Robot Uprisings

by Daniel H. Wilson

  “Please don’t make fun of me, Tessa. I know I haven’t always done the best job. But all I ever wanted was to make you feel like a part of this family.”

  I was crying now too. My heart was pounding and my throat burned. I hated that she thought being a part of the family was something she gave to me, not something I got automatically, like her or Nate or Dad.

  “Maybe I don’t want to be,” I said. “Maybe now that Dad’s gone and we’re not a real family anymore, you should have to give me back.”

  I saw her face for just a second, as terrible as it had been after Dad died, when I’d catch her sometimes with her eyes blank and glassy, like she was dead too. Then I turned and ran up the stairs to my room.

  In bed I started to feel doubt get in under my skin. I knew I hadn’t imagined the stove, or the locks on the doors, but maybe they were just the natural malfunctions of an old house. Maybe the house would just keep throwing small, unfixable terrors at me, and I’d have to live with them until I graduated from high school, never feeling at home.

  I fell asleep and had angry, rushing dreams.

  I woke to the sound of water—not a drip or leak, but a steady stream. I got up; there, in the hallway, was a pool of dark water spreading out from under the bathroom door, reflecting the moonlight. I was about to slosh through it to get to Mom’s room—then I remembered Grandpa, and instead took a running start, and jumped across it.

  Mom’s room was cool and dark and smelled clean, like her skin had when I was a little girl. When I whispered to her, she shot up, eyes wide and frightened.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “You need to see something,” I said.

  I led her into the hallway. She put her face in her hands when she saw the water pooled there.

  “Oh no,” she said. “There must be a leak. That’s the last thing we need.”

  “It’s not a leak,” I said.

  The door was cracked; I pushed it open from the center, staying away from the metal doorknob. The bathroom was full of water. It poured from the faucet into the full sink and over the lip of the counter in a moonlit cataract. It was beautiful. My mom looked confused.

  “Did someone leave the water on?” she asked, more to herself than to me.

  “Nobody left the water on, Mom.”

  A cockroach edged along the wall. I stomped behind it to scare it into the water. It stopped at the margin of the pool, feelers working; I stomped again. It shot into the water, and for a minute all its little legs flailed at once. Then it floated, dead.

  Mom looked at me like she was finally paying attention.

  “We need to leave,” I said, and she nodded.

  Nate was sleeping with his scrawny arm thrown over his face. Mom shook his shoulder lightly and whispered in his ear, “Nate, sweetie, we need to go outside for a minute.”

  “What?” he said, still half-asleep. “No.”

  But he got out of bed and let Mom lead him out of the room by the hand. In a few years, he’d be in high school, but I still remembered when he was a baby, and if you offered him your finger he’d cling on for dear life.

  I didn’t believe in God or praying, but I whispered “please please please” as I put my hand on the handle of the front door. When it wouldn’t move, I yanked at it angrily, like I could somehow break the lock. The back door was the same.

  “What’s happening?” Nate asked me.

  Mom was trying the windows—all locked down, of course.

  “There’s a problem with the house,” I said to Nate, “so we need to find a way out.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked. “What kind of problem?”

  When I was six and Nate was a year old, just learning to walk and point and call for me with his baby version of my name, some of my mom’s older cousins came to visit. While Nate and I played with blocks on the floor, the woman said to Mom, “It’s nice you have one of your own now.”

  I saw Mom start to get angry, saying something to the cousins I didn’t understand. Then I stood up and faced the woman myself.

  “He’s not hers,” I said. “He’s mine.”

  We didn’t play together anymore, but I still knew him better than anyone. I knew he’d keep asking questions until I told him the truth.

  “Not all of Grandpa’s robots were destroyed,” I said. “Some of them were really tiny, and they got into the walls of the house. Now they control the electricity, and they’re trying to use it to hurt us.”

  Nate nodded, like none of this was surprising to him.

  “So why don’t we turn the electricity off?” he asked.

  Mom was bashing a chair uselessly against the triple-reinforced windowpane. I touched her shoulder.

  “Nate has a better idea,” I said.

  The central panel was useless now, but the circuit breakers were in the basement. I flicked the light on easily; the robots seemed to have stopped playing with the lights for the time being. Maybe that had just been practice.

  The basement was cold and smelled like earth. It held an old laundry sink, a ratty yellow couch, and a little pile of mouse droppings in every corner. Their animalness reassured me.

  The circuit breakers were in a big beige box against the far wall. Inside were three long rows of switches, all identical, all unlabeled. Mom started flipping all of them. I listened for any rumblings in the house, any sparks or crackles or changes in the soft nighttime background noise, but I heard only the faint trickle of the faucet flooding the second floor. Mom flicked the last switch. The light stayed on.

  “Maybe there’s a master switch somewhere else,” Mom said. “Your grandfather was always jerry-rigging things like that.”

  “Or maybe the robots got to the wiring and made it so we couldn’t turn it off,” I said.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “I think we call 911,” I said.

  Mom and I looked at each other. Neither of us knew what would happen if the police found out we had robots in the house. The laws passed after the Wars allowed them to use any means necessary to destroy robots and anyone attempting to build or house them.

  “If I could just find an override switch,” Mom said. “I’m sure he would’ve put one in.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You guys stay down here and look for the switch. I’m going to go up and make the call. I don’t want to see what else they know how to do.”

  Mom nodded.

  “Be careful and come straight back,” she said.

  I didn’t roll my eyes like I usually would have.

  “I will,” I said.

  The sound of the water would’ve been soothing if I didn’t know what it meant. I stopped in the living room; it was pouring bright and deadly over the stairs. I thought about what the house would look like if the robots took over—a lake in the hallway, mushrooms growing from the walls. And us somewhere, turning into dust.

  I didn’t like my chances if I tried to hop around the water. I went to the kitchen where the boxes were still piled, and found the one labeled COAT CLOSET. I riffled through it—our old down jackets from when we used to go hiking, all four of us, in the mountains north of the New Cities; Nate’s tiny basketball jersey from three years ago; Dad’s winter coat, still with the smell of him that made my eyes fill. I put them all aside and dragged from the bottom of the box what I’d been looking for: a pair of rubber boots.

  I still tried to hop around the water as I ran up the stairs, but when I heard it splash against my boots I didn’t panic, and I made it to the top safely. My mobile was charging by my bed just where I’d left it; the bed was unmade and looked inviting, like I could just crawl into it and go back to sleep.

  I didn’t—I dialed.

  The operator sounded sleepy. In this town, she probably didn’t get very many calls.

  “This is going to be kind of hard to explain,” I said, “but we have robots in our house.”

  I heard a click, and I thought she’d hung up on me. Maybe she thought I was a prankster.
Then I heard a different voice, much colder and more alert.

  “You’re located at 4444 Pin Oak Drive? Confirm please.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Describe your emergency.”

  “Well,” I said, “my grandfather was a roboticist, and this is his house, and I think he left some robots here. They’re really tiny, and they got into the wiring—”

  As I talked I could hear the chopping of helicopter blades, far away and then closer. I looked out the window and saw a searchlight strafe the house.

  “Are you here already?” I asked.

  “Remain calm, Ms. Karel. Do not attempt to leave the house until the officers tell you to do so. Find a safe location with your family and stay there.”

  “How do you know my name?” I asked.

  But the woman hung up. I stared at the phone for a minute. The searchlight lit the window again. I knew I should be relieved that someone else was in charge now, but I thought of what the therapist had said about my grandfather, and about how the woman had already known my name, and I was scared. I took my mobile with me and ran down the stairs to the basement.

  The door was shut. I pushed it.

  “Mom!” I called.

  The house was silent except for the sound of water, and a hot panic spread from my chest to my fingertips.

  “Mom!” I called again.

  I heard her then.

  “Tessa,” she called. “We shut the door because Nate was scared of the water. And it just locked.”

  “Are you okay?” I yelled.

  “We’re fine,” she said, but I could hear her straining to sound calm.

  I listened more closely. Under the steady streaming of water overhead, I could hear a more muffled sound behind the door.

  “Mom, is that faucet on?”

  A pause.

  “It is, but we’re fine. We’re far away from it. What did the police say?”

  “They’re coming. They’re going to get us out,” I said. I wasn’t sure how or even if the police were going to help us, but if Mom could lie to make me feel better, I could do the same for her.

  “Just stay away from the water,” I called. “They’ll be here soon.”

  “Where are you going?” Nate yelled. “Stay here!”

  “I’m just going to check things out,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Outside the kitchen window, I saw fire trucks gathering. Then an unmarked van pulled up and ten people in dark clothes got out of it. Two of them were carrying what looked like suitcases.

  I remembered now a story I’d heard in the New Cities, about a young man in a bad part of town, somebody’s cousin’s cousin. He was a smart kid who didn’t like following the rules, and he dropped out of high school to do his own thing. One day he disappeared. The rumor was that he was building robot parts—not even intelligent machines, just remote-controlled arms and little rovers that darted across the floor—and some plainclothes guys from the government showed up and said, “Come work for us or go to jail forever.”

  But there was another version of the story, one where the men from the government never talked to him at all. Instead they set fire to his apartment with him in it, so that not even a part of a robot could make it out into the world.

  I looked outside at the fire trucks gleaming under the streetlights, as bright red as the day they came to my elementary school to take us all for rides. I thought again about the therapist. I wondered what the neighbors had done to my grandfather after the Wars, after he came home from detainment already broken down and guilt-ridden and scared. Of course he would’ve felt like he needed security. Maybe he built the microbots not because he was bored, not because he couldn’t stay away, but because he needed to protect his house and they were the best way he knew how.

  But one of our problems with robots—one of the things that led to the Wars—was that they always took things too literally. Maybe they not only protected the house, but protected the house from him.

  The stairs were completely inundated now, a waterfall pouring into the kitchen. I watched it as I opened the network app on my mobile and scanned for new names. I saw all the networks I’d seen before, and then a new one, called “home.” That must be how the robots were talking to each other across all the different parts of the house. I started up my password app—Grandpa would have given his bots good security protocols, but that was decades ago, and cracking had gotten a lot more sophisticated since then.

  Outside, the plainclothes officers were talking to the firemen. One of them opened a suitcase; I couldn’t see inside. But now I could see men and women crouching in the bushes around the house, all of them with guns. I took a deep breath in and out like my mom had taught me when I was little and afraid of monsters.

  I looked back at my mobile. I was in.

  I opened up the command terminal, and I could see the robots talking to each other, right there in my hands. They used a combination of letters and numbers, something they’d taken from my grandfather’s natural language and made their own. I thought of feral children, left alone in the house for years after their parents died, speaking to each other in their own singsong tongue:

  DEF.SETVARS: LOC (88, 6, 19);

  DEF.CHEK: ALL;

  DEF.CLOSE;

  STAT LOC (92): POWERED;

  DEF.OPEN;

  I wondered which of the lines scrolling across my screen were talking about killing me and my family. Under other circumstances I would’ve wanted to learn the language—now I just had to learn it well enough to wipe it out.

  I watched the screen, looking for patterns. The def terms looked like commands, although I had no idea what they meant—they probably referred to tiny movements I wouldn’t be able to see, even if I could look inside the walls. And I figured that loc was location, but the robots clearly hadn’t divided up the house the way people would—there were hundreds of location numbers, and only seven rooms. My only hope was to find a command that shut down all the robots at all locations, all at once.

  I looked outside again. The man with the suitcase looked like he was arguing with one of the firemen. A woman in black—tall, skinny, square-shouldered; she almost looked like me—was carrying her suitcase up close to the house.

  I typed the first thing I could think of:

  DEF.STOP: ALL;

  I listened for any change, any winding down of tiny motors in the dark.

  Nothing.

  I tried the door; still locked. I’d been stupid to think such a simple command would do it. And I probably had only a few more guesses left—if the other bots saw too many bad inputs from my mobile, they might spot it as an intruder and boot it off the network. I tried to focus. I figured my grandfather had been caught by surprise—he hadn’t known what his robots could do, and he might not have had time to try to disable them. But I was betting that he’d taught them some command for “stand down,” long before they killed him, and I hoped they still responded to it.

  Out the window I saw that the argument was getting worse. The fireman had tears in his eyes. The other firemen were out of their trucks, standing motionless in a line, like some sort of ceremony was about to begin.

  Grandpa had been in the army, I remembered—maybe they’d respond to military commands. I tried:

  DEF.ATEASE: ALL;

  Nothing.

  DEF.FALLOUT: ALL;

  Nothing again.

  I heard scratching against the side of the house. It sounded like while the fireman and the man with the suitcase were arguing, the woman who looked like me was quietly placing explosives all around us.

  Maybe I needed something more specific, something that told them we weren’t a threat. That seemed complicated, though—I’d have to figure out how they referred to us, if they even had a term for humans at all.

  DEF.IGNORE: ALL;

  Nothing happened in the house, but I thought I noticed a slight pause in the stream of code on my screen. And amid the commands I started seeing lines like:

>   DEF.DEBUG: LOC (704);

  I was worried they were catching on.

  “It’s set,” I heard a woman’s voice say outside the house.

  And then from the basement: “Tessa! Tessa!”

  Nate’s voice sounded years younger, like fear was pushing him back in time. I ran downstairs to the basement door.

  “Are you okay?” I yelled.

  “We’re fine,” said Mom. Her voice sounded far away, like they were backed against the far wall. “Are the police here?”

  “They’re working on it,” I lied. “Where’s the water?”

  “We’re staying dry,” Mom said.

  Then Nate yelled, “It’s everywhere! We’re standing on the couch and there’s nowhere to go.”

  I imagined them trapped, huddled in the dark, while the water crept up to reach their skins. I didn’t know what I could do, except try to soothe Nate as long as possible. I wanted him to feel like we were protecting him, even if we couldn’t.

  “You’re safe on the couch, Nate. You’re going to be okay. Just pretend you’re in your bed and you’re dreaming. Lay down. Lay down and rest.”

  It came to me then like a door falling open, the thing Grandpa would’ve said to tell anyone, robot or human, so that they could stop fighting, that they were safe. I typed:

  DEF.LAYDOWN: ALL;

  A pause. I thought I heard a change in the sound of water. But then the commands began scrolling again, smooth as before.

  “Tessa!” Nate called again. His voice was quieter now, almost despairing.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said, but I didn’t see how it would.

  I ran back upstairs. Through the kitchen window, I saw the police backing away from the house. The fireman was leaning up against the truck, his eyes closed like he was praying. I wondered what it would feel like when the house blew—if it would be slow, the fire spreading toward us as we tried to crawl away, or if we’d hear a bang and then we wouldn’t exist anymore, just like that. I wondered if the robots would really be destroyed, or if they’d just lie low, waiting to come out until the next time they found a power grid and could start their work or game anew. I thought again of abandoned children—this time retreating to the woods, braiding each other’s hair and singing to each other and waiting.