We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  She moved her hand. Water dripped from her fingertips into the tub. The thing turned its head towards the sound. It took a step. She froze. The apparition stopped moving too, just stood there, humming like the fridge. It plucked at its own nipples, pulled its breasts into cones of ectoplasm. It ran hands over its body, then over the sink, bent down to thrust its arms right through the closed cupboard doors. It dipped a hand into the toilet bowl. Sparks flew, and it jumped back. Issy’s scalp prickled. Damn, the thing was electrical, and she was sitting in water! She tried to reach the plug with her toes to let the water out.

  Swallowing whimpers, she stretched a leg out: Slow, God, go slow, Issy. The movement sent a chunk of melting ice sliding along her thigh. She shivered. She couldn’t quite reach the plug and if she moved closer to it, the movement would draw the apparition’s attention. Issy breathed in short, shallow bursts. She could feel her eyes beginning to brim. Terror and the chilly water were sending tremors in waves through her.

  What the fuck was it? The thing turned towards her. In its quest for sensation, it hefted its cock in its hand. Inserted a finger into what seemed to be a vagina underneath. Let its hands drop again. Faintly, Issy could make out a mark on its hip, a circular shape. It reminded her of something…

  Logo, it was the logo of the Senstim people who’d invented the wetsuits!

  But this wasn’t a wetsuit, it was like some kind of, fuck, ball lightning. She and Cleve hadn’t discharged their wetsuits. She remembered some of the nonsense words that were in the warning on the wetsuit storage boxes: “Energizing electrostatic charge,” and “Kirlian phenomenon.” Well, they hadn’t paid attention, and now some kind of weird set of both suits was rubbing itself off in their bathroom. Damn, damn, damn Cleve and his toys. Sobbing, shivering, Issy tried to toe at the plug again. Her knee banged against the tub. The suit-ghost twitched towards the noise. It leaned over the water and dabbed at her clutching toes. Pop-crackle sound. The jolt sent her leg flailing like a dying fish. Pleasure crackled along her leg, painfully intense. Her knee throbbed and tingled, ached sweetly. Her thigh muscles shuddered as though they would tear free. The jolt slammed into her crotch and Issy’s body bucked. She could hear her own grunts. She was straddling a live wire. She was coming to death. Her nipples jutted long as thumbs, stung like they’d been dipped in ice. Her head was banging against the wall with each deadly set of contractions. Issy shouted in pain, in glory, in fear. The suit-ghost leapt back. Issy’s butt hit the floor of the tub, hard. Her muscles were twitching spasmodically. She’d bitten the inside of her mouth. She sucked in air like sobs, swallowed tinny blood.

  The suit-ghost was swollen, bloated, jittering. Its inner lightning bolts were going mad. If it touched her again, it might overload completely. If it touched her again, her heart might stop.

  Issy heard the sound of the key turning in the front door. “Iss? You home?”

  “No. Cleve.” Issy hissed under her breath. He mustn’t come in. But if she shouted to warn him, the suit-ghost would touch her again.

  Cleve’s footsteps approached the bathroom. “Iss? Listen, did you drain the wet—” Like filings to a magnet, the suit-ghost inclined towards the sound of his voice. “Don’t come in, Cleve; go get help!”

  Too late. He’d stuck his head in, grinning his open, friendly grin. The suit-ghost rushed him, plastered itself along his body. It got paler, its aura-lightnings mere flickers. Cleve made a choking noise and crashed to the floor, jerking. Issy levered herself out of the bath, but her jelly muscles wouldn’t let her stand. She flopped to the tiles. Cleve’s body was convulsing, horrible noises coming from his mouth. Riding him like a duppy, a malevolent spirit, the stim-ghost grew paler with each thrash of his flailing body. Its colour patterns started to run into each other, to bleach themselves pale. Cleve’s energy was draining it, but it was killing him. Sucking on her whimpers, Issy reached a hand into the stim-ghost’s field. Her heart went off like a machine gun. Her breathing wouldn’t work. The orgasm was unspeakable. Wailing, Issy rolled away from Cleve, taking the ghost-thing with her. It swelled at her touch, its colours flared neon-bright, out of control. It flailed off her, floated back towards Cleve’s more cooling energy.

  Heart pounding, too weak to move, Issy muttered desperately to distract it the first thing that came to her mind: “Y… you like, um, chocolate fudge?”

  The ghost turned towards her. Issy cried and kept talking, kept talking. The ghost wavered between Issy’s hot description of bubbling chocolate and Cleve’s cool silence, caught in the middle. Could it even understand words? Wetsuits located pleasurable sensation to augment it. Maybe it was just drawn to the sensuousness of her tone. Issy talked, urgently, carefully releasing the words from her mouth like caresses:

  “So,” she said to the suit-duppy, “I watching this cookie tin twist through the air like a Frisbee, and is like slow motion, ’cause I seeing gobs of chocolate goo spiraling from it as it flies, and they spreading out wider and wider. I swear I hear separate splats as chocolate hits the walls like slung shit and one line of it strafes the fridge door, and a gob somehow slimes the naked bulb hanging low from the kitchen ceiling. I hear it sizzle. The cookie tin lands on the floor, fudge side down, of course. I haven’t cleaned the fucking floor in ages. There’re spots everywhere on that floor that used to be gummy, but now they’re layered in dust and maybe flour and desiccated bodies of cockroaches that got trapped, reaching for sweetness. I know how they feel. I take a step towards the cookie tin, then I start to smell burning chocolate. I look up. I see a curl of black smoke rising from the glob of chocolate on the light bulb.”

  Cleve raised his head. There were tears in his eyes and the front of his jogging pants was damp and milky. “Issy,” he interrupted in a whisper.

  “Shut up, Cleve!”

  “That thing,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “People call it a ganger; doppel—”

  The ganger was suddenly at his side. It leaned a loving head on his chest, like Issy would do. “No!” she yelled. Cleve’s body shook. The ganger frayed and tossed like a sheet in the wind. Cleve shrieked. He groaned like he was coming, but with an edge of terror and pain that Issy couldn’t bear to hear. Pissed, terrified, Issy swiped an arm through its field, then rolled her bucking body on the bathroom tiles, praying that she could absorb the ganger’s energy without it frying her synapses with sweet sensation.

  Through spasms, she barely heard Cleve say to it, “Come to me, not her. Come. Listen, you know that song? ‘I got a weakness for sweetness…’ That’s my Issy.”

  The ganger dragged itself away from Issy. Released, her muscles melted. She was a gooey, warm puddle spreading on the floor. The ganger reached an ectoplasmic hand towards Cleve, fingers stretching long as arms. Cleve gasped and froze.

  Issy croaked, “You think is that it is, Cleve? Weakness?”

  The ganger turned its head her way, ran a long, slow arm down its body to the floor, back up to its crotch. It stroked itself.

  Cleve spoke to it in a voice that cracked whispery on the notes: “Yeah, sweetness. That’s what my Issy wants most of all.” The ganger moved towards him, rubbing its crotch. He continued, “If I’m not there, there’s always sugar, or food, or booze. I’m just one of her chosen stimulants.”

  Outraged tears filled Issy’s mouth, salty as butter, as flesh. She’d show him, she’d rescue him. She countered:

  “The glob of burned sugar on the light? From the ruined fudge? Well, it goes black and starts to bubble.” The ganger extruded a tongue the length of an arm from its mouth. The tongue wriggled towards Issy.

  She rolled back, saying, “The light bulb explodes. I feel some shards land in my hair. I don’t try to brush them away. Is completely dark now; I only had the kitchen light on. I take another step to where I know the cookie tin is on the floor. A third step, and pain crazes my heel. Must have stepped on a piece of light bulb glass. Can’t do nothing about it now. I rise onto the toes of the hurting foot. I think I feel blood runnin
g down from heel to instep.”

  The ganger jittered towards her.

  “You were always better than me at drama, Iss,” Cleve said.

  The sadness in his voice tore at her heart. But she said, “What that thing is?” Cleve replied softly, “Is kinda beautiful, ain’t?”

  “It going to kill us.”

  “Beautiful. Just a lump of static charge, coated in the Kirlian energy thrown off from the suits.”

  “Why it show up now?”

  “Is what happens when you leave the suits together too long.”

  The ganger drifted back and forth, pulled by one voice, then the other. A longish silence between them freed it to move. It floated closer to Cleve. Issy wouldn’t let it, she wouldn’t. She quavered:

  “I take another step on the good foot, carefully. I bend down, sweep my hands around.”

  The ganger dropped to the floor, ran its long tongue over the tiles. A drop of water made it crackle and shrink in slightly on itself.

  “There,” Issy continued. “The cookie tin. I brush around me, getting a few more splinters in my hands. I get down to my knees, curl down as low to the ground as I can. I pry up the cookie tin, won’t have any glass splinters underneath it. A dark sweet wet chocolate smell rising from under there.”

  “Issy, Jesus,” Cleve whispered. He started to bellow the words of the song he’d taunted her with, drawing the ganger. It touched him with a fingertip. A crackling noise. He gasped, jumped, kept singing.

  Issy ignored him. Hissing under his booming voice she snarled at the ganger, “I run a finger through the fudge. I lick it off. Most of it on the ground, not on the tin. I bend over and run my tongue through it, reaching for sweetness. Butter and vanilla and oh, oh, the chocolate. And crunchy, gritty things I don’t think about. Cockroach parts, maybe. I swallow.”

  Cleve interrupted his song to wail, “That’s gross, Iss. Why you had to go and do that?”

  “So Cleve come in, he see me there sitting on the floor surrounded by broken glass and limp chocolate, and you know what he say?” The ganger was reaching for her.

  “Issy, stop talking, you only drawing it to you.”

  “Nothing.” The ganger jerked. “Zip.” The ganger twitched. “Dick.” The ganger spasmed, once. It touched her hair. Issy breathed. That was safe. “The bastard just started cleaning up; not a word for me.” The ganger hugged her. Issy felt her eyes roll back in her head. She thrashed in the energy of its embrace until Cleve yelled:

  “And what you said! Ee? Tell me!”

  The ganger pulled away. Issy lay still, waiting for her breathing to return to normal. Cleve said, “Started carrying on with some shit about how light bulbs are such poor quality nowadays. Sat in the filth and broken glass, pouting and watching me clean up your mess. Talking about anything but what really on your mind. I barely get all the glass out of your heel before you start pulling my pants down.”

  Issy ignored him. She kept talking to the ganger. “Cool, cool Cleve. No ‘What’s up?’; no ‘What the fuck is this crap on the floor?’; no heat, no passion.”

  “What was the point? I did the only thing that will sweet you every time.”

  “Encased us both in fake skin and let it do the fucking for us.”

  The ganger jittered in uncertain circles between the two of them. “Issy, what you want from me?”

  The ganger’s head swelled obscenely towards Cleve.

  “Some heat. Some feeling. Like I show you. Like I feel. Like I feel for you.” The ganger’s lower lip stretched, stretched, a filament of it reaching for Issy’s own mouth. The black cavity of its maw was a tunnel, longing to swallow her up. She shuddered and rolled back farther. Her back came up against the bathtub.

  Softly: “What do you feel for me, Issy?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I do. We do. It’s good. But what do you feel for me, Issy?”

  “Don’t ridicule me. You know.”

  “I don’t know shit, Issy! You talk, talk, talk! And it’s all about what racist insult you heard yesterday, and who tried to cheat you at the store, and how high the phone bill is. You talk around stuff, not about it!”

  “Shut up!”

  The ganger flailed like a hook-caught fish between them.

  Quietly, Cleve said, “The only time we seem to reach each other now is through our skins. So I bought something to make our skins feel more, and it’s still not enough.”

  An involuntary sound came from Issy’s mouth, a hooked, wordless query.

  “Cleve, is that why…” She looked at him, at the intense brown eyes in the expressive brown face. When had he started to look so sad all the time? She reached a hand out to him. The ganger grabbed it. Issy saw fireworks behind her eyes. She screamed. She felt Cleve’s hand on her waist, felt the hand clutch painfully as he tried to shove her away to safety with his other hand. Blindly she reached out, tried to bat the ganger away. Her hand met Cleve’s in the middle of the fog that was the ganger. All the pleasure centres in her body exploded.

  A popping sound. A strong, seminal smell of bleach. The ganger was gone. Issy and Cleve sagged to the floor.

  “Rass,” she sighed. Her calves were knots the size of potatoes. And she’d be sitting tenderly for a while.

  “I feel like I’ve been dragged five miles behind a run-away horse,” Cleve told her. “You all right?”

  “Yeah, where’d that thing go, the ganger?”

  “Shit, Issy, I’m so sorry. Should have drained the suits like you said.”

  “Chuh. Don’t dig nothing. I could have done it too.”

  “I think we neutralized it. Touched each other, touched it: We canceled it out. I think.”

  “Touched each other. That simple.” Issy gave a little rueful laugh. “Cleve, I… you’re my honey, you know? You sweet me for days. I won’t forget anymore to tell you,” she said, “and keep telling you.”

  His smile brimmed over with joy. He replied, “You, you’re my live wire. You keep us both juiced up, make my heart sing in my chest.” He hesitated, spoke bashfully, “And my dick leap in my pants when I see you.”

  A warmth flooded Issy at his sweet, hot talk. She felt her eyelashes dampen. She smiled. “See, the dirty words not so hard to say. And the anger not so hard to show.”

  Tailor-sat on the floor, beautiful Buddha-body, he frowned at her. “I ’fraid to use harsh words, Issy, you know that. Look at the size of me, the blackness of me. You know what it is to see people cringe for fear when you shout?”

  She was dropping down with fatigue. She leaned and softly touched his face. “I don’t know what that is like. But I know you. I know you would never hurt me. You must say what on your mind, Cleve. To me, at least.” She closed her eyes, dragged herself exhaustedly into his embrace.

  He said, “You know, I dream of the way you full up my arms.”

  “You’re sticky,” she murmured. “Like candy.” And fell asleep, touching him.

  (2000)

  LEARNING TO BE ME

  Greg Egan

  Gregory Egan was born in Perth in 1961. He studied Mathematics at the University of Western Australia then worked as a computer programmer. In the early 2000s he took time out of his writing career to advocate for refugees arriving in Australia. Egan’s first two hard-sf novels, Quarantine (1992) and Permutation City (1994) set the pace for a career that has seen him win the Hugo Award once and be nominated eight other times. His philosophically adept stories often explore unusual psychologies and unexpected ways of thinking, while having more fun than is entirely decent with concepts of body and neural modification and artificial evolution. He is notoriously camera-shy, and claims that none of the pictures of Greg Egan on the Web are actually of him.

  I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

  Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdr
opped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.

  Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could do it for me.

  I thought: if hearing that makes me feel strange and giddy, how must it make the jewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: “Exactly the same; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel…”

  And it too wonders—

  (I knew, because I wondered)

  —it too wonders whether it’s the real me, or whether in fact it’s only the jewel that’s learning to be me.

  *

  As a scornful twelve-year-old, I would have mocked such childish concerns. Everybody had the jewel, save the members of obscure religious sects, and dwelling upon the strangeness of it struck me as unbearably pretentious. The jewel was the jewel, a mundane fact of life, as ordinary as excrement. My friends and I told bad jokes about it, the same way we told bad jokes about sex, to prove to each other how blasé we were about the whole idea.

  Yet we weren’t quite as jaded and imperturbable as we pretended to be. One day when we were all loitering in the park, up to nothing in particular, one of the gang—whose name I’ve forgotten, but who has stuck in my mind as always being far too clever for his own good—asked each of us in turn: “Who are you? The jewel, or the real human?” We all replied—unthinkingly, indignantly—”The real human!” When the last of us had answered, he cackled and said, “Well, I’m not. I’m the jewel. So you can eat my shit, you losers, because you’ll all get flushed down the cosmic toilet—but me, I’m gonna live forever.”