I reached into my pocket, still afraid that Clarke would turn on me at any moment.
“What about the others?” Jenny said.
“Fuck the others. Preparty.” I pulled the chips out. Clarke grabbed one and shoved it into the USB port on his chest. “Come on, come on.”
Jenny held her hand out and I handed her a chip. She uploaded it.
“I have never—” I started.
Clarke: “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
“Here,” Jenny said, handing me the chip that she had used. “We’ll fly together.”
“Nice arm,” Clarke said to me. Then he pulled away on his bike. The sound receded. I was left alone with Jenny. I had made the right decision.
“Come on,” she said, impatient. I thought she looked off-balance.
“Are you okay?”
“Come on,” she said again.
I realized she wanted me to climb on top of her the way Clarke had. I did, and she started moving before I had a firm grip. I didn’t fall off, though. I uploaded the chip she had handed me. When I looked over her shoulder, the world had changed. It was daytime, and I had to turn off my night vision. Instead of the cliff and the ocean we were in a dense jungle. The leaves hit against us as we drove along a narrow trail. Jenny’s clothes had changed. She wore torn cloth that only just covered her enough to be decent. I looked down to see that I was dressed the same. “Whoa,” I said, and held on tighter.
“Yeah,” Jenny said.
There were sounds all around us. I realized they were animals. I was suddenly afraid. Up ahead, I saw a figure on an animal. It was Clarke. He was here too.
“Where are we going?” I said into Jenny’s ear.
“Town.”
We were gaining on Clarke. Jenny really could fly. Then we were in the town, although it wasn’t what I had expected. The buildings were huts. Their construction seemed impossible; they were much too large, considering the wood and leaves that had been used to build them.
Clarke dismounted and the animals fell silent. “Whoo-eee!” Clarke shouted, and he pointed his hands up in the air. “That should bring them running.”
I realized that Clarke was seeing something else. I turned to Jenny. “Huts?” I said.
“Yeah, graybeard. Huts.”
I reached a hand up to my face and felt that I did have a beard. I had been given a program. I was a robot. So why did this all seem so wrong?
A group of brutish-looking men approached. There was one girl with them, although she looked no older than a twelve-year-old human. I realized I wanted to hurt her. I looked at Jenny, but she wasn’t paying attention to me anymore.
“Look at this group here,” Clarke said.
“You started without us?” one of them said.
“Who’s this humanoid?” another said, pointing to me.
I stepped forward ready to punch him in the face. I wanted to see what was inside him, and it seemed as good a way to find out as any. But Clarke stepped up and put a hand on my chest. “This no-good piece of shit is the man that’s got your hookup,” Clarke said. “Grog.” He looked at me. “That’s Grog, Cog, Smog, and Fairy.” He didn’t indicate which was which, and I didn’t care to find out. “Check out my man’s gun hand,” Clarke said, holding up my right arm, which still sported a clamp at the end.
“Give with the sims,” the one I decided to think of as Cog said.
“Ah-ah,” Clarke said, spinning around to my other side. “Numbers first.” And then Clarke cut through the group, everyone parting to let him by, and we all fell in line behind him. Jenny and the girl had their arms around each other. Cog fell into step with me.
“You’re staying out at the beach house,” Cog said to me.
“There’s no beach here,” I said. I looked around. There were small animals crawling on the tops of the buildings. “What are those?” I said.
Cog followed my gaze. “What do they look like?”
“Little people with tails and fur.”
Cog shook his head. “Fucking hell . . . Clarke, you bastard, this one’s already simmed up. Why the fuck do we have to wait?”
“Monkeys,” Jenny yelled, answering my question. “Come here, boy,” she called to one of them. I watched as he came to the edge of the roof, considered Jenny, and then ran off. “I guess he doesn’t like me.”
I moved up to join Jenny, more comfortable with her. I could tell that we were seeing the same thing.
Allistair’s was a tiny one-room hut that was almost completely empty when we crashed in. Our little group seemed to fill the place immediately, and everything was suddenly too loud. It would bring the other animals from the woods. It would endanger us all. “Shhhhh,” I said, but nobody heard me.
Allistair, or at least the person behind the counter, looked at us as though he had seen us all before, but he pulled a double take when he got to me. Clarke threw something down on the table, and then Allistair set chips out on the table for each of us. I took mine and uploaded. The numbers hit my system hard on top of the sim. I could feel my processes being kept busy trying to read the data, and as the numbers crunched everything got slower.
“Give ’em up,” Grog said.
Clarke said, “Now, my boy.”
I pulled the chips out of my pocket and they got passed around. Maybe the numbers were interfering with the sim, but the room no longer seemed to be the inside of a hut. It was now a square brick room, poorly lit. I saw that my companions all wore sweater vests and bowler hats, where before they had been dressed in the same tattered clothes I had. Some of them had removed simul-skin from various parts of their bodies. One of them had clamps for hands.
One of the patrons from the corner came up to us. He was an old robot, perhaps an order three, with no human features other than his form. “Hey, boys,” he said. “Hey, boys.” A chip got passed around to him. He took it back to his corner, bowing as he went.
I found another sim chip in my hand and I uploaded. The world didn’t change this time, but everything seemed brighter. It was as if I could see what was going to happen before it actually happened. I could see that Jenny was mine for the night. What could I do? a part of me thought. I tried to message her only to find the numbers had frozen my messaging program.
“What are we going to do, Clarke?” somebody asked.
Clarke had Fairy in his lap. She was a full-size robot after all, I saw.
“Sapien was built by humans,” Clarke said.
The group looked at me. I felt embarrassed and wished that Clarke hadn’t shared the information. And then I was annoyed with myself, because usually I was proud of the fact that I had been built by humans. It granted me a sense of superiority that I was somehow closer to the creators, and I therefore had to be more like them. But here I knew that there was no value to that. Grog actually apologized to me, putting a placating hand on my back.
“More numbers!” Jenny yelled.
Clarke paid. We uploaded.
“Let’s go,” Clarke said. He moved like lightning. We all did, leaving sparks behind us. Outside it was night, and the town was as I had remembered it upon arriving several days before. But everything was rimmed with neon outlines. I tried to get next to Jenny again. She was deliberately staying away from me, I could see now. She had dangled herself in front of me back in the cabana, but for them it was all a game. Bring out the human-built, he’s so humanoid, it’ll be great fun. What else is there to do in this town? No, she was teasing me, and I had been stupid to allow myself to think anything else. I had come . . . Well, I couldn’t think why I had come.
“Grog,” Clarke said, and Grog came to his side. “Throw me.” Clarke pointed at one of the windows nearby.
Grog picked Clarke up. The group stopped and formed a half circle around them. Grog pulled back and launched Clarke, who slammed into the window. The window broke, glass falling to t
he ground. The wood of the frame splintered, but Clarke didn’t jump in, as I thought he might. He stood up, and the group waited. Nothing happened. Clarke stepped back. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
Smog went over to the window on the other side, reached up, and broke it with his fists. Clarke moved on and we all followed him. Jenny was beside me now. “Why’d we break those windows?” I said.
She shrugged. “They were there.”
“What about those?” I said, pointing to one of the houses across the street, its windows still intact.
She shrugged again.
I knew I should say something about her hair . . . something so that she would pay attention to me. I didn’t want to lose her attention.
Clarke stopped suddenly. “John Gropner,” he said.
Fairy wheeled around with her arms out. “Wheeeeeee.”
“Gropner,” Smog said.
“No,” Jenny said.
“For Sapien,” Clarke said, looking at me.
“Clarke, you kill Gropner and you’ll be sorry in the morning.”
“You kill Gropner and you’ll be sorry in the morning,” Clarke played back Jenny’s voice. “Look, last human, last human-made robot, it’s only fitting.” Clarke looked at me. “Well, not last human,” he said.
When Clarke started moving again, everybody seemed to know where he was going. We passed through the center of town, where a large fountain was still running with water, the lights from inside causing the arcs of water to glow, or perhaps that was just part of the sim. Down the street from the fountain, there was a one-story house set back from the street; a small patch of grass formed a rectangle in front of the house. I was certain the grass was artificial. Clarke went up to the door as if he had done it many times, and knocked. I expected there to be no answer, as there had been in the house where he had broken the windows, but almost immediately the door opened. A small man stood in the doorway. It was immediately apparent that he was human. His body was bent, his face covered in whiskers—real, not like the gray beard that had briefly covered my face in the sim. His hair was white and wild. “Clarke,” he said, when he saw who it was. He looked past him at the group of us standing on the sidewalk.
“Gropner, it’s time,” Clarke said.
“Is it?” the old man said.
And then Clarke reached forward, grabbed the old man, and held him above his head. As he turned and crossed the lawn, he extended his telescopic arms, raising the old man high into the air. The group of us was silent in the suddenly eerie quiet. Then Clarke threw the old man into the street. The sound of the old man’s body hitting the ground was flat. If there had been any question before as to whether he was bio or robotic, the blood that flowed from his nose and right elbow made it clear. I thought I should leap forward and stop this. The blood was glowing red; it was clearly acidic, like battery fluid, dangerous, a good argument that would also protect this human.
Clarke descended on Gropner’s form and kicked him in the face. Gropner made a sound.
Hadn’t they known each other? Why would this man allow this? The rest of the group surrounded the man on the ground. Each took a turn kicking his body. Even Jenny rolled over his legs with her wheels. I closed in with the group, but I didn’t participate. I opened and closed the clamp where my right hand should have been. The man’s legs weren’t in the right position anymore. They had been broken, allowed to flop at odd angles.
I looked around. A group of decent-looking robots stood a little way up the street, watching. I wanted to call to them, but I didn’t remember how. I kept trying to send a message, but it only bounced in my system: “Help, help, help.” I looked in the other direction and saw a family of robots standing on their front lawn watching as well.
Clarke and Cog seemed the only people interested in beating the man anymore, and then only halfheartedly. He wasn’t dead; amazingly, he hadn’t even lost consciousness but was moaning gently.
“Think there’s anything good in there?” Cog said to nobody in particular.
Clarke looked up at the house. “Nah. Let’s get some numbers.” He walked away from the man on the ground, and we all followed him. Jenny had her arms draped over Fairy, and the two were singing, their high, feminine voices screeching in the night. I looked up at the sky. The stars seemed to sparkle with a greater intensity than was usual, almost flashing completely on and off, like a pulse, or perhaps a code. The sim must not have worn off yet. I had the sudden thought that the beating might have been part of the sim’s environment, but when I looked back Gropner was still lying on the ground. The crowd of bystanders had grown. A young robot ran into the street, looking after us, and then, satisfied that we were really leaving, he took a running kick at Gropner’s face. I didn’t flinch; I didn’t even experience the requisite surge of empathy that should have accompanied such a sight; I was numb to our gang’s exploits, the sims and numbers coursing through my system deadening me. I was a dead thing.
Back in Allistair’s nobody had moved. There were numbers already spread out on the counter, and everyone in the group took one and then fit themselves into a large circular booth against the wall. I passed up the numbers chip that was handed to me, and my rejection went unnoticed. Jenny was opposite me, still entangled in Fairy’s limbs, laughing. They were sharing a sim and didn’t seem to see anyone else at the table. We had just beaten a man to death! Well, he wasn’t dead when we left him, but what human could sustain such a beating, especially one so old? There was no doubt that he was dying even now. Why?
“Why?” I said, turning to the robot next to me. Grog?
He didn’t respond; he was talking to Clarke across the table.
I tried my other side. “Why?”
This syllable—one letter, really—was so elusive, so important. It was this word that had sent me to Barren Cove, and perhaps this word that had sent me out that night. For all our perfections, our complexities, the intricacies of our systems, our ability to assimilate and synthesize information that was gathered through multiple sensory inputs—they built us ears! They built us eyes!—why had they given us this word, this question: Why? It was a hole in our design. It was what made us more like them. These other robots laughing around the table, deliberately conflating their systems, perhaps they didn’t feel it, this hole inside them, because they were robot built. They had evolved, able to procreate, more bio than me, and yet less human. They still knew to hate. That had to be part of it.
“My dad’s getting treads,” Cog said.
“No he isn’t,” Grog said.
“He’s getting fucking treads.”
“My dad’s lucky I don’t just shut him off; he does nothing but sit in the house all day.”
Hadn’t I been promised a good time? I thought that I had. I tried to recall the data, but the numbers were still in the way. Why? I wanted to shout it—why!
Everyone at the table fell silent. The old man that we had passed a sim to before stopped just feet away from the table, no doubt on his way to beg another round, now frozen in fear at the silence.
Everyone looked at me. I had messaged them all. I stood up. There wasn’t enough room between the bench and the table to stand, so as I stood, the table pressed up against the people across from me. “Why did you do it? What’s the matter with all of you?”
Clarke smirked back at me. “How’d you lose your hand, old man?”
I pointed the clamp at him. “You lost my hand!”
“You’re one robo motherfucker,” Clarke said.
Cog picked up one of the numbers chips and tossed it at the old robot still standing a few feet from our table. I wasn’t an old man, I wanted to say; he was an old man. He didn’t even look human!
Clarke opened and closed his metal jaw and held out his hands. “What else is there to do?”
The girls were whispering to each other.
I turned to go out, but
my legs caught on the bench and I fell back into the seat. Everyone else was waiting for me. I grabbed one of the numbers chips off the table and uploaded it. There was some light laughter at that. I leaned back. My systems were moving so slowly, so slowly. I knew that there would be a system error soon and I would have to shut down. I was happy for that; they could do with me what they wanted.
10.
“YOUR HAND ARRIVED,” Kent said from across the table.
I turned and tried to remember being brought back to the cabana. The surf rushed in a smooth arc that foamed as it hit the shore. Seagulls provided the descant over the ocean waves. I sat forward, resting my arms on the tabletop; they felt so much lighter than they had the night before.
Kent held up a small cardboard box. “I brought it down so we wouldn’t have a repeat of last time.”
“Thank you,” I said, watching him push the box across the table. “How long have you been sitting there?”
“Only half an hour. There is something pleasant about hearing the ocean waves, so mathematical and yet irregular. It’s like watching the second hand on a clock and knowing that your internal clock will match it. Do you ever do that?”
I didn’t answer him.
“You ought to try it. It can help the hours fly.” He looked around as though he were seeing the place for the first time. “It is rather dismal, isn’t it?”
“It suits my needs,” I said. He didn’t even begin to resemble the Kent recalled in Dean’s files. Who was he?
He shrugged. “So you say. Do you need help with that?” Kent said, indicating the unopened box that sat on the table between us. He sat up, exposing quite a bit of one of his thighs as his bathrobe fell open.
I realized that he wanted to see the hand. Perhaps it was like his fascination with robot history. I leaned forward and grabbed the box. “I think I’ll be fine,” I said, opening it. The hand rested between two plastic pillows of enclosed air. It could be seen through the upper pillow, obscured by the plastic and the blue letters of warning that coated it. Apparently, the packaging could be deadly. I picked up the new hand with my good hand, holding it in front of my face.
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