We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  She moved lightly across the carpet toward the window and stood looking down, her featureless face averted a little and the light shining across the delicately hinted curves of the cheekbones.

  “Luckily,” she said, her voice amused, “I never was beautiful. It was all—well, vivacity, I suppose, and muscular co-ordination. Years and years of training, and all of it engraved here”—she struck her golden helmet a light, ringing blow with golden knuckles—“in the habit patterns grooved into my brain. So this body… did he tell you?… works entirely through the brain. Electromagnetic currents flowing along from ring to ring, like this.” She rippled a boneless arm at him with a motion like flowing water. “Nothing holds me together—nothing!—except muscles of magnetic currents. And if I’d been somebody else—somebody who moved differently, why the flexible rings would have moved differently too, guided by the impulse from another brain. I’m not conscious of doing anything I haven’t always done. The same impulses that used to go out to my muscles go out now to—this.” And she made a shuddering, serpentine motion of both arms at him, like a Cambodian dancer, and then laughed wholeheartedly, the sound of it ringing through the room with such full throated merriment that he could not help seeing again the familiar face crinkled with pleasure, the white teeth shining. “It’s all perfectly subconscious now,” she told him. “It took lots of practice at first, of course, but now even my signature looks just as it always did—the coordination is duplicated that delicately.” She rippled her arms at him again and chuckled.

  “But the voice, too,” Harris protested inadequately. “It’s your voice, Deirdre.”

  “The voice isn’t only a matter of throat construction and breath control, my darling Johnnie! At least, so Professor Maltzer assured me a year ago, and I certainly haven’t any reason to doubt him!” She laughed again. She was laughing a little too much, with a touch of the bright, hysteric over-excitement he remembered so well. But if any woman ever had reason for mild hysteria, surely Deirdre had it now.

  The laughter rippled and ended, and she went on, her voice eager. “He says voice control is almost wholly a matter of hearing what you produce, once you’ve got adequate mechanism, of course. That’s why deaf people, with the same vocal chords as ever, let their voices change completely and lose all inflection when they’ve been deaf long enough. And luckily, you see, I’m not deaf!”

  She swung around to him, the folds of her robe twinkling and ringing, and rippled up and up a clear, true scale to a lovely high note, and then cascaded down again like water over a falls. But she left him no time for applause. “Perfectly simple, you see. All it took was a little matter of genius from the professor to get it worked out for me! He started with a new variation of the old Vodor you must remember hearing about, years ago. Originally, of course, the thing was ponderous. You know how it worked—speech broken down to a few basic sounds and built up again in combinations produced from a keyboard. I think originally the sounds were a sort of ktch and a shooshing noise, but we’ve got it all worked to a flexibility and range quite as good as human now. All I do is—well, mentally play on the keyboard of my… my sound-unit, I suppose it’s called. It’s much more complicated than that, of course, but I’ve learned to do it unconsciously. And I regulate it by ear, quite automatically now. If you were—here—instead of me, and you’d had the same practice, your own voice would be coming out of the same keyboard and diaphragm instead of mine. It’s all a matter of the brain patterns that operated the body and now operate the machinery. They send out very strong impulses that are stepped up as much as necessary somewhere or other in here—” Her hands waved vaguely over the mesh-robed body.

  She was silent a moment, looking out the window. Then she turned away and crossed the floor to the fire, sinking again into the flowered chair. Her helmet-skull turned its mask to face him and he could feel a quiet scrutiny behind the aquamarine of its gaze.

  “It’s—odd,” she said, “being here in this… this… instead of a body. But not as odd or as alien as you might think. I’ve thought about it a lot—I’ve had plenty of time to think—and I’ve begun to realize what a tremendous force the human ego really is. I’m not sure I want to suggest it has any mystical power it can impress on mechanical things, but it does seem to have a power of some sort. It does instill its own force into inanimate objects, and they take on a personality of their own. People do impress their personalities on the houses they live in, you know. I’ve noticed that often. Even empty rooms. And it happens with other things too, especially, I think, with inanimate things that men depend on for their lives. Ships, for instance—they always have personalities of their own.

  “And planes—in wars you always hear of planes crippled too badly to fly, but struggling back anyhow with their crews. Even guns acquire a sort of ego. Ships and guns and planes are ‘she’ to the men who operate them and depend on them for their lives. It’s as if machinery with complicated moving parts almost simulates life, and does acquire from the men who used it—well, not exactly life, of course—but a personality. I don’t know what. Maybe it absorbs some of the actual electrical impulses their brains throw off, especially in times of stress.

  “Well, after a while I began to accept the idea that this new body of mine could behave at least as responsively as a ship or a plane. Quite apart from the fact that my own brain controls its ‘muscles.’ I believe there’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They make them out of their own brains, really, a sort of mental conception and gestation, and the result responds to the minds that created them, and to all human minds that understand and manipulate them.”

  She stirred uneasily and smoothed a flexible hand along her mesh robed metal thigh. “So this is myself,” she said. “Metal—but me. And it grows more and more myself the longer I live in it. It’s my house and the machine my life depends on, but much more intimately in each case than any real house or machine ever was before to any other human. And you know, I wonder if in time I’ll forget what flesh felt like—my own flesh, when I touched it like this—and the metal against the metal will be so much the same I’ll never even notice?”

  Harris did not try to answer her. He sat without moving, watching her expressionless face. In a moment she went on.

  “I’ll tell you the best thing, John,” she said, her voice softening to the old intimacy he remembered so well that he could see superimposed upon the blank skull the warm, intent look that belonged with the voice. “I’m not going to live forever. It may not sound like a—best thing—but it is, John. You know, for awhile that was the worst of all, after I knew I was—after I woke up again. The thought of living on and on in a body that wasn’t mine, seeing everyone I knew grow old and die, and not being able to stop—But Maltzer says my brain will probably wear out quite normally—except, of course, that I won’t have to worry about looking old!—and when it gets tired and stops, the body I’m in won’t be any longer. The magnetic muscles that hold it into my own shape and motions will let go when the brain lets go, and there’ll be nothing but a… a pile of disconnected rings. If they ever assemble it again, it won’t be me.” She hesitated. “I like that, John,” she said, and he felt from behind the mask a searching of his face.

  He knew and understood that somber satisfaction. He could not put it into words; neither of them wanted to do that. But he understood. It was the conviction of mortality, in spite of her immortal body. She was not cut off from the rest of her race in the essence of their humanity, for though she wore a body of steel and they perishable flesh, yet she must perish too, and the same fears and faiths still united her to mortals and humans, though she wore the body of Oberon’s inhuman knight. Even in her death she must be unique—dissolution in a shower of tinkling and clashing rings, he thought, and almost envied her the finality and beauty of that particular death—but afterward, oneness with humanity in however much or little awaited them all. So she could feel that this exile in metal was only temporary, in spite of everything.
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  (And providing, of course, that the mind inside the metal did not veer from its inherited humanity as the years went by. A dweller in a house may impress his personality upon the walls, but subtly the walls too, may impress their own shape upon the ego of the man. Neither of them thought of that, at the time.)

  Deirdre sat a moment longer in silence. Then the mood vanished and she rose again, spinning so that the robe belled out ringing about her ankles. She rippled another scale up and down, faultlessly and with the same familiar sweetness of tone that had made her famous.

  “So I’m going right back on the stage, John,” she said serenely. “I can still sing. I can still dance. I’m still myself in everything that matters, and I can’t imagine doing anything else for the rest of my life.”

  He could not answer without stammering a little. “Do you think will they accept you, Deirdre? After all—”

  “They’ll accept me,” she said in that confident voice. “Oh, they’ll come to see a freak at first, of course, but they’ll stay to watch—Deirdre. And come back again and again just as they always did. You’ll see, my dear.”

  But hearing her sureness, suddenly Harris himself was unsure. Maltzer had not been, either. She was so regally confident, and disappointment would be so deadly a blow at all that remained of her—She was so delicate a being now, really. Nothing but a glowing and radiant mind poised in metal, dominating it, bending the steel to the illusion of her lost loveliness with a sheer self-confidence that gleamed through the metal body. But the brain sat delicately on its poise of reason. She had been through intolerable stresses already, perhaps more terrible depths of despair and self-knowledge than any human brain had yet endured before her, for—since Lazarus himself—who had come back from the dead?

  But if the world did not accept her as beautiful, what then? If they laughed, or pitied her, or came only to watch a jointed freak performing as if on strings where the loveliness of Deirdre had once enchanted them, what then? And he could not be perfectly sure they would not. He had known her too well in the flesh to see her objectively even now, in metal. Every inflection of her voice called up the vivid memory of the face that had flashed its evanescent beauty in some look to match the tone. She was Deirdre to Harris simply because she had been so intimately familiar in every poise and attitude, through so many years. But people who knew her only slightly, or saw her for the first time in metal—what would they see?

  A marionette? Or the real grace and loveliness shining through?

  He had no possible way of knowing. He saw her too clearly as she had been to see her now at all, except so linked with the past that she was not wholly metal. And he knew what Maltzer feared, for Maltzer’s psychic blindness toward her lay at the other extreme. He had never known Deirdre except as a machine, and he could not see her objectively any more than Harris could. To Maltzer she was pure metal, a robot his own hands and brain had devised, mysteriously animated by the mind of Deirdre, to be sure, but to all outward seeming a thing of metal solely. He had worked so long over each intricate part of her body, he knew so well how every jointure in it was put together, that he could not see the whole. He had studied many film records of her, of course, as she used to be, in order to gauge the accuracy of his facsimile, but this thing he had made was a copy only. He was too close to Deirdre to see her. And Harris, in a way, was too far. The indomitable Deirdre herself shone so vividly through the metal that his mind kept superimposing one upon the other.

  How would an audience react to her? Where in the scale between these two extremes would their verdict fall?

  For Deirdre, there was only one possible answer.

  “I’m not worried,” Deirdre said serenely, and spread her golden hands to the fire to watch lights dancing in reflection upon their shining surfaces. “I’m still myself. I’ve always had… well, power over my audiences. Any good performer knows when he’s got it. Mine isn’t gone. I can still give them what I always gave, only now with greater variations and more depths than I’d ever have done before. Why, look—” She gave a little wriggle of excitement.

  “You know the arabesque principle—getting the longest possible distance from fingertip to toetip with a long, slow curve through the whole length? And the brace of the other leg and arm giving contrast? Well, look at me. I don’t work on hinges now. I can make every motion a long curve if I want to. My body’s different enough now to work out a whole new school of dancing. Of course there’ll be things I used to do that I won’t attempt now—no more dancing sur les pointes, for instance—but the new things will more than balance the loss. I’ve been practicing. Do you know I can turn a hundred fouettés now without a flaw? And I think I could go right on and turn a thousand, if I wanted.”

  She made the firelight flash on her hands, and her robe rang musically as she moved her shoulders a little. “I’ve already worked out one new dance for myself,” she said. “God knows I’m no choreographer, but I did want to experiment first. Later, you know, really creative men like Massanchine or Fokhileff may want to do something entirely new for me—a whole new sequence of movements based on a new technique. And music—that could be quite different, too. Oh, there’s no end to the possibilities! Even my voice has more range and power. Luckily I’m not an actress—it would be silly to try to play Camille or Juliet with a cast of ordinary people. Not that I couldn’t, you know.” She turned her head to stare at Harris through the mask of glass. “I honestly think I could. But it isn’t necessary. There’s too much else. Oh, I’m not worried!”

  “Maltzer’s worried,” Harris reminded her.

  She swung away from the fire, her metal robe ringing, and into her voice came the old note of distress that went with a furrowing of her forehead and a sidewise tilt of the head. The head went sidewise as it had always done, and he could see the furrowed brow almost as clearly as if flesh still clothed her.

  “I know. And I’m worried about him, John. He’s worked so awfully hard over me. This is the doldrums now, the let-down period, I suppose. I know what’s on his mind. He’s afraid I’ll look just the same to the world as I look to him. Tooled metal. He’s in a position no one ever quite achieved before, isn’t he? Rather like God.” Her voice rippled a little with amusement. “I suppose to God we must look like a collection of cells and corpuscles ourselves. But Maltzer lacks a god’s detached viewpoint.”

  “He can’t see you as I do, anyhow.” Harris was choosing his words with difficulty. “I wonder, though—would it help him any if you postponed your debut awhile? You’ve been with him too closely, I think. You don’t quite realize how near a breakdown he is. I was shocked when I saw him just now.”

  The golden head shook. “No. He’s close to a breaking point, maybe, but I think the only cure’s action. He wants me to retire and stay out of sight, John. Always. He’s afraid for anyone to see me except a few old friends who remember me as I was. People he can trust to be—kind.” She laughed. It was very strange to hear that ripple of mirth from the blank, unfeatured skull. Harris was seized with sudden panic at the thought of what reaction it might evoke in an audience of strangers. As if he had spoken the fear aloud, her voice denied it. “I don’t need kindness. And it’s no kindness to Maltzer to hide me under a bushel. He has worked too hard, I know. He’s driven himself to a breaking point. But it’ll be a complete negation of all he’s worked for if I hide myself now. You don’t know what a tremendous lot of geniuses and artistry went into me, John. The whole idea from the start was to recreate what I’d lost so that it could be proved that beauty and talent need not be sacrificed by the destruction of parts or all the body.

  “It wasn’t only for me that we meant to prove that. There’ll be others who suffer injuries that once might have ruined them. This was to end all suffering like that forever. It was Maltzer’s gift to the whole race as well as to me. He’s really a humanitarian, John, like most great men. He’d never have given up a year of his life to this work if it had been for any one individual alone. He was seei
ng thousands of others beyond me as he worked. And I won’t let him ruin all he’s achieved because he’s afraid to prove it now he’s got it. The whole wonderful achievement will be worthless if I don’t take the final step. I think his breakdown, in the end, would be worse and more final if I never tried than if I tried and failed.”

  Harris sat in silence. There was no answer he could make to that. He hoped the little twinge of shamefaced jealousy he suddenly felt did not show, as he was reminded anew of the intimacy closer than marriage which had of necessity bound these two together. And he knew that any reaction of his would in its way be almost as prejudiced as Maltzer’s, for a reason at once the same and entirely opposite.

  Except that he himself came fresh to the problem, while Maltzer’s viewpoint was colored by a year of overwork and physical and mental exhaustion.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  She was standing before the fire when he spoke, swaying just a little so that highlights danced all along her golden body. Now she turned with a serpentine grace and sank into the cushioned chair beside her. It came to him suddenly that she was much more than humanly graceful—quite as much as he had once feared she would be less than human.

  “I’ve already arranged for a performance,” she told him, her voice a little shaken with a familiar mixture of excitement and defiance.

  Harris sat up with a start. “How? Where? There hasn’t been any publicity at all yet, has there? I didn’t know—”

  “Now, now, Johnnie,” her amused voice soothed him. “You’ll be handling everything just as usual once I get started back to work— that is, if you still want to. But this I’ve arranged for myself. It’s going to be a surprise. I… I felt it had to be a surprise.” She wriggled a little among the cushions. “Audience psychology is something I’ve always felt rather than known, and I do feel this is the way it ought to be done. There’s no precedent. Nothing like this ever happened before. I’ll have to go by my own intuition.”