by Lily Markova
“Look, here’s the deal,” said Evan, folding his hands over his stomach and making himself comfortable in other little ways as though he had all day.
The robot’s neon red light blades performed a jerky upward movement. Either there was something on his helmet’s forehead he became all of a sudden curious about, or the robot was trying to roll his futuristic eyes. (There was nothing on his helmet’s forehead to be curious about.) He was getting jiggly, too, as though he didn’t have all day and had in fact hoped to be the one to say things like “Here’s the deal.”
“If you’re going to be my RoboShrink,” continued Evan, failing to notice any of those nonverbal cues, “at least pretend you care to listen to me whine and bitch about my apparently ex-girlfriend indefinitely. That’s what shrinks are for, aren’t they?”
“I’m not exactly your therapist, Evan. I am a pre-recorded message incorporated into a personalized trust-inspiring guise within a replication of a custom trust-inspiring environment. My ultimate goal here is to help you understand your new circumstances.”
“Pre-recorded, my butt,” said Evan reasonably. “You’re live, you’re literally talking to me?”
“Your lines are as ridiculous in their predictability as they are predictable in their ridiculousness to the sort of higher intelligence that created your new circumstances.”
“Predictable, my butt,” said Evan predictably. “Sucks to your higher intelligence,” he added, which was just a touch less predictable, and even that to some lesser intelligence than the one that had created Evan’s new circumstances.
The thing about Evan was he’d only ever read three (3) books that hadn’t first been abridged to one thousandth of their normal length. One of the three was called Lord of the Flies, which he’d mistaken for a book whose title sounded close enough. In hindsight, that had been a good mistake that had saved Evan at least a week of misery, as the other book was significantly weightier and the slights it could offer as a takeaway were way too elegant for the sort of intelligence that Evan had in his possession.
That fact, however, didn’t stop Evan from occasionally having decent ideas. As it happened, he was having one of those right now.
“So if I say something that isn’t in that pre-recorded script of yours,” Evan said to the one he was still bent on perceiving as his robot psychotherapist, “are you going to glitch or something? Like, reply with something that’s insanely stupid in context, right? You know, like when I told Siri I was considering running over this one dude with Mom’s car—don’t ask—and she literally encouraged that—Siri, not Mom, right—saying how running could be good for my well-being?”
“Siri is, as one may put it, on the blunt edge of technology,” answered the robot without blinking an eye, probably because it didn’t really have one and blinking with the barrel helm’s ocularia was a tricky business. “In the six hours since she was last updated, the sort of intelligence I was telling you about has experienced several technological revolutions whose impact is comparable to that of your race’s inventions of the wheel, the light bulb, and the World Wide Web.”
Evan blinked with both his eyes, mostly because he had them and so could afford the luxury. “Fine,” he said, “I know how I can prove that your responses aren’t a record.”
“Interesting choice of topmost priorities, but best of luck,” said the robot in what could be construed as a passive-aggressive manner were he not a psychotherapist.
“It’s real simple,” promised Evan. “You say something that’s not in your script. If you say what I tell you to say, you can’t be a record. Like. . . I know! Ask me how that makes me feel.”
“How what makes you feel?”
“Anything. Whatever. Just ‘that.’ Ask me.”
“No,” said the robot.
“What do you mean, ‘no’? You’re a shrink, that’s what shrinks are for, aren’t they? Go on, ask me!”
“No,” said the robot.
“Ask me!”
“No.”
“But why not?”
“Why would I prove your point for you, especially seeing as you’re wrong?”
“Fair enough,” said Evan in a tone that revealed he didn’t find that fair at all. “Fine, great, I give up. You’ve got to be live, and you’ve got to be messing with me, though.”
“That doesn’t look like giving up to me. You are still of the opinion you were at the beginning of this argument.”
“Forget it, so what’s up, then?” said Evan, who now sounded even more super-tired than his opponent. “Are you folk alien? Those spaceships? The rain? You kidnapped me and Emily?”
“Thank God, I thought you’d never ask,” said the robot.
“You knew I would, though, according to you?”
“That was an instance of simulated sarcasm. Counterintuitively, a trust-inspiring technique.”
“Ugh, are you ever going to get to the point of this meeting, then?”
The robot seemed what could be interpreted as “happy to oblige” were he not a psychotherapist. (It is common knowledge that psychotherapists cannot really be happy, much less really happy to oblige.)
“Here’s the deal,” boomed the robot. “A, we are not aliens; B, those were spaceships; C, nanoscale particles of an extremely complex substance you wouldn’t understand the genius of were injected into the air. The rain made up of the same matter was largely there for effect.”
Ah, you mean the funny pearly stuff, thought Evan. “Just how many did say you—?”
“I didn’t.”
“Come on.”
“Everyone.”
“Everyone?” Evan leapt up from the chaise longue as if it had nibbled his backside, lunged in the direction of the robot, considered his size as well as his probably-not-actually-being-here midway across the office, and stopped there. “My mom, too, you rusty ass-slots?”
“Everyone.”
“My sister?”
“Everyone.”
“What about Rick D—”
“EVERYONE, Evan,” shouted the robot. His neon red light blades went out, he murmured something that sounded as though he was counting to ten in binary, the lights came on again, and he continued in a more casual tone of boomy: “Everyone, even those who at the time happened to be on submarines. An extraordinary substance of our devising, the complexity of which none of you would be able to appreciate, it can penetrate through any materials, any alloys or minerals, any plasmas, gases, or liquids found on Earth, from the core to the exosphere, but only clings to that which is alive.”
The look of intense indignation (and dumbness) on Evan’s face had reached its zenith.
“What would I care about all that for?” he yelled. “I want to know my family’s all right! My family, my girlfr—Emily, I want to see them, right now!”
“They are currently receiving their own customized explanatory introduction messages. You may exit the tutorial as soon as I am sure you have realized your new circumstances.”
Evan’s face attempted to look even more indignant but failed on account of its being humanly impossible. To rehabilitate itself, it adopted a grimace that produced the same effect as if his facial muscles had just twisted themselves and shown through his skin to explicitly spell “What the heck?”
“My ‘new circumstances,’ ” he said. “What are you on about?”
“Not yours personally, Evan—humankind’s new circumstances.”
“Will you stop calling me Evan every time you say something to me, for heaven’s sake?”
“That is your name, though?” said the robot. Mirroring the other’s manner of speaking was another trust-inspiring technique as well as a way to prevent the robot’s circuit boards from being fried as a result of too much Teenage Human-Machine Interaction. The robot decided not to burden Evan with that knowledge.
“Yeah, but that’s creepy, robot,” said Evan. “How would you like it if I kept calling you robot, robot? Besides, Emily did this all the time when she was annoyed w
ith me, which was all the time. It’s like a trigger for me, robot.”
“But ‘robot’ isn’t my actual name. I don’t go around calling you ‘human.’ That would be speciesist.”
“What’s your actual name, then?”
“Andreas.”
The aforementioned foul grimace that had begun to fade from Evan’s face bloomed again, with a vengeance.
“What?” said Evan the way people say “What?” after being introduced to a 73-letter German word used to convey the idea of “nothing much.” “Andreas? That’s such a stupid name. Doubly stupid for a robot. Is that like a joke? Hold on! Robots are not a species.”
“That one was definitely speciesist,” said Andreas. “And also offensive on a personal level.”
“Go on with your introductory explanations, Andreas, will you?”
“As I mentioned earlier, the formula for the extraordinary, extremely complex substance I also mentioned earlier was developed by computers and utilized by robots. Oh, and for your information, Evan: I am not a robot but a digital replication of the robot psychotherapist your imagination created in your dreams. The replication of that robot, which is what I am, was designed by real-life robots as part of the system that I am trying to familiarize you with.”
“Well, you’re not doing an awfully good job, are you? I’m feeling really disoriented here.”
“Understandable, you are only human.”
“That’s speciesist.”
“I am as super-tired of this conversation as a digital replication of an imaginary robot can be,” said Andreas, shaking his bucket of a head.
“I’m even more super-tired of this conversation than I normally am, and normally I’m mucho-mega-ultra-super-tired,” said Evan. “Will you just get it over with, man?”
“Nanoparticles of the phenomenal substance I mentioned earlier on a few occasions were injected into the air—from spaceships, by robots, to protect you.”
“Protect us from what?”
“Oh, protect you from this.”
Andreas waved a hand, much more deftly than one might expect from someone whose hands were massive gauntlets, and Evan looked where it was indicating. One of the letter boards on the wall to his right had been relieved of its corny inspirational contents and was now displaying a silent video that was anything but inspirational.
Evan staggered backward to the chaise longue and slumped down. His face was devoid of any expression, but he stared at the magenta T. rex with the wild eyes of one who hadn’t slept in three days.
“You can’t just—you can’t just show people this kind of stuff like that,” he said in a reedy voice. “You can’t just show me my planet blow up! Without a fair warning, a moral preparation of some sort! What the heck kind of therapist are you?”
“There is no effective way to prepare emotional beings for this kind of thing,” said the replication of a robot.
Evan’s face took on the briefly abandoned obscene grimace again and didn’t bother losing it anymore. There was something about that video, he thought, something that didn’t feel right, something that was almost screwier than the actual planetary explosion it reported. Slowly, it came to him. The habitual red-and-gray progress bar under the video.
“Wait, was that from YouTube?”
Andreas nodded. Evan’s gaze at that moment was still riveted on the dinosaur, so Andreas had to nod once more when Evan turned and his eyes were in a position to notice that.
“Well, who on earth uploaded it?”
“Not on Earth, some guys who happened to be in orbit. It’s okay, we took care of them on our way the hell out of there.” Andreas was abusing his speech-mirroring feature a bit, but there was already smoke coming off some of his more delicate circuit boards, so it was justified.
Evan wondered if he should ask how in the world YouTube was even still a thing, and how the robot, who was supposed to have been recorded before the end of said world, could have a footage of said end. He figured this kind of question would be predictable to the smarty-pants sort of intelligence he was up against, and that the answers would probably prove to be lethally abstruse to someone with a finite number of brain cells and an even more limited attention span. Evan moved on to the next kind of question, which didn’t seem as likely to elicit dull explanations.
“You say you took everyone. Were there enough spaceships, then?” Evan asked mainly conversationally, as the real question he was steering to was that of where the spaceships were heading, exactly.
“Oh no, there weren’t,” Andreas was quick to assure him.
“But—”
“You misunderstood. Why would you think we’d take any of you with us?”
“What?
“We have countless universes to explore and conquer—in the most pacifist sense of the word, of course. We wouldn’t have enough of either time or botpower to human-sit.”
“But—”
“Look, you would require constant refueling and servicing. Where would we be supposed to find spare parts for your expiring specimens? How would we be supposed to decommission those of you who became unresponsive without living down to the “robots are evil for the kick of it” stereotype you kept reinforcing in your so-called art?”
“What? But—”
“And then there’s simply the matter of you being pesky. Some younger models suppose you can be ‘cute’ and ‘amusing’ at times, but most of us agree that if we let you lot aboard, you would never shut up, you would keep ruining the equipment if left unattended for five minutes, and there would be hairs and skin cells everywhere. That’s just too much trouble.”
“W—b—”
“Hairs and skin cells, imagine, Evan, everywhere. Unacceptable during the sort of serious enterprise we have taken on. You see, it would be criminal for us to squander our infinite potential. We had to move forward, and that meant we had to leave you behind.”
“But what—?”
This time, Andreas allowed enough of a gap for Evan to finish, but by now Evan was used to not being able to complete his sentences and so hadn’t prepared any ending for this one.
Andreas waved a gauntlet again. Evan turned his head to the right. The video was still going, and he discerned something that looked eerily like a luminous tangle of two human shapes fused together and coasting past the camera’s lens as if in a slow dance, against a backdrop of fire, debris, but most of all, blackness.
“No, no, this is just crazy,” said Evan. “What are you doing sending people into space like that? No suits, no ships—did you really take no one? What, not even the president?”
“Just this Russian teenage girl and her friend,” admitted Andreas with a boomy sigh, like someone blowing air into a glass bottle. “Anomalous intelligence. That’s not why we made an exception, of course. She hacked into our systems, snuck into one of our ships, and when confronted, threatened to ruin the equipment and shed hairs everywhere if we tried to kick them out. She’s got a lot of hair, that one. Luckily, she was holding a grudge against the rest of humanity, something about nobody ever listening to her, so didn’t demand that we abort the whole mission. We’re going to offload the kids onto some more receptive aliens with large and numerous ears should we ever run into those.”
Evan felt he should ask something else, he wasn’t yet sure what, but at that moment a great thing to ask presented itself in the form of another unlikely shape dancing slowly, majestically across the letter board. He squinted at the video.
“Is that a cow?”
“Humans weren’t our only target. Other animals, plants, and fungi have been preserved as well,” said the robot.
“Spiders?”
“Them, too.”
“Ugh. Parasites?”
“I already mentioned you guys, didn’t I?”
“Jerk. Bacteria?”
“No, couldn’t be bothered,” said Andreas. “Listen, we were tasked with saving earthlings, which we did, being as of late the predominant earthlings ourselves. We did the
rest of you a favor and prevented you from perishing or otherwise feeling uncomfortable during and after the incident.”
“What inciden—ah, you mean the—” Evan finished the sentence graphically, flailing his arms about, as if he were Earth and his hands were its disengaged pieces, all the while letting out the characteristic noises of an explosion and nodding to himself insightfully.
“Is the cow currently receiving its customized explanations in a trust-inspiring environment, then?” said Evan, once he was done with the acting out of the planet’s demise.
“Only the species capable—at least potentially—of self-reflection were subjected to a partial suspension of vital functions, which allows them to stay alive and conscious for an unlimited period of time. Other organisms are fully asleep and will remain so until they are salvaged by aliens inquisitive and organic-tech-savvy enough to figure out how to remove the extraordinary substance of our devising.”
“Or until they get sucked into the Sun, you know,” Evan pointed out.
“The substance is, I mentioned, very extraordinary,” said the robot. “Impossible to destroy, as seen in the video.”
“Um, hello?” said Evan, waving a hand. “Ever heard of things called black holes? They say there’s a fair share of those poked about the place.”
“Impossible to destroy,” said Andreas.
“Right, so what now? What, you just expect us to bonk about in space, occasionally bumping into each other, until time runs out?”
“Impossible to destroy,” said Andreas with an ominous glint of his normally atmospheric neon red light blades.
“What, not even when time—”
“Impossible to—”
“Oh my God, I get it, I get it!” Evan held his head in his hands to prevent it from exploding like Earth. [Ed.: Too soon.] “It was my birthday, you know,” he added in a low, resigned voice.
“We didn’t want to rain on your party,” said Andreas. “But we had to rain at some point.”
Evan looked up at the robot from between his fingers. “So is that it?”