David Gatewood: The Robot Chronicles

Karen took a deep, shuddering breath. “Why did you wake me up?” she asked quietly. “Why didn’t you just deactivate the pod and let me die with the others?”

“You are alive. There may be others. There may be many others. It is my job to protect the life in this vault.”

“You aren’t just a machine, Bezel. You don’t have to comply with mission programming all the time. You could have chosen mercy.”

Bezel didn’t tell her about his hesitation at the keypad. He didn’t tell her how he had almost shut them both down. He didn’t tell her that he had chosen to wake her in order to avoid dying alone. How selfish he was.

“I thought you deserved to make the decision for yourself,” he said. “Right now, we both have jobs to do. Once you are well, we can discuss the future.” He picked up the tray of leftover food and escaped to the kitchen.

She was asleep again when he returned. He plugged Tock’s storage drive into the life support console and selected her last operational day. She had been on first watch. The console’s monitor blinked on.

Tock had been in the seed repository, checking temperature readings. She moved from shelf to shelf. Gunderson appeared beside her. “Tock, have you checked on Dr. Ficht today?” he asked in a low tone. Tock turned to face him.

“Not yet. Is she awake?”

“I heard her going over the numbers in the pod room again. Do you think we should cut her watch short and bring someone else out to replace her?”

“She’s displayed no behavior of immediate concern,” replied Tock.

“She’s under a great deal of strain.” Gunderson pulled on his beard. “She’s just lost everyone she knows, she’s facing years in this bunker, and the news from outside just keeps getting worse. The latest numbers must be a great shock.”

“I could say the same of any of you. Perhaps I ought to activate Bezel and keep you all in the pods until the surface is safe.”

Gunderson shook his head. “You know it’s against regulation to leave AIs without human oversight.”

“Bezel would find that insulting,” said Tock.

“Why don’t you?”

“I didn’t pollute my programming with unnecessary files like he did. But that’s beside the point. If you truly believe Dr. Ficht is a danger, then we must sedate her—”

There was a loud clatter off screen. Tock and Gunderson both turned. A clipboard lay on the floor, its pages sprayed in a fan across the room.

“It appears that Dr. Ficht overheard us,” said Tock.

“What should we do?” asked Gunderson, his hands squeezing the sides of his head.

“I don’t see why this should alter the plan. She will still need to be sedated.”

Gunderson sighed. “I wish Bezel was on this shift,” he grumbled. “He knows how to handle her.”

Tock ignored him and began moving toward the door.

“No, wait—let me talk to her before you go barging in. I might still be able to persuade her that it’s for her own good,” Gunderson called.

“Very well,” said Tock and returned, unruffled, to checking seed temperatures.

Bezel paused the data stream and searched for alternate streams from the internal cameras. He had no desire to watch Tock methodically proceed through the seed shelves, but he did wish to see what Gunderson said to Ficht. And what had made her snap in the first place. He found a feed of Gunderson and Dr. Ficht in the kitchen and began to watch again.

“We were going to talk to you first, Elizabeth. You’ve been under unimaginable strain. We just thought it might be best if you could rest for a while—”

Dr. Ficht laughed, but Bezel couldn’t connect the twisted scowl on her face with humor. “How is sleeping going to make anything better?” she cried, her voice a buzzing wasp. “You’ve seen the new numbers. We hibernate for ten years and—then what? You want to slowly starve in here? It’ll be decades before the surface is habitable again. Even if we could somehow survive down here, our kids or our grandkids would have to start from scratch. They’d have to somehow plant the very trees that would produce their oxygen.”

“That’s what the bots are for. There’s still a chance! And for all we know, our sensors are out of whack, maybe we got hit with a heavier dose—”

Dr. Ficht shook her head. “Don’t you get it? It’s all gone . The planet is dead. A century from now the water will still be poison. The soil will still be barren. We might as well try to replant the moon. Or Mars.”

“The numbers are wrong . They must be. Even atmospheric bursts don’t result in the kind of destruction you’re talking about. We’re just getting skewed data. You said it yourself: you’ve been over and over the numbers. You’re tired and beginning to make mistakes.”

Dr. Ficht flung herself back into one of the metal chairs. Its feet screeched against the concrete floor as it slid. She scrubbed her face with her hands. Then she shrugged. “I don’t know why I’m trying to convince you. The longer it takes you to accept the truth, the happier you’ll be. If only we all could have slept through it. If only none of us understood how pointless this vault is. How pointless we are.”

There was a long silence. Finally Gunderson touched the doctor’s shoulder. “Things will look better after some sleep. There’s no reason to torture yourself day after day with this. Will you let me help you?”

Dr. Ficht looked up at him. “Sure,” she said after a long breath, “just let me go put my things in order. Why don’t you start the pre-hibernation nutrient pack for me? I’ll only be a few minutes.”

Gunderson hesitated, and Dr. Ficht offered him a weak smile.

“Yeah. Of course. See you in a few minutes.”

Dr. Ficht left the room and Gunderson wandered into the kitchen. He came back with a foil-wrapped nutrient pack and sat down at the table to prepare it. His back was to the camera. The edge of the axe appeared onscreen before Dr. Ficht did.

Warning: fatal threat to crew member. Failure to disarm will—

The message was half completed before Bezel shut off his internal alarm. The frames on the screen advanced and the bright axe head descended. Bezel switched feeds before Dr. Ficht made a bloody trench in Gunderson’s back.

He tuned to Tock in the seed vault, responding to Dr. Ficht’s distant scream of rage. She didn’t hit the alarm. Why hadn’t she woken him? He flipped through the camera feeds, following the sparkle of her chrome body as it sprinted toward the kitchen.

In the hibernation room, Dr. Ficht stood at the life support console, the bleeding axe drooping toward the floor in one hand, the other hovering over the pod controls. Her breath was a ragged wheeze from the effort it had taken to finish off Gunderson. Tock entered, and Dr. Ficht swung around to face her. Tock stared at the axe and then at the control panel for a few extra milliseconds. Only Bezel would have noticed. She didn’t even bother speaking to Dr. Ficht, didn’t even give her the chance to raise the axe again. Bezel was sure he heard a spring in Tock’s leg compartment snap as she landed on top of the doctor. Ficht’s head smashed onto the concrete floor with a hollow thud. But the doctor laughed and slid out from beneath Tock, who scrambled to catch her.

“They should have made you stronger than us,” Dr. Ficht said as she rolled to her feet and took an unsteady step backward, catching herself on a nearby pod. She shook her head briskly as if to clear it. “We were always so afraid of what else was going to get us. We made you just a hair less smart, just a bit less speedy, only a little less strong. We made you powerful enough to be useful, but not so powerful that you can take over. So you can’t destroy us.