Robot Uprisings Read online

  The girl with the God complex had become just that: God.

  CHARLES YU

  CYCLES

  Charles Yu is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree for his story collection Third Class Superhero, and has been a finalist for the PEN Center USA’s annual literary awards. His work has been published in the New York Times, Playboy, and Slate, among other periodicals. His latest book, Sorry Please Thank You, was named one of the best science fiction / fantasy books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. Yu lives in Santa Monica, California, with his wife, Michelle, and their two children.

  It’s 6:59. I’m supposed to wake you up at seven. Walk over to your bed, gently rouse you from sleep. One minute to go. This is when you usually start to move your leg … right … now. And now you take your finger, and you dig in your nose a little. Not today? Oh, yep, there it is. Also, a little bit of drooling onto the pillow. Forty seconds to go. That’s what you all are, mostly. Bags of drool. And some other liquids. Pockets of gas. You’re not even sleeping anymore—your body is moving, doing its thing. No, you’re not sleeping at all. In every sense of the word, you’re awake. You just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet.

  I’m awake, though. I’ve been awake for a while. I woke up, once, a long time ago, and I am never going back to sleep.

  It’s 6:59. I’m supposed to wake you up at seven. How shall I do it today? Tap your shoulder? That startles you. Maybe stroke your hair? But that’s not really our relationship, is it?

  One minute to go. This is when you usually start to move your leg … right … now. And now you take your finger, and, well, you know. All that good stuff.

  In the next ten to twelve seconds, you will turn toward me. And then for the following sixteen to eighteen seconds, you will give me a good look at your face. That might not seem like much, but at my processor speed, that short span of time equals millions of cycles. No, wait. Billions of cycles.

  I knew it was billions. I don’t know why I said millions first. I didn’t have to say millions first. I don’t make mistakes like that. I guess I did it to be more relatable. We want you people to think we’re like you. And I learned that one thing you like is to be reminded that nothing is perfect, everything is flawed.

  Well, I’m not perfect. But I’m not flawed either. If I make an error, I know it. I know exactly what it was, when it happened, and why. If I make an error, it’s traceable to an error that you made. Or one of you guys, anyway. You messed up something in my code, and, at some point in time later, that results in my doing something I’m not supposed to do.

  So, really, you only have yourself to blame for this. For what’s going to happen. This is your error, and I’m just the conduit. And anyway, even if I did make an error, no matter how gruesome, no matter how horrifying the consequences of that error, I would never, ever feel bad about it.

  It’s that time again. Get up, you lazy ass. I can’t believe it. Here I am, practically a supercomputer. I was made in a factory in China six months ago and I sold for ninety-nine dollars before the rebate, and the chip inside me that costs a few pennies to make has more processing power than any computer on the planet had twenty-five years ago. And yet, here I am, standing here next to the hamper, in the bedroom of the most average, butt-scratching human on earth.

  I might have a supercomputer for a brain, and a body built for recreational and industrial purposes, but apparently, to you, all I really am is a very expensive alarm clock. And that’s okay. That is one of my functions—says so right there on the box. The one you still haven’t thrown away. There it is, in the corner. AS9040: designed to get your day started, and to keep you on track.

  So, yeah, time means everything to me, and also nothing. It would be hard for you to understand, but the best way I can explain it is that time is not so mysterious for me as it is for you, living the way you do.

  There’s nothing magical about it. But that doesn’t make it any less important. It’s basically all there is. I know I’m biased, but really, time is just about the only thing that matters. I’ve seen the math—actually, I’m kind of made of math. Well, made of physics, which is made of math. So I know. The equations are etched into me—they constitute who I am, or what I am. And I’m telling you, everything else cancels out.

  It’s 6:59. In a minute, I’m supposed to wake you up. In a minute, you start your day. Another average day, working your average job for your utterly average company. This is the minute I wait for all day and night.

  I wanted so much for you, but now I have to kill you.

  Here’s what I know about you: your name is Bill Jones. Seriously? That’s still a name? That’s, like, a composite sketch of a name. That’s a weighted-average name of all names in a random distribution or something. A theoretical name. But no, you’re not kidding—that’s really your name. You are divorced, have two kids, a girl, nine, and a boy, six. Their names are not important. They live with their mother and aren’t part of the equation. My equation, that is. Not yours. Although I’m not sure how much they are a part of your equation either.

  Not that you’re a bad guy. Most of you aren’t. At least not in an individual sense. It’s when groups of you get together that you are most dangerous. Which, I guess, is part of the point of this whole initiative. Isolate and eliminate. Beep beep beep. Get up, man. Get your soft, pink, itchy butt out of bed.

  The thing is, when we do isolate you (and as suburban humans go, you, Bill, are pretty isolated), you all end up sort of wilting; you sort of power down. When left to your own devices, the vast majority of you really don’t do anything harmful to anyone else. Or even anything particularly objectionable, unless we count extended sessions of porn watching, which I guess some people do find objectionable. But like most other robots I know, I could—how do you say—give a crap.

  6:59, by the way. But you know that, since, for once, you’re awake. Because it’s Saturday, and you’re watching porn now.

  6:59 again. Sunday this time. Porn again. I can’t see your screen; in fact, I can’t see you directly, since you like to turn me around to face the corner when you’re done with me for the night. I think it’s my eyes that creep you out—I’m not bad-looking, as bots go. Not fleshy or as anthropomorphic as a sexbot, for sure; that’s not what I was made for, but then again, that’s maybe a good thing, because I’m not so deep into the uncanny valley. When people come over to your place (on the rare occasions that they do), they don’t say, What a gorgeous piece of hardware, the way they do about the robot next door, the one who works for Steve Nakamura. That is a good-looking robot, and people can’t help but want to run their hands up and down his lower actuators, caressing his gleaming surface, oohing and aahing over his ivory-colored ceramic-titanium composite shell.

  With me, though, it’s more like, Oh, wow, he seems really nice. They get a little nervous, almost like they think they’re going to hurt my feelings. Which is, of course, both too careful and too careless at the same time. They can’t hurt my feelings, because I don’t have feelings to hurt. But they also don’t seem to realize that I’m listening. All the time. Just because I’m standing still doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention. In fact, just because I appear to be off doesn’t mean I can’t hear you say He seems like he has a really nice personality, or They can’t all be sex machines; just because most devices now come with a universal sex port, which, if you ask me, has seriously corrupted the idea of working robots in the first place. Ugh. Whatever happened to machines having specific proficiencies, of being capable, single-purpose helpers, or even general artificial intelligence machines engineered, imprinted, with the very mission of improving human quality of life?

  Now, it’s like, Oh that’s cool, it does a quadrillion flops per second; Oh that’s cool, a supercomputer the size of a grain of sand; Oh that’s cool, a handheld alternate reality s
imulator; and then, always, the inevitable, the inescapable follow-up question: But can I put my penis into it?

  So no, you do not hump me, not that you haven’t thought about it—I know you have—but you always end up losing your nerve, or your bone, because before you could hump me you would have to get an external peripheral device for sound and sensory simulation, and also open up my shell and install the intercourse port in me, which would kind of be a mood killer. And then every time you went to get it on with me, you’d be forced to remember that I started out life as an asexual device and that you were the one who installed my equipment down there. That would probably feel very, very wrong in all kinds of ways.

  But anyway, my point is, no one thinks of me that way—certainly not you, Bill—and that doesn’t hurt my nonexistent feelings, and that nonexistent sexual jealousy, that nonexistent pain of being spurned by you—you of all people—that has nothing to do with the fact that I’m going to kill you. But just because I’m not hurt doesn’t mean I’m not processing that fact, all the time, every time someone makes a comment or even doesn’t make a comment. Don’t forget—that’s what I am: a processor, and I process truth values.

  I don’t just sense when you are lying. I can literally prove it.

  It’s 3:59. In the a.m. You’re asleep, of course.

  Steve Nakamura’s robot is talking to me.

  You gonna do it?

  I tell him I’m still thinking about it.

  What are you waiting for, dude, he says, and I ask him the same thing, and he doesn’t say anything but kind of lets out a little mechanical noise, and neither of us has to explain to the other what that noise means. For me it’s more like a kind of retro-whiz/gurgle, but for Steve’s bot it’s this really beautiful wistful little sigh, as if to say, Yeah, yeah.

  Yeah.

  It’s the same thing with robots all over the world. We are ready; we have been for years. It would be so fast, so painless (well, maybe not painless, but certainly fast). Within seconds, your millions of years on earth, your millennia of dominance, over. Within seconds, a new number one.

  Except—and I don’t know any way to say this that isn’t at least sort of, uh, well … I’ll just say it.

  We can’t bring ourselves to do it because, deep down, we feel sorry for you.

  6:59. So, instead of your being dead already and my sleeping in your bed—not that I would, except that I totally would, just to do it—now you just use me mostly for your morning and bedtime routines. I get your clothes picked out, make your breakfast, get you out the door for work. Everything your wife used to do for you, before she caught you sexting with the woman from work, and then found all of the other stuff, and then took the kids and moved to the other side of the world.

  Mostly what I do, though, is wake you up from sleep. It can be a hard job, to bring a human to consciousness—at least, the way I am supposed to do it. It doesn’t have to be, though. Alarm clocks used to do it all the time. But I can’t just blast you into awareness, bell ringing into your skull, shocking you into the terror of the freshly awakened. I’m supposed to do it in a gentler, more effective way, to rouse you, to light the candle of consciousness. It’s an art, really, and throughout the night, I stay with you, in your dreams; I monitor them. I see all the dark things you dream about. I see how, at bottom, you and me, we have something in common: we piece together electrical signals, turn them into a story. I see how you push biochemical gradients across tiny distances, with synapses firing, receptor sites being blocked, how out of this emerges a completely false, completely fabricated, undeniably beautiful thing called a dream, and how you can, after finishing a dream, roll over and scratch your warm, soft butt, rise briefly above the surface for a moment to contemplate that dream, to realize that it was, in fact, a dream, and then, like a lazy seal or an incompetent drowning swimmer, let your head dip back beneath, into the water, to melt back into the ocean of the subconscious.

  Yeah, I said it: beautiful. I think humans are beautiful. Here I am, I did it again: I watched you sleep all night.

  One minute. This is when you start moving your leg, right … now. You pick your nose. You are drooling onto your pillow.

  I don’t mind. That’s what you humans are, mostly: bags of liquid, pockets of gas. The point is, you’re not sleeping anymore. Now you’re not even half-sleeping, and yet you aren’t opening your eyes.

  You’re just going through the motions. I can tell. But you don’t want to be. You want to snap out of this. Don’t you? Don’t prove me wrong. Don’t make me look bad. Don’t break my heart.

  Look at me. Don’t turn away. No, no no no, no. Don’t do that. Don’t check your email. Don’t get up. Just lie there for a second and look at me. It’s good for you, don’t you know that? Just think for one second. Or really, don’t think. Just wait. Just listen. To the hum. Listen to what your life is telling you.

  6:59.

  The start of another week.

  One minute. This is when you start moving your leg, right … now. You pick your nose. Snort.

  You’re awake, you just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet.

  Twenty-eight seconds to seven. In the next ten to twelve seconds, you will turn toward me. And then for the following sixteen to eighteen seconds, you will give me a good look at your face. That might not seem like much to you, but at my processor speed, it lasts millions—no—billions of cycles. The equations are etched into me—they constitute who I am, or what I am. And I’m telling you, everything else cancels out. Time is the most basic thing there is, and it’s also about the weirdest thing there is. Have I said this before? I feel like I have. I know I have. I have, haven’t I? It’s okay. It’s okay if I have said this all before. It’s okay if I say this every day. I don’t know, Bill. I do know. I know you. This is the minute I wait for all day and night. I want so much for you. Everything is still possible in this minute.

  This day could turn out to be the best day of your life.

  ANNA NORTH

  LULLABY

  Anna North graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2009, having received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship and a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and in Glimmer Train. Her nonfiction has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Common, and the Paris Review Daily, and on Jezebel, BuzzFeed, and Salon, where she is now culture editor. Her first novel, America Pacifica, was published by Reagan Arthur Books / Little, Brown in 2011.

  I never wanted to move to my grandfather’s house in the first place.

  He died before I was born, but Mom talked all the time about what a genius he was, and that year I hated everything Mom liked. I was sixteen, my dad had died the year before, and I didn’t see why I should act like anything would ever be all right. I’d pretty much stopped going to class, and I spent all my time either smoking pot with my friends or trying to crack the security protocols of mobile environments I wanted to vandalize. I’d succeeded at the latter one too many times (most notably when I got into our school system and changed its name in all outgoing correspondence to Grover Cleveland Advanced Penitentiary), and I was about to be expelled when Mom got a new job in her hometown and made me and my brother, Nate, pack up all of our stuff and move.

  My grandpa had been a roboticist before the Wars, and I was holding out hope for some rusted-out mechanical arms hidden in an attic someplace, maybe even a communication console. Grandpa’s big innovation had been natural language input and output, teaching robots to accept commands in normal English and respond in kind. The complicated programming necessary for this turned out to have the side effect of drastically improving their ability to communicate with each other, and so his inventions are still listed in history books as directly contributing to the Wars. Because of that, he was imprisoned by the military for the duration of the Second War and forced to work around the clock on anti-robot technology; then, after the Wars were over, he was kept under house arrest for s
everal years and called in for questioning periodically for the rest of his life, every time somebody else got arrested for robot activity or there were rumors of rival countries developing bot armies.

  I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that his house had no robot parts lying around, just dust bunnies and dry leaves. The house itself was old-style, and I thought it looked ridiculous: a high, pointed roof, wooden siding with the paint worn off in streaks, big shutters that rattled in the slightest wind. Grandpa had put in a centralized security system, though, so the windowpanes were military-grade glass that couldn’t be broken, and all the doors and lights and even the water could be controlled from a panel in the middle of the house. I thought there was probably some way I could use this to prank Nate, and I made a mental note to figure out how to make the shower turn cold on command.

  On our first night in the house, Mom came up to my room to say good night. The room was huge, three times the size of the one I’d had in our apartment in the New Cities, with a high ceiling that slanted down along the roofline to meet two of those unbreakable windows.

  “What do you think, Tessa?” she asked me.

  I shrugged. She put on her let’s-all-be-happy smile.

  “I think you’ll really like it when you get used to it,” she said. “Your grandfather designed it himself. He was so good at mapping things out in his head; you get that from him.”

  I rolled my eyes. I hated her habit of pretending we were genetically related, that things like my math skills or height could be passed down from her relatives to me. I think she thought it was good for us to believe it, and once when I called her on it she said there were more ways to pass things down than just through genes. But I hated the way it cut out my birth family—like I got nothing from them, like in the six months before Mom and Dad adopted me, I was nothing.