David Gatewood: The Robot Chronicles

He smoothed the sheet over the cot’s mattress and tucked the blanket in at the foot. He surveyed the room and grabbed some extra blankets. She would be cold for a while. And then hungry. He draped the blankets over a nearby chair and went back to the control console. The cafeteria records said she’d requested grilled cheese most often. He passed Tock again on his way to the kitchen and tried not to make an association.

In the kitchen, a corpse sat at the table. Its ribcage had been stretched open from the back, its uniform still draped over the limbs, its parka flung on the chair beside it. The name tag read Gunderson. One of the crew that had been awake for first watch. He hadn’t even defended himself. Bezel looked at him for a long moment. Karen wouldn’t like seeing all these bodies. He had time. He’d better dispose of them and clean up the mess as best he could.

Bezel thought it best to place them all in the seed repository. Karen wouldn’t be capable of walking far on her own for some time, and by then, Bezel hoped, he would have sufficiently prepared her. It took a long while, almost three hours to place them all side by side and clean the hibernation pods.

He carried Tock down last, placing her at the end of the long lines of bodies. He could almost feel the power draining from him with every whir of a servo. He didn’t look at Tock’s silver face. He knelt down in the ash and felt for the seam of the compartment in her right calf. It was dented, and the release mechanism stuck. Bezel tried to pry the compartment open but his fingers were too large. After several attempts he resorted to a thin-bladed utility knife he found in the maintenance room. He tried to drive the parallel images out of his processor and regretted the history discs he’d downloaded for his leisure time. If only the humans had stopped before his generation. If only they’d been stuck at the sophisticated mimicry of the Obsoletes instead of achieving true AI. He thought he might have given up his entire existence to skip this one solitary day. Maybe even to skip the past fifteen minutes.

At last the compartment popped open. He pulled out her energy pack and stood up quickly. He looked at the utility knife and threw it across the room. He sent out a ping to Tock’s old address, knowing he would never get an echo-reply. Then he carefully bent the door back in place as well as he could and returned to the kitchen.

Bezel wasn’t certain Karen would even be able to chew or swallow after fifty years of hibernation. He wasn’t programmed to know the rate of muscle atrophy in humans. He prepared an IV just in case and laid the needle next to the steaming tray of food. He carried the unconscious woman to the cot and covered her with several blankets.

Then, he waited.

He turned Tock’s energy pack over and over, its plastic casing slipping between his printless fingers, all the while knowing he should be conserving his power, not activating unnecessary circuits by fidgeting. Why was he stalling? There was no doubt he would need the battery, and it wasn’t hurting anyone. Before he could waver again, he popped open the spare compartment in his left leg and clicked the pack into place. The compartment slid smoothly shut. It was done. The warning message abruptly stopped. He knew that it would be back.

Bezel watched Karen’s nostrils flare slightly with each breath, watched the heart monitor’s line jiggle and wave. He thought about reviewing Tock’s storage drive, but couldn’t bring himself to leave Karen’s side. She might be the only other living thing on the planet. He had to make sure she survived.

The cheese congealed in a waxy puddle on the plate. Bezel thought about making another sandwich for her, but he didn’t even know if she’d be able to eat it. So he continued to wait. At last her mouth drooped open and she yawned. He noticed that she wasn’t stretching. He wondered if she was trying and failing to move her shriveled muscle tissue, and he wished he’d spent more resources on medical training. She opened her eyes and saw him staring down at her.

“Is it as bad as they said?” she asked, her voice crackling with thirst. He held a straw to her mouth and she sipped some water. Good. She could swallow at least. She noticed he hadn’t answered. “Bezel, just tell me how bad it was. My parents were on tour in western Europe—surely they had a chance?”

“I’m sorry, Karen, I’m afraid at last report the destruction was total,” he answered slowly, sitting down. She turned her head slightly to see him. Good, she could move her head.

“I understand. I’d hoped that the radiation wouldn’t spread that far. We learned in class that a nuclear blast would only travel so far…” She trailed off.

“If it had been bombs, there might have been some hope. Even if it had been all the bombs we knew about. Reactors are different.”

“I didn’t think that there were enough of them to do so much damage.”

Bezel shook his head. “If it had been one or two—but this was a coordinated hit. They hit the waste storage facilities too. All over the world. All at once.”

“Who was it? Why did they do this?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Does it matter anymore? Everything and everyone is gone. Whoever it was must be sufficiently punished by now.”

“Surely there must be someone besides us left—” Karen tried to raise her head but couldn’t get it more than an inch from the pillow. “Where is everyone else? Is Tock with them?”

“Communications were knocked out shortly after the vault was sealed. But that was to be expected. There may be others, in bunkers or fallout shelters, maybe even out in the atmosphere now, I don’t know. The external sensors aren’t working correctly, so I can’t tell you whether or not the outside world is safe yet.”

“What does the rest of the crew say? Are you and Tock going to go out and scout now that our hibernation time is finished?”

Bezel hesitated. He offered her a corner of the sandwich; she took a bite and waited expectantly. “The rest of the crew, including Tock, didn’t make it,” he said after she’d swallowed. He thought he saw a startled twitch in her fingers, but that was the extent of her movement.

“What?” she cried. “How? When?”

“I don’t know,” he said, slowly extending and then bending her left arm for her. “I was only activated a few hours ago myself. Something went wrong with the recharge station—well, with everything, actually. I haven’t yet checked the incident reports or the video feeds. I wanted to be sure that whatever had happened didn’t happen to you.”

“Surely there must have been some clue, some sign,” she protested. “If the hibernation pods failed then shouldn’t the watch have been there to save us?”

“They never made it past the first watch, Karen. I found Gunderson—he’d been murdered. And the zoo and pods were sabotaged. There was a fire or an explosion in the repository.”

“And Dr. Ficht?”

Bezel shrugged. He hadn’t found Dr. Ficht. She should have been on first watch with Gunderson. She couldn’t have left the vault—it had still been sealed when Bezel rebooted. Perhaps she had been burned to ash in the fire.

“Shouldn’t we find out?” Karen asked. Bezel moved to her other arm.

“Why?” he asked.

“What if we’re shut in here with a murderer?”

“No. We are alone. If whoever did this survived, there would be signs. Missing food, laundry, something. The life support console says that it’s been fifty years since the hibernation pods were shut down.”

“Is that why I can’t move?”

“The motor meant to simulate activity burned out on your pod at some point. It was never meant to last for this long. But your muscles also weren’t meant to lie dormant. They have atrophied. You will have to undergo physical therapy for some time to rebuild them before you will be able to function fully again.”