The Robot Chronicles

by Hugh Howey

  With temperatures and wind chills in the range seen recently, frostbite and hypothermia from prolonged exposure are real concerns. Death can strike long before the body actually freezes.

  Mathison cursed the woman, cursed himself.

  What was her story? What tragedy could make the woman think something like that could take the place of a real, breathing human child?

  Or could it?

  The woman beside him continued to sob. What have I done? he asked himself. What have we done?

  Had he just left a little girl to perish in the cold? Did it matter that she had her mother’s eyes, her hair, was made in her mother’s image? Could she feel the coldness overcome her, the horror of darkness closing in, the fear of dying alone, unloved? After she was gone, would it matter, if she didn’t have a soul?

  And what if she did?

  What did it mean for him to make the choice to leave her there? Had he just failed the Turing test of his own humanity?

  “Damn it!” he said.

  The wind pushed back at the truck door as Mathison fumbled at it, stumbled outside again. He had to lean forward to keep from being blown back.

  Every step was agony now, not just because his constant shivering now made him falter, but because every step was a repudiation of all that he’d taken for granted before tonight. But he followed the truck’s headlights, farther, farther, out into the night.

  When he reached the girl, still there where he remembered, he knelt down without looking at her palm, at the ugly brand that set her apart from everyone. Instead, he looked at her.

  She was just a little girl, in a party dress and stockings, helpless, almost sleeping. The smallest thing. Her lips were ashen, her eyes were closed, and her eyelashes were frosted over in crystals. But she was breathing. The girl was alive.

  She stirred without opening her eyes, when he reached under her arms to lift her up. “Daddy,” she murmured.

  The snow blinded him. “No, sweetie,” he said, through tears. “I’m so sorry.”

  Not more than sixty pounds, he thought, as he lifted her. The smallest thing. So frail, almost inconsequential.

  Her ribbon had come undone, and her auburn hair was askew, strewn with snow, the crystals sparkling like stars. He brushed them away as he carried her back, back toward the headlights in the distance, back to the warmth from the opening door, back into her mother’s arms.

  Interstate reopened

  The westbound lanes of I-94 are now open to traffic after being closed while officials investigated the crash.

  Officials had advised early Friday afternoon against travel on I-94 because of icy road conditions and limited visibility.

  There were snowfall warnings for several areas around Port Huron on Friday evening. Those warnings have since been lifted.

  A Word from Samuel Peralta

  The classic Turing test is a qualitative measure of a machine's ability to mimic the behavior a human. The test was posed by Alan Mathison Turing, a British mathematician, philosopher and computer scientist.

  As I write this, the Turing test has just been passed in real life, by an artificial intelligence that its programmers call Eugene Goostman. This A.I. fooled the test judges, at least 33% of the time, into believing they were conversing not with a robot, but with a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy.

  “Humanity” is the story of a double Turing test, about how a little girl and a man both fail their tests, and their redemption.

  The epigraph is taken from the film A.I. by Steven Spielberg, a modern retelling of Pinocchio (or the commedia dell’arte Buratino) in which a robot boy longs to regain the love of his human mother by becoming “real.”

  “Humanity” also references the experience of the Holocaust era, when a Star of David was used as a method of identifying Jews. The apartheid of the world of “Humanity” is underscored by my Three Principles of Robotics—with apologies to Isaac Asimov—mentioned in passing in this story and explored elsewhere in my other stories, including “Liberty” (subtitled “Seeking a Writ of Habeas Corpus for a Non-Human Being”). It’s a construct that allows me to explore the nature of, not robots, but human beings.

  “Humanity” is set in a world I think of as the Labyrinth—the same world that houses my stories “Trauma Room,” “Hereafter,” and “Liberty”—a world where corporations have expanded beyond governments, where people live in the shadow of surveillance by telepaths, and where robots are second-class members of society, on the verge of becoming self-aware.

  If that world sounds almost familiar, you’d be right. Change “telepaths” to “intelligence agencies” and “robots” to the name of any one of the many displaced segments in our societies, and we’d be talking about the world we live in today.

  Ever since I fell in love with science and speculative fiction—both the classic writers, including Asimov and Ray Bradbury, and the more contemporary, including Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro—I’ve realized that what such fiction does so well is to illuminate not the future, but the present.

  And yet, we live in a present in fear of the future—of something unknown, dystopian, apocalyptic. I believe that, despite all this, there is promise. There is hope. I write about that, and I hope you’re with me for the journey.

  My website—forever being revamped—is http://www.samuelperalta.com. And if I have new books, a continuation to “Humanity,” or other stories, a small circle will hear about it first on my free newsletter http://bit.ly/SamPeraltaNews. Please join me there.

  Many thanks to my editor, David Gatewood, whose surgical eye kept me from splitting too many infinitives. Thanks, too, to my colleagues in these pages and in my community of science and speculative fiction writers, for their encouragement and support of a simple poet. It’s a privilege to share these pages with such talented authors.

  The best is yet to come.

  Adopted

  by Endi Webb

  The fierce pounding on the metal double doors escalated. Louder, harder. Like metal hammers. I was scared, more scared than I had been in weeks, though the events of the previous few days seemed to have been having a competition among themselves to see which one could make a twelve-year-old boy pee his pants first.

  I looked up at Dad, the man I had always known as Dad, and he just stared ahead at the rattling door, the hinges shaking, the sound of metal scraping on metal coming from the other side. His breathing was labored and heavy, still a little raspy from the knife that punctured his lung weeks ago. The banging turned to crashing, and he gripped my trembling hand tighter.

  I remembered the zombie movies my dad and brother would take me to just a few years ago, and this was always my favorite part. The unseen walking corpses would bang on the doors, trying to get at the tasty brains of the cowering people hiding inside.

  But these were not zombies.

  They were men. And women. Some children.

  At least, they looked like people.

  I could never tell a robot from a real person. They acted like people. They smelled like people. They laughed and cried like people. But when they decided to kill you, they were not people.

  They were inhuman.

  And they were stronger than people. One time, my dad took me on a trip to New York. We rode a lot of trains. In one train station the crowd was enormous, and no one saw it coming. A man on the concourse walked up behind a woman waiting for a train, and just stared at her until she turned to look at him.

  And then he punched his fist into her side.

  His fist went right into her body, clear up to his elbow. She didn’t even scream. Just coughed a little blood and shook a bit—and that was all. She fell down and the man calmly walked away, as a station full of terrified passengers quickly emptied itself, hysterical people scattering, screaming in all directions.

  I didn’t move though. I was too scared. I couldn’t even scream. I was nine. I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. My dad just grabbed me and ran.

  It was like that now. I
wanted to say something to Dad. Anything. Are they going to get past the door? Do you have any bullets left? Do we still have time to go to Charlie’s grave? Are we still having pizza for dinner? But my throat tightened with each nerve-wracking crash, and my joints stiffened in terror as I saw the hinges shake.

  “We can’t stay here.” Dad let go of my hand and paced up and down, searching the room we were trapped in. He opened the other door in the room and confirmed that it was just a storage closet. He slammed it shut. He grabbed a chair and stood on it, knocking loose a ceiling panel with his already-bloodied fist. Jumping up, he grabbed the edges of the adjacent panels, pulled himself halfway through the ceiling, and looked around.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  The crashes had given way to powerful thuds, as our pursuers began assailing the door with a heavy object.

  Dad lowered himself back onto the chair. “Come here. Now!” I ran to him and he grabbed me under the armpits and lifted me up into the hole in the ceiling.

  “Grab onto the sides and pull yourself in!” I did as he said, and hoisted myself over the edge of a nearby panel. He followed close behind, and when he was up he pointed to a large duct.

  “Crawl.” I obeyed, crawling as fast as I could to the large steel tube. It was supposed to be attached to the wall, but it was loose, and Dad ripped it the rest of the way off.

  “Go!” I climbed up into the ductwork, pulled out my cell phone to use as a flashlight, and worked my way down the tube, Dad close at my heels. Behind us I heard a loud clang and a crash, and thuds from who knows how many boots spilling into the room.

  “Dad!” I cried, my voice finally loosened by the action of climbing and crawling. I pointed behind us in the duct, directing my phone’s flashlight at a man that crawled toward us with inhuman speed. Dad already had the gun out. As the man reached out to Dad’s ankle, he got a bullet through his eye. He slumped onto the floor of the tube, and another man, close behind the first, crawled up and over his bloody companion. With another explosion from the gun, he too collapsed. The bullet had passed straight through his thin metal skull, splattering the wall of the duct with blood and what must have been bits of brain.

  Dad said something, but I couldn’t hear. My ears still hurt from the gunshots, amplified by the close quarters of the tube. He yelled it louder. I still couldn’t hear, but I saw him point down the duct.

  I crawled.

  I built a fort once, with my brother. We used fallen tree limbs and other junk that we found in the woods of the abandoned lot behind our house. It had a low, rickety ceiling and a few long passages that connected its three small rooms. We used to crawl between those rooms as we planned our battles against the enemy of the week. One room was our command and control center, and another was the armory where we stored the weapons—usually swords, given the abundance of sticks in the forest. We would take turns being the alien or the terrorist or the robot, and we’d swipe at each other with the makeshift weapons with a ferocity that surprised me then. I guess I had already seen too much violence.

  “Turn right.”

  I could hear again. I had reached a fork in the duct, and I veered to the right. As I crawled forward, my bare knees banged on the thin metal floor and I wondered how all the other robots that must be in the building wouldn’t hear it. When we finally exited the duct, they would be there. Waiting. Patiently, as all robots do. As all robots must—could a robot even be impatient? Can you program something to be impatient?

  I was not patient. I’d always wanted everything now, if not earlier. When I was younger, I wanted to do everything my older brother could do—play the video games Mom and Dad would let him play, watch the movies he could watch. I always wanted to use my dad’s latest phone or computer, even though I knew I’d have to wait to use his hand-me-downs.

  Dad huffed along behind me, squeezing his large body through the narrow tube. He was in okay shape for a person his age, but it always seemed like he struggled to keep up with me, whether we were going for a run, playing basketball or soccer, or being chased by killer robots. He fell farther behind as I continued on, and I heard his wheezing voice: “Wait up!”

  We came to a cross where we were presented with three directions to choose from. “Stop,” Dad spluttered. I held still, and he as well, though as we listened for pursuers all we could hear was his labored breathing. Somewhere far below us, we heard a door slam. We listened. Dad’s breathing had calmed, and now, just barely, we heard voices. In a room below us.

  Sir, they’ve disappeared. Dr. Fineman thinks they went up into the HVAC system, but the two grunts he sent up didn’t come back.

  Send more up. Try to direct them toward the experimentation rooms.

  The father has a gun.

  A pause.

  And that concerns me … how?

  But sir, do we want to send more men up if they just get shot?

  Another pause.

  Very well, sir.

  Robots called themselves men. I don’t know why—even if they looked like people, they weren’t. They were programmed. They had metal bones, metal skulls, fiber optics in their brains and nerves.

  But they bled.

  A few years ago, I watched the Terminator movies with my brother when Mom and Dad were out on a date. Our robots were kind of like those movie robots, but ours were way more real. More human. Grittier, funnier, kinder, and deadlier. And they weren’t all evil. At least, I don’t think so.

  I met one once, in school. The principal had arranged an assembly, and a robot came to speak to us. He was nice, even funny, even if the humor seemed forced. Staged. He said he was part of a group of robots that believed that humans and his kind could live in harmony, despite our recent history. He said there were some groups of robots that wanted the world to themselves, but most were peaceful. Our principal said it was kind of like the problem we’d all had with jihadists a few decades ago. Most Muslims were peaceful, even though a few wanted to kill us all.

  But a Muslim couldn’t punch his fist through a human torso.

  The speaking had stopped. Dad pointed to the right again and I crept forward as quietly as I could. I can’t remember how large the building was—it just looked like a police station—but we had been crawling for several minutes.

  Dad and I had been hiding in a dumpster last night when they picked us up. We thought they were the police, and they said they could take us to a safe place. When they brought us in the building, they separated us, and one officer asked me the strangest questions for about an hour before Dad showed up in the office and blew the man’s brains out. Questions like, Have you ever wanted to kill a loved one? Were you ever attracted to your mother? If a stranger offered you candy to stab him, would you do it? If a group of babies was about to be crushed by a falling building, how many would you save, knowing that each additional child you saved increased the chances of all of you dying by ten percent? Have you ever heard voices in your head telling you to do things? I didn’t know how to answer some of them, and it started feeling really creepy.

  We entered a stretch of tubing that had short branches going off to the right every ten feet or so, and with my light I saw that they all ended in vents after a few feet. Each branch must have terminated over a separate room. I pointed down one of them.

  “How about here?” I whispered.

  Dad hesitated, but said, “Okay. But let me go first.” I crawled ahead a few feet to let him open the grate, and after a minute he crawled through into the dark room. I followed. The space was filled with a long table surrounded with chairs. Some kind of conference room. There were a few whiteboards with diagrams and equations on them, and lots of Spanish.

  The robots all spoke perfect Spanish. It made sense, since the first robots had been made by a team at the University of Buenos Aires, and that was the language they coded in. When the robots started to learn on their own and reached the singularity, they preserved Spanish as their main language, but most robots seemed to speak English just fine, too. Just an
other program to upload, I supposed.

  The singularity was a lot less awesome than some people thought it would be. The idea was that mankind would build smarter and smarter computer programs, until finally, the programs themselves could design an even smarter program—without the help of a human. That program would then design an even smarter one, in less time, and the smarter one would build an even more advanced one in even less time, and so forth—until the time between one generation and the next would be so small that overnight there would be superintelligent computers. It didn’t happen quite that way—certain laws of physics took over, I didn’t really understand it. But robots did start to build other robots, until one day they started to look and sound just like humans.

  Dad put the grate back and tiptoed to the door. He put his ear up to it and listened for several minutes, his breathing assuming a regular pace now, and then motioned that I was to follow him. I cracked the door open and looked out into the hallway. It was lit, but we didn’t see anyone there. Down the hallway to the right we spotted a small room where we could hear a copy machine hard at work.

  Dad motioned to the left with his head and I followed him. He glided quickly down the hall and opened the next door down. We entered and shut the door as quietly as we could behind us. In this room was another table, but this one was set as if for dinner. There were place settings, cups, plates, butter, pitchers of water, and in the middle, a basket of fruit.

  My parents found me on their doorstep in a basket. I was nearly one, and they never found out who left me. My mom, my new mom, had been in a car accident the year before that left her unable to have any more kids—just Charlie, who’s four years older than me—so she called me her miracle baby. They never told me about it though, until a few years ago, and I was always the type to have irrational fears about being different anyway. For years, until I was ten or so, I thought I was retarded. Like, literally retarded. My reasoning was that a retarded person wouldn’t know they were retarded, so because I thought I was normal, that meant I was retarded. It affected how I talked, and gave me serious self esteem issues—so bad that lots of other kids probably thought I was retarded. Then last year I thought I was gay because a kid on the bus said “That’s so gay!” after I told him something—which I can’t even remember now, I just remember being petrified when he said it since the gays at my school weren’t treated very well by the other kids. Not until I kissed Suzie Wilkinson a few months later did that fear get put to rest.