Ada actually giggled, which spoiled the moment, but he felt better for having said it. The Social Harmony man gave the smallest disappointed shake of his head and turned away to prod at a small, sleek computer.
“You went to Ottawa six months ago,” the Social Harmony man said. “When we picked up your daughter, we thought it was she who’d gone, but it appears that you were the one carrying her phone. You’d thoughtfully left the trace in place on that phone, so we didn’t have to refer to the logs in cold storage, they were already online and ready to be analyzed.
“We’ve been to the safe house. It was quite a spectacular battle. Both sides were surprised, I think. There will be another, I’m sure. What I’d like from you is as close to a verbatim report as you can make of the conversation that took place there.”
They’d had him bugged and traced. Of course they had. Who watched the watchers? Social Harmony. Who watched Social Harmony? Social Harmony.
“I demand a consultation with a Social Harmony advocate,” Arturo said.
“This is such a consultation,” the Social Harmony man said, and this time, he did smile. “Make your report, Detective.”
Arturo sucked in a breath. “Leonard MacPherson, it is my duty as a UNATS Detective Third Grade to inform you that you are under arrest for trade in contraband positronics. You have the following rights: to a trial per current rules of due process; to be free from self-incrimination in the absence of a court order to the contrary; to consult with a Social Harmony advocate; and to a speedy arraignment. Do you understand your rights?”
The Social Harmony man held up one finger on the hand closest to the black robot holding Ada, and she screamed, a sound that knifed through Arturo, ripping him from asshole to appetite.
“STOP!” he shouted. The man put his finger down and Ada sobbed quietly.
“I was taken to the safe house on the fifth of September, after being gassed by a Eurasian infowar robot in the basement of Fairview Mall—”
There was a thunderclap then, a crash so loud that it hurt his stomach and his head and vibrated his fingertips. The doors to the room buckled and flattened, and there stood Benny and Lenny and—Natalie.
Benny and Lenny moved so quickly that he was only able to track them by the things they knocked over on the way to tearing apart the robot that was holding Ada. A second later, the robot holding him was in pieces, and he was standing on his own two feet again. The Social Harmony man had gone so pale he looked green in his natty checked suit and pink tie.
Benny or Lenny pinned his arms in a tight hug and Natalie walked carefully to him and they regarded one another in silence. She slapped him abruptly, across each cheek. “Harming children,” she said. “For shame.”
Ada stood on her own in the corner of the room, crying with her mouth in a O. Arturo and Natalie both looked to her and she stood, poised, between them, before running to Arturo and leaping onto him, so that he staggered momentarily before righting himself with her on his hip, in his arms.
“We’ll go with you now,” he said to Natalie.
“Thank you,” she said. She stroked Ada’s hair briefly and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Ada.”
Ada nodded solemnly.
“Let’s go,” Natalie said, when it was apparent that Ada had nothing to say to her.
Benny tossed the Social Harmony man across the room into the corner of a desk. He bounced off it and crashed to the floor, unconscious or dead. Arturo couldn’t bring himself to care.
Benny knelt before Arturo. “Climb on, please,” it said. Arturo saw that Natalie was already pig-a-back on Lenny. He climbed aboard.
They moved even faster than the black robots had, but the bitter cold was offset by the warmth radiating from Benny’s metal hide, not hot, but warm. Arturo’s stomach reeled and he held Ada tight, squeezing his eyes shut and clamping his jaw.
But Ada’s gasp made him look around, and he saw that they had cleared the city limits, and were vaulting over rolling farmlands now, jumping in long flat arcs whose zenith was just high enough for him to see the highway—the 401, they were headed east—in the distance.
And then he saw what had made Ada gasp: boiling out of the hills and ditches, out of the trees and from under the cars: an army of headless, eight-armed black robots, arachnoid and sinister in the moonlight. They scuttled on the ground behind them, before them, and to both sides. Social Harmony had built a secret army of these robots and secreted them across the land, and now they were all chasing after them.
The ride got bumpy then, as Benny beat back the tentacles that reached for them, smashing the black robots with mighty one-handed blows, his other hand supporting Arturo and Ada. Ada screamed as a black robot reared up before them, and Benny vaulted it smoothly, kicking it hard as he went, while Arturo clung on for dear life.
Another scream made him look over toward Lenny and Natalie. Lenny was slightly ahead and to the left of them, and so he was the vanguard, encountering twice as many robots as they.
A black spider-robot clung to his leg, dragging behind him with each lope, and one of its spare arms was tugging at Natalie.
As Arturo watched—as Ada watched—the black robot ripped Natalie off of Lenny’s back and tossed her into the arms of one of its cohort behind it, which skewered her on one of its arms, a black spear protruding from her belly as she cried once more and then fell silent. Lenny was overwhelmed a moment later, buried under writhing black arms.
Benny charged forward even faster, so that Arturo nearly lost his grip, and then he steadied himself. “We have to go back for them—”
“They’re dead,” Benny said. “There’s nothing to go back for.” Its warm voice was sorrowful as it raced across the countryside, and the wind filled Arturo’s throat when he opened his mouth, and he could say no more.
Ada wept on the jet, and Arturo wept with her, and Benny stood over them, a minatory presence against the other robots crewing the fast little plane, who left them alone all the way to Paris, where they changed jets again for the long trip to Beijing.
They slept on that trip, and when they landed, Benny helped them off the plane and onto the runway, and they got their first good look at Eurasia.
It was tall. Vertical. Beijing loomed over them with curvilinear towers that twisted and bent and jigged and jagged so high they disappeared at the tops. It smelled like barbeque and flowers, and around them skittered fast armies of robots of every shape and size, wheeling in lockstep like schools of exotic fish. They gawped at it for a long moment, and someone came up behind them and then warm arms encircled their necks.
Arturo knew that smell, knew that skin. He could never have forgotten it.
He turned slowly, the blood draining from his face.
“Natty?” he said, not believing his eyes as he confronted his dead, ex-wife. There were tears in her eyes.
“Artie,” she said. “Ada,” she said. She kissed them both on the cheeks.
Benny said, “You died in UNATS. Killed by modified Eurasian Social Harmony robots. Lenny, too. Ironic,” he said.
She shook her head. “He means that we probably co-designed the robots that Social Harmony sent after you.”
“Natty?” Arturo said again. Ada was white and shaking.
“Oh dear,” she said. “Oh, God. You didn’t know—”
“He didn’t give you a chance to explain,” Benny said.
“Oh, God, Jesus, you must have thought—”
“I didn’t think it was my place to tell them, either,” Benny said, sounding embarrassed, a curious emotion for a robot.
“Oh, God. Artie, Ada. There are—there are lots of me. One of the first things I did here was help them debug the uploading process. You just put a copy of yourself into a positronic brain, and then when you need a body, you grow one or build one or both and decant yourself into it. I’m like Lenny and Benny now—there are many of me. There’s too much work to do otherwise.”
“I told you that our development helped humans understand
themselves,” Benny said.
Arturo pulled back. “You’re a robot?”
“No,” Natalie said. “No, of course not. Well, a little. Parts of me. Growing a body is slow. Parts of it, you build. But I’m mostly made of person.”
Ada clung tight to Arturo now, and they both stepped back toward the jet.
“Dad?” Ada said.
He held her tight.
“Please, Arturo,” Natalie, his dead, multiplicitous ex-wife said. “I know it’s a lot to understand, but it’s different here in Eurasia. Better, too. I don’t expect you to come rushing back to my arms after all this time, but I’ll help you if you’ll let me. I owe you that much, no matter what happens between us. You too, Ada, I owe you a lifetime.”
“How many are there of you?” he asked, not wanting to know the answer.
“I don’t know exactly,” she said.
“3,422,” Benny said. “This morning it was 3,423.”
Arturo rocked back in his boots and bit his lip hard enough to draw blood.
“Um,” Natalie said. “More of me to love?”
He barked a laugh, and Natalie smiled and reached for him. He leaned back toward the jet, then stopped, defeated. Where would he go? He let her warm hand take his, and a moment later, Ada took her other hand and they stood facing each other, breathing in their smells.
“I’ve gotten you your own place,” she said as she led them across the tarmac. “It’s close to where I live, but far enough for you to have privacy.”
“What will I do here?” he said. “Do they have coppers in Eurasia?”
“Not really,” Natalie said.
“It’s all robots?”
“No, there’s not any crime.”
“Oh.”
Arturo put one foot in front of the other, not sure if the ground was actually spongy or if that was jetlag. Around him, the alien smells of Beijing and the robots that were a million times smarter than he. To his right, his wife, one of 3,422 versions of her.
To his left, his daughter, who would inherit this world.
He reached into his pocket and took out the tin soldiers there. They were old and their glaze was cracked like an oil painting, but they were little people that a real human had made, little people in human image, and they were older than robots. How long had humans been making people, striving to bring them to life? He looked at Ada—a little person he’d brought to life.
He gave her the tin soldiers.
“For you,” he said. “Daddy-daughter present.” She held them tightly, their tiny bayonets sticking out from between her fingers.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said. She held them tightly and looked around, wide-eyed, at the schools of robots and the corkscrew towers.
A flock of Bennys and Lennys appeared before them, joined by their Benny.
“There are half a billion of them,” she said. “And 3,422 of them,” she said, pointing with a small bayonet at Natalie.
“But there’s only one of you,” Arturo said.
She craned her neck.
“Not for long!” she said, and broke away, skipping forward and whirling around to take it all in.
ALTERNATE GIRL’S EXPATRIATE LIFE
ROCHITA LOENEN-RUIZ
In Springtime, her garden yielded a hundred wisteria blossoms. White English roses climbed the pergola. Digitalis purpurea, lavender from the South of France, mint and thyme, rosemary and tarragon, basil and sweet marjoram—they all grew in Alternate Girl’s one hundred percent super-qualified housewife garden.
Across the street, excavators dug up large swathes of grass.
“They’re building a new complex over there,” her neighbor said. “I heard the farmer who owned that land went off to live the life of a millionaire.”
Her neighbor babbled on about yachts and sea voyages and Alternate Girl stood there staring while the machines went about their business of churning up grass and soil. She wondered what it would be like to be crushed under those hungry wheels, and she flinched at her own imagination.
“A pity,” her neighbor said. “I sure will miss the view.”
Alternate Girl murmured something vague in reply, and went back to tending her flowers.
She wondered if the farmer was happier now that he had his millions. Would wealth and sea voyages make up for severed ties and the erasure of generations of familial history?
She pulled out a stray weed, and scattered coffee grinds to keep the cats from digging up her crocus bulbs.
She shook her head and headed back indoors. She’d only known two kinds of lives, and in neither of them had she been a millionaire.
Most expatriates pursue a model life. This makes them a desired member in their adopted society. They appear to assimilate quickly, adapting without visible complications to the customs of the country in which they reside.
On the surface, they may appear contented, well-adjusted, and happy. However, studies reveal an underlying sorrow that often manifests itself in dreams. In dreams, the expatriate experiences no ambivalent feelings. There is only a strong sense of loss. It isn’t uncommon for expats to wake up crying.
—On Expatriate Behavior by Mackay & Lindon
In her dreams, Alternate Girl fled from her life as an expat. She sprouted wings and let the wind take her back to the gates of her hometown.
Even in the dreamscape she could smell the exhaust from passing jeepneys. She could taste the metal dust in the air. The moon shone on the gentle curve of asphalt, cutting through dusty thoroughfares, creating long dark shadows on the pavement. Metal tenements jutted up out of the land, pointing like fingers at the night sky.
By day, a constant stream of drones strove to keep those buildings together. Every bit of scrap metal, every piece of residual wiring was used to keep the landscape of steel and concrete from breaking to pieces. For all its frailty, for all of its seeming squalor, there was something dear and familiar about the way the streets met and turned into each other.
Even if her life was filled with the coziness of here and now, she could not shake off the longing that thrummed through her dreams in the same way that the thrum of the equilibrium machine pulsed through this landscape.
Towering above the tenements was the Remembrance Monument. Made of compressed bits and parts, it contained all the memories of those gone before. Each year, the Monument reached higher and higher until its apex was lost in the covering of clouds. When she was younger, she’d often imagined she could hear the voices of the gone before.
Above the pulse of the Equilibrium Machine, above the gentle susurrus of faded ghosts, she heard a cry. High and shrill, it emitted a hopelessness Alternate Girl remembered feeling.
It was the same cry that pulled her out of her dreams back into the present. She turned on her side, pressed her ear against her pillow, and stared into the darkness.
This is my home now, she told herself. I am happy as I am. We are happy as we are.
Never mind her personal griefs. Never mind her longing for that lost landscape.
Would you like a chance to revisit the past or to visit the future? Optimum Labs offers you the chance to take the leap in time. Our company is 100% customer satisfaction guaranteed. Unlike other scams out there, Optimum labs offers you the real thing.
Alternate Girl stared at the screen. Each day the spam mails showed up without fail. Same time stamps, same recipient name, all from anonymous senders.
Who sent these mails? And did everyone in her neighborhood receive the same mail with the same time stamps every day? If she had the courage to reply, would she receive an answer from all the anonymous senders? Her hand hovered over the delete key. If you sent garbage to the landfill, it got buried underground, but what about garbage in the ether? Did it float around silently on the airwaves? Would all the spam and the deleted mail come back to haunt her in the form of ether pollution or some such specialized name?
While she sat there, the speakers gave off a faint ping. She clicked and waited as the new message filled h
er screen.
Happy Birthday, Alternate Girl! Today, is a milestone for all of us. You have successfully completed one hundred weeks of expatriate life. In recognition of your hard work, a reward has been issued to you at the designated station. Report in as soon as you can and don’t forget to register at our renewed website. Greetings from [email protected].
Alternate Girl squeezed her eyes shut. She opened them and stared once more at the message on her screen. Could it be what she had been waiting for all this time or was Mechanic finally calling her home?
Most expatriates express mixed feelings regarding their origin. Many of them harbor a secret fear of losing touch with the collective memory. While they seem content with their new lives, repatriation is a common subject of conversation. For the expatriate, to return raises a complex response.
One of the subjects of this study worded it this way: “Return is something I fantasize about and desire. But at the same time, it is something I am afraid of.”
Choosing to build a new life in an unfamiliar land represents a leaving behind of the collective, and while there may still be remnants of a shared life, the expatriate faces uncertainty. What if he or she has lost the ability to pick up the threads of the old life?
—On Expatriate Behavior by Mackay & Lindon
Her first recollection was of Father’s eyes shining down at her from his great height. Light filtered in through drawn shades and she could see an outline of buildings from where she lay. It seemed as if there were a thousand busy bees buzzing inside her skull. Beside her, someone moaned. She shivered and echoed the sound.
“There, there,” Father said. “No need to be frightened. Father,” he said, pointing to himself. “Metal Town.” He gestured to something beyond her vision.
She repeated the words after him, and listened as he murmured sounds of approval.
“You’re progressing very well,” he said. “Soon, I’ll take you to the Mechanic.”
He shuffled away out of her line of sight. She heard a thump and another moan, and she called out anxiously. “Father?”
“I’m here,” Father said. His voice was soothing and she drifted away into a kaleidoscope of screeching metal and the crescendo of another voice wailing out Father’s name.
Robots: The Recent A.I. Page 10