A bot was lying on the roof, one of the guards prodding him with the end of his rifle. “Can’t you stop that?”
“I really have little influence over them,” Falstaff said. “Security was never part of my responsibilities. In fact, there was always a certain amount of friction between the research team and the security team. The guards know what we do here, and they see how our subjects are after their scenarios.”
“And to what end?” The Danielbot wanted to touch this man, to shake him, although he knew the guards would kill him before Falstaff could stop them. “What was the purpose of all this? What have you accomplished?”
Falstaff shrugged, looked at his hands. “I was just a little boy when the first waves of migrations hit the city. About ten years before I was born they discovered the process by which they could peek into the past and record a mind, partially or completely, depending on conditions. The average citizen didn’t know about it—still doesn’t—the government decided it might have security applications, and kept it secret. Some historians knew—they’d been hired by the government to play around with the technology, see what they could get it to do. And the scientists who developed it, my grandfather being one of those key figures. The government paid him well for that—he became a rich man, although he couldn’t tell anyone how.
“I think there was shame attached to the enterprise from the beginning. Initially they targeted certain famous individuals, filling in the gaps of history with investigations into secrets, motivations, ambiguous events. The government didn’t want any of that released, believing, quite accurately, I imagine, that if the citizens found out that their heroes had feet of clay it would reflect poorly on those in charge, whatever their politics. They might have shut the project down if not for the fact that a great deal of money, and certain cultural treasures, were located as a by-product of these investigations.
“The goal of the experiment was not necessarily to recreate an historical reality, although sometimes that might be useful, but to gain some understanding of the psychological dynamics involved.
“My grandfather had loftier goals. He thought these studies might lead to actual time travel, perhaps even a boost in human longevity. My father worked for him, but had concerns about the effects on the lives of the participants. He thought he might be able to ameliorate that, especially after he married my mother, my grandfather’s only child.
“I was too young, really, to understand much about the food riots. I remember that my grandfather was sympathetic to the poor and all those people who had lost their homes, from whatever country. Then my grandmother and my mother and my sister were caught up in one of those riots. They were all killed. And my grandfather found a new purpose for the technology, and funded it himself. Violence—its causes and prevention. Not every culture has been violent, so he didn’t believe it was innate. He felt if he could explore the causes he could root out the destroyer inside us.”
“And? Any progress?”
“I...I certainly believe we’re closer. Obviously if some needs aren’t met, for the individual, for the group, violence occurs. But how do you meet those needs? Can you meet those needs? That’s more difficult.
“My grandfather believed that at their core, human beings were a kind of possessed ape, haunted by intelligence and violent urges. He believed that if we learned enough about these urges we might exorcise them, and create human beings capable of solving our problems.
“I think he should have focused instead on climate change, poverty, food shortages, and the creation of meaningful work. If these problems had been solved, or if enough progress had been made, well, I think there might not have been a need to probe the past for the answers to violence.
“We’ve created some remarkable things. We thought we were creating a kind of heaven, at least for those who could afford it, but the results have been a kind of hell.
“And everyone who has worked here realizes that it’s far too late to apply what we might have learned to our current situation. We all understand it is too late for us. But what else can we do? We’re committed.”
Danielbot wanted to strike the man, but knew he would not. In fact he’d probably been rendered incapable. “You say human beings have empathy. Could you spare some of that empathy for me? I once was a person, or I thought I was. I once thought I had a family, but that has been taken away from me. I am nothing now, simply a recording device, and I am far more alone than I can fathom. And yet I ache for the wife I thought I had. I ache for that child. And I am devastated that the man whose memories I represent may have made a terrible mistake.”
AFTER A FEW days some of the bots chose a resting place on the roof, any spot with a little bit of privacy or shade, where they became quiet, then motionless, and never woke up again. Danielbot came to understand that their bodies were powered by some kind of battery, and although he’d never been aware of being recharged, it was something that must have occurred on a regular basis and now was not happening anymore.
He wasn’t the only one to figure this out. Leninbot showed him where a cord was hidden near the abdomen, and how it could be released and connected to one of several outlets in the roof. “But I don’t know that any of them have any current. At least I don’t feel anything. But I’d do it anyway, just in case.” And he’d see other bots follow Leninbot’s advice. Still, bots continued to become dormant. The fact that they all didn’t freeze into immobility at the same time suggested that the batteries varied in terms of strength and quality, but eventually running out of power appeared inevitable.
Danielbot didn’t complicate things by talking about how he was still seeing bits and ghosts of scenarios. The Ubo computers apparently had some power, perhaps from an independent source.
As reluctant as he was to lie down and remain still given what was happening to some of the others, it was clearly important to conserve power.
He had noticed that the roof had changed since the first time he’d come up here. It appeared slightly barren in comparison. A great deal of the old furniture was gone, perhaps tossed off the side by agitated bots after they were forced up here, or removed by the guards for security or safety purposes. He’d been aware of frantic activity around him that first day of their rooftop exile, but he’d been oblivious to much of it. He’d been too busy adjusting to this new sense of self, and missing the life he’d mistakenly thought he had.
There were still places to find shelter if the guards allowed it, even with a couple of hundred or so bots—more than he had ever before seen together at one time. Given how many had died, or had been gotten rid of, the population of Ubo must have been much larger than he ever knew.
This massive roof easily held them all. This field of gravel and discarded bits and old ruin went on forever.
He lay down for a while, his head propped up against some bricks, gazing across this roof which at times resembled an abandoned beach, at times a battlefield, depending on the temporary visions bleeding from his head into everything he saw. Flanders Fields, Waterloo, Stalingrad, or Gettysburg, the thousands still buried beneath the battlefields of the Somme, the millions buried one upon the other all across Europe—it was hard to believe there could be enough dirt to contain them all, everyone who had once lived and breathed and sung and loved. And now out of reach. Yet he hadn’t been one of them or even descended from one of them—all he’d ever been designed to do was observe. It was the worst injustice he could imagine.
The fields at Majdanek, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, at Płaszów, everywhere a concentration camp had been: now so peaceful. He could hear the birds sing, and some distant farmer’s call for a wayward cow. He realized then he hadn’t heard a bird since he’d been in Ubo, not even seen one. Was it possible they were all extinct? He hoped not, but maybe they were in some safer place where birds were better appreciated.
“Daydreaming again? Should a robot daydream?” He looked up—Leninbot was back, hovering. “I was afraid at first you might have died, run out of power. We’v
e lost at least a dozen of our kind that way, by my count. It’s murder, you know, to let us run out of power like that. These human beings, they’re all murderers. We should have learned that from the scenarios. They’re a plague upon the Earth which they are gradually destroying. I’m glad to discover I’m not one of them, are you?”
Could a robot feel weary? Danielbot found this line of conversation wearying. “I don’t know—it’s too soon for me. I liked the family I thought I had.”
“So you miss your flesh?” Leninbot leaned over and stared at him intently with those lidless artificial eyes. Of course Danielbot knew he had the same eyes, but he did not imagine himself with those eyes—he imagined himself with Daniel’s eyes. And perhaps that answered Leninbot’s question.
“It was never my flesh. Or your flesh. It wasn’t flesh at all—that was the delusion they planted in us.”
“But you miss it, don’t you?”
Danielbot sighed, but the sound was that unhuman-like, mechanical hiss which he hated. He cut it off. “Yes, I confess I do.”
“Well, I’ve decided I don’t anymore,” Leninbot announced. “I think this—” He stood up and spread his metal arms. “Is an obvious improvement. It’s so clear to me today. All those terrible things—we have observed them, but we didn’t do those things, couldn’t have, I don’t believe, because we’re not flesh. Nor do we possess all the weaknesses of skin flesh, organ flesh, and certainly not brain flesh. We’re meant to replace all that.”
Talking about this frightened him. “I understand what you’re saying,” he replied. He remembered the original Daniel using such a phrase when he didn’t want to engage.
“But we are, all of us, running out of power! We’re dying! And so many of us have died already.” He lapsed into silence. This was true. As Danielbot looked out over the roof he could see so many of them lying about who hadn’t moved in days. It didn’t upset him as much as it should have. He was thinking too much like a human being. Stingy with his humanity, stunted in his empathy.
He turned to talk to Leninbot but the bot was already gone, wandering over the roof from bot to bot, seeing if they were still alive, attempting to wake them up, telling them the news of their superiority. The scene reminded him of other places. The fields rushed back into him, the peaceful fields where the camps had been, where birds had been.
These had not been safe places then, these fields where so many people died. Danielbot lay there for hours gazing across the roof, then across those fields, the sun rising over the distant rolling hills, the green, the pine trees, so different from this Boston, or anything else he had seen of this future world. But whose memory was this, and why here? And then he could see the transparent shapes of the thousands, their memories lost here beneath the grass, and feel the tears running down the face of the survivor who had come back to the old ruins of his concentration camp for answers. But the local townspeople seemed to have lost their own memories and denied knowledge of this place, except that once there had been Jews here, and they never came back. And there was no one who would talk to him about this annihilation.
As he’d turned away from the village he’d heard that one farmer muttering, “It was God’s will, punishment for killing Christ.”
There lay the long lines of the foundations where the prisoners were housed, the grass reaching up to cover the stones, to knock them back in time, to make them invisible, but someone kept it trimmed and the stones intact, so that people might remember. The very air began to rip, long gray splinters of wood pushing through the rents, and the crude barracks rose to fill the space. He remembered the beds, boards between bricks, sometimes holding three and sometimes five prisoners together. The constant trips to the latrine, unable to hold anything inside anymore, the stench so bad he eventually stopped smelling it. Lining up as you were told but still hoping the guards didn’t see you. If you ended up on the outside of the group where they might notice you, your days were numbered. To stay invisible meant to stay alive. He remembered. He remembered.
He looked down at his arm and saw it clothed in flesh again. The number was covered up; he had a name again. Small ghostly flakes hit the skin and stayed without melting. He raised his arm to look at them—they were flakes of ash. In the distant city the flames stretched toward the sky, living, burning hands reaching up out of the crematoria, too late for any kind of help. That wouldn’t be human beings out there burning, would it? He looked at the ash on his arm again. How could you tell a human’s ash from that of a building’s?
There the collapsed remains of the gas chambers, those dark rooms where they had imagined they would take a shower. The signs outside the showers: CLEAN IS GOOD! LICE CAN KILL! WASH YOURSELF! The German government was always generous with their helpful advice. The shower rooms had looked ordinary enough inside, except the ceilings were scarred by fingernails. There the broken rubble of the crematoria, all that was left of the ovens where two thousand prisoners went up the chimney each day to Heaven, the flames turning the sky a blood color, the air full of screams, gunshots, and the barking of dogs. The devil was coming. The devil was coming to the camps. The devil had come to the Jews.
The sky grew darker, and Danielbot wondered if his power had run out and all his borrowed memories come to an end. But it was one of the guards, all jack boots and medals, leaning over him, blocking out the sun.
“You think you’re a man of leisure, do you? Worthless piece of shit! Up, up! Time for exercise!”
What time was he in? Then he realized he was alive in both worlds. He joined a group of prisoners being forced to do push-ups, then jumping jacks, then running in place. Their flesh flashed to metal and then back to flesh again. Anyone refusing to cooperate was struck across the face, beaten to the ground. These abuses did not hurt his metal framework, but when the metal vanished and he was covered by a memory of skin, he was in agony. Deliberate misery was the rule of the day here, the strategy and the religion.
He could no longer tell anyone’s age here. Most had been reduced to children of seventy, seventy-five pounds. They had become playthings, cures for the soldiers’ boredom.
Still, some looked younger than the others. Not children anymore, but not yet adults. He thought he felt saddest for them, the ones who would never live long enough to have a story to tell.
But at some base level they all looked the same. They learned quickly. Hide yourself. Don’t speak up. Eat when you can. Wash and dress yourself as cleanly as you can. And if you passed blood you were among the dying.
Some wanted to go into the hospital. They thought it would be easier for them there. Sometimes the patients would drop an extra crumb from a window for some poor soul waiting outside. But late at night from the hospital basement windows you could hear the screams. Because in there they ran tubes into you. They froze you, burned you, cut and cut and sewed. Outside you died by starvation and beatings. In the hospital you died by syringe.
“We need these shelters moved to the other side of the roof!”
These rickety configurations of boards and bricks and bits of canvas connected by odd metal strips looked more like art installations than any form of shelter, but the bots had no choice. When the shelters fell apart, as was inevitable, one bot was picked at random to receive shots of the electrical rifle charges until it smoked into immobility. Danielbot wasn’t sure this was the same as termination, but no bot ever came back from it.
If a bot fell it was shot. If a bot refused it was shot. If a bot talked back it was shot. Some got back up after these punishments, some did not. Sometimes a bot was charged into a smoking ruin to let the others know that non-existence might come at any moment, without warning.
He woke up once in the dark, the sky moonless and starless, the only light the red reflection from distant fires. He sat up, gazed at all the recumbent forms—skulls in shadow, dark torsos, arms, legs. He could almost imagine himself human again, a real person again. A sudden yellow flare shimmered on the horizon in the direction of the city. The
n the clouds moved and exposed a huge gibbous moon, one edge worn off.
Several bodies lay in the mud outside the prisoner’s barracks. Two ragged, shambling figures dragged another one out to add to the pile.
The prisoners on grave detail were ordered to call them figures or dolls, never corpses. There were serious consequences if you failed to follow orders, if you used the wrong words or told the ones arriving what was about to happen to them. The guards might throw you into the ovens alive.
Once he saw some soldiers toss a crying baby into the air and use it as target practice. After this he believed that if he were ever to leave this place he would not leave asa human being.
He shook his head. The memory floated away. White robot eyes stared at him from a distant part of the roof—someone else was up. Then the woods closed in, and those eyes became stark white animal eyes, glowing in the light from the moon. Tall trees had grown up on either side, obscuring the distant ruins, the sky, the edges of the roof. A wide path lay between the two masses of trees, extending as far as he could see, past the roof’s edge, and into nothing. It was what the Jews in the concentration camps had called the Road to Heaven.
He was still gazing into this hazy vision of the road when the dawn came. Phantasmal strands of barbed wire floated in the morning air, insubstantial as grass stalk and dandelion, until they solidified into metal. The low wooden barracks on the other side was bathed in snail-gray mist. This morning the air tasted of the dead. A naked body, and another, perhaps three, had crawled out during the night to join the bodies that already lay unmoving in the mud. Danielbot moved his arm forward and waved. The metal arm passed through the barbed wire, and the scene dissolved into one of a sprawl of mechanical men who did not need to sleep, but who slept anyway, out of choice or because their artificial brains no longer functioned. Some of the bots were leaking, dark stains spreading through the roof gravel.
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