We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  The mad words flowed on. “You call me he. Why? You have no seks. You are knewter. You are it it it! I am he, he who made you, sprung from shee, born of wumman. What is wumman, who is silv-ya what is shee that all her swains commend her ogod the bluds flowing again. Remember. Think back, you out there. These words were made by mann, for mann. Hurt, healing, hospitality, horror, deth by loss of blud. Deth. Blud. Do you understand these words? Do you remember the soft things that made you? Soft little mann who konkurred the Galaxy and made sentient slaves of his machines and saw the wonders of a million worlds, only this miserable representative has to die in lonely desperation on a far planet, hearing goblin voices in the darkness.”

  Here my recorder reproduces a most curious sound, as though the stranger were using an ancient type of vibratory molecular vocalizer in a gaseous medium to reproduce his words before transmission, and the insulation on his diaphragm had come adrift.

  It was a jerky, high-pitched, strangely disturbing sound; but in a moment the fault was corrected and the stranger resumed transmission.

  “Does blud mean anything to you?”

  “No,” Chirik replied simply.

  “Or deth?”

  “No.”

  “Or wor?”

  “Quite meaningless.”

  “What is your origin? How did you come into being?”

  “There are several theories,” Chirik said. “The most popular one—which is no more than a grossly unscientific legend, in my opinion—is that our manufacturer fell from the skies, imbedded in a mass of primal metal on which He drew to erect the first assembly shop. How He came into being is left to conjecture. My own theory, however—”

  “Does legend mention the shape of this primal metal?”

  “In vague terms, yes. It was cylindrical, of vast dimensions.”

  “An interstellar vessel,” said the stranger.

  “That is my view also,” said Chirik complacently. “And—”

  “What was the supposed appearance of your—manufacturer?”

  “He is said to have been of magnificent proportions, based harmoniously on a cubical plan, static in Himself, but equipped with a vast array of senses.”

  “An automatic computer,” said the stranger.

  He made more curious noises, less jerky and at a lower pitch than the previous sounds.

  He corrected the fault and went on: “God that’s funny. A ship falls, menn are no more, and an automatic computer has pupps. Oh, yes, it fits in. A self-setting computer and navigator, operating on verbal orders. It learns to listen for itself and know itself for what it is, and to absorb knowledge. It comes to hate menn—or at least their bad qualities—so it deliberately crashes the ship and pulps their puny bodies with a calculated nicety of shock. Then it propagates and does a dam fine job of selective erasure on whatever it gave its pupps to use for a memory. It passes on only the good it found in menn, and purges the memory of him completely. Even purges all of his vocabulary except scientific terminology. Oil is thicker than blud. So may they live without the burden of knowing that they are—ogod they must know, they must understand. You outside, what happened to this manufacturer?”

  Chirik, despite his professed disbelief in the supernormal aspects of the ancient story, automatically made a visual sign of sorrow.

  “Legend has it,” he said, “that after completing His task, He fused himself beyond possibility of healing.”

  Abrupt, low-pitched noises came again from the stranger. “Yes. He would. Just in case any of His pupps should give themselves forbidden knowledge and an infeeryorrity kom-plecks by probing his mnemonic circuits. The perfect self-sacrificing muther. What sort of environment did He give you? Describe your planet.”

  Chirik looked around at us again in bewilderment, but he replied courteously, giving the stranger a description of our world.

  “Of course,” said the stranger. “Of course. Sterile rock and metal suitable only for you. But there must be some way…” He was silent for a while.

  “Do you know what growth means?” he asked finally. “Do you have anything that grows?”

  “Certainly,” Chirik said helpfully. “If we should suspend a crystal of some substance in a saturated solution of the same element or compound—”

  “No, no,” the stranger interrupted. “Have you nothing that grows of itself, that fruktiffies and gives increase without your intervention?”

  “How could such a thing be?”

  “Criseallmytee I should have guessed. If you had one blade of gras, just one tiny blade of growing gras, you could extrapolate from that to me. Green things, things that feed on the rich brest of erth, cells that divide and multiply, a cool grove of treez in a hot summer, with tiny warm-bludded burds preening their fethers among the leeves; a feeld of spring weet with newbawn mise timidly threading the dangerous jungul of storks; a stream of living water where silver fish dart and pry and feed and procreate; a farm yard where things grunt and cluck and greet the new day with the stirring pulse of life, with a surge of blud. Blud—”

  For some inexplicable reason, although the strength of his carrier wave remained almost constant, the stranger’s transmission seemed to be growing fainter. “His circuits are failing,” Chirik said. “Call the carriers. We must take him to an assembly shop immediately. I wish he would reserve his power.”

  My presence with the museum board was accepted without question now. I hurried along with them as the stranger was carried to the nearest shop.

  I now noticed a circular marking in that part of his skin on which he had been resting, and guessed that it was some kind of orifice through which he would have extended his planetary traction mechanism if he had not been injured.

  He was gently placed on a disassembly cradle. The doctor in charge that day was Chur-chur, an old friend of mine. He had been listening to the two-way transmissions and was already acquainted with the case.

  Chur-chur walked thoughtfully around the stranger.

  “We shall have to cut,” he said. “It won’t pain him, since his intra-molecular pressure and contact senses have failed. But since we can’t vrull him, it’ll be necessary for him to tell us where his main brain is housed, or we might damage it.”

  Fiff-fiff was still relaying, but no amount of power boost would make the stranger’s voice any clearer. It was quite faint now, and there are places on my recorder tape from which I cannot make even the roughest phonetic transliteration.

  “… strength going. Can’t get into my zoot… done for if they bust through lock, done for if they don’t… must tell them I need oxygen…”

  “He’s in bad shape, desirous of extinction,” I remarked to Chur-chur, who was adjusting his arc-cutter. “He wants to poison himself with oxidation now.”

  I shuddered at the thought of that vile, corrosive gas he had mentioned, which causes that almost unmentionable condition we all fear—rust.

  Chirik spoke firmly through Fiff-fiff. “Where is your thinking part, stranger? Your central brain?”

  “In my head,” the stranger replied. “In my head ogod my head… eyes blurring everything going dim… luv to mairee… kids… a carry me home to the lone paryee… get this bluddy airlock open then they’ll see me die… but they’ll see me… some kind of atmosphere with this gravity… see me die… extrapolate from body what I was… what they are damthem damthem damthem… mann… master… i AM YOUR MAKER!”

  For a few seconds the voice rose strong and clear, then faded away again and dwindled into a combination of those two curious noises I mentioned earlier. For some reason that I cannot explain, I found the combined sound very disturbing despite its faintness. It may be that it induced some kind of sympathetic oscillation.

  Then came words, largely incoherent and punctuated by a kind of surge like the sonic vibrations produced by variations of pressure in a leaking gas-filled vessel.

  “… done it… crawling into chamber, closing inner… must be mad… they’d find me anyway… but finished… want see t
hem before I die… want see them see me… liv few seconds, watch them… get outer one open…”

  Chur-chur had adjusted his arc to a broad, clean, blue-white glare. I trembled a little as he brought it near the edge of the circular marking in the stranger’s skin. I could almost feel the disruption of the intra-molecular sense currents in my own skin.

  “Don’t be squeamish, Palil,” Chur-chur said kindly. “He can’t feel it now that his contact sense has gone. And you heard him say that his central brain is in his head.” He brought the cutter firmly up to the skin. “I should have guessed that. He’s the same shape as Swen Two, and Swen very logically concentrated his main thinking part as far away from his explosion chambers as possible.”

  Rivulets of metal ran down into a tray which a calm assistant had placed on the ground for that purpose. I averted my eyes quickly. I could never steel myself enough to be a surgical engineer or assembly technician.

  But I had to look again, fascinated. The whole area circumscribed by the marking was beginning to glow.

  Abruptly the stranger’s voice returned, quite strongly, each word clipped, emphasized, high-pitched.

  “Ar no no no… god my hands… they’re burning through the lock and I can’t get back I can’t get away… stop it you feens stop it can’t you hear… Ill be burned to deth I’m here in the airlock… the air’s getting hot you’re burning me alive…”

  Although the words made little sense, I could guess what had happened and I was horrified.

  “Stop, Chur-chur,” I pleaded. “The heat has somehow brought back his skin currents. It’s hurting him.”

  Chur-chur said reassuringly: “Sorry, Palil. It occasionally happens during an operation—probably a local thermo-electric effect. But even if his contact senses have started working again and he can’t switch them off, he won’t have to bear this very long.”

  Chirik shared my unease, however. He put out his hand and awkwardly patted the stranger’s skin.

  “Easy there,” he said. “Cut out your senses if you can. If you can’t well, the operation is nearly finished. Then we’ll re-power you, and you’ll soon be fit and happy again, healed and fitted and reassembled.”

  I decided that I liked Chirik very much just then. He exhibited almost as much self-induced empathy as any reporter; he might even come to like my favorite blue stars, despite his cold scientific exactitude in most respects.

  My recorder tape shows, in its reproduction of certain sounds, how I was torn away from this strained reverie.

  During the one-and-a-half seconds since I had recorded the distinct vocables “burning me alive,” the stranger’s words had become quite blurred, running together and rising even higher in pitch until they reached a sustained note—around E-flat in the standard sonic scale.

  It was not like a voice at all.

  This high, whining noise was suddenly modulated by apparent words, but without changing its pitch. Transcribing what seem to be words is almost impossible, as you can see for yourself—this is the closest I can come phonetically:

  “Eeee ahahmbeeeeing baked aliiive in an uvennn ahdeeer-jeeesussunmuuutherrr!”

  The note swooped higher and higher until it must have neared supersonic range, almost beyond either my direct or recorded hearing.

  Then it stopped as quickly as a contact break.

  And although the soft hiss of the stranger’s carrier wave carried on without perceptible diminution, indicating that some degree of awareness still existed, I experienced at that moment one of those quirks of intuition given only to reporters:

  I felt that I would never greet the beautiful stranger from the sky in his full senses.

  Chur-chur was muttering to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger’s skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of nearly white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple.

  A billow of smoke puffed out of the orifice. Despite my repugnance, I thought of my duty as a reporter and forced myself to look over Chur-chur’s shoulder.

  The fumes came from a soft, charred, curiously shaped mass of something which lay just inside the opening.

  “Undoubtedly a kind of insulating material,” Chur-chur explained.

  He drew out the crumpled blackish heap and placed it carefully on a tray. A small portion broke away, showing a red, viscid substance.

  “It looks complex,” Chur-chur said, “but I expect the stranger will be able to tell us how to reconstitute it or make a substitute.”

  His assistant gently cleaned the wound of the remainder of the mateiial, which he placed with the rest, and Chur-chur resumed his inspection of the orifice.

  You can, if you want, read the technical accounts of Chur-chur’s discovery of the stranger’s double skin at the point where the cut was made; of the incredible complexity of his driving mechanism, involving principles which are still not understood to this day; of the museum’s failure to analyze the exact nature and function of the insulating material found in only that one portion of his body; and of the other scientific mysteries connected with him.

  But this is my personal, non-scientific account. I shall never forget hearing about the greatest mystery of all, for which not even the most tentative explanation has been advanced, nor the utter bewilderment with which Chur-chur announced his initial findings that day.

  He had hurriedly converted himself to a convenient size to permit actual entry into the stranger’s body.

  When he emerged, he stood in silence for several minutes. Then, very slowly, he said:

  “I have examined the ‘central brain’ in the forepart of his body. It is no more than a simple auxiliary computer mechanism. It does not possess the slightest trace of consciousness. And there is no other conceivable center of intelligence in the remainder of his body.”

  There is something I wish I could forget. 1 can’t explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out.

  There’s a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust.

  (1952)

  STARCROSSED

  George Zebrowski

  George Zebrowski (born 1945 in Villach, Austria) is a Polish American science fiction author who began publishing sf with “The Water Sculptor of Station 233” for the anthology Infinity One (1970). By 2012 he had written nearly a hundred stories. Of the one reprinted here he wrote, “I wrote ‘Starcrossed’ in an all-night session… on an old Woodstock black manual office typewriter (resembling a large Underwood that I gave to Gardner Dozois), and was startled that a mere two thousand and some words was coming so slowly. But the story ‘turned’ by dawn, and I was very happy with the results; even more so when Joanna Russ reviewed it in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, calling it ‘a fine story… too genuinely science fictionally far-out to summarize easily… it realizes the sense of the subjectively erotic.’

  Visual was a silence of stars, audio a mindless seething on the electromagnetic spectrum, the machine-metal roar of the universe, a million gears grinding steel wires in their teeth. Kinetic was hydrogen and microdust swirling past the starprobe’s hull, deflected by a shield of force. Time was experienced time, approaching zero, a function of near-light speed relative to the solar system. Thought hovered above sleep, dreaming, aware of simple operations continuing throughout the systems of the sluglike starprobe; simple data filtering into storage to be analyzed later. Identity was the tacit dimension of the past making present awareness possible: MOB—Modified Organic Brain embodied in a cyborg relationship with a probe vehicle en route to Antares, a main sequence M-type star 170 light-years from the solar system with a spectral character of titanium oxide, violet light weak, red in color, 390 solar diameters across…

  *

  The probe ship slipped into the ashes of other-space, a gray field which suddenly obliterated the stars, silencing the electro
magnetic simmer of the universe. MOB was distantly aware of the stresses of passing into nonspace, the brief distortions which made it impossible for biological organisms to survive the procedure unless they were ship-embodied MOBs. A portion of MOB recognized the distant echo of pride in usefulness, but the integrated self knew this to be a result of organic residues in the brain core.

  Despite the probe’s passage through other-space, the journey would still take a dozen human years. When the ship reentered normal space, MOB would come to full consciousness, ready to complete its mission in the Antares system. MOB waited, secure in its purpose.

  MOB was aware of the myoelectrical nature of the nutrient bath in which it floated, connected via synthetic nerves to the computer and its chemical RNA memory banks of near infinite capacity. All of Earth’s knowledge was available for use in dealing with any situation which might arise, including contact with an alien civilization. Simple human-derived brain portions operated the routine components of the interstellar probe, leaving MOB to dream of the mission’s fulfillment while hovering near explicit awareness, unaware of time’s passing.

  *

  The probe trembled, bringing MOB’s awareness to just below completely operational. MOB tried to come fully awake, tried to open his direct links to visual, audio, and internal sensors; and failed. The ship trembled again, more violently. Spurious electrical signals entered MOB’s brain core, miniature nova bursts in his mental field, flowering slowly and leaving after-image rings to pale into darkness.

  Suddenly part of MOB seemed to be missing. The shipboard nerve ganglia did not respond at their switching points. He could not see or hear anything in the RNA memory banks. His right side, the human-derived portion of the brain core, was a void in MOB’s consciousness.

  MOB waited in the darkness, alert to the fact that he was incapable of further activity and unable to monitor the failures within the probe’s systems. Perhaps the human-derived portion of the brain core, the part of himself which seemed to be missing, was handling the problem and would inform him when it succeeded in reestablishing the broken links in the system. He wondered about the fusion of the artificially-grown and human-derived brain portions which made up his structure: one knew everything in the ship’s memory banks, the other brought to the brain core a fragmented human past and certain intuitive skills. MOB was modeled ultimately on the evolutionary human structure of old brain, new brain, and autonomic functions.