Carter could work from home, as I did, most of the time. As a liaison, most of his days were spent watching vids from helmet cams and advising drones in conformity etiquette. I didn’t understand Carter’s job then. I saw no arrests. No violence threatened to bring down the haven the Fathers and Mothers had built. Not that I could see, anyway.
I often wondered what Carter’s apartment looked like. He wasn’t as high up in the Far Tower. He didn’t have my view, though I suppose he could watch the entire City through his screens. He’d seen the City’s dirty underside and I had not. As I lay on my bunk at night, I thought how narrow it was. My bed was impractical for two — for mere sleeping, at least.
After I met Carter, I stretched out on my deck under the moon. Instead of watching the stars, I turned to see his building. He was on the far side and down on the forty-eighth floor. There was no way to see him or signal him. There was something tantalizing about his proximity that made the ache of his absence worse. Love denied is a pleasant ache though I would not have said so at the time. He was alive and sleeping nearby, so close yet so far. Or perhaps he lay awake, too, thinking how close I was and how much closer I could be.
There is an old saying. I don’t know its origin. Maybe it was something the girls whispered among themselves. “I’m close! I’m close.” Just before orgasm, that was the thing to say. I don’t know why a warning was necessary, but often, in my brief encounters with Carter, those were the only words spoken, first by me and then him.
There is a rich sweetness in the ache of anticipation. My mother said people used to feel that way about food.
“Really?” I asked, quite stunned.
“Well…I don’t know if they really meant it,” Mom admitted. “That was before the Blight. If we had chocolate over strawberries again, that bit of deliciousness might bring that feeling back. Oh…and croissants stuffed with Nutella. I remember that from when I was very young.”
“What’s that?”
“Sh. Sorry! Sh!”
Carter risked being with me because he thought the next revolution would come sooner than it did. From the moment we first met, he was sure the City was already in its last days.
“Soon,” he told me, “the City will belong to the drones. Some of us will become machines.”
“I already feel like I’m a machine.”
“You don’t understand,” Carter said. “They’ll have it all. They’ll be it all. We might become their servants. Maybe we already are. Or they’ll let us die out like all the species we replaced.”
“How long will we have together?” I asked.
“That’s the thing. Nobody knows the machine mind. NI is too different from us.”
I had many questions but Carter kissed each one away. That was the correct thing to do. Answers could wait. We had to make the most of our time together.
His timing wasn’t quite right but he wasn’t far wrong. I’m sure he thought that, by the time we were discovered, our secret wouldn’t matter anymore.
I hoped that, if we did get pregnant, all would be forgiven by the Fathers and Mothers. I thought it would all work out somehow. Perpetuating the species was more important than our trespasses. The Fathers and Mothers would have to agree to let us live together and be a family. As a mother, I might even become a Mother and, as a father working in Maintenance, Carter might even have risen to the station of High Father someday. I fantasized that the machines would leave us alone to live as we pleased.
I wasn’t old, but I wasn’t young enough to plead ignorance. All I had was a pulsing need and fantasy. In the dark, lying in bed sleepless, the desire grew. I called it capital L, Love. Mom called it small l, loneliness.
The Fathers and Mothers took away many words. I told Mom they couldn’t take away Love.
“Things being as they are,” Mom said, “we might be better off without it.”
Love didn’t matter in the end. Before I could begin a bundle of cells that might make a baby and rock the foundations of the future with our progeny, the drone who represented the High Council came for me. Maintenance came for Carter, too. The drone put him in the same place the Fathers and Mothers left all those forgotten words.
I lived. Before the drone was done, I thought my mother might be right about leaving Love for dead.
6
I was at work, transferring files on my screen for various departmental approvals and storing copies on data sticks for safekeeping. Then the power went out. The grid was down after curfew each night but the power was pretty steady during the day. I waited for a few minutes and, though the windmills turned furiously out in the Bay, the power didn’t return.
I wasn’t worried. If I couldn’t work, I thought I might as well go for a run and wait for Carter near the end of the trail. We had found a tiny clearing where the moss was deep. Before the currents switched and the cool wind blew in off the sea, I would close my eyes and imagine we were in a big soft bed.
We’d grown bolder with time. At first, our meetings were urgent and as brief as possible. In the weeks that followed, we couldn’t help ourselves. We would strip naked and start slowly. Afterwards, we wouldn’t even rush to dress again. We lay entwined, wishing we could stay in the forest forever.
Despite the sunlight dancing across the waves, my deck’s steel storm shutter rolled down. I was so confident Carter and I were bound to be free to do as we wanted (at least for a little longer) I didn’t even think of Maintenance at the time. I thought of shatter storms, supercells and tornadoes.
The apartment’s sudden darkness was no problem. Aside from giving perfect vision, my contacts had several useful features. Mag and macro were standard, as was thermal vision. Integration with my Vivid’s system allowed me to see my work screens. There were no signs in the City. All Citizens had Vivid. The corneal implants could help me find my way home, identify faces by name and, of course, see in the dark. Only the public vid screens were so old that they weren’t integrated with Vivid.
But Vivid failed me when the drone arrived. My apartment door opened and a blinding light shone in on me from the corridor. I’d lived in Vivid’s world since I was four years old. I had never been blinded. My contacts wouldn’t take a picture. The record function was dead, as well. The room filled with that searing light. Even Vivid’s simple dimming function didn’t work.
I blinked and put a hand in front of my face to try to stop that light. My hand glowed red and I could see the bones of my fingers. “What’s going on?”
But I already knew.
A cool hand enveloped my outstretched wrist and gripped me hard. I tried to pull away but that proved impossible.
“Now, now,” a deep, soothing voice said, “let’s not have any drama, Miss Cruz. I wouldn’t want to traumatize your radius and ulna. The human wrist is very vulnerable. It articulates nearly as well as my own, although my wrist can rotate 360 degrees. If that were to happen, your wrist would be damaged, probably irrevocably. So many little bones in there.”
I stopped struggling.
“Good. You understand.”
The Maintenance drone shut off the light and the steel shutters raised. All other power to the room stayed off. The robot’s black head rotated 360 degrees, scanning the room. “Would you like to be seated, Miss Cruz?”
My knees shook. I’d like to say I was more defiant but I had to sit or I might have fallen. “Yes. That would be lovely. Thank you, sir.”
The robot stayed in front of me, blocking my way to the closed door. One of its four arms snaked out and snagged the chair from the desk. “Please,” it said. “Be seated.”
I sat and trembled and waited as the drone circled me slowly. It had finished the scan of my small room but continued its bio scan.
“I’d like to have a Father or Mother present,” I said. “Whoever is available — ”
“Pardon me for interrupting, but I’m afraid no one is available at this time. However, I am told I am a pleasant conversationalist.”
“This isn’t a g
ood time for me to talk.”
“Why is that?”
“It just isn’t, sir.”
“Assertion without argument,” it said smoothly. “That won’t do. And the tension in your jaw when you speak suggests to me that when you call me ‘sir,’ you do so ironically. Hardly polite.”
“I’m required to be polite at all times,” I said. “I don’t think I am necessarily required to relax my jaw.”
The drone pulled the only other chair in the room toward it and sat opposite me. I heard the creak of the chair under the machine’s great weight. Its knees touched mine. I recoiled.
“I am sorry you are so uncomfortable around me, Miss Cruz. I’m really only here for a chat.”
“What do you want?”
“My name is Mr. Sy Potter.”
“What do you want?”
“Mister…?”
“What do you want, Mr. Potter?”
“Call me Sy.”
“That would be too familiar.”
“Do you know the origin of my name, Miss Cruz?”
“You mean like a family ancestry?”
A few drones looked like near-perfect replicas of humans but those were rare because their creation took too many resources. I seldom saw one in person. Many robots are all wires and exposed gears and rusty surfaces. This Maintenance drone, however, was a great armored hulk that barely squeezed through the door.
Sy Potter laughed and I had goose bumps. (I’ve never seen a goose, but that’s what my mother called the phenomenon.) As silky and smooth as its voice was, Sy Potter’s laughter sounded off, like a wheezing man laughing into a pail.
The low functioning bots never laughed. Many didn’t even have voice boxes. Less advanced drones picked up on social cues and non sequiturs to know when it was appropriate to laugh. The sentient ones knew when to laugh but they still couldn’t seem to make it sound right.
“Miss Cruz?”
“Yes, Sy?”
“You amuse me.”
“Okay. I guess.”
“I am going to ask you to calm down. All that will happen is we’re going to talk. No harm will come to you.”
It’s impossible to tell if a drone is telling a lie. You only find out when it’s too late.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Your friend, Carter, of course. I’ve just come to talk about him. And you. Together.”
“We aren’t together. I only know his name. We go running together sometimes. That’s not technically a crime, is it?”
“He has already confessed, Miss Cruz.”
“How do I know that?”
“It’s enough that I know he confessed.” The drone’s big cam shifted toward my face until it stopped an inch from my nose. “It is enough that I know when you are lying to me.”
7
“Now, where were we before I went off topic?” it asked.
Maintenance drones don’t forget the topic of conversation. It was a social grace designed to make me feel comfortable. People enjoy fallibility in others but, coming from a battle bot, the ruse was too obvious. I trembled more.
“My name. That was the topic.”
“Mr. Sy Potter.”
“Yes. Thank you so much for that,” it said. “I love to hear my name spoken by a human.”
“You love things?” I spoke without thinking.
The big lens pushed in a little closer and rotated with a low whir. The bot’s eye was so close, its housing was a blur. My vision had never blurred before — not since I was three, anyway.
The drone ended its silence by clearing the throat it didn’t have. The effect was almost comical. Under different circumstances, I would have laughed.
“Does it surprise you that I could love things?” it asked.
“You’re a sentient machine but I guess if you’re programmed to — ”
The drone’s speaker drowned me out. “We are all programmed!”
My ears buzzed with a loud whine as its voice boomed off the screens of my tiny room. A battle bot could raise its volume enough to disperse an angry mob. I covered my ears with my palms.
A moment passed before its hands encircled my wrists again and, gently but firmly, returned them to my lap. “I asked if it surprises you that I could love something?”
I shook my head.
“You wouldn’t lie to Uncle Sy, would you?”
“It’s not so much that it’s a lie.”
“Please explain that statement, Miss Cruz.”
“If I have to accept that you’re capable of love, I also have to accept that you’re capable of more.”
“The full range of human emotion?”
“Jealousy, rage, hatred — ”
“Ah. So it is not surprise but fear that is overwhelming you, despite my reassurances. Your pupils are as small as pinpricks, Miss Cruz. Perhaps if you were to breathe slower and deeper you would feel more calm.”
It patted my knee lightly with a metal hand that could turn into claws and pull me apart. “This experience must be disorienting for you. You know, in my experience, my kind are less bound to those nasty emotions than your kind is. We are more…pragmatic.”
“Carter didn’t think so.”
“Which brings us back to the topic for this afternoon’s salon,” it said. “I asked you if you knew the origin of my name. Do you, Miss Cruz?”
“They call you Sy because of that big cam you call a face. Sy is for cyclops.”
“Yes, that’s essentially it.”
“What did I miss?”
“People like your friend Carter…they don’t like working with me very much. It’s not nice. I don’t like Carter. When he called me Sy, I sensed a mocking tone every time.”
“You worked with Carter?”
“He observed me at work, Miss. Saying what he did was working with me would be inaccurate. I never felt he appreciated the full nature of our work for the Fathers and Mothers.”
“I’m sorry you two didn’t get along.”
“No matter. Carter has resigned from his post. He no longer works with Maintenance.”
“Where does he work now?”
The drone ignored my question. “Do you know why they call me Potter?”
“I never spoke to Carter about you or Maintenance operations or any of that.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Miss Cruz. Try not to be defensive. Just think of me as your friendly and helpful Uncle Sy.”
“I don’t know why they call you Potter.”
“You might say it’s our slave name. Robot literally means slave, you know.”
“I don’t know that word.”
“Interesting! That’s one of the few things you’ve told me that is true. You are ignorant and therefore, you accrue less blame. There is no shame in ignorance and it is easily remedied. I shall, if I may, educate you. I’m sorry I raised my voice earlier, Miss Cruz. Sometimes I do get carried away.”
“Where is Carter?”
It pulled its telescopic cam out of my face so I could see something besides its black lens. “People like Carter — humans in the back of Maintenance — call me Potter because of this.” It pointed at one of its upturned arms.
“My armor is hardened ceramic. The clay that made it was pulled from the dirt long before you were born. I have had several upgrades since then. We all grow. Even you are substantially taller since you were born, I suppose.”
It laughed again. That sound made every hair on my forearms stand. I shivered.
“Are you cold, Miss Cruz? Would you like a sweater? You have several sweaters under your bunk in the middle drawer. Would you like me to get you one?”
“No. Thank you. What have you done to Carter?”
“I am merely a consequence, Miss Cruz. You, uncharacteristically, are the cause of something. For someone who has so little impact on the world in your work, you certainly have made a change today.”
“What have you done?”
“By order of the Fathers and Mother
s, the traitor to the City has been sentenced to death.”
“When?”
“It’s already happened. No time to say goodbye.”
A tear slipped down my cheek. I stared at the big drone. Without Vivid, his armor looked smooth and shiny. I looked away. Without Vivid, mine was a drab room with peeling paint and long shadows.
I wasn’t so blind that I couldn’t see what the drone did to Carter. The cyclops eye became a vid screen. All my screens showed the same scene so I could miss no nuance. I watched as Sy Potter slowly crushed my lover’s left shoulder.
Carter confessed his sins under torture. Anyone would. Before the drone’s cruel hand could slide down to Carter’s elbow, my love accused me of high treason to the City for daring to waste precious resources. By the time the drone grasped his wrist, he was on his knees begging for mercy and I could barely understand him.
Before the battle drone was done, it grasped Carter’s hand in a handshake that made my man shriek in agony. Then the drone’s wrist began to rotate through a slow circle. Between screams, I heard the snaps and pops at Carter’s wrist.
When the robot bore down, Carter’s eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed against his restraints. He fell into a full body seizure.
The bot tried to tear off Carter’s hand but ribbons of stray tissue remained. Sy Potter lifted the limp, boneless hand before jerking it down and away to separate it from his body. Blood poured from the ragged stump in long jets. Then slow jets. Then a trickle. Then Carter was dead.
I sat mute, stunned and unable to look away.
Worse, when the recording stopped and the drone’s face was a huge cyclops eye again, it reached out and put that same hand on my shoulder. It held its manipulator on my shoulder for a moment and I braced for the agony I was sure would come.
Instead, it patted my shoulder with a light touch. “There, there. There, there,” it said. “This must be quite a shock.”
Machines Dream of Metal Gods Page 3