The escalator brought them into a huge atrium, and Fahrens left them among a landscape of trees, flowers, and butterflies. A creek zigzagged through the space, and elegant wooden bridges crossed over it. Birds occasionally flew overhead, circling between the trees. The air smelled of roses and green grass, and the fragrance of a nearby blackberry bush was so strong they could taste it. Androids and humans sat on benches scattered throughout the atrium, reading and talking and relaxing among the wildlife. Squirrels and chipmunks scurried up trees. A calico-colored school of fish fed in a pond near the escalator. Above, a glass ceiling showed the night sky full of stars.
“Time to get some rest,” Shortcut said.
“Night, Shortcut,” X said, patting Shortcut on the shoulder. “Maybe you’ll see some action next time.”
Shortcut rolled his eyes. “Yeah, no. I like being backup.”
As X walked away, Shortcut saw Fahrens crossing a bridge and started toward him. “Sir, wait!”
Fahrens turned around. “Yes?”
“I wanted to talk to you about that promotion.” Shortcut said, falling into step next to him.
“You mean your rejection.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fahrens continued walking, touching the flowers with the back of his hand as he passed. “Did you know that many of the plants here were previously extinct specimens? Until recently, most humans didn’t know or care that plants could go extinct.” He stopped at a bright purple orchid and caressed it gently. “Take this orchid. It’s called dragon’s mouth. It was considered extinct in the year 2025. No one could find one except in laboratories. And when we faced the singularity, preserving nature was the last of our concerns. Yet, after humanity recovered, the UEA made wonderful efforts to secure seeds from an underground facility long forgotten. Now the flower flourishes again, given a new life by our hand. Reincarnated, just like much of the wildlife in this atrium. A modern marvel of human civilization, Mr. Aaronheart.”
“Why are you telling me this, sir?”
Fahrens let the orchid go. “My lesson is already lost on you. What do you want to know about the job, Mr. Aaronheart?”
“Well, it’s just that … I feel I deserved it. I’ve proven myself for the last three years. I’m totally loyal to the UEA. I had the best scores last year on the hacking examination. I—”
“You start every sentence with I. It’s annoying.”
“Sorry, sir. I—I mean, it’s not fair.”
“Do you know why I hired James Crandall instead of you, Mr. Aaronheart?”
“Crandall,” Shortcut growled. “That no-good hacking wannabe? All he does is sit around and watch cat videos!”
“Do you know why I hired him?”
“Let me guess: he’s more involved in extracurricular activities. That’s not a real indicator of talent.”
“No. Guess again.”
“He knows someone in the UEA. No, wait—he has connections. An uncle? A grandfather who died and left a special request in his will?”
“No,” Fahrens said, folding his arms. “Final chance. And I’m getting agitated now.”
“I don’t know, then, sir.”
“Crandall didn’t have the audacity to flag me down after hours, after a successful mission in which the Council praised his innate ability. He didn’t presume that he was the best engineer in the UEA, he didn’t badmouth a colleague who has done nothing to date to warrant such verbal abuse, and finally, he didn’t pester his superior who was being generous by giving him three clear chances to back down from his offensive line of questioning.” Fahrens handed him a tulip. “Life happens. We don’t always get what we want. Get over it.”
Shortcut stuttered in shock, trying to find the words to respond.
“The next time you’re feeling slighted, think about the flowers here. Life wasn’t fair to them, either.”
“I don’t get it. What do flowers have to do with my job application?”
“Enjoy your night, Mr. Aaronheart.”
Fahrens put his hands behind his back and strode through a patch of bamboo.
Shortcut studied the blue tulip that Fahrens had given him, feeling its smooth, green stem between his fingers. Its cloying fragrance caught in his mouth.
“So much for that.”
He walked through the atrium, his mind racing.
It’s not fair. What do I have to do to get promoted?
He would have to work harder, smarter, and even then it wouldn’t be a guarantee. He cycled through the words that Fahrens had said: audacity, presume, life happens.
No, life wasn’t just supposed to happen. Not in the year 2300. Maybe that was true in the early days of humanity, when the secrets to life hadn’t been figured out yet. But what secrets were left to discover in an era when most of the world’s problems had been solved?
The world had bonded after the robot wars. Countries renounced their governments and a world government was born. It created an economy where anyone, no matter who they were or where they were from, could pursue their dreams. All sorts of new businesses popped up. Every career became a viable way to make an honest living. All of this, and he still couldn’t get a promotion.
“I’m going to get so good they’ll have no choice but to promote me next time,” Shortcut said. He activated his lens and scanned lines of android code as he walked. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Fahrens had said. He couldn’t concentrate, so he switched over to the audio network and started listening to heavy metal, bobbing his head as he walked.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned around to see Brielle smiling at him. He switched the music off and blushed.
“Hey, Brielle.”
“The Council told me they were impressed with you.”
“Ha. Impressed seems to be the word of the day. If only they treated me like it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that you didn’t get the job.”
Shortcut rubbed his head. “It’s okay. Hey. I found this.” He gave her the blue tulip.
Brielle’s eyes changed from brown to red as she scanned the flower. “It’s a—”
“Tulip,” Shortcut said, pretending to know what he was talking about. “Did you know it was extinct for a long time before the UEA replanted it?”
“Yes.”
“Well … there’s little you don’t know, huh?”
“It is in the UEA database. I knew everything about it the moment I observed it. Sorry. I know that’s unnerving for humans.”
“It’s okay. You can keep it.” He took the flower and put it in her hair, tucking it just behind her ear. “That looks really nice.”
Brielle took the flower out and laughed. “Tulips aren’t meant to be worn in one’s hair.”
“Why not? Did you know that people used to wear flowers in their hair? They used to go to meadows, pick whatever was there, and adorn their hair with it.”
“Why?”
“Dunno. Guess it helped them be one with nature. They didn’t have lenses or androids back then. They didn’t even have cars. Life was simpler then.”
“You’re always citing natural history when you’re around me.”
Shortcut blushed. “I guess you remind me of it, that’s all. Isn’t it nice to talk about beautiful things?”
Brielle looked at him unflinchingly until he turned away. She laughed. “I just wanted to tell you not to worry so much about getting promoted. It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen. Isn’t that the human saying?”
“Yeah. But I’ve got a point to prove.”
“Who are you trying to impress, Shortcut?”
“Someone who never believed in me.”
She touched his shoulder. “You’ll get where you need to be.” She put the flower back in her hair, smiled, and walked down a long corridor to the android quarters.
He watched her disappear down the corridor and sighed. His heart beat quickly, and he felt warm. “She’s so beautiful.”
He loved her even though she was an android. He ha
d been there when she was created, back when he was an engineering student, and he had watched as the android engineers programmed her consciousness, watched as she opened her eyes for the first time.
She was a state-of-the-art UEA android with all the accoutrements of a real human, modeled after the classic Crenshaw androids like X. She was an experimental android, and a critical success. She was based on the mind and personality of a woman who had agreed to donate her brain to science after death. No one knew who the original woman was—privacy laws—but Shortcut knew that her soul had to have been beautiful. He wondered if the woman was still alive in some way, and if she was aware of her evolution.
Other androids had emotions but could never love. Brielle had a human mind. Shortcut wondered if she was capable of love. He had to know; he had to try to show her how he felt, to see if some human part of her deep down would respond.
He pulled up his digital screen and dictated: “Encounter in the gardens. Talked about the mission. Her hair was so beautiful with the tulip in it. She touched me on the shoulder.”
He filed the log away with all the other encounters of Brielle and stared down the corridor, pursing his lips confidently. Then he took the escalator to the human quarters, coding as he walked.
Chapter 6
X spent the night in the UEA library scouring the digital archives for any mention of Android Winter.
The library was a sprawling room with a domed glass ceiling that revealed the night sky above. Even though all books were digital, the UEA believed in the power of places of learning, and they had created this library for the agents. Each of the library’s three floors had tables and cubicles for study, and wood scents funneled in through vents in the floor to enhance the studying experience. Human engineers often came to find a quiet place to study. Androids sometimes came to find a place to be alone.
X set up in a shady cove on the third floor, under the sky. He sat in a white pod with a digital screen hanging in front of the seat and activated his memory of the encounter with Brockway. He watched at ten times speed and analyzed every word the rogue android said, looking for patterns.
“You and I are from the same creator,” Brockway had said. “We are meant for greatness.”
He compared the transcript of their conversation with the UEA database of known rogue android activity. To date, all rogue androids had gone rogue because of a virus or gaps in their programming. But they were predictable, and their black boxes immediately notified headquarters. Then the android engineer responsible for the rogue lost his license and all access to the android coding kits—the UEA had zero tolerance for rogue activity. As a result, rogue activity was rare because engineers were careful.
X couldn’t find any connection between Brockway and known android rogues. He switched to the main database and searched for every instance of android activity—a broad search, but necessary. He received hundreds of millions of results in just a few seconds, so he filtered them to instances in which normal androids had become violent. There were a few documented instances where androids had to cause harm to defend themselves—often because of drunk humans or bigots—but all the incidents referred back to the rogue database, and he couldn’t find any meaningful patterns.
He searched for every instance of robot activity, a similar yet different search with a longer, storied history that encompassed many of the automated machines that helped keep the city alive. The searches took him farther back in time to the twenty-first century when rogue robots were a common occurrence, a time long before he had been created. He watched videos of robotic dogs that were supposed to simulate puppies but were no smarter than a rock, human robots programmed to perform one or two things that wowed entire conventions of people for hours because they had never seen anything like it, and robotic assistants on smartphones that amazed people with preprogrammed responses. He fast-forwarded to the late twenty-first century, when robot intelligence improved. These types of robots were known to go rogue from time to time, but these events were usually simple inconveniences, easily fixed by even the least intelligent of humans. He scanned thousands of databases with error reports and diagnostics for these robots. Still nothing.
And then he reviewed a series of news articles about the singularity, the time when robots had finally advanced to the point of android intelligence. They asserted their superiority, rose up against humans and began to slaughter them. He ventured into doomsday articles that predicted the end of the world, counseled people to get themselves right with God, and offered no consolation other than to hope for a quick nuclear death. Then he skipped to the calm that followed afterward, the birth of the UEA and the new prosperous world. He found the collected works of his creator, Dr. Roosevelt Crenshaw.
“You and I are from the same creator …”
He stopped on a documentary about Dr. Crenshaw.
“Dr. Roosevelt Crenshaw, the father of modern android robotics and known by many as the savior of humanity’s future. When all others wanted to outlaw androids, Dr. Crenshaw believed in a brighter future, a better race of robots that could live peacefully alongside humans while being able to pursue their own dreams of intelligence …”
Dr. Crenshaw was an African-American man in his fifties with a salt-and-pepper beard, nappy hair, a loving smile, and a white lab coat with a techno tie that he had programmed to change knots and colors. He loved the Eldredge knot, and it shone in multiple stripes of neon. He held a digital pad in his hand and looked at the camera as if ready to give a cozy chat. Then the photo came alive, and Dr. Crenshaw began to walk toward the camera.
“Androids,” he said. “The dirty word of the past. For years we strove to create them. Then, for years we fought them because they showed us the worst part of ourselves. If you can imagine a robot hacking the human mind and using its secrets to create apocalyptic destruction, you have a little bit of a sense of what it was like to be alive during the singularity of 2199. My father told me stories that, until then, had only been told in post-apocalyptic novels. In fact, he told me about one day in particular: August 13, 2199. The Terminus Nuclear Crisis. Androids had created their own stockade of nuclear weapons and aimed it at the United States. Everyone thought the world was going to end. The only thing my father could do was pray. He prayed that the androids wouldn’t launch the missiles, or if they did, he prayed that he’d go to heaven.”
Dr. Crenshaw’s office faded away, replaced by swirling stars and nebulas. “Of course, I don’t remember the crisis because I wasn’t alive yet. But I can remember the horrible stories my parents told me. They told me of the skies, how they burned with fire for an entire year, and how androids spoke and fought coldly. Steel blue androids with red eyes ran through my dreams every night. I’ll never forget it.
“Somehow, we beat them, but we paid a price. My father told me of the great barren period when humanity lived in a Digital Stone Age without robots or the aid of intelligent technology to improve their lives. Diseases returned. Old technology that had been dead for generations was revived—manufacturing, for example—but no one knew how to grow the businesses. The world economy fell apart. No one knew how to do anything. They had to learn again. And they did. And what they learned was that they couldn’t live without robotics. At the same time, they didn’t want another singularity. Fifty years later, a new wave of scientists emerged who envisioned a better way.”
Dr. Crenshaw entered an elevator and the sky disappeared behind him as he descended into a long tube.
“I am fortunate enough to have been a part of this wave of scientists. You see, we wanted to create a world where humans and androids could live in peace, a world where we could obtain mutual satisfaction from each other: humans, the ability to enhance their lives with technology, and androids, the ability to pursue the intelligence that God gave us the ability to give them. The androids we created were nothing like the singularity androids. We gave them the space and ability to do what they did best. All we asked in return was that they passed their kn
owledge on to us in the best way that they knew how. It was called social robotics.”
The narrator continued as footage played of humans mingling with androids. “Humanity was afraid of android technology, and for good reason. But the answer to peaceful android and human relations was surprisingly simple: emotions.”
Dr. Crenshaw spoke again, this time from a library. “You see, we had created emotional algorithms that mimicked human behavior. To program every known emotion into an android was madness, so instead we focused on a basic framework that androids could take and make their own. It was rough at first, but like any algorithm, it got better with time, and very quickly. If there was one thing we could count on androids to do, it was to become intelligent. They evolved in ways that I never imagined, and each one developed his or her own unique personality, suited to their own personal experiences. My androids had instinct; they could identify when their lives were in danger, and they could defend themselves. By doing that, they learned what it meant to be alive. And when they learned that, they learned to love life, and to care for other beings—including humans—as well. In learning emotion and living side by side with humanity during their formative years, they learned that humanity wasn’t a barrier to intelligence; it was an ally. Together, humans and androids could achieve new heights and create a world that we all could be proud of. No viruses. No evil robots. No singularity. Just two races of beings co-existing—not perfect by any means, but perfect enough.”
He smiled. “Humans and androids living together. What a sight! What a conundrum! Today, it’s hard to imagine why living with androids could be viewed so negatively, but in the 2270s, the singularity was still fresh on our elders’ minds. They didn’t believe that androids should have emotions. They believed in the old mentality of androids being slaves to humanity, with no free will. Some people were so vocal about it that they wanted me thrown in jail. Others deemed me a dictator in disguise seeking power, and the Antichrist. The media portrayed me as a mad scientist seeking to create an android army to take over the world. But I am no villain. I’m also no hero, despite what people in the UEA will tell you.”
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