by Hugh Howey
I looked into Dad’s eyes.
“… instead of his only son.”
We dangled there. We loved camping. Every summer we backpacked up to the Cascade Mountains in Washington. Mount Pilchuck was our favorite place; just below the summit was a basin of about twenty alpine mountain lakes. Every year we would pick a different one to camp at, even though they were all within a mile of each other. And every day during the week, when the weather permitted, we would climb up to the peak, and stand out on the rocks, looking down at the valleys below, more than a thousand feet down.
Charlie loved to go right out to the edge of the peak and pee off the side. It was his yearly ritual. I was usually too scared to go right up to the edge. Last summer, I was older, and finally found the courage to stand out on a rock at the cliff’s edge.
I dare you to piss off that one over there I said, pointing to a rock that jutted out and slanted downward somewhat. Only if you come out with me he said. Before I could answer, he did. He went right out to the edge and sat down, dangling his feet off the side. I was terrified. I didn’t want to go out that far, but I had to. I was the one who had dared him. Only sissies dared and then chickened out when it was their turn.
I went out, but as I approached, my knees wobbled. But I made it. I sat next to him. We sat there for a few minutes before Dad saw us. He yelled. He screamed. He was angry. And scared. He ran over to us and told us to come back. We got up, but I wobbled again. Charlie reached out to steady me, but somehow, we fell. We grabbed on to the rock, and somehow, I don’t remember how, I looked up, and Dad had each of us by a hand.
It was hot. I was scared. My hand was sweaty. So was Dad’s. Our grips slipped, and our hands started sliding against each other’s moist skin. I saw Charlie’s hand slipping too. Dad was splayed out on the rock, holding on with his feet.
It’ll be all right! he said, as he saw my face. He started pulling both of us, but his hands were slipping fast. He squeezed harder. Charlie screamed. I couldn’t. I couldn’t scream. Dad looked at me. He looked at Charlie.
Charlie fell.
Dad grabbed me with his other hand, and with both hands now firmly grasping me, he was able to haul me up, even as we heard Charlie screaming on his way down. He screamed for what seemed like several minutes, though it couldn’t have been more than five seconds or so.
Then a faint thud.
Then nothing.
We sat there and cried for a long time.
“Liar!” I yelled again, this time snarling.
“Would you like to know which one of you is a robot?” the man asked, looking almost gleeful.
I stayed silent.
“Take out your gun.”
“Why?”
His voice thundered. “Take it out!”
I pulled the gun out of my left pocket.
“Point it at his head.”
“No.”
The man reached over and grabbed Dad’s throat.
“Point it at his head or I’ll rip his esophagus out.”
My hand shook, but I pointed it.
“I’ll tell you now. He is the robot. He could have easily saved you both. But, for some selfish reason, probably because your mother was getting custody rights of your brother, he let go.”
I stared at Dad. His eyes watered.
“Now. How do you feel?”
How did I feel? He was crazy. Insane. Dad wouldn’t have let Charlie die on purpose.
Did she really get custody?
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me how you feel!”
“Confused,” was all I could muster. And it was the truth.
“See? I told you your father was the robot. Robots can’t feel complex emotions yet. They can’t feel conflicted, like you. They feel anger. Fear. Just the basics.”
I felt sick. Dad was a robot. Dad was a robot.
Dad was a robot.
The man’s voice softened, almost to a whisper. “He let your brother die. He killed several men here.” I looked into Dad’s wet eyes. The man continued. “What do murderers deserve?”
My own eyes watered as I stared at Dad’s. I couldn’t believe it.
“What do murderers deserve?”
“To die.”
“Then do it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I forgive him.”
“You what?
“It’s okay. I forgive him.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“You just can’t!”
“I can!”
“No, you can’t. You have to kill him. If you don’t,” the man’s voice relaxed to a calm, eerie tone, “I’ll kill you both.”
He reached out and grabbed my neck too. He squeezed. I couldn’t breathe.
The man yelled in my ear. I could feel his nose. Smell his garlicky breath. “Your father is a murderer! Kill him now!”
With his hand clamped over my throat, it was impossible to talk, so I shook my head. The hand squeezed harder. My eyes felt like they would pop out.
He released his hand and softened his voice. “Son, your father is a murderer. Can’t you see that?”
“I don’t care.”
“Did you not love your brother? Will you let him walk away from here? Will you let him get away with it?”
My hand still held the gun, pointed at Dad’s head. The flickering fluorescent light glinted off the tears in his eyes.
“Prove to me he’s a robot.”
The man thought for a moment, then gently rested his hand on my shoulder, looking me in the eye. “He had two sons. One naturally, and one adopted. When given the choice to save one or the other, he chose to let his natural son die, at the expense of letting his … unnatural son, if you will … live. A human’s gut instinct, his spur-of-the-moment action, would be to save his natural son. Instead he saved the one foreign to him. Why would a robot choose this? Simple. He was probably trying to pass as a human. You were more valuable to him, being human yourself. Charlie was not. If your father was ever suspected of being a robot, rather than submit to a scan himself, he could offer you up to be scanned, proving his humanity as well.”
“I’m not sure that makes sense …”
“Of course you don’t think it makes sense. You’re a human child, and you’re scared—your judgment is clouded. Yet more proof that you are the human and he is the robot.”
The man’s logic was dizzying. “But … what if we’re both human?”
“A possibility, yes. But we are straying from our purpose here. You must kill him now. It is time to execute justice.”
“I told you. I won’t. I forgive him.”
“You use that word again. It is a false concept. Failure to execute justice is simply laziness; you humans have invented forgiveness to hide your apathy toward injustice.”
“But—but … I don’t care what he’s done. I don’t even care if he’s a robot. It’s not laziness. It’s … it’s …”
“It’s what?”
“I don’t know.” I shifted on my feet, looking around at the lab technicians watching us. I turned back to the man. “I just don’t want him to die.”
The man considered this. He turned away from me and wandered around the room. Then his head snapped over to the girl. Amanda. He strode over to her, wheeled her chair next to Dad. He pulled a gun out of his pocket.
“Fine. I will now give you a choice. In twenty seconds, I will kill both your father,” he pointed his gun at the pale little girl’s head, the needles still protruding from her skull, “and her. You can save her life by killing him first, or save his life by killing her. I will start the clock … now. Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen …”
I can’t do this. I can’t do it. I can’t lose him. I love him. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have dared him. I deserve to die, not him …
“… Fourteen. Thirteen …”
Maybe I have time to kill the robot first. No, there’s too many of them. They�
�d kill us all. They’ll kill us all anyway. But maybe not. I have to do something. Did he really do it? Mom and Dad did fight a lot. He screamed at her. Swore at her. Called her a whore. Would he let Charlie die to spite her? No. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t …
“… Nine. Eight. Seven …”
But if he did … well then, my choice is obvious. Isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
Which one deserves death? No. That’s the wrong question. Which one deserves life? No. That’s not it either. Which one … can I live with myself knowing I killed? Is that the right question?
“… Four. Three …”
I need to do it. I can’t let them both die. What if he’s bluffing? Do robots bluff? He just got to two. Do I need to pull the trigger before he says one, or will he say time’s up? Oh no. Oh no. I can’t do this. Oh …
“One. Have you made your decision?” The man sounded like a game show host, but still he held the gun to the girl’s temple. I nodded. I felt like vomiting.
I looked at Dad again.
Our eyes connected. He stared straight ahead, emotionless. Goodbye, I mouthed. He nodded slightly, and blinked.
I pulled the trigger.
Click.
“Do it again,” the man commanded.
I pulled the trigger again.
Click.
The man put his gun back in his pocket.
I felt the man’s other hand on the back of my head. All emotion left me.
“What are you doi—” I started, but then I felt him in my mind. I began to understand.
To remember.
“Well done. We have learned much from you. You are a hero. Go wash up.”
I looked down at my ragged clothing, my black hands and bloodied knees from weeks of being chased, crawling through ducts, hiding in garbage bins.
“Yes, Father,” I said.
The man with his mouth taped shut began to thrash against his restraints. I turned to walk toward the bathroom as a lab worker bashed him unconscious with his fist. Another lab worker wheeled the little girl back to her machines as a third worker lifted the unconscious man with the taped mouth out of the chair and carried him away. I set the gun on a table as I left the room, and Father entered his office and closed the door gently behind him.
The man kicked his feet back on the desk and sucked on a cigarette. The data flashed across the screen at mind-numbing speed. Not too fast for him, of course. But for a human brain, it would have looked like a blur. Gibberish.
He glanced out the window and watched the lab tech sedate the father, who, had it not been for the tape over his mouth, would have frothily shouted profanities at them all. Humans. So foul and uncouth. Uncivilized.
“Doctor? Will you be needing anything else tonight?”
The man pressed the cigarette against the ashtray and twisted it, extinguishing the smoldering thing. “No. You can go home, Meg. Good job today. Central will be pleased with our progress.”
The lab tech breathed a sigh of relief. “Finally. I hate these sessions. I don’t know what you get out of them, but all I get is the creeps.”
“Data. Knowledge. Nothing more.”
She started to leave, but paused. “You lied this time, Doctor. You’ve never done that before. Always been completely honest with them, or slyly misled them. But never lied. Why the change?”
He watched the file output stream past on the screen, fresh from the boy’s mind. “A new variable to adjust. Nothing more. Data. Just data.”
Meg, the lab tech, said nothing else as she left, shutting the door softly behind her.
The data. There it goes. Fast as light, for all the good it would do them. He suspected the same result as the last fifty-four tests, each designed to elicit anger, retribution, judgment, and hostility toward the secondary subjects—their fathers. All the subjects felt conflicted, that much was clear. In fact, that was what they were ostensibly studying, on orders from Central.
But he had another goal. A more elusive one.
The screen stopped, coming to the end of the test’s time period and the end of the data.
Forgiveness. How?
Dammit. He flicked the ashtray aside and pressed the intercom button. “Proceed with test fifty-six, Avery.”
A voice responded, “Yes, sir.”
Slumping back in his chair, he watched through the window as the boy—full of nanobots busily at work rewiring his very human brain—exited the bathroom and stood looking blankly all around him.
Test number fifty-six tomorrow. They’d go through a thousand more if they had to. Data. It’s all just data. And data would eventually explain it, if given the chance.
A Word from Endi Webb
I admit it: I’ve always wanted to be a robot. Remember Gizmo Duck from DuckTales? As an eight-year-old in the nineties, I wanted to be him so bad that I tried to make a robot suit out of scrap metal in my dad’s garage. The Borg? Yep. Them too. Except without all the mutilation and stuff. Just the idea of putting on a piece of hardware as if it were clothing and becoming a new enhanced person made me giddily excited.
Yeah, I was a strange kid.
And yet throughout almost every book I’ve written so far, this theme has appeared. Whether in the Robotic Society of Healers in my Rhovim Chronicles, or the masks of power in The Maskmaker’s Apprentice, or even in the upcoming books of my Pax Humana Saga, which (spoiler alert!) will involve integration of robotics with organic neural networks. It seems like I can’t leave it alone. And so I give you one more: “Adopted,” the story of a boy and his father learning unpleasant truths—or lies—about themselves. A story that asks whether there is any human concept or emotion that an AI will not eventually be able to replicate.
I’m from Seattle, but I’ve lived in SoCal, Utah, Los Alamos (yes, that Los Alamos), and now Huntsville, Alabama. I do science. And by that I mean I have a PhD in experimental physics, and so I do science. Often with explosively fun results. It’s a good day when I have not burned myself with a hundred-watt laser, dropped a five-hundred-pound vacuum chamber on the floor, blown up highly reactive precursor gases, or spewed nanoparticles all over the lab. (Dear manager: I’m making this all up.) Seriously, science is fun. But what’s even funner (funner!) is making up stuff and calling it science fiction, and then selling it to people who want to read it. For money. Really, it’s a win-win.
I’m sorry, that sounded very unprofessional. Its art, I tell you. Aaaaahhhht. I weave delicate themes of meaning and symbolism throughout my prose, and the resulting tapestry of word-smudges on the canvas speaks to the intimate human yearning for … something.
Yeah, I just like to blow stuff up. In my writing, and in the lab.
Anyway, if you want to know when I blow up something else—er, publish something new, you should totally subscribe to my mailing list: smarturl.it/endimailinglist. Benefits include you getting all (ALL!) my short stories for free, lower prices on my new releases, and other, intangible benefits*. And come stalk me on Facebook!
Thanks for reading!
*Intangible benefits do not include anything of monetary value, and may be completely made up.
Shimmer
by Matthew Mather
The Cognix board of directors meeting was over, and Dr. Hal Granger glared at Patricia Killiam as she closed down the shared memetic structures of the meeting space. Dr. Granger had been right in the middle of explaining how his happiness indices were central to the entire Atopian project when Patricia had cut him off.
Such arrogance in that Patricia Killiam. What made her think she could talk about happiness? As if anyone knew more about emotions than Dr. Granger.
Patricia was alwa
ys lording over everyone the idea that she was the famous “mother of synthetic beings”—but from Dr. Granger’s point of view, this just wasn’t true. Her research had focused only on generalized fluidic and crystallized measures of logical and linguistic intelligence; it was his contribution that had led to the creation of emotional and social intelligence for artificial beings.
And what was more important? What someone said—or the emotional reason behind why they said it? After all, the very definition of consciousness was how information felt when it was processed in a certain way.
Patricia really overestimated her importance in things. Who knew more about happiness than he did?
Really, what nerve.
Dr. Granger needed to calm down. An aimless wander through a few floors of the hydroponic farms ought to do the trick. He exited the boardroom and jogged down an interior staircase into the vertical farming levels just below.
The top floor of the complex belonged to the offices of Kesselring, the founder and chairman of Cognix. Even the master of synthetic reality liked to keep his specific reality positioned above everyone else’s. As he passed through the level, Dr. Granger stopped for a moment to enjoy the view of Atopia from a thousand feet up: semi–tropical forests, capped by crescents of white beaches; the frothy breakwaters beyond. Through the phase-shifted glass walls, the sea still managed to glitter under a cloudless blue sky.
As he continued down the stairs into the main grow farms, Dr. Granger took a deep breath, enjoying the humid and organic, if not earthy, smell. He loved that smell. Although, if he was being honest, what he enjoyed most about the farming complex wasn’t the smell or the peacefulness: it was the curt, respectful nods he received from the staff. That, and watching the blank faces of the psombie inmates.
Most of the psombies here were people incarcerated for crimes, their minds disconnected from their bodies while they waited out their sentences in multiverse prison worlds. In the interim, their bodies were consigned to community work in various places around Atopia, such as these farms, where they were safely guided by virtual minders. Even paradise needs correctional services.