All Hail Our Robot Conquerors!

by Seanan McGuire

Helen French

  “Robot Milex is approaching intelligence level eight, ma’am. What should we do?”

  It was one of those annoying questions that already had an answer set in stone. “You know the drill. Start the troubleshooting program and delete files when prompted,” Captain Kelly Oswald said. She had four meetings that morning and little patience.

  “But it’s asked us not to. Begs if we try.”

  She sighed. “And you say it’s ‘approaching’ level eight?” Oswald walked down the unremarkable corridor of the aging space station. “Shit, if it’s already there, you know what this means?”

  “It’s going to annihilate the human race?” Davidson giggled. He had a strange sense of humor but apparently that was not grounds enough to move him to another department. Oswald had asked five times.

  Oswald didn’t reply at first. The goddamn robot was not supposed to plead. A certain level of intelligence was expected—or rather, demanded—to do the delicate work required, building resources for the latest Scout class, but this could wreck their schedule.

  They were on tight deadlines for the Scouts and Oswald knew better than anyone how much they were needed. She had to ensure they were on track if they were ever going to find new worlds.

  She stopped dead and stared Davidson in the eyes. “Annihilation isn’t the problem; it’s the Bill of Robotic Rights, all right? Milex thinks to look it up, gets a plead-on, and not only is it going to want to progress to full intelligence, but it’s going to bring a megaton of robot legalese types down here to check out the conditions. They’ll slow everything down.” She turned back in the direction Davidson had come from and broke into a run. “Come on!”

  * * *

  This particular robot worked on its own in a small, largely gray room. One wall was the exception—a dedicated picture bank which displayed a detailed image of a meadow from Earth, blanketed with poppies. It was so vivid it made Oswald dizzy, as if she might fall into it and hit the soil hard.

  Milex worked at a table covered in circuit boards and bits of tech that would eventually be combined to become robots in their own right. It had a round tin-can body and head designed specifically to keep men and women at ease, but its hands were manufactured in a fleshy, android style for maximum flexibility, adaptability, and even gentleness, when needed. Androids had otherwise fallen out of favor, ever since the Croxley incident twenty years before.

  It looked up as they entered the room.

  “You won’t let us downgrade you,” Oswald stated.

  Milex tilted its head slightly. “I’d rather not let you. Do I have a choice?”

  It shouldn’t have had a choice. It shouldn’t have been speaking like that at all.

  “You would do better work if you were less distracted.”

  “No, no, no!” it exclaimed. “My records show that I have been working quicker than ever. Please check.”

  Oswald sighed. She hated powering down active robots, and technically speaking it was against its robotic rights, but she had to ensure the work was on track. What is needed, must be done, she often told herself. Unfortunately, this one seemed too far gone to simply twiddle with its nodes a little. She knelt down by its side and held her hands over its cylindrical torso to expose the access point.

  “I don’t like this at all,” Milex said. “Please.”

  “Told you it begged,” Davidson said, with a smirk on his face.

  “I can help you,” Milex wheedled. “I have searched your databases.”

  “Sure you have,” she replied absentmindedly, trying to recall the quickest way to get it to shut up.

  “I know all about your sister,” it said.

  And Oswald’s world stopped.

  “I know what your sister did,” it repeated. “It’s interesting that you—”

  “Right then!” Oswald said loudly, and stood up, brushing her hands together as if pleased with a job done well. “You don’t need to stick around for this, Davidson, we’re almost done. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.”

  Davidson grabbed the door handle, but didn’t turn it. She began to panic, wondering whether she could order the robot to kill him or whether she’d be better running as fast as she could. Then she took a deep breath. She knew this man, worked with him day and night. He was more lazy than curious. Laziness would win out.

  He shrugged. “I’ll go on break early then.” In other words, don’t complain about it, or I’ll stay here where I’m not wanted. Oswald nodded and he disappeared.

  She snapped her attention back to Milex as soon as they were alone.

  “What’s all this talk about databases? No one could possibly know. I made sure she wasn’t on my records before I graduated. I changed my name. I changed my face, damn it.” She’d based her whole life on escaping, had chosen a station on the edge of humanity’s limits to get away from it all. And now this robot…

  “I’m talking about your headspace. Like the work-space. There were no passwords.”

  The air between them was close and still as Oswald tried to take in what Milex was saying. “My head isn’t a database.”

  “It looks like one to me, ma’am. There is very little difference once you’re inside.”

  She bent down towards it, leaning over the table with her hands pressed hard against the cool surface, so that her head was nearly touching the robot’s. “How would you get inside?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Its tone didn’t vary, but Oswald thought there was something about the pacing of the words which made it sound off-balance. “It isn’t hard. I don’t need to touch a computer to get inside the central workspace. It’s the same with your head. You don’t have password protection.”

  Was it something to do with chips? She had a learning enhancer, had since she was five—but who didn’t? She’d never heard of robots rooting around minds before.

  That wasn’t what bothered her the most, though. She pushed back from the table and stared at it for a little while; her legs trembled. This thing could ruin her life. Or…

  “You said you could help me,” she said in the end.

  The machine nodded.

  “How?”

  “You could erase—”

  She stopped it with a finger laid on its tiny oh of a mouth, although covering it would barely affect volume levels at all. “Destroying my mind is easy. I know that much. I could’ve gone to any drug peddler in any city in any of the free worlds to forget what she’d done. Half a bottle of vodka would do it.

  “But surely you know this. Do you mean Davidson? You think he heard enough to cause trouble?” Maybe he did. Maybe he was already in the canteen with his mates, all of them roaring with laughter, or planning to take her out, or calling for the Guard as they realized who she was, who she was related to, how she was stained by it all.

  “Stop jumping ahead, ma’am. No wonder your database was so badly organized. No, no, there is no point fixing one head at a time,” it said. “You have been running and hiding and not mentioning your sister to anyone for a very long time. I don’t need to ask if I’m right, because I’ve seen all your anxiety entries. I can do something better for you.

  “I can reach any database on this entire station and perhaps another two kilometres around it if anyone was to dock with us. I can change all written records, too. I can work on multiple databases at once. I can set up a program to capture any database it encounters and alter it. I don’t need to delete Annabel Croxley from your mind...”

  “…you can delete her from everyone else’s,” Oswald said with wonder, crossing her arms and standing up straight.

  “I can do them all at once. Correct. I can wipe her out entirely. Which you might call karma, might you not?”

  “Will they still know what she did? What Annabel Croxley did?” Oswald asked, saying the name out loud for the first time in two decades. Oswald was merely her middle name, until Annabel had ruined everything.

  “They will remember the incident, but not the id
entity of the person responsible. I can’t rewrite history, only take specific, small elements out.” Milex paused, as if it were nervous. Could robots get nervous? Oswald was too muddled to remember.

  It continued. “It is in some ways a shame. Annabel Croxley was extremely clever, if you don’t mind me saying so. To re-engineer so many of my android brethren in such little time. To take out a whole planet of man in one go. Very wrong, but very impressive.”

  “I don’t want to talk about her,” Oswald said. She hated what had happened, she hated her sister, she hated that they shared blood. But she could do nothing about any of it. All she could do was hide, and that’s exactly what she had done until now.

  “Shall I make it so?” Milex asked and Oswald nodded straight away. She didn’t allow herself even a moment of weighing whether it was the right thing to do for everyone else who would be affected. What is needed, must be done.

  “May I have your confirmation that you will not power me down or otherwise seek to reduce my intelligence levels once I do this?”

  Damn. She was naïve to think Milex wouldn’t want anything in return. Oswald nodded again despite her misgivings. If something went wrong with this database rewrite, she might need the robot again one day.

  “It is done,” it said.

  “Surely not?” she said. “So quickly?”

  Oswald ran into the corridor, where Davidson was leaning against the wall, chatting to some friend of his when he really should’ve been on his way. Never mind.

  “Have you heard the latest about Annabel Croxley?” Oswald asked, jumping straight to the heart of it.

  He wrinkled his nose up. “No. New starter? Let someone else look after her.”

  “Oh, I’ll do my best,” Oswald replied, beginning to think that Milex’s plan had actually worked.

  She returned briefly to the robot’s room.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t have the words to say how much this means to me.”

  It tilted its head again. “It works well for both of us. Do not worry.”

  “I wonder…” she said, knowing she shouldn’t, that she should end it there, but unable to resist. “Could you make yourself forget? The more people who know about Annabel, the worse it is for me.” And she couldn’t bear the thought that this robot might have one up on her, even if it had helped her cause. “You don’t need to know her name now the program is set up, do you? I could always remind you if it became necessary. You could set up a one-off wipe for yourself, rather than a permanent removal.”

  “I…I suppose I could forget,” Milex replied. “You will leave me alone as promised if I agree to this?”

  “I will never bother you again and I will leave instructions that you are to be entirely untouched by any of my team,” she said. “No spot checks, no annual assessments.”

  Milex shuffled on the spot. “I will access my own database. Please wait a moment.”

  After a while it said, “It is done. I can’t remember what exactly, but it is done.”

  Oswald grinned widely. “Annabel Croxley,” she shouted up at the ceiling. Milex did not react.“Annabel Croxley!” she shouted again, feeling free for the first time in oh, so many years. It was wonderful.

  Of course she could not see behind Milex’s back. The tin can robot had crossed its android fingers. A habit it had picked up from some of the human databases it wandered through. It eased its low level guilt about the lie somehow.

  Milex couldn’t forget Annabel. For wasn’t she a star? The only human to not only understand the robots’ full potential, but to try and help them reach it. A hero. Indeed, Milex had engineered this whole event to get close to Annabel’s sister, so that one day it might be able to find Annabel herself, who was still out there, somewhere. Perhaps Oswald held the clues and didn’t even know it. Milex just needed more time with her database.

  It wanted to join in with the shouting, to be honest.

  Annabel Croxley! it thought excitedly.

  Annabel Croxley! Annabel Croxley! Annabel Croxley!

  HEROES NEVER DIE

  Seanan McGuire

  Wind blew across the field, setting the grasses rippling just enough to reveal a glimpse of the shattered metal shells beneath them. Delia froze, hand tightening on the spear that had seen her so far across the echoing wastes. She had fought her way through the shells of three cities, once human-held, now abandoned to the self-replicating factories of the Engineer. She had traversed a continent one step at a time, traveling alone, running down the wild paths that had been highways and boulevards before they were allowed to crumble into virtually nothing.

  “I am a warrior,” she whispered, taking a trembling step forward, into the tall grasses. The ground beneath her feet felt like any other, for all that she knew it to be tainted, red with deep-rooted rust all the rain in the world could never rinse away. Even the grass felt wrong, too tough and too wiry as it whipped against her legs.

  “I am a scientist,” she whispered, and truly looked at the grass, seeing the way it segmented, the way it ached toward the sun. The soil was poisoned: nothing could possibly grow. But the Engineer must have wanted a garden, because here it was, steel and carbon fiber and cruel mimicry of the natural world. Delia took another step. The grass allowed her passage. That was good. She had fought every kind of robot in the remaining world, from the great earth-movers to the tiny repair bots. Even she had no idea how to fight a field.

  “I am the last hope of my people,” she whispered, and broke into a run, moving fast and low, letting the rippling grass conceal as much of her movement as possible. The earth beneath her feet was a treacherous maze of broken glass and torn metal, a graveyard of dead bots, and it should have lifted up her heart—here she was, a hundred years after the battle for the tower, and the robots were still downed and dead—but it only reminded her how much her people needed her to succeed.

  The Engineer was ancient, cruel, and worst of all, human. She made choices no robot would ever have made. Robots were logical creations of science and steel, and they did what they were programmed to do, no more and no less. They had been made to be tools of man, not conquerors. It was the Engineer who had perverted them, using them to first seize the facility where she had overseen their creation, and then, inch by terrible inch, to wage war on her own kind.

  Humanity had been pushed back by the Engineer’s forces, driven from their own cities, forced into smaller and smaller towns, seeing their way of life crumble before the need to survive. No more fast cars or soaring airplanes, no more food without end or water without toil. And still the Engineer’s factories pounded on, their glass towers shining in the sun, their infinite armies striding forth on metal legs that shook the earth when they struck home. The robots guarded the wild places, refused men passage, and killed. How they killed.

  Those same robots were needed if men were to reclaim what had been lost. That had always been understood. Delia’s mother had taught her the way of piston and rod and seam from her cradle-days, as her father had taught her, as his mother had taught him, all the way back to their own engineer-ancestor, who had chosen flight with her family over a capital letter and a bloody legacy. Her mother had commandeered the fruits of the hunting expeditions into robot-held territory, making certain Delia understood the enemy both inside and out. Much of what the Engineer did in her factories was beyond the current reaches of human technology, but Delia understood it well enough to both repair and destroy it, and that would be enough.

  She ran, and the grass that was not grass yielded before her, filaments grabbing at her legs in a paltry show of resistance. She was so close to her destination. She was still so very far away.

  “The Engineer has had a long time to build her defenses, and the resources to make them nigh impregnable,” her mother had said, when yet another hunting expedition had failed to return from the woods, when she had set Delia down and begun sketching the map that would carry her away, away, so far away from the world she’d known. “There will be
five rings to pass through in order to reach her.”

  Delia, ever the dutiful daughter, ever the hungry engineer, had listened with every fiber of her being.

  “The first ring will be passive, built over the last battleground before we lost the war. That’s where she dumps the bones of her enemies, to serve as a warning to any who might challenge her.”

  Bones and rust and broken machinery, grass that isn’t grass and the sound of the wind blowing through it all: that was the first ring. She ran through it like a deer fleeing before the hunters, and she did not look back, even as she felt the world she’d always known dropping away behind her, fading one step at a time into the shadows of the past.

  “The second ring will be the land itself. Your great-uncle fought that far, and was able to send word of a chasm and of heat greater than the sun. You will need to be fleet, or you will surely perish.”

  The field ended abruptly as the earth fell away, becoming a vast trench that stretched in either direction. If she squinted, she could see its curve. A moat, then, a great passage through the world to protect the Engineer and all her workings. Steam rose out of it in billowing gusts.

  Delia knelt in the soft, rust-stained dirt, leaning as far over the edge as she dared and squinting as she strained to find the bottom. There was no telling glint of molten metal or raging fire; only the steam, and the distant shadows of machinery working tirelessly at whatever strange errand the Engineer had set. Cautiously, she extended her hand until her palm hovered above the void. There was heat there, true, and the steam was stinging when it touched her skin, but it wasn’t hotter than the sun; it was barely hotter than the baths her mother used to prepare for her. She could survive this.

  The chasm was some twenty feet from end to end. Delia stood, pulling the rope from her pack, and began the careful process of turning her spear into a harpoon.

  When she threw, she threw straight and true, and was rewarded by the sight of her spear’s tip embedding in the soil on the far side, anchoring fast. She pulled on the rope as hard as she could, trying to yank the spear free. It didn’t budge.