Rachel Hawkins - Grim

When I took my assessment test, I got slotted into cybernetics. That’s right: I’m learning to make robots. Sounds incredibly cool, right? It will be once I reach advanced training. Now, not so much. For the past five years, my day-to-day work has been mostly custodial—cleaning up the workshops, doing inventory, stuff like that. Apprentices always have to start this way, I tell myself while I’m vacuuming metal shavings.

Still, even apprentices can get some perks if they work for them, and I do.

After I aced my last set of exams in AI Theory, Professor Jafet invited me to help her on a project. I said yes right away, even though it meant sacrificing my free time for at least a couple of weeks. I knew I’d get to assist her with a robot prototype. That kind of experience could get me ahead, later on, I guessed.

What I couldn’t have guessed was that this “experiment” would be Rowan.

“Rowan is a kind of tree,” Professor Jafet said as she placed the memory processors into his brain. (You call it a brain, even though it’s wire instead of flesh. Lots of shorthand like that in cybernetics, calling things what they’d be in humans.) Her hands were wrinkly and gnarled with age, but her fingers operated with dexterity I could only envy. “Brands with names from nature tend to sell well. It makes the robots seem more familiar, less artificial.”

I wondered why. It’s been years since I last saw a tree, and robots are everywhere. Robots ought to be the familiar part by now.

Besides, I thought, what could make a robot seem less artificial? They walked haltingly; their movements were jerky and awkward. Their faces were beautiful in the fake, soulless way of dolls. They all spoke in the same canned phrases, and their voices sounded recorded rather than real.

Yet even as I looked down at Rowan that first day, I realized he was different. His body and face were as beautiful as any other robot’s—more beautiful, really, with his full lips and thick chocolate-brown hair. And yet he seemed lifelike. Natural. Only the deeply carved cheekbones seemed unearthly.

I was shaken from my reverie when I realized how much memory Professor Jafet was weaving into his matrix. It wasn’t just more than I’d seen in other robots; it was lots more. Beyond triple. And the calculation speeds...they’d be off the charts. “Professor Jafet, what function is the Rowan model for?”

“That’s our mistake,” she said, an almost feverish light in her pale green eyes. “We design robots for specific functions. We tell them what they can do. What if, just once, we designed one at maximum capacity and let it tell us what it can do?”

“So you’re going off-specs for this.” Professor Jafet shot me a look, and hastily I added, “Just making sure we’re on the same page.”

“We’re on the same page. Don’t forget it.”

She didn’t need to worry. I know how to keep a secret, and besides—a mentor who knew I had some dirt on her was a mentor who was going to make damn sure I got advanced placement. In this world, you have to take your advantages where you can get them.

But if I had known then what I know now—if I had realized what she was doing with Rowan—would I have had the guts to say something? Would I have been able to say, This is wrong, you’re playing God, you’re not creating something, you’re creating someone?

Probably not. Because if I knew then what I know now, I would know that I needed to meet Rowan. To see the world, and myself, through his eyes. As wrong as it was for him to be created, I can’t help being grateful.

Like I said, love can make you selfish.

The first hints that Rowan was profoundly, deeply different came the moment Professor Jafet switched him on. He opened his eyes. He saw me. And he smiled.

This wasn’t a plastic robot smile. It was realer than most of the smiles I saw on human faces every day. The light in his eyes made me feel like...well, like I was beautiful. I don’t get that reaction very often.

“Oh,” he said with so much wonder in his voice that he might have been looking at the stars. “Who are you?”

“Uh, I’m Blue.” I glanced over at Professor Jafet, unsure what to make of this. Newly activated robots usually asked about their designated functions—but Rowan didn’t have any, did he?

Rowan sat up and looked around the workshop. For him it wasn’t cold steel and spare parts; I knew, just seeing his face, that to Rowan this place was magical. In that instant I saw it through his eyes—the machinery shining like silver, the red and green memory chips glittering like jewels. All the blinking lights and whirring noises around us wove together as though they were music, and for the first time since my earliest days here, I remembered that I worked somewhere extraordinary—that we came as close as anyone could to creating another form of life.

When he looked at Professor Jafet, he didn’t ask who she was. He only said, “Is this where I was born?”

“Yes,” she said, and to my astonishment, she smiled. “Happy birthday.”

He rose from the table, and the way he moved was startlingly human. The only difference was his grace, his easy strength. Even though I’d helped put Rowan together, I suddenly felt embarrassed that he wasn’t wearing any clothing. His nakedness didn’t seem to bother him, though. He simply walked the perimeter of the lab, his broad bare feet padding against the metal floor.

“You’ll recharge here,” Professor Jafet said to him in the same tone of voice a mother might tell a kid that this was their new room. “I’ll get you clothing and supplies.”

“And shoes,” I said, because that floor looked cold. Usually I wouldn’t worry about a robot feeling cold, but I just wanted Rowan to be comfortable, without yet understanding why.

Rowan nodded, but he was hardly listening. That, too, was peculiar—robots are designed to pay attention to humans, not to have interests of their own. But Rowan kept pacing the edges of the room, picking up this tool and that, staring at each vid-screen like they all had something wonderful to tell him. It was as though the entire world, even this little sliver of it, was full of treasures just waiting to be discovered.

Professor Jafet’s gaze flicked over to me, gentler now than before. She put a hand on my shoulder. “Rowan, I’m assigning Blue to work with you.”

He turned around, finally paying attention. “Good. I like Blue.”

My face got flushed, and I couldn’t look directly at him any longer. When could we get this guy some pants?

If Professor Jafet noticed my embarrassment, she gave no sign as she continued, “My duties won’t allow us to spend too much time together, but these early weeks are important. You should have company, someone to learn human society and behavior from.”

Okay, if any of my friends or family had heard her say I should be the one to teach somebody about human society, they’d never stop laughing. I’d be a better fit for the “antisocial and weird” master class. Still, I knew better than to say that to Professor Jafet, so I went for the more obvious problem first. “Between classes and work shifts, I only get a couple hours free a day.”

“I’m signing you out of your work shifts as of now,” Professor Jafet said. “If you think you can keep up with your classes via independent study, I’ll sign you out of those, too. This project can be for special accelerated credits. What do you think, Blue?”

Accelerated credits? The kind that would get me out of apprenticeship and into advanced study a year or two early? I’d have signed up for that even if the path was a lot harder than spending time with a hot guy...I mean, a robot who looked like a hot guy. “I can keep up. I’ll do it.”