David Gatewood: The Robot Chronicles

Micah wiped his head, slicking his hair back, and checked his watch. Kitpie would be recharging the poles right now, or should be.

Skip’s body was still crumpled on the deck, a victim of the Kawasaki Frequency. But he could be reset.

So many decisions.

Micah slowly, hesitantly, kneeled before Nikolaevna.

With a swift motion he plunged his hot pen into the panel opening, into her motherboard. He ground the plasma tip deep into her circuitry. His pen dug in, severing a small chipset from her circuit boards.

Her LED shut off, her processors no longer working.

Again he reached under his simuskin, opening the panel at the base of his skull; he implanted the chip and soldered it into place. Nikolaevna’s chip. And with it, the routines that she had programmed to counter the Kawasaki Frequency.

He closed the panel, pulled the flap of simulated skin over it, and pressed everything back into place.

The ship was silent and cold. A few dust motes idled along the beam from the pen light that rested on the floor.

Micah lifted Skip’s unconscious ferrotanium body into his own strong ferrotanium arms.

“Margaret would’ve wanted it this way,” he said. “Come on Skip, let’s go home.”

First, I’m fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time to be included in this anthology. Without the support of my fellow authors I wouldn’t be able to participate in such an exciting project. I’m even more fortunate that the group didn’t ask me to leave, once all the other phenomenal talent was pooled!

Like any story, “The Invariable Man” began as something completely different. A while back I thought how cool it would be to write about a man who owns a mansion run by robots. This thought must have occurred after watching the season finale of Downton Abbey with my wife. At some point, though, the story transitioned to an old man in Tucson, Arizona, with the oppressive southwestern heat as a backdrop. A hot backdrop.

I hope you enjoyed reading “Invariable.” I hope you enjoyed it to the point that you want to read more of my stories. If so, please sign up for my newsletter at http://www.akmeek.com/newsletterso that you can receive free copies of my stories, along with other amazing stuff.

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Unwrapping the Companionwas Alex’s earliest memory: his father, home late, stripping the tape from the brown box and plunging his hands into the boil of packing foam. The smell of plastic, clean and warm. The squeak of Styrofoam.

In his dad’s hands, a white, round-cornered cube lay atop a squat rectangular body. Blocky limbs hung from its shoulders and hips.

Alex lifted his face. “It looks like me!”

“If you squint.” His dad smiled.

“What’s it do?”

“It’s your buddy. It does all the things friends do.”

His dad went back to work. Marisa tucked him in. The Companion rested on his desk, silent.

“Would you sing to me?”

The Companion’s faceplate lit up with lines and circles for its mouth and eyes. “What would you like me to sing?”

Before he fell asleep, Alex decided its name was Bill.

Only one other girl had a Companion when Alex started preschool. By the time he finished kindergarten, half the class carried them in their packs—recording notes, or reminding them to take their pills in soft, thoughtless voices.

“It’s a toy,” Jaden said, chin drawn back, when Alex asked. “It doesn’t have a name.”

“Mine either,” Alex said. He didn’t ask Bill to sing to him for three days. Two lines into “I Wish I Were A Pepperoni Pizza,” Alex joined in.

Middle school wasn’t good for Alex. High school was worse.

The other boys swapped up their Companions every year, showing up to school with sleek abstract cases that did their math homework and presorted their porn collections. Alex asked his dad for a new model, too, but flensed it of all its personality software. It went straight back in the drawer every day after school.

At home, Bill gave him voice lessons, designed a personalized guitar instruction routine, sat beside Alex while he watched movies. After the big software update sophomore year, Bill could even crack jokes during the bad flicks.

Three and a half years passed in subtle agony. Alex signed up for the Prom Assembly.

He knew they would laugh when he brought Bill onstage—in his blocky, kiddie-model body. He had thought he wouldn’t care. “Most of you don’t know me,” Alex said over the vanishing applause for a pretty girl who had sung a pop song by a woman he’d never heard of. “My name’s Alex.”

He tried to spot his friends in the dim auditorium. It wasn’t that all the faces looked the same, but under the lights, they meant nothing to him, grey stumps on vague necks. “I don’t think any of you know Bill. Say hello, Bill.”

Bill waved a blocky arm, servos whirring. “Hello, Bill.”

Disbelieving laughter. Suddenly and viciously aware he would never have to see any of these people again, Alex skipped the rest of their rehearsed patter and crunched into the first chord of “Baby, Your Body’s My Bass.” Bill wailed beside him, self-amplified, their voices converging and diverging like living sine waves, like the pulse of a steel heart. The last note trickled away. Alex couldn’t hear his panting over the applause.

“Take a bow, Bill,” he half-snarled. Bill bowed. Kids stood, whistled, chanted the little bot’s name.

“Did you have fun?” Bill asked him in the parking lot.

“Yeah! Did you feel that? Didn’t you?”

“I’m glad you had fun.”

His dad sent him to NYU. By junior year, Alex Jeffers’s stage income covered his tuition. They made cable videos, toured, hired a team to manage their netstream. After the ’54 update, Bill could improvise on the fly; reporters couldn’t decide if they loved or hated his brusque, peppery interviews.

Jeffers & Bill weren’t the only ones. There was Pearl and Ruby; Binary; Monotone Mike and the Meatbags; a thousand others playing local clubs and posting tracks online. Jeffers & Bill were just the first to break. The banter and the charm. The crest of the wave.

Bill, like the others, wasn’t allowed out on his own (except when they gigged in Sweden). To compensate, Alex never made him turn off—just leave the room when he was having sex.

“He’s not yours,” some kid hollered between songs in a swing through Seattle. The dark theater was a smaller venue: three thousand seats, cozy, like Alex preferred. He smiled out at the crowd.

“Here’s one we wrote when I was just another kid, and Bill was just another Companion.”

“He’s not your property.”

“And this show isn’t yours,” Bill snapped into his prop microphone. “So shut your stupid mouth, pour another beer down your nose, and have a good time.”

Bill ripped into a punked-out, beeped-up riff on their childhood tune. The bootleg out-trended everything that night. They’d killed. They’d massacred. They’d carved through the seats and left no man, woman, or child alive.