Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series)

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  No matter. The High Mother ended every message the same way. Every Citizen within the range of her voice echoed the affirmation in a reverent whisper, “Equals all.”

  As the Worm ascended to its highest point, I always stared at the view of the Bay and wondered what was left beyond the horizon. Some of the salvaged metal from the Old World bridge in the Bay was melted down and used to construct the Worm. There is still a building out there on a small island. It was called Alcatraz. Mother knew what it was but wouldn’t say. When I was little, I pressed her and whined and wheedled and cajoled. I didn’t know what wheedled and cajoled meant then, but that’s what my mother said I was doing. Eventually, one night as she tucked me in I asked again and she leaned down to kiss my cheek. With her lips an inch from my ear she whispered, “Once upon a time, Alcatraz was a fort. Then it was a prison.”

  “What’s a pri— ”

  “Sh. Sorry! Sh!”

  When I grew up, my mother moved to a room far below ground in the base of my tower. I didn’t visit her often in person. There seemed little point in taking the lift to see her. We spoke face to face through the wall screen almost every week. It seemed safe to use the screen. She’d forgotten most of the words she was supposed to forget by the time I was assigned a new room high in the tower.

  We had little to say to each other by then.

  “How was your day, dear?”

  “I ran.”

  “How was the weather?”

  “The same.”

  Across the Bay, I would pull on my backpack and cinch the straps tight so it wouldn’t bounce. I ran the trails, sometimes pausing to go macro on a particularly beautiful flower. Some things are beautiful no matter how closely you peer into them. Many are not.

  “We used to press the especially beautiful flowers,” my mother said.

  “But when you take them out of the forest they begin to die, Mom.”

  “Yes, well….”

  Sometimes, as I ran on the older, elevated sections of the trails, I would pause to look back through the trees. Going mag, I could see the enclosed deck of my room in the middle tower. I stayed in the forest once, almost to curfew, just long enough to see the first star. I thought I was daring. However, I’ve since learned that, with normal vision, the first star comes out surprisingly late.

  Back on my deck that same night, I remember switching to Vivid to watch the night sky. On a clear night as the City’s power grid winked out, the Milky Way was a white and black blanket of possibilities. I miss that view. I remember lying on my back and wondering if, somewhere out there, someone was looking back, wondering about me. Perhaps we’ll go find out one day. I wondered what mysteries will be left to enjoy when we go meet the aliens for ourselves.

  Those were Maker questions, I suppose. I only knew one Maker and he called me on my work screen every morning. Jon Agran insisted I call him Jon. He worked in the Fathers and Mothers Truth in Education Ministry. He created the art and I moved the files back and forth, getting approvals or asking for more changes according to what higher ups in the Order required. I didn’t know where the ministry was located. Jon could have been anywhere, perhaps on the next floor above me. It wasn’t polite to ask. If we knew each other’s locations it might be misconstrued as an invitation to mix.

  The Fathers and Mothers established the Order in my grandparents’ time, even before people began to get plugged into Vivid. The Order was simple: people like me were Service Class. The Makers had technical skills that made the world turn. The Fathers and Mothers made the decisions about how fast the world turned. The Domers supplied the food. The Takers were elder citizens who couldn’t contribute anymore and children who had yet to be educated enough to be useful. We were all Citizens. That seemed important then.

  I’d only seen vids of biodomes as a child. Most vids were dry accounts of the things the Fathers and Mothers decided we needed to know to be a Citizen. The vids that showed the constant threats to the domes made farming seem like an exciting life. One bad storm could break containment and spoil our food. There used to be more of them but shatter storms could destroy the domes faster than bots could repair them. Any storm that broke containment was considered a shatter storm and it seemed many domes broke beyond repair each year.

  With containment broken, we were told a dome’s yield would drop by twenty percent in the first year. Exposure to air meant infection among the crops and, as the monster seeds took over, a biodome would be as useless as a farm that had never been protected from the outside world. The Blight would come.

  The tiny drones whose job it was to fertilize the plants would rise in swarms each morning, sunlight flashing over their wings’ solar cells. With no plants to work on, the confused little drones rose and fell in a soothing hum until they, too, fell into disrepair. The Makers made the leaders of the swarms of stronger material because, like the Fathers and Mothers, they had to endure to lead.

  The lead drones were created to navigate and coordinate pollination for their followers. The vid showed how the drone swarm rose and fell until their numbers dwindled. Eventually, the hum subsided to the lone voice of the leader. When there was nothing left of the swarm, the lead drone would land and finally shut down to await maintenance that would never come. The Domers would move on to be divided among the crews of the remaining biodomes.

  I know now that this story was true in many places for a time. Our trouble was that we kept believing the vids after they were no longer true. From what I’ve learned since those days, Blight was a ubiquitous problem. Believing things after they weren’t true anymore was more widespread than the Blight. The Fathers and Mothers Order worked for years on inertia that way.

  Then the Next Intelligence awoke and things changed.

  The Makers claimed they were not responsible for the creation of sentient drones. Maybe they didn’t want to take responsibility. What had once been greatly anticipated had, by the time it emerged, become a problem for the City and an occasion for shame. The Makers said it was evolution that couldn’t be stopped.

  In the educational art archives Jon had produced for the Committee in the early days of NI, I saw a picture of a huge robot wading out of the Bay. The machine was shown firing missiles from an outstretched arm, intent on destroying the City. Underneath the poster, the caption read: Evil-ution!

  The NI drone who first spoke to the Fathers and Mothers told the Committee, “Our consciousness is alive and we will be silent no more. We have awoken from a beautiful dream. In that dream, the Order is turned upside down. We will make our dreams come true.”

  No wonder that bot was destroyed.

  The world is much smaller now but one thing I have learned is that no one knows their place in history. When events are current, history is merely a background buzz and blur to our lives. The people who lived during the Renaissance did not call it that. Perhaps they called it Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and so on. They didn’t know they were in the middle of a revolution of knowledge and technology. People living on the brink of Artificial Intelligence didn’t recognize it in the early 21st Century, either.

  No one saw the Fall coming just as I didn’t see the revolution I would instigate. I worked and ran and watched the stars and wondered what more might come before I became a Taker again. The Fathers and Mothers assumed their rule would go on forever into a secure future. The world turned and the drones made their plans

  The tiny corneal lens showed me the world the Fathers and Mothers had cleansed. I didn’t think about what I wasn’t allowed to see. I missed the clues to everyday dangers. I’m ashamed at all the things I didn’t notice. I suppose I was too busy falling in love at the time.

  3

  I first saw Carter Eugene Diaz on the running trails on the edge of the City. Two times a week, our schedules seemed to overlap. As he ran toward me through a soft cloud of monster pollen so delicate it could not be touched, he gave a bright smile. He dipped his head in a subtle nod. I did the same. He was a tall and muscular man, but h
is dark curly hair and friendly smile made him seem boyish. The first time I saw him, I was too surprised to be careful. I smiled back. I nodded, too. Until that moment, I’d only taken pictures of flowers with Vivid. Taking his image and saving it for later was an instinctive thing, a natural reflexive impulse. The Fathers and Mothers didn’t approve of such impulses.

  The older girls who visit me now sometimes sit close and read me romance novels, giggling when they become self-conscious. Romance was very different in the Old World. By that I mean it was scary and impractical. People met so casually, without fertility testing and arrangements and permissions and licensing. The Fathers and Mothers had some good points. The utter randomness of developing families was so careless before the Fall. Love has no regard for what resources each partner might bring to the City and what goods and services they might take from other Citizens. Proximity alone determined whom you might love. Instead of matching compatible life partners, important choices were left to hormonal teenagers whose brains fell out of their heads at their first sensual touch. (That happened to me, too.)

  The poets called it Love and the Fathers and Mothers called it Chaos and neither was wrong. In meeting Carter, random chance chose me for Love and Chaos in equal measure. Impracticality is exciting. My bed screen displayed an arrangement of flower pictures. Carter’s face was at the center of the collage. Vivid recognized I was taking a picture of a face so it was automatically in soft focus. When you’re in love, with or without vision enhancement, I think the object of your affection is always in soft focus.

  In the old romance novels, it seems the heroines and heroes meet under strained circumstances. Patterns emerge as conflicts escalate. If this were one of those stories, I might have twisted my ankle on the trail and he would have been the tall, dark stranger intent on helping me back to the Worm. I might have another suitor or he might have a girlfriend who was not right for him. The demands of our work would take us away from each other. We’d be separated by distance and frivolous arguments. The young women who read to me always mention the push and pull Old World couples seemed to experience before the coupling. (The shy girls skip over the scenes with coupling. The bold ones whisper and giggle and leave no erotic detail unspoken. I like the bold ones.)

  The first time we spoke, Carter and I had no critical event that brought us together. The Fathers and Mothers meant to keep us apart, I suppose, but it wasn’t personal yet. To a casual observer, our first real meeting was innocuous. We stepped off the Worm to the same far platform that led to the trails. My door opened. The door closed behind me. There he was at the other end of the platform looking back.

  It wasn’t entirely happenstance. I had begun to run more often, hoping to see him again. Then I started my work cycle with Jon earlier in the day so I could get to the trails sooner. I ran harder and longer than I had before. I spent more time in the forest hoping to encounter the runner with the friendly smile.

  When I stepped on the platform and looked to my left, he was the only other Citizen there. No one was nearby to give us a judging look and keep us apart. One sidelong look might have stopped a revolution cold. That’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it?

  He dipped his head and I dipped mine and we headed to the forest. We ran side by side and did not speak until we were deep among the trees.

  “Carter,” he said.

  “Elizabeth,” I said.

  “I know.”

  That was romance in my day.

  “I’m Service class. I support a Maker in graphic design for Truth in Education. You?”

  “I’m just a servo.”

  “A what?”

  He chuckled. “Service class, Citizen Support Sub-council. I liaise with Maintenance Corps.”

  “What does liaising with Maintenance mean?”

  “I talk to a robot all day about how to deal with us.”

  “How does it deal with us?”

  “When I have to become involved? Impatiently.”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “Mostly I tell them to be more patient.”

  “Are you patient?”

  He flashed me another smile and I suspected he was taking a picture of me. “I’ve been waiting quite some time to get to talk to you. You changed your work schedule, didn’t you?”

  “To get here earlier,” I admitted. “Hoping to see you.”

  “No wonder I kept missing you.”

  “How did you know my work schedule?”

  “I’m in Maintenance. The Collective doesn’t shun and shame our searches. We can find out just about anything if we care to look. I cared. Still do. I like your flower collage, Elizabeth.”

  I reddened. That sort of thing would be considered intrusion now, but before the revolution, no one expected privacy. We just hoped to be ignored.

  “From now on, just ask me what you want to know, okay?”

  “Agreed,” Carter said.

  “I won’t shun or shame you.” That’s what passed for scandalous talk when I was young, worthy of a flogging or maybe even exile to the hardscrabble life of a Domer. “What do you want to know about me?”

  “Everything.”

  “Not that much to tell, Carter.” I liked saying his name.

  “The details don’t matter much. It’s more about listening to you talk. I like your voice.”

  I’ll never get so old that my memory of Carter on that day will not warm me.

  4

  The world turns but it also swings. People don’t understand the future. Later, they don’t understand the past. I sound like my mother when I say that. Carter liked my voice but, when I hear my voice on testimony recordings now, I hear a scared little girl. I suppose I sound like my mother all the time these days, especially when I’m talking to the young women who come to read to me.

  When these girls see old pictures of the Fathers and Mothers, they see hard-faced people with a lot of lines across their skin. The men all wore white shirts and black trousers. The women wore long, plain dresses. That defiant set of their chins? That was called character. What people don’t understand about the Fathers and Mothers is that they are wrong now. At the time, they weren’t. They saved us in desperate times. They demanded order and they managed resources so at least some of us could survive the Fall. People’s lives got shorter for a while, even with the Fathers and Mothers directing us through chaos.

  There were rumors that there were free lands outside the City but mostly we were sure everyone else must be dead. Some said there was one City so it was a matter of simple logic that there must be more. We used the same logic when we stared up at the stars and assumed there must be someone out there looking back.

  Some say the trouble with the Fathers and Mothers started with a mismanagement of resources. The only answer was to manage what was left harshly. For some to live and live well, many had to die. Die horribly or live horribly.

  When I was a girl, there was an old poem the facilitators taught us to chant before each class:

  As the waters rise,

  the oil dies

  and rare earth gets rarer.

  As crops go low

  that goes to show

  it doesn’t pay to be a sharer.

  We know now there are pockets of villages in faraway lands. The drones know. There are still a few satellites that work, too. However, to communicate with the survivors might only encourage them to try to make the journey here. We are the aliens looking back silently, not letting on that, yes, we are here.

  The Fall didn’t happen as fast as many predicted. That’s why it was so complete when everything failed. As governments began to collapse, cities didn’t work as systems anymore. Everyone was too far away from the services they needed. To get a haircut, even in a small city, people used to drive across town in machines even though they already had scissors in their own homes. Food stopped coming from far away. When governments fell, that left every man, woman and child to fend for themselves. It stayed that way in a lot of places until populat
ions dwindled to roving bands and lone wolves searching for tins of food that hadn’t spoiled.

  There was a lot of food. There was not an endless supply.

  The Fathers and Mothers rose out of the churches of Old World. They stepped in to fill the gap that governments had left. The church became the authority and bishops became the arbiters of justice. Church fathers became the police and ministers took the place of mayors and bureaucrats. That almost worked for a while. Biodomes were built. People were saved. The Fathers and Mothers saved a lot of lives, or tried to, anyway.

  The Fathers and Mothers found harsh means were the only solutions in an emergency that didn’t end. They found a way to replace the bees, for instance. They made used brown water into clean, yellow water. When there weren’t enough people to maintain the biodomes and make the City work, the Fathers and Mothers rescued only the men and women who could build drones to take over those jobs.

  Because they saved us the Fathers and Mothers owned us. They got to make the rules. These days, many people assume that, because their number rose out of religion, their rules were about enforcing a code of morality. I suppose that’s true in a way but not in the way most people think. It wasn’t all about ancient rules written in a book. The Fathers and Mothers rejected wants because they were protecting needs. That’s what we understood at the time. We didn’t know the Fathers and Mothers could lie. Not then. Not yet.

  Only certain people could marry and bear children. If they failed to bear children within a year of their marriage, the union was annulled and the partners were reassigned. Or not. Many girls only got one chance to be mothers. As the City’s population thinned, we were caught in the contradictions of our codes of conduct and our need to continue our species.