Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  ‘But Professor Notkin says that. . .’

  At this much-hated name Professor Bradley positively arches his back. Like a cat! No, really. Like a furious, hissing feline! ‘Come on Rosie,’ he cries. ‘Don’t bait me, Rosie.’

  ‘Brad, now, listen, Notkin is . . .’

  ‘—after my bloody job,’ cried Professor Bradley, rolling his hands in an agitated dumb-show. ‘She’s after my Lab. She can’t have it. If I didn’t have to keep pouring my energies into combating her conspiracies against me—’

  ‘Oh,’ says Rosie, in a disappointed voice.

  ‘Conspiracies is too strong,’ agrees another.

  ‘Some might consider it actionable,’ opines a third.

  ‘Agh!’ yells Bradley, in the sheerest of sheer annoyance.

  There is an embarrassed pause.

  ‘Come now,’ says Rosie, in a placating tone. ‘Notkin is a good scientist. There’s no need to get so worked-up about office politics. You get this sort of office politics anywhere and everywhere! You can’t blame Notkin for being ambitious. Being ambitious is not a crime.’

  ‘She has been undermining me for eighteen months now. She sells you on this pipe dream of remote viewing . . .’

  ‘At least it doesn’t involve shit being blown up,’ snaps one of the men.

  And once again there is an awkward silence.

  ‘Give me a break,’ growls Bradley. ‘Patrick, you of all people—’

  ‘I’m not kidding, Brad,’ says Patrick. ‘The bandwidth may be small, but with Notkin’s system . . .’

  ‘. . . which she stole from my work . . .’

  ‘. . .we get real data, and - and - and nothing blows up.’

  Everybody falls silent. After a short while, Rosie says: ‘Look, Brad, we’re not out to get you. We’re really not. We’re not trying to replace you with Notkin. But you have to give us something to work with. Give us a result that’s more than seventeen seconds.’

  ‘Then give me Tungayika,’ said Bradley.

  ~ * ~

  Four

  We’ve come a long way, from the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs to Japan in 1945, and then via diminishing leaps to the present. From that heated meeting we need to use the magic time-travel machine called ‘story’ to step forward only two more months. Hardly any time at all. And here we are, right now.

  Bradley is in a corridor inside his own lab and trying to get in, but his way is being blocked by three people. One of them is a policeman. The policeman looks kind-of embarrassed, but he’s there, and he’s resting his palm on the back of the grip of his holstered gun. Of the other two people, one is Professor Notkin, aforementioned; and the other is Rosie - Roseanna Chan, senior liaison, perhaps the most objectively powerful person (in terms of political power) anywhere on the mountain.

  Bradley says: ‘Crimes against humanity?’ He says this several times. ‘Crimes against humanity? Crimes against humanity?’ Then, ‘I thought that was a joke. Rosie,’ he says, turning to her. ‘You’re going to let Notkin hand me to the police for crimes against humanity?’

  ‘I’m afraid my hands are tied,’ says Rosie, looking blank. Blank is her version of looking uncomfortable. ‘Maybe if Tungayika had—’

  ‘She sabotaged Tungayika!’ cries Brad, pointing a finger at Notkin. ‘She sabotaged it to get my job, to take my lab, to . . .’

  ‘Calm yourself,’ advises the policeman.

  ‘There’s no need for a scene,’ Notkin agrees, blandly.

  ‘It does you no good,’ says Rosie.

  ‘C’mon, Rosie! You know how she’s been plotting for years to unseat me! I taught her everything she knows, and this is how she repays me?’

  ‘You’ve taught me a lot, Brad,’ says Professor Notkin. ‘I’ll always be grateful.’

  Brad’s eyes do that bulgy-outy thing, as if they are filled with a metallic gel and Notkin is a massively powerful electromagnet. Words temporarily fail him.

  ‘Time to come away, sir,’ says the policeman. ‘Leave these people to do their work.’

  ‘It’s not their work!’ Bradley complains. ‘It’s my work!’

  ‘You are under arrest,’ the policeman reminds him.

  ‘Ah!’ says Brad, as if the idea has just occurred to him. ‘And what about the statute of limitations, eh? There is such a thing as a statute of limitations, even on murder.’

  ‘But not,’ said Rosie, as gently as she can, ‘for crimes against humanity. That’s why I’m afraid the officer here has got to take you in. But I’m certain it’s a temporary thing. It’ll only be a few days in jail until we find a judge prepared to bail you.’

  ‘Bail me on a charge of crimes against humanity?’ boggles Brad.

  ‘It is an unusual case, yes,’ says Rosie. ‘We all realise that.’

  ‘Too right it is. These people were all dead already! These people were all long dead already! How can you murder somebody who’s already dead? Try and peg me with the guilt of these people when they’re already . . .’

  ‘Dead, yes, and long ago,’ says Notkin. ‘But dead because of you.’ And for the first time there is, as the phrase goes, steel in her voice. You see now how she might have moved herself in only four years from grad student to Head of the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Laboratory.

  Bradley is blustery, and he can do no better than repeat himself. He’s lost. It’s over for him. ‘They died before I was even born!’

  ‘It’ll be interesting to see what the court makes of that defence,’ Notkin notes. ‘Hey! Don’t punish me! The people I killed are already dead!’

  ‘I am not a murderer,’ says Brad.

  ‘Let’s not—’ says the policeman.

  ‘This is bull,’ says Brad. ‘I flat don’t believe this.’

  ‘I’m afraid that Professor Notkin’s hunch has been proved,’ says Rosie. ‘Do you think we’d be acting like this otherwise? I’m afraid it’s been looked into. There have been literally - literally — hundreds of federal agents and specialists looking into it. And it’s fair to say that there have been . . . ructions. Oh, some pre-tty ma-jor ructions. At the highest levels.’

  ‘Just because a bunch of dead people are dead?’

  ‘Not that! Well, obviously, that,’ says Rosie. ‘But the White House is more worried by the thought that - oh, come on Brad!’ All one word: cmnbrad!. uttered with the force of exasperation. ‘Our national defence is still predicated on nuclear deterrence, after all. We’ve still got thousands of missiles with nuclear warheads. It’s a shock to discover that firing them at a target would have no more effect than . . .’ and she searches for an analogy, before falling back (she is a scientist, after all) on the literal truth ‘. . . no more effect than dropping eight tons of inert metal. There’s some high-level rushing around on that account, I don’t mind telling you. There are some chickens deprived of their heads in the corridors of power, I don’t mind telling you.’

  ‘All that nuclear physics, all the stuff I learned as a student - the basis of nuclear power stations,’ Brad splutters. ‘I refuse to believe it’s wrong.’

  ‘It’s not wholly wrong, of course. But it turns out - wrong in one important regard.’

  ‘Crazy!’

  ‘Simply not explosive,’ says Rosie. ‘Nuclear tech will fuse of course, and go fissionable of course, but only slowly. It’ll work in a nuclear pile. It just won’t explode over Hiroshima. It’s a tough lump to swallow, but swallow it you’d better. It’s the truth. The defence chiefs of staff are having to swallow it. None of our nuclear warheads are actually explosive. That’s a big swallow for them. Those early bombs sent our physics a bit skewy. It might even be, you know, comical, if it weren’t so serious. If the implications weren’t so serious. Look, I’ll send the research work to your phone. I’m sure they’ll let you keep your phone in jail. You can read up on it. In actual fact, you know what? They took a regular warhead up to the Mojave last week and tried to explode it, and nothing happened
.’

  ‘One damp squib,’ said Brad. But he sounded tired. Maybe the fight was finally going out of him.

  ‘I’m afraid not. I’m afraid it’s true of all our warheads. None of them work, which is to say; none of them will explode. The same is true of the Chinese nukes, and the Russian ones, and the Indonesian ones - turns out the technology just doesn’t work. I mean, you can’t blame those last-century scientists. They did their chalkboard calculations, and they figured the bomb would blow, and when the bomb really did blow it seemed to confirm their calculations. So they didn’t worry too much about the more abstruse implications of the equations.’

  ‘And how easy it is,’ says Notkin, ‘to get one’s calculations wrong. Wouldn’t you say, Professor?’ She may be forgiven this snide interjection. She’s suffered under Bradley’s cyclotropic eccentricities and incompetences for many years. And it’s her facility now.

  ‘And when Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and the subsequent nuclear tests seemed to confirm …’ Rosie says. ‘But the horrible truth is that although those military leaders thought they were dropping those bombs and killing those people, they didn’t. You did it. You didn’t realise that that was what you were doing, but it was. The responsibility is yours. And since . . .’

  And, suddenly, Brad is running. He is running as fast as his lanky legs will propel him, and the policeman is shouting ‘stop or I’ll shoot!’ He has finally unholstered his pistol. But Rosie stops him. ‘There’s no need to shoot,’ she says. ‘There’s no way out of here. It’s a closed facility.’

  Is she right, though? It is a closed facility, yes. But is there no way out?

  What do you think?

  Bradley runs, and runs. It’s been his facility for many years, and there are things about it which not even the ambitious Professor Notkin knows.

  Like what?

  Like this capsule, in this room, wired up with the full power the facility can provide.

  Previous drops have propelled a capsule no larger than a human thumb, wrapped about in shielding and cladding designed to protect it. But size isn’t actually a constraint, since time (it turns out) is not topographic in the way space is. It preserves angles, and it preserves an analogue of velocity; but not mass, or dimension, or, and to quote the great Algerian theoretical temporicist El-Dur, les êtres de l’hyperespace sont susceptibles des définitions précises comme ceux de l’espace ordinaire, et si nous ne pouvons les représenter nous pouvons les concevoir et ... — well, anyway. Anyway, the point is that there’s no reason, given enough energy, why a larger capsule might not be sent back. No reason at all. And you must understand this about Professor Bradley: he really really believes he’s cracked the containment field problem. He thinks the Tungayika mess-up was deliberate sabotage by the envious, ambitious, scheming Professor Notkin. He’s sure that he’ll be able to shoot himself back - and stabilise - and polarise - and get away. And what’s the alternative? Prison is the alternative. Crimes against humanity? - execution, like a Nuremberg villain? Ignominy, and a destroyed reputation, and his beloved technology thrown on the scrapheap? Or (this is what he is thinking) or: one final throw of the dice, one catastrophic twist in the story to turn failure into triumph, to vindicate everything he has done. A personal one-way mission, backwards in time, simultaneously freeing him from captivity and proving the worth of his invention!

  It’s no choice at all, really, for Professor Bradley. It’s exactly consonant with his impetuous personality; his ressentiment, his chafing restlessness. His fundamental incaution. He’s in the room, and he fits a metal chair-back snugly under the door handle.

  His phone comes to life in his breast pocket. The ringtone is ‘Rain’ by The Beatles. A fumble with a trembling thumb, and the device is turned off.

  Professor Bradley powers up the generators, and climbs into the padded innards of his own experimental capsule, and he pulls the lid down on top of him.

  Crimes against humanity? Or? Maybe beat the rap with one flick of this—

  ~ * ~

  Three

  And we’re off!

  There’s almost nothing to see from the tiny porthole in the capsule. There’s not even really a seat to sit down on, just a little shelf to rest his narrow buttocks. But once the switch is flicked there’s a whomp and a whoosh and Brad’s head cracks against the ceiling of the capsule. A painful collision. Before he knows it he’s back resting on the little shelf, trying to peer out of the fogged up porthole and rubbing his head. Why did he bounce upwards when he accelerated backwards? He ought not to have moved at all; time, after all, is not space. But there is a trembling thrum to the capsule, as if time travel involves some kind of friction, or something. He can’t think. But it hardly matters. It hardly matters now. The switch has been thrown.

  The view outside the capsule is not of a smooth backward-running movie. It’s a strobe-y series of discontinuities, frozen moments that hold for a second, or sometimes more, of subjective time and then jerk into a prior arrangement. Very strange. It hurts Bradley’s eyes to watch it.

  The capsule is three months back. This is the time of his meeting with the suits, before the Tungayika debacle. It was at this time that Gupta, who worked directly for Notkin, came to his boss and said: ‘I’ve been looking at the underlining metrics from the drops, and something real screwy is going on with the numbers.’

  It was at this time that Notkin (by no means a fool) began to wonder: but if the physics for the A-bomb was so misguided, then where did all that energy come from to flatten the city? And furthermore to wonder: all those nuclear tests - that explosive energy must have come from somewhere! And what if the delta fold-up function that Brad included in his equations in fact follows an exponential rather than a sequential logic?

  So many people killed! Of course that had never been Brad’s intent. Don’t you think you ought to judge him on his intentions? He had the best of intentions. He personally wouldn’t so much as pull a puppy’s tail, consciously. He’s a considerate and—

  Too late! We’ve gone back past that moment.

  ~ * ~

  Two

  When now? We’ve jarred backwards a number of years before. This was the time of the first successful test: the probe lasting thirteen seconds of shielded life in the earlier time frame before exploding so violently. It was a frabjous day when that news was broached. On that day Brad drank two thirds of a bottle of champagne and, unused to the excess of such a gesture, was sick in a waste bin. You see, it was possible to shield the probe, even if only for a temporary period, when it—

  No, we’re earlier than that now. Hurtling backwards the whole time.

  This was when Brad was giving his introductory lecture to the new recruits. These were all brilliant minds, but all of them were ignorant of the business of time travel. The whole discipline was classified. The basic equations were classified. The government would hardly spend so many billions on a project and leave it flapping vulnerable in the public breeze. So the students sit expectantly. Notkin is there, looking much younger and plumper and with eager eyes; all twelve of them have eager eyes.

  Bradley says: ‘Shall I tell you the problem with time travel?’

  And they listen.

  ‘You need to stop thinking of it as travel,’ says Bradley. ‘It’s not like wandering around a landscape. When you put an object from our time into another time frame, it’s like bringing matter and anti-matter together. It’s actually very much like that; the matter of your probe’ (he holds up the thumb-sized plasmetal object) ‘is of a radically temporally distinct sort to the matter of your surrounding environment - the air, the ground on which it finds itself, the water in the atmosphere. They mutually annihilate and release energy. Boom!’

  The students’ are wide-eyed and attentive.

  ‘That would be bad news for the chrononaut,’ says Brad, walking round to the front of the desk and leaning himself, rakishly, up against it. He is half-distracted - or no, a third-distracted, no
more - by the eyes of that plump graduate student there, in the front row. Very striking. Attractive. He was not a man with a wide experience of women, but something about her gaze appealed to him. ‘Our chrononaut would step out of the door of his time machine into the world of 1850 and, boom! In fact he wouldn’t even get the chance to open the door. The material out of which his time capsule was made would react as soon as it appeared. Boom! How big a boom?’

  So he calls up the white board, and as a group they go through the numbers, with Brad leading them, to show how big a boom. And it is big. It’s high-explosive big. And as they do this, as he nudges their naïf misunderstandings in the right direction, and pushes the correct equations through the mass of variables, Brad thinks: she’s bright as well as pretty. He starts to daydream, idly, about whether this young new PhD might be interested in—