Ubo

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  17

  SOME OF THE bots had taken up pieces of blanket and were busy polishing themselves, wiping off dirt, rubbing out blemishes, bringing the metal and plastic to a high sheen. Some had concentrated particularly on their serial numbers, making them gleam like engraved trophy inscriptions. But for Danielbot the cleaner, the shinier they became, the more suggestive they were of death.

  Danielbot spent his time examining his thought processes, his reactions. He certainly felt like more than a recording—he felt everything. He had an entire life to draw on, and a wide range of responses. And yet he also knew he was incomplete. By definition he had to be—those were all someone else’s memories.

  One of the other bots caught him staring and fixed his jaw into an exaggerated robotic smile. When he tilted his head he looked like a caricature of starvation.

  Other bots sat collapsed together in the corners or folded up on themselves in resting positions that would have been impossible for a human being.

  A great deal of physical self-examination was happening. The panic of the previous few hours had subsided—the bots appeared to be waiting for the promised return of power and their old, familiar, and comforting faces. But Danielbot had no desire to see his old skin again.

  Various bots examined the mechanics of their new bodies with obvious fascination. Periodically the power flickered and he saw, ever so briefly, the old human faces of the other prisoners. The others were apparently having the same experience. They greeted these glimpses of the past with a kind of mechanical sigh, like the faint leak in an air compressor.

  The human guards waited in their own little group, sitting against the wall beneath the observation window, their rifles vaguely pointed in the direction of the bots. They looked casual and relaxed, which was probably pretense. As roaches they’d been emotionless, their expressions alien and impenetrable. Now they seemed like nervous schoolboys.

  Leninbot was nowhere to be seen. He had said nothing since Falstaff had spoken to them. Danielbot hoped he hadn’t done anything foolish.

  Ghostly imagery continued to overlay Danielbot’s field of vision, intensifying and solidifying into three dimensional scenes during the power flickers, but always present to some degree, providing depth and subtext even to the most commonplace gestures and actions. At times he witnessed replays from his own scenarios, but a good number of the scenes and characters and terrible events were completely unfamiliar to him, as if the Ubo databanks had ruptured and were now flooding his brain, if brain was even the right word for whatever stored this information.

  “You’ll need to take that gear off.” One of the ex-roaches was standing over him, his weapon aimed.

  “What?”

  “Those nodules on your head. They belong in one of the labs. You can’t have them.”

  “They’re—I don’t know—welded to my head? I can’t take them off.”

  The man sighed, reached over and began pulling on one. Danielbot’s head lifted with it. It didn’t hurt, but it was a strange sensation. The cables that ran through Danielbot’s neck stretched tightly. The fellow started shaking the nodule, making Danielbot’s head wobble. He saw sparks, tiny explosions.

  “Stop!” Falstaff was suddenly standing beside them, his hand on the man’s arm. “They won’t come off—you’re going to damage the equipment!” Danielbot wondered if Falstaff meant the nodules, him, or both.

  “Just doing my job.” The man averted his eyes, looking angry.

  “You’re security. I’m technical. Let me worry about how the damn equipment is used. Just go... guard something.” The guard strutted away. “I’m sorry, Daniel.” Falstaff sat down on the floor beside him.

  Danielbot gazed at the bots sprawled around the room. They looked like oversized toys whose batteries had run down, left scattered by a very bored and very large child. “I asked you not to call me by that name. I’m not Daniel anymore.” He looked down at the number on his arm, and then showed it to Falstaff. “A7713. Or Danielbot.”

  “You’re going to hear that number enough from the guards, but it’s not going to come from me. I’m sorry—we didn’t anticipate any of this. We were assured we would have independent power. These weren’t things you were supposed to know about.”

  “So my... Daniel’s life went on. He was about to make a terrible mistake, and I’ll never know what he decided.”

  “We can’t change the past. We don’t even choose the moment at which we take the record. We send this bit of programming back inside a probe, and it recognizes a certain degree of anger, a particular sort of pathology—a matrix of hundreds of violence-related factors. Otherwise we’d be recording thousands of people. We record that person, and we retrieve the recording. There’s one profile for the monsters of history, another for the ones we recruit to act like those monsters—the ones like you we can study and communicate with. I assure you they’re not the same. You’re not here because you’re a bad person. It’s based on probabilities, and hundreds of character traits.”

  “Why do you need us? Why make it so complicated? Why not use your own people, volunteers?”

  “Well, we would, but they’ve made that illegal. It’s considered human experimentation. I’m not sure the results would be as illuminating, in any case. With a recording we can suppress certain qualities and bring out others. We can make it a controlled experiment. But if we were to use—”

  He paused. Danielbot filled in. “Real people?”

  “I was going to say ‘an original.’ With people, you get what you get. You can’t change them to fit the experiment better.”

  “I get it. I’m clearly not human, so you can feel free to fuck with my life.”

  “Daniel... Danielbot, please...”

  “No please about it. Please would imply you made a polite request. You didn’t.” Being upset made him feel more human. “But you repeat the scenarios over and over again, using different ones of us?”

  “It’s part of the protocol. Each explorer experiences these scenarios slightly differently. We compile the results to get a more accurate glimpse into the violent personae.”

  “So, we’re explorers now? Not prisoners?” Danielbot turned his head away from his ex-friend, this roach who hadn’t had the decency to wear his roachness around them, and tried to close his eyes. It was then he realized that bot eyes had no lids, and that only a kind of unconsciousness would completely prevent him from seeing. “You’re like little boys experimenting with pulling the wings off a fly. Once you discovered you could do it, you developed a need to do it.”

  “No, it’s not like that. Daniel...”

  “Stop calling me Daniel!” One of the guards rushed to respond but Falstaff waved him away. “I fail to see,” Danielbot said, “what you have accomplished here. I’ve only had glimpses of the world out there, admittedly, but what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard, simply based on that I would say you’ve practically destroyed it.”

  The two sat in silence for a time. Finally Falstaff stirred. “We always thought we could fix what we’d broken. We were smart enough, we were clever enough. But sometimes the only practical solution is not to break things in the first place.”

  There was another rumbling and more of the ceiling came down. The bots jumped up and the guards rushed in to corral them into a semblance of order. Danielbot was separated from Falstaff but didn’t object. He had no plan, and little desire to formulate one.

  “We’re moving to the roof to wait for rescue!” one of the guards shouted. The idea seemed ludicrous, but Danielbot had no choice but togo along with it.

  Despite their obvious distress, the bots fell into line quickly. But something about the line bothered a few of the guards, who grabbed them, rearranged them, moved them aside like so much excess furniture, prodded them with the rifles. The bots acquiesced, terrified of a possible electrical charge. If one lagged, a charge against the base of the spine sent it sprawling forward, knocking the others out of line. The guards shouted angrily, as if the bots were b
eing willfully disobedient. One of the bots fell and refused to move. Two guards blasted it until smoke issued from its targeted parts.

  Eventually the guards herded them into the stairwell. The bots in back, rifles pointed at their heads, shoved those in front of them up the stairs. A bot near the top of the staircase fell, sliding back down with a static-filled howl.

  One of the guards poked the fallen form with the end of his rifle. A quick blast at the base of the skull pan made the body jerk, climb to its knee joints, then fall back onto the floor. Another blast stilled it. When it wouldn’t get up again despite determined prodding, two of the guards shoved it into a corner of the landing where it lay like a pile of stray parts.

  18

  THE GUARDS WERE extremely nervous the first day or so as everyone camped out on the roof. They brandished their electric rifles at the slightest sign of resistance, screaming at the bots and threatening deadly force. It might have been the openness of the setting, without cover if there was a rebellion, although Danielbot could not imagine his fellow mechanical men organizing and attacking.

  There must have been an adjustment in policy because no rifles were actually fired. What surprised Danielbot most was how quickly everyone fell into their roles: the guards standing up straight in their blue uniforms, attempting to walk and talk with authority and to devise humiliating games designed to keep the bots off-balance. After a few days they seldom brought their rifles down to a ready position. The bots, despite their larger size and heavy frames, developed a subservient posture, bowing their upper bodies to make themselves appear shorter, avoiding eye contact, and for the most part doing what they were told.

  The skies were continuously gray with an occasional redness in the lower clouds, and black smoke hung just above the skyline. Far below, waves hit the building with a churning and shushing, but Danielbothad no intention of going close enough to the edge of the roof to steal a glimpse. Now and then the sky tore into rain and there was no shelter. The guards used a roll of plastic to create a makeshift roof they could sit under. Maybe the bots were waterproof. In any case they weren’t offered a solution. Most of them just stood about in the downpour.

  Some of the guards claimed that a helicopter would come to take them all off the roof. Danielbot would be surprised if anyone had that kind of fuel to spare. It wasn’t stated openly, but he expected that only the guards were subject to rescue, leaving the “equipment” behind. He overheard one of them say they should just shoot the bots and escape before it was too late. Another said there was no such order, so he was holding tight.

  The bots knew many of their fellows by voice, but the guards couldn’t tell them apart without their fleshy mirages, and referred to the prisoners by their serial numbers or a truncated version thereof.

  Danielbot—and to some degree Leninbot—kept to the edges of the groups, and thanks to Falstaff’s occasional interventions, were left alone much of the time and protected from the pettier forms of harassment, although they weren’t excluded from prisoner counts. The worse thing was bearing witness to the demeaning activities the guards devised to promote discipline and the bots quickly acquiesced to.

  Count-offs happened an hour or so apart, or whenever there had been a minor altercation or disagreement, or whenever a guard decided to entertain a whim.

  “Count off, alphabetical followed by numerical!”

  “A7713!”

  “A15510!”

  “B10232!”

  “B14368!”

  “EH7384!”

  If an error was made in the count, the bots had to repeat it twice. The guards would sometimes become creative with the counts, ordering the prisoners to deliver them backwards, or to skip every other numeral, or to call out a number thirteen more than their actual number. Sometimes physical movements were added to the count, push-ups or jumping jacks, activities not well suited to their mechanical frames.

  Danielbot had begun to suspect that,besides personality and individual history, a certain amount of acquiescence had been programmed into their bot brains, a tendency to obey identified authority figures. Otherwise, he could not explain their willingness to follow orders, or his inability to even imagine a rebellion.

  Some of the bots were made to stay in one spot for hours. Physically this was no challenge, but they had been provided with full memories of what pain and fatigue felt like, so after awhile they suffered accordingly.

  When left alone, the bots returned to the same rooftop activities they’d participated in when they’d worn their human guises. They played their invented board games, danced and sang, or attempted to perform physical exercise. They subjected each other to petty abuse. The guards allowed the abuse to happen, but if too large a crowd gathered they would warn them off by punishing the first available offender. One of the guards discovered that a low level dose of electricity applied constantly to the back of the head pan might produce both delirium and persistent pain without death (or rather, “an irreversible shutdown”). There was no physical reason for the pain, but the bots felt it anyway. The guard looked excited to watch.

  Around their fourth afternoon on the roof, there must have been a significant current surge in the systems below because some of the bots were suddenly refreshed with their old appearances, Leninbot included. He smiled as he rubbed at his pink, illusory skin. Danielbot returned the smile but neither made any attempt at morecontact.

  At this point the Danielbot didn’t care much if he looked like Daniel ever again. It was all an ugly lie and to have his perfect disguise returned to him would have only made it worse. Somehow he needed to embrace who he was and not who he was not.

  For Danielbot, along with the current surge had come a renewed onslaught of violent memories, highly fragmented and without his usual sense of participation. The memories played as a reel of vicious movie scenes spliced together with no sense of continuity or artistry. Urban gang wars blended into southern lynchings, then bits of Abu Grabe, suicide bombers in the Mideast, and Jim Jones exhorting parents to feed their children poisoned Kool-Aid. Danielbot wondered if whatever medium they’d used to store the threads of violent memories trawled from the past had become corrupted. It seemed he might be receiving the bottom-of-the-barrel bits, the test runs and the unsuccessful attempts, the events too old to retrieve cleanly—whatever was left over in the backwaters of the memory banks.

  In the late afternoon dimness,the roof had become a broad field of prairie grass, low-lying hills on the horizon, a few distant twists of tree. Smoke and weeping, howls of pain.

  The soldiers were aiming at a small brown-skinned running form, although the child was much too young to run properly, a toddler at most who staggered and fell and got himself up again. The Colorado Indian Wars. 1864 or thereabouts. The men were laughing, poking fun at each other’s limited skills. “You shoot like my ol’ granny, after she’d been drinkin’ all day!”

  The one with the scraggly red beard cursed, tried again, taking his time. The small form dropped. They cheered.

  “In my neighborhood we called them the shadow people. They’d come in the middle of the night and the next day you’d find them camped out in the alley, or on a playground, sometimes even in your back yard. That was around the start of it.” John had been sitting beside him, speaking, but Danielbot hadn’t noticed him until now. “When they first reached the coast. Some of them had gone up into New York first, but the people from the southwestern states had gotten there first, so they came here.”

  “The people escaping South America,” Danielbot said. “And Mexico.”

  “That’s right. How did you—” John frowned. “Oh yes, your last scenario was with the God of Mayhem. We used to share our contemporary criminal findings with law enforcement and the military, but that was back when those agencies were more functional.

  “It’s an odd thing, with all that we can do, the things we can make, the miracles we can accomplish—your very existence being one of them—that we can’t seem to solve the food problem,
or the overpopulation problem, or the environmental problem. We’ve had a helluva time just keeping our people sheltered, much less providing them with worthwhile things to do.

  “How do you fault people for fleeing a burning house, whatever the immigration laws might be? And believe me, their house was burning. And you don’t let your children get hurt, or die—you get them out of there, whatever the cost. The shadow people did what they had to do.”

  “So people are no better, no more generous, than they used to be in my day,” Danielbot said.

  “Human beings have greater powers of empathy than you might think. Their ability to mirror feelings, even quite dark feelings, to understand someone else’s desperate situation, is really quite remarkable. That’s why the scenarios work as well as they do.”

  Danielbot wondered. If he had a question, was it coming from him, or from the Daniel simulation inside him? He decided to ask it anyway. “Is this what you wanted to do with your life?”

  Falstaff looked genuinely surprised. He stared at his hands, taking turns rubbing one with the other. Danielbot felt envious. He missed the human version of his hands. “It was never my goal. How could it be? Who could imagine such a thing? It’s been okay. It’s been interesting. It’s kept body and soul together at a time when many are denied that benefit. But—human beings settle, you understand? That’s much of what we spend our time on. Sometimes our imaginings are exquisitely detailed in that regard: what, specifically, we would accomplish, who we would be with, what they would look like, even down to the fine details of weather and the quality of the light that day. We also imagine what we would look like on such occasions, and it’s usually somewhat different than the way we in fact look today.

  “But we settle for less. Because we have no choice.”

  “Why? Why no choice?”

  “Because no one can imagine reality, or would want to. That’s the sad truth of it. Reality seems a poor substitute for what we dream. Most of us eventually accept that, even though it annoys and disappoints. But some of us become so angry, our frustration building over a period of years, that we erupt. We rage. And we destroy.”