Robots: The Recent A.I.

by Elizabeth Bear

  I want to shut up.

  “And tell me what I’m going to do here,” you say.

  With the private voice, I say, “Be patient, and she faints.”

  “That’s not a solution,” you say. “What if somebody comes along?”

  “Nobody is coming,” I say.

  “Not yet,” you say. “But this might take all day, and then what?”

  “Right,” Naomi says. “That’s a good point.”

  You stare at her.

  “Don’t waste time,” she says. “Take me now. Charge me with that toy knife and do your worst.”

  Naomi’s shirt and bra have fallen to the earth. The chill of the air and the endless sweat from her ruddy skin makes her uncomfortable, but she ignores what she can. Lowering her knife, she glances at the other tools, and then she looks up and watches you. When her eyes drop again, you take one sudden step forward, and her larger knife lifts, aiming squarely at your heart.

  You hesitate.

  “Coward,” she says with an angry, mocking tone.

  You fume, considering a straight charge. But as I start to warn against that strategy, you step back. Calculation and reserve take hold, and that’s when you tell me, “Find out what you can. Everything you can about her.”

  The piece of me inside her pack has already burrowed into her wallet.

  “My name is Naomi,” she says, “and I like bird watching and hiking and I have a degree in business administration and love to read mysteries and live in an efficiency apartment with four mice named after dead singers and a few hundred friends that my software chats with every day.” She pauses, breathing hard. “I wish I had a talent for painting but I don’t. I can’t play any instrument and there is no boyfriend, and I have a secret life involving gourmet cooking and crime solving, which is silly. You know? In real life, I go to the bathroom. I make small talk at work. I eat badly and wish I didn’t, and if I was rich enough for plastic surgery I’d probably go to the trouble, but I’d feel guilty for not throwing the money at some big international problem that needs more resources than any one person can give.

  “That’s me. Naomi.”

  I have found her name, and my belated Web search begins.

  She looks at you, taking a tone. “Doesn’t it help, knowing a little something about your victim?”

  You do nothing, watching her blood drip into the ground.

  And she does the same, lifting both hands to better measure the flow and estimate the volume, then kicking the dampened earth with the toe of one boot. How much longer before her quick excited mind goes dim?

  “Sir,” she says. “Sir?”

  “Shut up,” you warn.

  “I meant what I said before, sir. I would be a much easier object of devotion than this one.”

  “Don’t answer,” you tell me.

  On my own, I decide on silence.

  “Guardian Angels,” she repeats.

  Neither of us speaks, waiting.

  She looks at the mask and the eyes. “You’ll eventually get an Angel. You won’t have any choice. Stalkers failed in the marketplace, which means they won’t be updated and supported much longer. And you’re young. A kid. You’re just getting started, and it shows. An impulsive boy hunting vulnerable women . . . do you really believe you can trust your safety and precious life to a talking fog that hasn’t been upgraded for two or three years?”

  With every sense at my disposal, I watch you.

  I read your body, delving into your thoughts, and what shows makes me feel odd.

  And that’s when she laughs, loudly and very sadly.

  “Wait,” she says. “You’re ahead of me, aren’t you? You’ve already started thinking about how and when to replace your old Stalker.”

  “Shut up,” you shout.

  Like never before, I feel cold.

  “Don’t listen to her,” you tell me, looking up over your shoulder.

  She leaps, arms extended and the knife held with fingers and thumbs. And maybe you aren’t surprised. You turn back again, lifting your hands to protect your face. But she doesn’t aim for the face. The blade plunges into the belly just above the groin, and you crumple and curse while trying to kick. But this is one enormous shock, embarrassing enough to cripple. The pain lifts and blood starts flowing, and she stands over you, aiming a boot at your groin, and to protect yourself you lift both legs high, ready to kick her.

  This is what she wants.

  Dropping low, she slashes at you with the keen edge, slicing through one pants leg and then into the other leg, forcing steel into the deep meat of the hamstring.

  Pain swells, and you scream.

  I have never heard such agony.

  She steps back, studying her work. Then after a final calculation, she turns and runs downhill, the untied boots clomping with every stride.

  I follow.

  Three hundred yards down the trail, she stops to breathe and look back. The knife is barely held in one purple hand. She lifts both hands and just manages to fit the hilt into her mouth, between clenched teeth, slowly cutting at the tight, well-knotted rope. The screams are constant and pathetic and distant. Part of me is struggling to craft some explanation of how a good man can be ambushed and then assaulted by this awful woman. But all of me hovers, watching her free herself, and then she shakes her arms hard, bringing the feeling back into the fingers. Not even looking up, she asks, “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  “Did you mean it?” I wonder aloud. “That you would be easier to love than that man?”

  Until this moment, she has done a remarkable job of burying her fears.

  But her scream is honest and horrible, and it hurts me to hear it, following as close as I can, hovering in her slipstream as she sprints heavily toward the distant car.

  DROPLET

  BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM

  1.

  Today Shar is Marilyn Monroe. That’s an erotic goddess from prehistoric cartoon mythology. She has golden curls, blue eyes, big breasts, and skin of a shocking pale pink. She stands with a wind blowing up from Hades beneath her, trying to control her skirt with her hands, forever showing and hiding her white silk underwear.

  Today I am Shivol’riargh, a more recent archetype of feminine sexuality. My skin is hard, hairless, glistening black. Faint fractal patterns of darker black writhe across my surfaces. I have long claws. It suits my mood.

  We have just awakened from a little nap of a thousand years, our time, during which the rest of the world aged even more.

  She goes: “kama://01-nbX5-#…”

  I snap the channel shut. “Talk language if you want to seduce me.”

  Shar pouts. With those little red lips and those innocent, yet knowing, eyes, it’s almost irresistible. I resist.

  “Come on, Narra,” she says. “Do we have to fight about this every time we wake up?”

  “I just don’t know why we have to keep flying around like this.”

  “You’re not scared of Warboys again?” she asks.

  Her fingertips slide down my black plastic front. The fractals dance around them.

  “There aren’t any more,” she says.

  “You don’t know that, Shar.”

  “They’ve all killed each other. Or turned themselves off. Warboys don’t last if there’s nothing to fight.”

  Despite the cushiony-pink Marilyn Monroe skin, Shar is harder than I am. My heart races when I look at her, just as it did a hundred thousand years ago.

  Her expression is cool. She wants me. But it’s a game to her.

  She’s searching the surface of me with her hands.

  “What are you looking for?” I mean both in the Galaxy and on my skin, though I know the answers.

  “Anything,” she says, answering the broader question. “Anyone who’s left. People to learn from. To play with.”

  People to serve, I think nastily.

  I’m lonely, too, of course, but I
’m sick of looking. Let them come find us in the Core.

  “It’s so stupid,” I groan. Her hands are affecting me. “We probably won’t be able to talk to them anyway.”

  Her hands find what they’ve been searching for: the hidden opening to Shivol’riargh’s sexual pocket. It’s full of the right kind of nerve endings. Shivol’riargh is hard on the outside, but oh so soft on the inside. Sometimes I wish I had someone to wear that wasn’t sexy.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she says in a voice that’s all breath.

  Her fingers push at the opening of my sexual pocket. I hold it closed. She leans against me and wraps her other arm around me for leverage. She pushes. I resist.

  Her lips are so red. I want them on my face.

  She’s cheating. She’s a lot stronger than Marilyn Monroe.

  “Shar, I don’t want to screw,” I say. “I’m still angry.”

  But I’m lying.

  “Hush,” she says.

  Her fist slides into me and I gasp. My claws go around her shoulders and I pull her to me.

  2.

  Later we turn the gravity off and float over Ship’s bottom eye, looking down at the planet Shar had Ship find. It’s blue like Marilyn Monroe’s eyes.

  “It’s water,” Shar says. Her arms are wrapped around my waist, her breasts pressed against my back. She rests her chin on my shoulder.

  I grunt.

  “It’s water all the way down,” she says. “You could swim right through the planet to the other side.”

  “Did anyone live here?”

  “I think so. I don’t remember. But it was a gift from a Sultan to his beloved.”

  Shar and I have an enormous amount of information stored in our brains. The brain is a sphere the size of a billiard ball somewhere in our bodies, and however much we change our bodies, we can’t change that. Maka once told me that even if Ship ran into a star going nine-tenths lightspeed, my billiard-ball brain would come tumbling out the other side, none the worse for wear. I have no idea what kind of matter it is or how it works, but there’s plenty of room in my memory for all the stories of all the worlds in the Galaxy, and most of them are probably in there.

  But we’re terrible at accessing the factual information. A fact will pop up inexplicably at random—the number of Quantegral Lovergirls ever manufactured, for instance, which is 362,476—and be gone a minute later, swimming away in the murky seas of thought. That’s the way Maka built us, on purpose. He thought it was cute.

  3.

  An old argument about Maka:

  “He loved us,” I say. I know he did.

  Shar rolls her eyes (she’s a tigress at the moment).

  “I could feel it,” I say, feeling stupid.

  “Now there’s a surprise. Maka designed you from scratch, including your feelings, and you feel that he loved you. Amazing.” She yawns, showing her fangs.

  “He made us more flexible than any other Lovergirls. Our minds are almost Interpreter-level.”

  She snorts. “We were trade goods, Narra. Trade goods. Classy purchasable or rentable items.”

  I curl up around myself. (I’m a python.)

  “He set us free,” I say.

  Shar doesn’t say anything for a while, because that is, after all, the central holiness of our existence. Our catechism, if you like.

  Then she says gently: “He didn’t need us for anything anymore, when they went into the Core.”

  “He could have just turned us off. He set us free. He gave us Ship.”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “He loved us,” I say.

  I know it’s true.

  4.

  I don’t tell Shar, but that’s one reason I want us to go back to the Galactic Core: Maka’s there.

  I know it’s stupid. There’s nothing left of Maka that I would recognize. The Wizards got hungrier and hungrier for processing power, so they could think more and know more and play more complicated games. Eventually the only thing that could satisfy them was to rebuild their brains as a soup of black holes. Black hole brains are very fast.

  I know what happens when a person doesn’t have a body anymore, too. For a while they simulate the sensations and logic of a corporeal existence, only with everything perfect and running much faster than in the real world. But their interests drift. The simulation gets more and more abstract and eventually they’re just thoughts, and after a while they give that up, too, and then they’re just numbers. By now Maka is just some very big numbers turning into some even bigger numbers, racing toward infinity.

  I know because he told me. He knew what he was becoming.

  I still miss him.

  5.

  We go down to the surface of the planet, which we decide to call Droplet.

  The sky is painterly blue with strings of white clouds drifting above great choppy waves. It’s lovely. I’m glad Shar brought us here.

  We’re dolphins. We chase each other across the waves. We dive and hold our breaths, and shower each other with bubbles. We kiss with our funny dolphin noses.

  I’m relaxing and floating when Shar slides her rubbery body over me and clamps her mouth onto my flesh. It’s such a long time since I’ve been a cetacean that I don’t notice that Shar is a boy dolphin until I feel her penis enter me. I buck with surprise, but Shar keeps her jaws clamped and rides me. Rides me and rides me, as I buck and swim, until she ejaculates. She makes it take extra long.

  Afterward we race, and then I am floating, floating, exhausted and happy as the sunset blooms on the horizon.

  It’s a very impressive sunset, and I kick up on my tail to get a better look. I change my eyes and nose so I can see the whole spectrum and smell the entire wind.

  It hits me first as fear, a powerful shudder that takes over my dolphin body, kicks me into the air and then into a racing dive, dodging and weaving. Then it hits me as knowledge, the signature written in the sunset: beryllium-10, mandelium, large-scale entanglement from muon dispersal. Nuclear and strange-matter weapons fallout. Warboys.

  Ship dropped us a matter accelerator to get back up with, a series of rings floating in the water. I head for it.

  Shar catches up and hangs on to me, changing into a human body and riding my back.

  “Ssh, honey,” she says, stroking me. “It’s okay. There haven’t been Warboys here for ten thousand years. . . . ”

  I buck her off, and this time I’m not flirting.

  Shar changes her body below the waist back into a dolphin tail, and follows. As soon as she is in the first ring I tell Ship to bring us up, and one dolphin, one mermaid, and twelve metric tons of water shoot through the rings and up through the blue sky until it turns black and crowded with stars.

  “Ten thousand years,” says Shar as we hurtle up into the sky.

  “You picked a planet Warboys had been on! Ship must have seen the signature.”

  “Narra, this wasn’t a Warboy duel—they wouldn’t dick around with nuclear for that. They must have been trying to exterminate a civilian population.”

  The water has all sprayed away now and we are tumbling through the thin air of the stratosphere.

  “There’s a chance they failed, Narra. Someone might be here, hidden. That’s why we came.”

  “Warboys don’t fail!”

  We grow cocoons as we exit the atmosphere and hit orbit. After a couple of minutes, I feel Ship’s long retrieval pseudopod slurp me in.

  I lie in the warm cave of Ship’s retrieval pseudopod. It’s decorated with webs of green and blue. I remember when Shar decorated it. It was a long time ago, when we were first traveling.

  I turn back into a human form and sit up.

  Shar is lying nearby, picking at the remnants of her cocoon, silvery strands draped across her breasts.

  “You want to die,” I say.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Narra.”

  “Shar, seriously. It’s not enough for you—I’m not enough for you. You’re looking for Warboys. You’re trying to get k
illed.” I feel a buzzing in my head, my breathing is constricted, aches shoot through my fist-clenched knuckles: clear signs that my emotional registers are full, the excess externalizing into pain.

  She sighs. “Narra, I’m not that complicated. If I wanted to die, I’d just turn myself off.” She grows legs and stands up.

  “No, I don’t think you can.” What I’m about to say is unfair, and too horrible. I’ll regret it. I feel the blood pounding in my ears and I say it anyway: “Maybe Maka didn’t free us all the way. Maybe he just gave us to each other. Maybe you can’t leave me. You want to, but you can’t.”

  Her eyes are cold. As I watch, the color drains out of them, from black to slate gray to white.

  She looks like she wants to say a lot of things. Maybe: you stupid sentimental little girl. Maybe: it’s you who wants to leave—to go back to your precious Maka, and if you had the brains to become a Wizard you would. Maybe: I want to live, but not the coward’s life you keep insisting on.

  She doesn’t say any of them, though. She turns and walks away.

  6.

  I keep catching myself thinking it, and I know she’s thinking it too. This person before me is the last other person I can reach, the only one to love me from now on in all the worlds of time. How long until she leaves me, as everyone else has left?

  And how long can I stand her if she doesn’t?

  7.

  The last people we met were a religious sect who lived in a beautiful crystal ship the size of a moon. They were Naturals and had old age and death and even children whom they bore themselves, who couldn’t walk or talk at first or anything. They were sad for some complicated religious reason that Shar and I didn’t understand. We cheered them up for a while by having sex with the ones their rules allowed to have sex and telling stories to the rest, but eventually they decided to all kill themselves anyway. We left before it happened.

  Since then we haven’t seen anyone. We don’t know of anywhere that has people left.

  I told Shar we could be passing people all the time and not know it. People changed in the Dispersal, and we’re not Interpreters. There could be people with bodies made of gas clouds or out of the spins of elementary particles. We could be surrounded by crowds of them.