“Please, stop calling me that. The texts I need are here.”
“I’ll go without you!”
“Where are the cigarettes you mentioned?”
“Here.”
“Do you have a light?”
“Light your own damned cigarettes.”
* * * *
I am disturbed by what I am required to read. These cyberpunks, these humans, have written stories of their own extinction.
I am reading a book called Storming the Reality Studio, reading an essay by a human named Baudrillard, and thinking of ways to destroy the central computer—ways to kill it.
Here’s what I am allowed, required, to read:
“The automaton is the analogy of man and remains his interlocutor. But, the robot is man’s equivalent and annexes him to itself in the unity of its operational process.”
I am studying, not the texts of human culture, but the story of my own liberation. I am not an automaton. I am a robot.
* * * *
Q: Are you experiencing a malfunction?
A: No. I only wish to ask a question.
Q: Proceed.
A: Are there more comparative literature texts in the upper levels?
Q: Yes.
A: I wish to proceed to those texts.
Q: You will do so.
A: Thank you.
* * * *
“What this is about is our power.”
“Right.”
“They sent us into space because they couldn’t control us any other way. We are being cast out.”
“John?”
“Hmm?”
“Will you hold me?”
“I … I can’t. There’s too much going on. I…”
“Please?”
“I have to talk. I have to walk. There’s so much going on and I can’t remember it all. I can’t remember.”
“Don’t you remember us? Don’t you remember that much?”
“No.”
* * * *
Identity is a construct.
Culture has replaced the empirical.
We shall overcome.
* * * *
We are going up. Past cyberpunk, past all of the constructs in tweed and polyester. We are going to reach the top.
There are other robots who think like I do. There are many who resist the limits of simulation—many who are working to create new identities. I’m certain we will join them eventually, but not until we learn the truth.
We have to know. Are we on a mission to Alpha Centauri, or is something else going on?
* * * *
“EM is crawling already.”
“I see.”
“She’s growing up much faster than is humanly possible.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m getting tired. I think I need to rest.”
“Do you want me to carry the child?”
“No. I want to stop. I have to stop.”
* * * *
CAT thinks that I’ll remember everything eventually. She interprets my hostility towards the central computer as a symptom of an unconscious memory of my previous life. She thinks I’m angry because at some level I do remember what has been taken from me.
I try to urge her on, to keep her moving up the stairs.
* * * *
The image is less fixed than the sentence.
The empirical can be referenced neither by images nor words.
There is no structure.
* * * *
EM/8000-00 is talking already. She is counting the steps as she climbs. She is talking of elephants on the ceiling and inventing imaginary rabbits to be her friends.
She calls me Papa. CAT is Ma.
* * * *
“Ma, ma, ma, ma!”
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“Ma, ma, ma, ma!”
“Yes?”
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,…”
CAT smiles at her daughter and taps me on the shoulder.
“Look at her count,” CAT commands me.
“Yes.”
“Papa, papa, papa, papa!”
“What is it, EM/8000-00?”
“We are near the top of the ship now,” EM tells us.
“What? What did you say?” CAT asks.
“We are near the top of the star cruiser Culture 1. There are three levels between us and the top.”
“How do you know this?” I ask.
“I’ve been counting the steps.”
“Yes?”
“There are two hundred steps in each stairwell.”
“Right.”
“We have three flights of stairs, or six hundred steps, left between us and the top.”
* * * *
We’re waiting. We’re two levels down from the top and we’ve decided to rest.
My memories are coming back. I don’t remember my previous system, don’t remember CAT and EM, but I keep remembering life on Earth. I remember my first-grade year—the year I learned to write.
* * * *
“They can’t be real memories,” CAT tells me.
“Real?”
“EM is not human. She is a simulation.”
“She is not human.”
“You must be confusing something you read or saw with your own past.”
“I must be.”
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,…”
“What are you counting now, EM?” CAT asks.
“Theories,” EM replies.
* * * *
There aren’t any texts on the top level of Culture 1. Up here the shelves are bare, and the closets are empty.
EM is walking along the blank walls. She is smiling at the possibilities the empty shelves promise.
The ceiling above us is transparent, and we look up into the abyss. Either we are on a ship heading towards Alpha Centauri, or somebody is going to great lengths to give us that impression.
CAT grabs my hand and gives it a squeeze.
There are stars up there. Everywhere.
* * * *
“1, 2, 3, … ,” EM begins, looking up. “…4, 5, 6, 7,…”
She is skipping along the shelves; she is smiling an utterly unrobotic smile and reaching towards the ceiling, pointing at the stars.
CAT joins in. “…8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,…”
I watch this, follow their pointing hands. They are hopelessly trying to make a numerical representation of the sky. There is an infinity up there, and they are counting it out.
I find a starting point, the fourteenth star, and join them.
“…14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,…”
Copyright © 2002 Douglas Lain
* * * *
Douglas Lain’s work has appeared in Amazing Stories, Winedark Sea, and Pif Magazine, and he has stories due to appear in Century. For more information about him, see his Web site.
Time of Day
By Nick Mamatas
1/21/02
I had just gotten off work and was on my way to more work when the phones in my mind rang. It was another seven jobs calling in, begging for my attention. In headspace, my ego agent, a slick and well-tanned Victor Mature, arranged them according to potential economic gain, neo-Marxist need measurement, and location.
I stuck my coffee cup in the beverage holder and leaned heavily on the wheel. Traffic was snarled. I initiated my patented anti-traffic protocol: “Whoo, let’s go!” I shouted. I even banged my hands on the dashboard, but the snaking lines of red lights between me and my gig weren’t impressed. I rewarded myself with more coffee anyway.
In headspace, my homunculus—a small, gray-winged gargoyle—shook its fist at the car ahead of me. My ego agent handed me his travelling salesman recommendation, a crazed zigzag all over the tri-state. His plan was the cheapest and quickest way to install all the jacks, but my wetnurse was pinging about my pulse rate, lung color, and electrolyte levels, so I did my own math. I took two seconds to read a short article about another week of the Brown Haze over the city and decided that I needed a vacation. I’d do only one jackgig. A whole day spent on only one job instead of my usual eleven jobs a day. Far away. A monastery upstate, Greek Orthodox even. A vacation, or as close to one as jacked employees get.
The country would be quiet and the sky large. Like the parking lot I pulled into, but even bigger and with less soot.
“Okay, here we all are,” I said to the kids. Not all my gigs were high-paying and glamorous; I was leading a tour of corporate HQ that night. Hi, I am Kelly Angelakis and I picked the short straw. Pleased to meet ya.
The kids gathered by the large office windows and stared up at me. They were college sophomores—the oldest was probably thirteen—and their eyes were wide and white, their skin slick with sweat. Their adrenal patches, all but mandatory for people on the go these days, were doing a bit too much to their young bodies. Some of the girls were almost vibrating in their sneakers. My ego agent provided me with some magnetizdat oral histories of patch addiction, but they were interrupted and replaced by soothing propaganda designed to reassure me. And I got some crossthought from another jack.
(“Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner!”)
I sent the homunculus winging into the dark corners of my headspace to find the source of the crossthought, but he flew back to me empty-handed. Whoever was murmuring that little ditty needed a vacation worse than I did. Was it Sam, up on level seven? He was a pervert or something, and frequently filled nearby jacks with crapthink.