He tried to write with his finger, the way that Luci wanted him to, but he had neither pointed fingernail nor scanner’s tablet. He had to use his voice. He summoned up his strength and whispered:

  “Scanners?”

  “Yes, darling? What is it?”

  “Scanners?”

  “Scanners. Oh, yes, darling, they’re all right. They had to arrest some of them for going into High speed and running away. But the Instrumentality caught them all—all those on the ground—and they’re happy now. Do you know, darling,” she laughed, “some of them didn’t want to be restored to normality. But Stone and the chiefs persuaded them.”

  “Vomact?”

  “He’s fine, too. He’s staying cranched until he can be restored. Do you know, he has arranged for scanners to take new jobs. You’re all to be deputy chiefs for Space. Isn’t that nice? But he got himself made chief for Space. You’re all going to be pilots, so that your fraternity and guild can go on. And Chang’s getting changed right now. You’ll see him soon.”

  Her face turned sad. She looked at him earnestly and said: “I might as well tell you now. You’ll worry otherwise. There has been one accident. Only one. When you and your friend called on Adam Stone, your friend was so happy that he forgot to scan, and he let himself die of Overload.”

  “Called on Stone?”

  “Yes. Don’t you remember? Your friend.”

  He still looked surprised, so she said:

  “Parizianski.”

  (1950)

  MUSÉE DE L’ME SEULE

  E. Lily Yu

  E. Lily Yu was born in Oregon, and now lives in Seattle. In 2012 she received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. Yu also works as a narrative designer for video games, including Destiny and Destiny 2.

  It was a bus skidding off a rain-slick ribbon of a road, everyone for a moment in flight, levitating from their seats, then the shear and scream of metal. This is what distinguishes you from others. For whether you were shot to bits in a war or whether a telephone pole crushed your liver against the steering wheel, the procedure is the same. You can assume what happened after that.

  Unless you are wildly rich—and you are not—the puddles of your organs were scooped out and replaced with artificial tissues that perform the necessary filtration, synthesis, and excretion for a fraction of the price of a transplant. Splintered bones become slim metal shafts. Ceramic scales cover ruined skin. They wheeled you out of the operating room hooked up to a bouquet of tubes, batteries, and drains, a grid of lights screwed into your plates, blinking red, blue, green. Stable. Functioning. Okay. As the drugs wore off you began to fumble at the strange new surfaces of your body.

  Your lover was in Zanzibar on a lucrative minerals contract and did not hear about your accident until after they had patched you up enough to tap out the first of many detailed emails. The damage was extensive, your reconstruction complicated. For the rest of our life you will need a constant power supply, a backup generator, and hourly system flushes. You could choose to live homebound, they say, never passing your door. They quote you the prices of the various adaptors and chargers you need, and you laugh and cannot stop laughing, lightning balls of pain throughout your unfamiliar body.

  Or, the nurses say, nervously thumbing down their screens, you could move to an experimental city in Washington designed for patients like you, where you would enjoy a certain degree of freedom and company. They do not add, a place where everyone looks like you. But their eyes shine with kindness.

  Your lover offers to pay for the house installation. If nothing else, you should give him credit for that.

  One nurse makes sure you are loaned a set of equipment from the hospital for your transitional period. You consider absconding with the adaptors—if the prices are to be believed, they’re worth a small Caribbean island or two—but you can’t extract the tracking tags. Besides, the nurse was nice.

  You ship two cardboard boxes to the address they give you and sell the rest. You give away your pair of budgerigars because you can’t take them with you. Your lover never liked them. Too noisy. Too messy. Too demanding. They chewed up the clawfooted chair from his grandfather’s estate, little chips and nocks like angry kisses in the gloss.

  Unexpected difficulties with buses and trains and airlines keep your beloved in Zanzibar, so when it’s time to leave, your friends do the heavy lifting for you. They are polite. They try not to stare.

  “What a dipshit,” you hear one mutter, unhooking a photo of your lover, and she is right. He should be here with you, packing sweaters you can’t wear anymore in plastic, boxing up your dinner plates.

  You take the medical flight that leaves twice a month, your new address printed on a plastic strip around your wrist. Your college roommate sees you off. You hand over your borrowed equipment at the gate, shrugging off the promises of care packages and visits. You flinch from the hug. You don’t look back.

  The air is sweet on your exposed skin when you first see the square mile of concrete that is Revival. At the center of the city, a sheaf of faceted skyscrapers floats above a squat white mall. Rings of smaller apartments slope down and away, glass and steel congealing to stucco, brick, and concrete as they approach the city limits, where buildings meet crisp dark pines, sharp as cuts. Far beyond the pines rise whitened mountains like licked ice cream. You will dream sometimes of climbing those mountains and plunging your face into soft, shocking snow.

  It is impossible, of course. Your batteries have enough charge for a couple of hours, but without fresh supplies of lymph and plasma, there’s only so much your filters can do. The city newsroom is staffed by former war reporters, bulletproof and bitter, and every couple of months there’s a story about a disconnection, either accidental or deliberate.

  In determinedly cheerful emails, you recount to your absent lover everything he has missed. You have been assigned a fifteen-by-fifteen room with enormous windows in the southeast corner of Revival. You have not yet bought a mirror. Very few stores stock them, and you are not sure you want one. Pets are prohibited. Rent is moderate but food prices are inflated and utility bills are astronomical. Double-digit municipal taxes give you a slight headache. The consortium of medical providers managing the city is nominally a nonprofit, but you do the numbers on the back of an electricity bill and figure the executives must be drawing large salaries.

  Since you are an accountant, you can work remotely. Your clients, who heard about the bus crash and have offered their timid condolences, assure you that it does not matter to them whether you are based in Des Moines or Los Angeles or Revival, Washington. Other residents are not so lucky. Their debts are paid for out of their retirement savings, or their estate, or alternatively by the sale of their genome and medical history and whatever organic components remain at the time of their death. The lease document makes for an interesting read. You tear the pages into tiny strips as you go.

  All too soon, you memorize the silver line of cables and pumps that strings apartment block to apartment block, running through grocery store aisles and along library shelves and shooting up the five floors of the bright, sterile mall. You know where it turns at the end of the pavement, in the shadow of the pines, and loops back toward the mall. A local joke has it that the silver lines, if viewed f
rom above, if all the intervening roofs and floors and ceilings were removed, spell out freedom.

  The city is lousy with crows, who dive for flashes of metal and glints of porcelain. They are not discouraged by thirty failed attempts if, on the thirty-first, they snatch a pin, a lens, a loose filament. They are easy to fend off, but the cold acquisitiveness in their eyes makes you shiver.

  Your lover comes to visit you only once, four and a half months after you move to Revival. You are slow, still limping, and a minute late. He climbs out of the taxi in his pressed suit and razor tie and looks around, fiddling with a button, cufflinks, hair. You are grateful that he recognizes you immediately. But he shrinks back a fraction of an inch when his eyes reach the steel screwed into your face and the coarse, fitful wires that grow where your skull was shaved.

  You are surprised. In Revival, where glamour magazines gather dust and fade, you are considered beautiful. Eyes slide toward you on the street. You had almost forgotten about the seams and screws, the viscous yellow and red fluids trickling in and out of you, the cables tangling everywhere.

  If you are honest with yourself, as you suddenly have to be, standing face to face with him, the two of you have not been lovers for some time. Right before the accident, you had agreed to separate for six months, as an audit of the relationship. You fed sunflower seeds to Tessie as he talked about opportunities in Tanzania, about looking for clarity in his life, his need to feel whole, like a hammer swing, a home run, his entire body committed to one motion. You nodded, you admitted the solidity of his arguments, and you stroked the budgie so roughly it bit your finger.

  While you were apart, he wrote a paragraph once a week in response to your daily emails. You would reread it three or four times, looking for the elided thought, the sunken meaning. It was October, the busy season, and you were starting to make mistakes and lose paperwork. When the last return was triple-checked and filed, you heaved a sigh of relief and boarded a bus for Maine, where you would spend your vacation with a friend.

  It was raining. Water entered an unnoticed hole in the toe of your boot, and you wrote a brief grumble to your love. Then the bus rumbled into the night, and you shut your eyes and let yourself relax.