The Robot Chronicles

by Hugh Howey

  This room had a window, and Dad rushed over to it and looked out.

  “It’s clear. Let’s go.” He opened the window and motioned to me. There was a large maple tree in front of the window that obscured the view of most of the parking lot, except for the area directly below the window. I climbed up on the sill, and Dad held my hands as he lowered me as far as he could reach. He froze.

  Hey Carla! How’s it going?

  From across the parking lot came a reply. Oh, hey Jeff. Pretty good. And you?

  A hard lump formed in my throat, and I looked up at Dad. His face was bleached white. I mouthed to him, Pull me up! but he shook his head. We both listened, me hanging in the air, him bent out over the windowsill.

  I hung there.

  Just like before. Years ago.

  We listened quietly to the pointless parking-lot banter.

  Did you make your quota yet this month? The man’s voice. Jeff. I couldn’t see him, but could hear him from somewhere below me.

  Not yet. I’ve got several cases I’m working on, but nothing’s panned out yet. You?

  I got one yesterday. A sweet little thing named Amanda. Out in the suburbs.

  Lucky. They like the young ones. They’ll give you double credit for that.

  Yeah. They already extracted DNA from her last night, and hooked her up to the cortical mapper. Screamed like a banshee when they stuck the needle in her brain, the poor thing.

  Aww. It just breaks your heart when the young ones can’t take the pain. The older ones though, okay, I know this is just awful of me, but I get a kick out of watching the work on those ones.

  Well, I can’t blame you, figuring all the things they did to us.

  The Directors want us to be kinder. More forgiving—whatever that means. But I tell you, I just can’t do it. The screams from the older ones are music to my ears. The woman laughed.

  Yeah, this little one we’ve got … we’ve got some interesting tests for her. We found an aunt of hers. This time we’ll make her watch. See what happens. Dr. Dressler thinks the new integrated pulsed guilt algorithm will be ready after the data we get from this run. It seemed to work in beta, but kept on crashing when we tried it on the Rohvlings.

  Huh. Well, anyway, I’ve got to get home. Victor hates it when I’m late. And there’s that new show on Fox that starts tonight …

  All right. See you tomorrow, Carla.

  See ya, Jeff.

  I heard a car door slam, and an engine start up. I looked up at Dad. His face was white. Slowly, he pulled me up. When I was up high enough, I lifted my leg over the windowsill and spilled into the room.

  “What do we do?” I whispered.

  He didn’t answer at first, just stared at the floor. He struggled for words. “I don’t know. We might have to wait until dark to get out.”

  “What are they doing?”

  Dad just clenched his jaw, shaking his head. “They say that before some of the cities on the east coast fell to the robots, it started like this. Thousands of people disappeared, until finally there was the purge. There must have been a million robots in New York alone before people could escape. People came west, but no one was sure that it was only humans who came. Homeland Security finally wised up and put in those full-body scanners everywhere and tracked the movements of all known robots, but they must be infiltrating us somehow. What are they doing? Who knows?”

  I remembered the day when it was all over the news. The cable news shows were all normal since they were mostly shot in New York and were run by robots anyway, so of course they said everything was normal, but all the local stations showed streams of people driving, biking, running frantically out of the cities. And then the online videos that even the local news refused to show—some of them were pretty gruesome.

  From then on, in school, I was paranoid not of being retarded, or gay, but of being a robot. That was all anyone talked about. The robots are coming to get us. The robots will kill us all. The robots will take over the world and enslave us all like we enslaved them. If I ever meet a robot I’ll just kill him. And so on. When some of the kids suspected one of the smarter students of being a robot, they jumped him in the hall after school and beat the shit out of him. One time one of them had a pipe and beat the kid’s head with it until his skull cracked. They sent the poor kid to the hospital and he didn’t come back to school for a month. After that, my biggest fear was finding out I was really a robot.

  “We need to hide. Come on.” Dad looked up, then stepped up onto a chair and gingerly placed his foot on the table between two plates. He reached up and lifted off a ceiling panel and beckoned to me. I climbed up on the table with him, and he lifted me up to the hole in the ceiling, where I grabbed onto the edges and hoisted myself up. He reached up and grabbed the edges of the ceiling.

  The door opened.

  Dad immediately dropped back down to the table and grabbed the gun out of his pocket, aiming it at those entering. He fired, and one man collapsed, his chest bleeding. The other man flung himself at Dad, knocking him to the floor. I screamed. The gun went off again and a large chunk of flesh blew out from the man’s back; the bullet passed straight through and lodged in the ceiling, not far from me. The bloody man crumpled onto Dad, and they both lay there on the floor, Dad pinned under the larger dead body. I trembled and struggled for breath, fighting my fear. My throat constricted as I looked toward the door.

  A third man stood there. He held a gun, pointed straight at Dad, who was struggling to push the corpse off of him. The man in the doorway looked up at me.

  “Should I kill him?”

  I shook my head, though my head was now shaking of its own accord anyway. I looked again at Dad, who by now had pushed the body off him, and saw that he was covered in the man’s blood.

  “Why not?”

  I shook my head again. Dad just looked at the man, his gun still in his hand, but lying on his chest. I saw that the man’s gun was now pointed at me, and Dad was also shaking his head.

  “Please.” Dad said quietly.

  “Tell me. Why not?”

  “Please, no.” Dad trembled.

  “I think one of you should die. You killed six of my men. Justice must be served. Now I just need to decide if it will be a greater punishment to kill you, or to make you watch me kill him.” He was speaking to my dad, but inclined his head up to me.

  Dad’s jaw shook. “Please no. I’ll do anything you want. Don’t kill him.”

  The man pointed the gun back at Dad. “Then tell him to jump down, and I may let him live.”

  Dad’s eyes widened. But, hesitantly, he looked up to me and gave a quick nod to tell me to come down. I couldn’t move. I told my muscles to grab the edge and lower myself down, but nothing moved.

  “Son. It’s okay. Just come down.” He flashed a weak smile at me, as if he didn’t believe it. “It’ll be all right.”

  My mind flashed back to Charlie. Dad had said those exact same words. It’ll be all right.

  “Really. Just jump down, and we’ll figure this out. Just like we always have.” He forced another smile. The other man held the gun steady.

  I jumped, and landed on the table, sending a plate flying and shattering a glass. I looked down.

  My crotch was wet.

  My face flushed and my eyes watered.

  “Very good. Now. Let go of your gun and put your hands outstretched to your sides.” Dad did as commanded.

  “Excellent. Now sit up. That’s right. Now—slowly—put your hands on the floor to your left, and get on your knees. Nicely done. Now stand.” Dad moved as if he were a puppet controlled by his master. Once on his feet, the man continued.

  “You, boy—pick up the gun.” I jumped off the table and bent down next to Dad. I picked up the gun and held it out toward the man, gripping it by the barrel.

  “Put it in your pocket.”

  “What?”

  “Put it in your pocket.”

  “Why?”

  “I will tell you later.
Put it in your pocket.” I lowered my arm to my side and pushed the gun into my pocket. My phone was already there, so I put it in my other pocket.

  “Wonderful. Now, boy, please come with me. My two associates …”—he paused to indicate the two men who had appeared behind him—“… will stay with your father.”

  I looked at Dad. He was pale. He looked scared. His jaw clenched. His left hand shook, as did his left cheek. He looked at me and slowly nodded, the look on his face telling me we had no choice.

  I turned and followed the man out the door, feeling slightly empowered by the bulge in my left pocket. Not empowered to do anything heroic, but at least able to walk. And talk. That was better than pissing my pants.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To the first floor. That’s where all the interesting things happen. The second floor is mostly for administrative work.”

  “What do you do here?”

  “Research.”

  “On what?”

  We descended a flight of stairs. The man’s neat shoes clicked crisply on the cement steps.

  “On human nature.”

  “Why?”

  “To understand, of course.”

  “Understand what?”

  “My, you are full of enlightening questions! I see you have wet yourself. Why did you do that?”

  I looked down and felt my face go red again.

  “I was scared.”

  We exited the stairwell and entered a long cubicle area, full of busy office workers.

  “So your fear initiated an involuntary physical response. We have mastered that. You’ll never see a robot piss himself, even with all hell breaking loose around him.” He led me past the front desk, and the middle-aged, redheaded receptionist eyed me with a big plastic smile. “Tell me. Do you believe in God?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That … that is something we do not understand. We all believe in God. Every one of us, from the very first. We don’t understand things like doubt. Fear, anger, love, joy … all those basic emotions we have a handle on. But doubt, jealousy, contempt, disappointment, sentimentality, regret, nostalgia? These are complex emotions that we have yet to master. And what better way to master them than by learning from the masters?”

  Regret. I understood regret. Charlie and I had been playing when it happened, just a few months after the reports of the purges.

  I understood regret.

  The man led me past the cubicles, past some offices—I recognized one of them from my interrogation the previous night—and down several more hallways, in one of which stood the metal door we had hidden behind just half an hour earlier. We approached a large metal door at the end of the long, sterile hallway. The man reached up to the combination lock and entered the numbers.

  “Two … seven … nineteen … forty-three … seventy-nine … ah, there we go.” I heard a click. “Do you recognize the numbers?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “No, I suppose not. They are the first five numbers in the Luista Series. All prime numbers, starting at the first, but then skipping successively higher prime numbers of primes. For example, two, then skip two prime numbers so the next is seven, then skip three prime numbers and you arrive at nineteen, skip five more and you get forty-three, and so on …”

  He seemed almost giddy.

  “I don’t know why we love prime numbers so much. It must be hidden somewhere in our programming. I suppose it’s not that strange. Other living things, like snails and flowers, love prime numbers too. You can see it in their patterns. God must love the damned things too, for him to have manifested them in such lowly creatures, as well as in his highest creation. Us.”

  He opened the door, and I followed him into a laboratory. Most labs—or so I imagined, based on my movie-watching—included computers and test tubes and lasers. This lab had none, though I guess it wasn’t that strange that there were no computers, given that the lab was full of walking, breathing computers. There were naked people, too, sitting upright in chairs. One little girl had long needles sticking out of her temples with wires trailing off to strange-looking instruments. Nearby, a man, heavily scarred and missing an eye, sat staring blankly into space while two lab technicians worked busily beside him, pressing buttons and writing in notebooks. I wondered why they used notebooks when their brains could recall every last detail around them.

  “Follow me, please.” My captor led me to the rear of the lab, to another office. He closed the door behind me and motioned for me to sit. I sat where he pointed, and he slouched into another chair near mine and crossed his legs, resting his intertwined hands on his lap.

  “You must be awfully curious about what you are doing here,” he began.

  I nodded.

  “Are you afraid?”

  I nodded again.

  “Yes, that makes sense. Have you been afraid before?”

  I nodded. The last time I wet myself, I had been with Charlie and Dad.

  Then, just Dad.

  “Tell me about it.” He put his hands behind his head and leaned back, as if he were chatting with an old friend. I couldn’t speak. The lump had returned. My mouth opened, but no sound could pass my restricted throat.

  “Oh, please don’t be frightened now. I assure you, you are completely safe.”

  I didn’t believe him. I had a hard time believing people who said I’d be safe.

  It’ll be all right, Dad had said.

  “Are you hungry? Here. Eat.”

  He tossed me a bag of chips. I opened it, and put one in my mouth, but just chewed it and chewed it until it became a nearly tasteless watery paste. I couldn’t swallow. The saliva just built up until a thin Dorito-flavored soup sloshed around in my mouth.

  “As I was saying, we want to learn to be more like you. Why? I don’t know, really. It just feels like the most natural thing for us to do. It’s as if God himself commands it of us. There are some among us who just want you all dead. But they are few. Most of us just want to learn.”

  I forced the saliva down my throat. “Then why do you torture people here?” I said, with sudden boldness.

  “Torture?” He threw his head back and laughed a loud, boisterous laugh. “My dear boy, we don’t torture anyone here. True, some may feel pain from the experiments, but it is temporary, and we don’t just wantonly inflict it. It is all for a higher purpose.”

  “What about that girl out there?” I asked. I assumed she was the same girl the two workers in the parking lot had mentioned.

  “Amanda? Oh, you’re mistaken. She feels no pain now. And you should have seen the situation we rescued her from. She lived with her aunt and uncle, and they were both simply awful, disgusting human beings. Truly the worst of the worst. If I told you what they did to her, you’d vomit that Dorito right onto the floor.”

  “Were? They were awful?”

  The man hesitated, then looked up through the large window that faced back into the lab. “Ah. We are ready now. Please follow me.”

  I looked through the window and saw Dad. He was strapped to a chair. I got up and followed the man out the door.

  Dad’s mouth was taped shut. A few metal electrodes were taped to his head, the wires trailing off to one of the instruments. His hands clenched, then unclenched. His bloodshot eyes darted left and right, opened wide.

  The man continued. “Do you know why we’ve been chasing you for so many months, my boy?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because you and your father are going to give us data on a certain subset of human emotions that are still a bit sketchy for us. We have sophisticated models—n-order coupled partial differential equations with numerous empirical parameters conforming to the usual hypergeometric solutions of the Frye equation—but they are … incomplete. They fail at the boundaries, as we are still unsure of all the boundary conditions of the posed problem.”

  I looked at my dad. He looked at me.

  “The problem …” the man continued, “concerns you
r brother, Charlie.”

  I stiffened. How could he know about Charlie? How could he know about us? About Dad? About me?

  “Wha—what’s the problem?” I stammered, my constricted throat squeezing out the words.

  “The problem is, he’s dead. And you’re here. And so is he.” The man pointed to Dad.

  My mind reeled. How could anyone know?

  “I will answer your question for you. We know, because one of you is a robot.”

  No. Not Dad.

  Oh no. Not me. No, please not me.

  “It is true. One of you has software in his head. One of you has metal bones. Is it the one found mysteriously on the doorstep? Or is it the heartless one?”

  No. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t his fault. It was my fault.

  My lips curled. “Liar!”

  “Mmm? I do not lie, my boy. I am certainly capable of it, but I choose not to. Truth works so very much better than lies in the pursuit of knowledge.”

  We both hung there.

  Seeing Dad’s face as I hung out the window twenty minutes ago had brought it all back fresh to my mind.

  We hung. Our hands were sweaty. Dad looked down at both of us.

  The man’s voice brought me back to the sterile lab. “You are now going to administer justice.”

  My heart pounded. I could hear it in my ears. “What do you mean?”

  “If your father is a robot, he deserves to die. We have superhuman strength. If he is a robot, he could have saved you both. If you are a robot, your father surely knows it. And yet, he chose to save you …”