We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  But the mind was reckoning on human factors.

  Very gently and smoothly Deirdre lifted Maltzer from the window sill and with effortless ease carried him well back into the safety of the room. She set him down before a sofa and her golden fingers unwrapped themselves from his arms slowly, so that he could regain control of his own body before she released him.

  He sank to the sofa without a word. Nobody spoke for an unmeasurable length of time. Harris could not. Deirdre waited patiently. It was Maltzer who regained speech first, and it came back on the old track, as if his mind had not yet relinquished the rut it had worn so deep.

  “All right,” he said breathlessly. “All right, you can stop me this time. But I know, you see. I know! You can’t hide your feeling from me, Deirdre. I know the trouble you feel. And next time—next time I won’t wait to talk!”

  Deirdre made the sound of a sigh. She had no lungs to expel the breath she was imitating, but it was hard to realize that. It was hard to understand why she was not panting heavily from the terrible exertion of the past minutes; the mind knew why, but could not accept the reason. She was still too human.

  “You still don’t see,” she said. “Think, Maltzer, think!”

  There was a hassock beside the sofa. She sank upon it gracefully, clasping her robed knees. Her head tilted back to watch Maltzer’s face. She saw only stunned stupidity on it now; he had passed through too much emotional storm to think at all.

  “All right,” she told him. “Listen—I’ll admit it. You’re right. I am unhappy. I do know what you said was true—but not for the reason you think. Humanity and I are far apart, and drawing farther. The gap will be hard to bridge. Do you hear me, Maltzer?”

  Harris saw the tremendous effort that went into Maltzer’s wakening. He saw the man pull his mind back into focus and sit up on the sofa with weary stiffness.

  “You… you do admit it, then?” he asked in a bewildered voice. Deirdre shook her head sharply.

  “Do you still think of me as delicate?” she demanded. “Do you know I carried you here at arm’s length halfway across the room? Do you realize you weigh nothing to me? I could”—she glanced around the room and gestured with sudden, rather appalling violence—”tear this building down,” she said quietly. “I could tear my way through these walls, I think. I’ve found no limit yet to the strength I can put forth if I try.” She held up her golden hands and looked at them. “The metal would break, perhaps,” she said reflectively, “but then, I have no feeling—”

  Maltzer gasped, “Deirdre—”

  She looked up with what must have been a smile. It sounded clearly in her voice. “Oh, I won’t. I wouldn’t have to do it with my hands, if I wanted. Look—listen!”

  She put her head back and a deep, vibrating hum gathered and grew in what one still thought of as her throat. It deepened swiftly and the ears began to ring. It was deeper, and the furniture vibrated. The walls began almost imperceptibly to shake. The room was full and bursting with a sound that shook every atom upon its neighbor with a terrible, disrupting force.

  The sound ceased. The humming died. Then Deirdre laughed and made another and quite differently pitched sound. It seemed to reach out like an arm in one straight direction—toward the window. The opened panel shook. Deirdre intensified her hum, and slowly, with imperceptible jolts that merged into smoothness, the window jaried itself shut.

  “You see?” Deirdre said. “You see?”

  But still Maltzer could only stare. Harris was staring too, his mind beginning slowly to accept what she implied. Both were too stunned to leap ahead to any conclusions yet.

  Deirdre rose impatiently and began to pace again, in a ringing of metal robe and a twinkling of reflected lights. She was pantherlike in her suppleness. They could see the power behind that lithe motion now; they no longer thought of her as helpless, but they were far still from grasping the truth.

  “You were wrong about me, Maltzer,” she said with an effort at patience in her voice. “But you were right too, in a way you didn’t guess. I’m not afraid of humanity. I haven’t anything to fear from them.

  Why”—her voice took on a tinge of contempt—”already I’ve set a fashion in women’s clothing. By next week you won’t see a woman on the street without a mask like mine, and every dress that isn’t cut like a chlamys will be out of style. I’m not afraid of humanity! I won’t lose touch with them unless I want to. I’ve learned a lot—I’ve learned too much already.”

  Her voice faded for a moment, and Harris had a quick and appalling vision of her experimenting in the solitude of her farm, testing the range of her voice, testing her eyesight—could she see microscopically and telescopically?—and was her hearing as abnormally flexible as her voice?

  “You were afraid I had lost feeling and scent and taste,” she went on, still pacing with that powerful, tigerish tread. “Hearing and sight would not be enough, you think? But why do you think sight is the last of the senses? It may be the latest, Maltzer—Harris—but why do you think it’s the last?”

  She may not have whispered that. Perhaps it was only their hearing that made it seem thin and distant, as the brain contracted and would not let the thought come through in its stunning entirety.

  “No,” Deirdre said, “I haven’t lost contact with the human race. I never will, unless I want to. It’s too easy… too easy.”

  She was watching her shining feet as she paced, and her masked face was averted. Sorrow sounded in her soft voice now.

  “I didn’t mean to let you know,” she said. “I never would have, if this hadn’t happened. But I couldn’t let you go believing you’d failed. You made a perfect machine, Maltzer. More perfect than you knew.”

  “But Deirdre—” breathed Maltzer, his eyes fascinated and still incredulous upon her, “but Deirdre, if we did succeed—what’s wrong? I can feel it now—I’ve felt it all along. You’re so unhappy—you still are. Why, Deirdre?”

  She lifted her head and looked at him, eyelessly, but with a piercing stare. “Why are you so sure of that?” she asked gently.

  “You think I could be mistaken, knowing you as I do? But I’m not Frankenstein… you say my creation’s flawless. Then what—”

  “Could you ever duplicate this body?” she asked.

  Maltzer glanced down at his shaking hands. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I—”

  “Could anyone else?”

  He was silent. Deirdre answered for him. “I don’t believe anyone could. I think I was an accident. A sort of mutation halfway between flesh and metal. Something accidental and… and unnatural, turning off on a wrong course of evolution that never reaches a dead end. Another brain in a body like this might die or go mad, as you thought I would. The synapses are too delicate. You were—call it lucky—with me. From what I know now, I don’t think a… a baroque like me could happen again.” She paused a moment. “What you did was kindle the fire for the Phoenix, in a way. And the Phoenix rises perfect and renewed from its own ashes. Do you remember why it had to reproduce itself that way?”

  Maltzer shook his head.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said. “It was because there was only one Phoenix. Only one in the whole world.” They looked at each other in silence. Then Deirdre shrugged a little.

  “He always came out of the fire perfect, of course. I’m not weak, Maltzer. You needn’t let that thought bother you any more. I’m not vulnerable and helpless. I’m not sub-human.” She laughed dryly. “I suppose,” she said, “that I’m—superhuman.”

  “But—not happy.”

  “I’m afraid. It isn’t unhappiness, Maltzer—it’s fear. I don’t want to draw so far away from the human race. I wish I needn’t. That’s why I’m going back on the stage—to keep in touch with them while I can. But I wish there could be others like me. I’m… I’m lonely, Maltzer.”

  Silence again. Then Maltzer said, in a voice as distant as when he had spoken to them through glass, over gulfs as deep as oblivion:

  “Then
I am Frankenstein, after all.”

  “Perhaps you are,” Deirdre said very softly. “I don’t know. Perhaps you are.”

  She turned away and moved smoothly, powerfully, down the room to the window. Now that Harris knew, he could almost hear the sheer power purring along her limbs as she walked. She leaned the golden forehead against the glass—it clinked faintly, with a musical sound—and looked down into the depths Maltzer had hung above. Her voice was reflective as she looked into those dizzy spaces which had offered oblivion to her creator.

  “There’s one limit I can think of,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Only one. My brain will wear out in another forty years or so. Between now and then I’ll learn… I’ll change… I’ll know more than I can guess today. I’ll change— That’s frightening. I don’t like to think about that.” She laid a curved golden hand on the latch and pushed the window open a little, very easily. Wind whined around its edge. “I could put a stop to it now, if I wanted,” she said. “If I wanted. But I can’t, really. There’s so much still untried. My brain’s human, and no human brain could leave such possibilities untested. I wonder, though… I do wonder—”

  Her voice was soft and familiar in Harris’ ears, the voice Deirdre had spoken and sung with, sweetly enough to enchant a world. But as preoccupation came over her a certain flatness crept into the sound. When she was not listening to her own voice, it did not keep quite to the pitch of trueness. It sounded as if she spoke in a room of brass, and echoes from the walls resounded in the tones that spoke there.

  “I wonder,” she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice.

  (1944)

  FLIGHT

  Joanna Kavenna

  Joanna Kavenna’s writing career began in 2005 with a voyage to the Arctic and the publication The Ice Museum, an imaginative hybrid of travel narrative and cultural history that drew comparisons to the work of Robert Macfarlane, himself one of Kavenna’s early champions. Inglorious (2007) is a delightfully self-referential novel in which a high-minded bookworm chooses not to leave for the Arctic, preferring a life of ill-defined philosophical reflection: needless to say, things don’t work out at all well. In Come to the Edge (2012), a Robin Hood scheme to combat rural inequality in Cumbria comes memorably unstuck. Kavenna’s most recent novel, modelled loosely on Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”, is A Field Guide to Reality (2016) in which a professor creates, and contrives to lose, a “manual for fixing existential angst”.

  I was above those old streets, so high, the wind was whispering – I could see the stars beyond the clouds, swelling and declining, as if they were breathing. The clouds were congealing around me, there was a low hum. I might have become afraid, I might have cried out – except everything was happening too fast, I was being propelled along, the wind was singing in my ears—

  Any moment I would vanish like steam into the clouds.

  It was beautiful up there, far above those streets – I’ve trodden them so many times, but now they were like patterns of dark and light, the people forming clusters, shifting again and again – Silver and blue, so pretty, I wished I could tell them how beautiful they looked. Even the grim-hearted, struggling home. You couldn’t see the lines on their faces, you couldn’t hear them coughing into their mobile phones, or lying to please each other and all of them trying so hard not to care about the flaming discourtesy of the fates, the way they’d been stamped on over and over. You just saw them as endless flitting shadows, one human, another, another ghost of a person, another. They filled the doorways of shops, then they vanished again.

  Would it console you at all, if you were tired, lost in the murk and someone told you – from above, from up here – where I fly – you are beautiful – would that console you?

  I had become quite unusual, perhaps I was escaping this prison, my body, perhaps I was ascending towards something else entirely. White light, above the clouds, perhaps it was the sun, so bright—

  Now I was in the silence, the clouds merging into further clouds, the sky like an ocean, the world inverted. Myself, somewhat transformed. I saw the houses so far below, terrace after terrace – everything so geometrical, as if someone had been busy with a gargantuan ruler. It was so neat and tidy. The people had been tidied into their terraces and told to be good. There you are, you interchangeable being. A box. Be good now. The whole city bearing down on each little box, with its inherent culture of humans. They mustn’t stray too far. Of course, they absolutely mustn’t fly away.

  You could tell the houses where people lived alone. They were bedraggled. They slumped as if they had been bombed and knocked carelessly back together. Sallow light emanating from the windows. Inside, the serried ranks of people cooking up a meal in a saucepan. Washing up even as they ate it. Erasing themselves from the kitchen. The lights flashed from one room to another, charting their solitary progress. Up in the bedrooms, they found their place again. Flat on their backs, gripping the mattress as the planet went whirling through space…Every morning they left, to trade their lives for more money. Not too much, just barely enough.

  *

  House after house after house – it went on and on until the bedraggled fields. Russet countryside for a while, and then another town. Each house was ringed around with a halo, there was coloured smoke streaming from the chimneys.

  I was above the ancient centre of the city. Oxford. The colours were brighter here, some of the chimneys spewed gold and silver. The low hum again – the smoke descending towards the ground below, where it turned black, deep black, vanished as if the ground had swallowed it.

  Swooping down—

  There was a window before me, I didn’t know which college I was in. One of the oldest, most lavish. Cloistered vaulting. A smell of gently rotting timber. A voice within – I could just discern it – a man, saying something. Really rattling on. The words were blurred, he sounded as if he was speaking underwater.

  I could hear him careering around his room, knocking stuff over. He sounded half mad, and anyway his window was engulfed in black vapour. There was a musty ruined smell, something ancient, rotting, murky. I turned upside down, so all the buildings were standing on their heads, and the roads were like smoke trails, and I tried to get to his window, I was I suppose like a bat, but then I just got stuck in the black fog, I couldn’t make anything out at all. I could really taste it – what was this man doing, weltering around in it—

  I tried to soar out of it – I was feeling dreadful, I thought I might faint—

  But then I saw something else – in the depths of the murk – a yellow glow – really in the depths of that toxic black smoke, there was something shining like gold—

  I was being drawn away—

  Oh God, the return – gravity coming to snatch me back – Newton dragging me down. I was flying along the streets—

  Like tunnels now – my nose nearly scraping the hedgerows – I could hardly keep myself afloat. It was close. I just made it. Over my gate, the shared gate of my block – across the sterile stretch of car park dirt – I scraped my fingers on the door mat – found I was briefly upside down again.

  Ah the agony. I was back.

  I was slumped in my chair again. Awake—

  Quite blameless and almost functional.

  *

  I should start at something like the beginning—

  I was living in a real little dump in what I understood to be a good part of town. My flat was buried deep at the bottom of a grandiose villa; the sort of place a single family once owned, lavished it with frills and ornaments, parked their servants somewhere squalid and rang bells whenever they discerned an insufficiency. But now it had been sliced into flats and each flat had been doled out for some extravagant price because the place was in such a good part of town. I lived in the basement and so the whole weight of the building seemed to bear down upon me; it made my head ache. And then the place was dank even at the height of summer, and the moment the temperature dropped it got pretty vic
ious down there. I coughed myself sick at night. There were two windows in the whole place; one for the bedroom, one for the living room. The rest was lit by angle-poise, you felt you had burrowed deep down and now you had to stay there, with the blind crawling creatures and other things that fear the light.

  I’d furnished it with cheap rickety furniture, tailored to an aesthetic that was not my own. I was an interloper in this good part of town. Around the corner, people told me, lived an international rock star. It was highly probable he hadn’t furnished his house with flat-packed monstrosities, but anyway I had. Then the place was adorned with accidental sculptures. Piles of unsold books. Floor to ceiling, a stacking system so perilous that there was a chance one day I’d get buried alive.

  People like books, I had thought. Second hand, cheaply priced. You advertise them on the internet, and people buy them. Well, people quite like books. Not as much as other things, it turns out. And they quite like them but perhaps they buy them from other people. So instead of a thriving online business I had a series of abandoned stacks of books, reproaching my poor judgement, and some of them even blocked out my few remaining strands of light. I had a few scattered emails, occasional requests, nothing that amounted to a real living. Just these phrases—

  Is there an earlier edition? Thanks… Nick Graham

  Dear Amelia, I wonder if you could let me know…

  Amelia, whoever you are – from whoever I am—

  And sometimes I would knock into one of the piles and then the thing was like a miniature city falling down, skyscrapers tumbling. And then I got to stack them all up again.

  Perhaps it was making me slightly sick in the brain. All this staring at the flickering screen. Skimming from one site to another, all of them beamed to me from wherever and typing so frantically as if time was very precious – even though I wasted every second – and hunting, I was really hunting around in that ether-world trying to find something – an answer. What was it? A secret? A sign that others felt as I did? Some word I had never heard before, that would encapsulate it all? I wasn’t greedy, I just wanted a single word. Just a few times I alighted on something, it made me half-hopeful, but then it faded under the general teeming mass of gossip and lunatic facts, perversions masquerading as common sense, things I’d half-read and not really understood. I cheated myself, called this justifiable distraction.