ROBOTS:
THE RECENT A.I.
RICH HORTON
& SEAN WALLACE
Copyright © 2012 by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace.
Cover art by Vladislav Ociacia.
Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke
ISBN: 978-1-60701-342-6 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-60701-318-1 (trade paperback)
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION, Rich Horton
EROS, PHILIA, AGAPE, Rachel Swirsky
ARTIFICE AND INTELLIGENCE, Tim Pratt
I, ROBOT, Cory Doctorow
ALTERNATE GIRL’S EXPATRIATE LIFE, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
THE RISING WATERS, Benjamin Crowell
HOUSES, Mark Pantoja
THE DJINN’S WIFE, Ian McDonald
STALKER, Robert Reed
DROPLET, Benjamin Rosenbaum
KISS ME TWICE, Mary Robinette Kowal
ALGORITHMS FOR LOVE, Ken Liu
A JAR OF GOODWILL, Tobias S. Buckell
THE SHIPMAKER, Aliette de Bodard
TIDELINE, Elizabeth Bear
UNDER THE EAVES, Lavie Tidhar
THE NEAREST THING, Genevieve Valentine
BALANCING ACCOUNTS, James L. Cambias
SILENTLY AND VERY FAST, Catherynne M. Valente
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
PUBLICATION HISTORY
ABOUT THE EDITORS
INTRODUCTION
RICH HORTON
Robots are of course one of the oldest sfnal tropes, arguably traceable to the Golem of Prague, and certainly a common feature of 19th-century proto-SF from the likes of E. T. A. Hoffman and Herman Melville. The word was famously invented by Karel Čapek in his play R. U. R. (1920), though Čapek’s robots were closer to what we now call androids. Also in the ’20s, another Eastern European writer, Vladimir Nabokov, wrote of robots in his novel King, Queen, Knave (1928). In genre science fiction, early famous treatments include Eando Binder’s “I, Robot” and Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy”; but it was Isaac Asimov who became the single sf writer most identified with the concept with his series of stories mostly in Astounding from 1940 on.
The dichotomy between the usually human appearance of robots and their mechanical origin has generally been central to the themes of robot stories. Early stories often treated the mechanical duplication of humanity as fundamentally wrong; or as a subject of comedy or satire. Binder and Del Rey were much more sympathetic to robots, even sentimental about their origin and their presumed inferior position to humans. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics placed them as by programming “willing” servants to humans, though his later elaborations of the implications of the Three Laws greatly complexified the definitions of “willing,” “servant,” and indeed “human.” Jack Williamson, in “With Folded Hands” and sequels, extrapolated the logical implications of Asimov’s Laws in a quite sinister direction.
But in recent years, certainly as evidenced in the stories in this anthology, the focus of writers’ attention has shifted from concern about the effects—good or bad—of robots on humans to the rights of robots themselves. It has long been clear that the possession by any entity of intelligence implies a question about its rights—and surely our sympathy immediately lies with intelligent beings denied rights.
And so these stories, in positing intelligent (if human-created) beings, mostly insist that these beings must be—in some sense—free. The definition of freedom can be complex, mind you. Even Asimov’s robot stories had an implicit question at the heart of many of them—can a being designed, or programmed, to in some sense derive self-worth from service fairly be set free? That question is central to many of the stories in this book—certainly it drives the seemingly strange choice made by the protagonist of Rachel Swirsky’s “Eros, Philia, Agape”; and it is likewise a key motivator in the relationship depicted in Lavie Tidhar’s “Under the Eaves”. Indeed in many of these stories a sexual or near-sexual relationship between a human and a robot is implied—and in so doing the stories address questions of human sexual relationships, of power relationships of all kinds, of slavery.
Another human relationship echoed in these stories is that of parent to child—if humans are parents of robots or AIs in some sense, what do we owe them? Particularly if the child clearly surpasses the parent is some ways? Benjamin Crowell’s “The Rising Waters” and Catherynne M. Valente’s “Silently and Very Fast” both movingly address the idea that an AI might regard a human or humans as its “parents.”
Ultimately, if robots are free, the question of how they might live without humans at all arises. So we see stories like Mark Pantoja’s “Houses” and James L. Cambias’s “Balancing Accounts”, two stories as different from each other as one might imagine, but both wondering how robots—made to serve humans—might escape those bonds and find their own lives. (Or take Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, which turns the tables yet again, and features a human growing up in a robot society.)
What is clear is that the trope of robots and AI is ever fertile, ever worth reexamination. Robots are by design enough like us—and enough different—to make us think about what it means to be human, and what it means to be like a human but different, and about how we can live with those differences. These stories, all from the past decade, are an invigorating new look at an old idea.
EROS, PHILIA, AGAPE
RACHEL SWIRSKY
Lucian packed his possessions before he left. He packed his antique silver serving spoons with the filigreed handles; the tea roses he’d nurtured in the garden window; his jade and garnet rings. He packed the hunk of gypsum-veined jasper that he’d found while strolling on the beach on the first night he’d come to Adriana, she leading him uncertainly across the wet sand, their bodies illuminated by the soft gold twinkling of the lights along the pier. That night, as they walked back to Adriana’s house, Lucian had cradled the speckled stone in his cupped palms, squinting so that the gypsum threads sparkled through his lashes.
Lucian had always loved beauty—beautiful scents, beautiful tastes, beautiful melodies. He especially loved beautiful objects because he could hold them in his hands and transform the abstraction of beauty into something tangible.
The objects belonged to them both, but Adriana waved her hand bitterly when Lucian began packing. “Take whatever you want,” she said, snapping her book shut. She waited by the door, watching Lucian with sad and angry eyes.
Their daughter, Rose, followed Lucian around the house. “Are you going to take that, Daddy? Do you want that?” Wordlessly, Lucian held her hand. He guided her up the stairs and across the uneven floorboards where she sometimes tripped. Rose stopped by the picture window in the master bedroom, staring past the palm fronds and swimming pools, out to the vivid cerulean swath of the ocean. Lucian relished the hot, tender feel of Rose’s hand. I love you, he would have whispered, but he’d surrendered the ability to speak.
He led her downstairs again to the front door. Rose’s lace-festooned pink satin dress crinkled as she leapt down the steps. Lucian had ordered her dozens of satin party dresses in pale, floral hues. Rose refused to wear anything
else.
Rose looked between Lucian and Adriana. “Are you taking me, too?” she asked Lucian.
Adriana’s mouth tightened. She looked at Lucian, daring him to say something, to take responsibility for what he was doing to their daughter. Lucian remained silent.
Adriana’s chardonnay glowed the same shade of amber as Lucian’s eyes. She clutched the glass’s stem until she thought it might break. “No, honey,” she said with artificial lightness. “You’re staying with me.”
Rose reached for Lucian. “Horsey?”
Lucian knelt down and pressed his forehead against Rose’s. He hadn’t spoken a word in the three days since he’d delivered his letter of farewell to Adriana, announcing his intention to leave as soon as she had enough time to make arrangements to care for Rose in his absence. When Lucian approached with the letter, Adriana had been sitting at the dining table, sipping orange juice from a wine glass and reading a first edition copy of Cheever’s Falconer. Lucian felt a flash of guilt as she smiled up at him and accepted the missive. He knew that she’d been happier in the past few months than he’d ever seen her, possibly happier than she’d ever been. He knew the letter would shock and wound her. He knew she’d feel betrayed. Still, he delivered the letter anyway, and watched as comprehension ached through her body.
Rose had been told, gently, patiently, that Lucian was leaving. But she was four years old, and understood things only briefly and partially, and often according to her whims. She continued to believe her father’s silence was a game.
Rose’s hair brushed Lucian’s cheek. He kissed her brow. Adriana couldn’t hold her tongue any longer.
“What do you think you’re going to find out there? There’s no Shangri-La for rebel robots. You think you’re making a play for independence? Independence to do what, Lu?”
Grief and anger filled Adriana’s eyes with hot tears, as if she were a geyser filled with so much pressure that steam could not help but spring up. She examined Lucian’s sculpted face: his skin inlaid with tiny lines that an artist had rendered to suggest the experiences of a childhood which had never been lived, his eyes calibrated with a hint of asymmetry to mimic the imperfection of human growth. His expression showed nothing—no doubt, or bitterness, or even relief. He revealed nothing at all.
It was all too much. Adriana moved between Lucian and Rose, as if she could use her own body to protect her daughter from the pain of being abandoned. Her eyes stared achingly over the rim of her wine glass. “Just go,” she said.
He left.
Adriana bought Lucian the summer she turned thirty-five. Her father, long afflicted with an indecisive cancer that vacillated between aggression and remittance, had died suddenly in July. For years, the family had been squirreling away emotional reserves to cope with his prolonged illness. His death released a burst of excess.
While her sisters went through the motions of grief, Adriana thrummed with energy she didn’t know what to do with. She considered squandering her vigor on six weeks in Mazatlan, but as she discussed ocean-front rentals with her travel agent, she realized escape wasn’t what she craved. She liked the setting where her life took place: her house perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, her bedroom window that opened on a tangle of blackberry bushes where crows roosted every autumn and spring. She liked the two block stroll down to the beach where she could sit with a book and listen to the yapping lapdogs that the elderly women from the waterfront condominiums brought walking in the evenings.
Mazatlan was a twenty-something’s cure for restlessness. Adriana wasn’t twenty-five anymore, famished for the whole gourmet meal of existence. She needed something else now. Something new. Something more refined.
She explained this to her friends Ben and Lawrence when they invited her to their ranch house in Santa Barbara to relax for the weekend and try to forget about her father. They sat on Ben and Lawrence’s patio, on iron-worked deck chairs arrayed around a garden table topped with a mosaic of sea creatures made of semi-precious stones. A warm, breezy dusk lengthened the shadows of the orange trees. Lawrence poured sparkling rosé into three wine glasses and proposed a toast to Adriana’s father—not to his memory, but to his death.
“Good riddance to the bastard,” said Lawrence. “If he were still alive, I’d punch him in the schnoz.”
“I don’t even want to think about him,” said Adriana. “He’s dead. He’s gone.”
“So if not Mazatlan, what are you going to do?” asked Ben.
“I’m not sure,” said Adriana. “Some sort of change, some sort of milestone, that’s all I know.”
Lawrence sniffed the air. “Excuse me,” he said, gathering the empty wine glasses. “The kitchen needs its genius.”
When Lawrence was out of earshot, Ben leaned forward to whisper to Adriana.” He’s got us on a raw food diet for my cholesterol. Raw carrots. Raw zucchini. Raw almonds. No cooking at all.”
“Really,” said Adriana, glancing away. She was never sure how to respond to lovers’ quarrels. That kind of affection mixed with annoyance, that inescapable intimacy, was something she’d never understood.
Birds twittered in the orange trees. The fading sunlight highlighted copper strands in Ben’s hair as he leaned over the mosaic table, rapping his fingers against a carnelian-backed crab. Through the arched windows, Adriana could see Lawrence mincing carrots, celery and almonds into brown paste.
“You should get a redecorator,” said Ben. “Tile floors, Tuscan pottery, those red leather chairs that were in vogue last time we were in Milan. That’d make me feel like I’d been scrubbed clean and reborn.”
“No, no,” said Adriana, “I like where I live.”
“A no-holds-barred shopping spree. Drop twenty thousand. That’s what I call getting a weight off your shoulders.”
Adriana laughed. “How long do you think it would take my personal shopper to assemble a whole new me?”
“Sounds like a midlife crisis,” said Lawrence, returning with vegan hors d’oeuvres and three glasses of mineral water. “You’re better off forgetting it all with a hot Latin pool boy, if you ask me.”
Lawrence served Ben a small bowl filled with yellow mush. Ben shot Adriana an aggrieved glance.
Adriana felt suddenly out of synch. The whole evening felt like the set for a photo-shoot that would go in a decorating magazine, a two-page spread featuring Cozy Gardens, in which she and Ben and Lawrence were posing as an intimate dinner party for three. She felt reduced to two dimensions, air-brushed, and then digitally grafted onto the form of whoever it was who should have been there, someone warm and trusting who knew how to care about minutia like a friend’s husband putting him on a raw food diet, not because the issue was important, but because it mattered to him.
Lawrence dipped his finger in the mash and held it up to Ben’s lips. “It’s for your own good, you ungrateful so-and-so.”
Ben licked it away. “I eat it, don’t I?”
Lawrence leaned down to kiss his husband, a warm and not at all furtive kiss, not sexual but still passionate. Ben’s glance flashed coyly downward.
Adriana couldn’t remember the last time she’d loved someone enough to be embarrassed by them. Was this the flavor missing from her life? A lover’s fingertip sliding an unwanted morsel into her mouth?
She returned home that night on the bullet train. Her emerald cockatiel, Fuoco, greeted her with indignant squawks. In Adriana’s absence, the house puffed her scent into the air and sang to Fuoco with her voice, but the bird was never fooled.
Adriana’s father had given her the bird for her thirtieth birthday. He was a designer species spliced with Macaw DNA that colored his feathers rich green. He was expensive and inbred and neurotic, and he loved Adriana with frantic, obsessive jealousy.
“Hush,” Adriana admonished, allowing Fuoco to alight on her shoulder. She carried him upstairs to her bedroom and hand-fed him millet. Fuoco strutted across the pillows, his obsidian eyes proud and suspicious.
Adriana wa
s surprised to find that her alienation had followed her home. She found herself prone to melancholy reveries, her gaze drifting toward the picture window, her fingers forgetting to stroke Fuoco’s back. The bird screeched to regain her attention.
In the morning, Adriana visited her accountant. His fingers danced across the keyboard as he slipped trust fund moneys from one account to another like a magician. What she planned would be expensive, but her wealth would regrow in fertile soil, enriching her on lab diamonds and wind power and genetically modified oranges.
The robotics company gave Adriana a private showing. The salesman ushered her into a room draped in black velvet. Hundreds of body parts hung on the walls, and reclined on display tables: strong hands, narrow jaws, biker’s thighs, voice boxes that played sound samples from gruff to dulcet, skin swatches spanning ebony to alabaster, penises of various sizes.
At first, Adriana felt horrified at the prospect of assembling a lover from fragments, but then it amused her. Wasn’t everyone assembled from fragments of DNA, grown molecule by molecule inside their mother’s womb?
She tapped her fingernails against a slick brochure. “Its brain will be malleable? I can tell it to be more amenable, or funnier, or to grow a spine?”
“That’s correct.” The salesman sported slick brown hair and shiny teeth and kept grinning in a way that suggested he thought that if he were charismatic enough Adriana would invite him home for a lay and a million dollar tip. “Humans lose brain plasticity as we age, which limits how much we can change. Our models have perpetually plastic brains. They can reroute their personalities at will by reshaping how they think on the neurological level.”
Adriana stepped past him, running her fingers along a tapestry woven of a thousand possible hair textures.
The salesman tapped an empty faceplate. “Their original brains are based on deep imaging scans melded from geniuses in multiple fields. Great musicians, renowned lovers, the best physicists and mathematicians.”
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