David Gatewood: The Robot Chronicles

“If you don’t want me to go outside, then I won’t,” he said. The recharge reminder blinked in his priority list again. He sorted the commands and pushed it farther down.

She clutched her head in her hands. “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “You’re leaving anyway. In a few months I’ll be completely alone, whether you walk out of the vault or just slump over one morning. I can’t do this. You shouldn’t have woken me up.” She looked over at him. “Undo it.”

“Undo it? Undo what?”

Karen didn’t answer. His power reserve tick, tick, ticked away. He should be on standby, not wasting energy. No, he should be in his charge station waiting to be activated. None of this was his fault. Memory files flicked by, retrieved, read, and reindexed before she even understood his question. “You want me to undo the radiation?” he asked, the power use ticking away faster now. “Is that what you want me to undo? Or was it the fire in the seed vault? The death of your comrades? Of Tock? I didn’t do any of those things. I can’t undo them.”

“You woke me up,” she spat at him. “I didn’t have to know any of this. I could have died not knowing. Happier.”

Bezel’s backup cooling fan clicked on. The power usage feed jumped with a smooth stream of numbers. Every spring felt too tightly wound. “I didn’t have to wake up either. I could have run down in peace. You don’t think I’m as purposeless as you? That I’m any less lonely?” Karen shrank away from him, but he didn’t see. “I’m not an Obsolete. I’m not your servant. I’ve lost the same world that you have. I can’t undo it. I can’t take it back.”

Bezel stopped himself. The pistons that shot cooling fluid through his core slowed to a moderate chug. The backup fan clicked off.

“You can do something ,” said Karen, pulling the thick pillow from behind her back and thrusting it toward him. “You don’t have to abandon me here. You can fix it before you go.”

Bezel took a step backward and stumbled over his chair. “No. I can’t do that.”

“You want me to treat you like an equal? Like you have feelings? Like you’re real ?” she said bitterly, still holding the pillow out toward him. “But you aren’t capable of mercy. Or empathy. You’re no better than an Obsolete. You’re worse, because you can’t even perform your designed function. Even the consoles are more useful than you.”

“I can’t kill you.”

“And I don’t have the strength to kill myself. If you leave me the medical kit, I’ll find the drugs I need myself,” she offered. It alarmed Bezel that she was no longer crying and her panic seemed to have passed.

“Tock was lost to save you. I had to—I had to steal her energy pack so that I could stay functional long enough to help you. I cannot kill you.”

“Then what do you suggest? That I stay here and go mad? You think you don’t have to worry about it. You’re dying. I won’t be your problem anymore. But I’ll do it myself as soon as I’m able to walk. Why delay?”

“What if there are others? Let me go and take some readings.”

“Let me come with you,” she said, dropping the pillow and her tired arm.

“There may not be breathable air.”

“Then at least it will be quick.”

“We will have to wait until you can walk. My power reserve will be close to depleted. If there is still a high level of radiation, I won’t be able to help you when you get sick.”

“If there’s still too much radiation, I won’t wait to get sick.”

Bezel sat down slowly in the chair again. “If that is your choice, then we will wait until you can walk.”

He lowered the lights. His power reserve ticked to fifty-nine percent. His agitation had caused him to consume power far too quickly. He made a resolution to eliminate emotional responses going forward, to stop overtaxing his cooling system. He shuffled the priority list so that the recharge reminder would stop blinking, then entered standby mode without speaking again to Karen.

She worked hard after that. Most days she was even cheerful. As if she were preparing for an athletic contest instead of her own death. Bezel preferred not to speak about the day they would go outside, but he held his peace as she pretended it would be better than the math led him to believe.

The recharge reminder crept up the priority list more and more often, and was eventually replaced by the low-power warning he’d had upon reboot. It distracted him, pulsing in the priority list, a constant urgency with no resolution or relief. It even interrupted his standby mode now. He reduced the speed of his cooling fans so they would take less energy. The intermittent silence as the fans shut down bothered Karen, who asked repeatedly if he had a short. She seemed to have a constant need for conversation, as if she were storing up for years of silence. Bezel tried to keep his responses simple and short, knowing each syllable shortened his functioning time. He sometimes escaped to the other vault rooms to avoid her, gradually transferring the bodies of their crewmates into the useless sample tanks of the frozen zoo so that Karen wouldn’t have to see them.

The day finally came when she could walk as far as the seed vault, and they decided to spend the day sifting the ash and searching the seed drawers. He tried to warn her, but she still cried as they passed through the dead zoo, with its dry leathery smell and shattered console. When they reached the blackened seed vault she collapsed into the chair Bezel had put in the doorway. Whether from exhaustion or disappointment, he wasn’t certain. The low-power warning flashed again, disorienting him. He stared at the spot where Tock had lain. For a second he thought he had picked up a distant echo-reply and his priority list scrambled. Then Karen was standing next to him, calling his name.

“What is it?” he asked, trying to listen around the blinking recharge reminder.

“Are you okay? Did you short out? You were talking to Tock.”

“Impossible—”

He flipped through his memory files for the moment before, but found pieces of it missing. He shook his head. “Must have written to a bad sector,” he told her. She still looked worried. “I’m okay,” he added, to make her concentrate on something else. He scooped some of the ash into a sorting tray and passed it to her. “I’ve already gone through some of the shelves nearest the blast. If we have hope of anything surviving it will be here on the edges of the room.” He filled his own tray and began sifting. Karen stuck her fingertips into the charred dust but she continued to stare at Bezel.

“Do you dream?” she asked suddenly.

“No. Human dreams are their brains organizing their memories. My memory is organized as it is created.”

“Then what was that? That bad sector thing?”

“I suppose you could call that a dream. A bit of memory that has been placed in the wrong spot. Don’t worry, I’ll retrieve it during defragmentation if it is important.”

She nodded absently and spread the ash around the tray. Bezel finished his and discarded the lifeless soot before scooping up some more.

“So I guess you don’t believe in an afterlife then,” she said abruptly. Bezel wished the low-power warning would stay off for just a few more minutes between iterations.

“What do dreams have to do with the afterlife?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess I just always thought that you dream with your soul. That something still runs even when your brain is asleep. Or gone.”

Bezel looked up from the pile of gray. “If dreams were accepted as proof of having a soul, the history of your entire species would be different,” he said dryly, “and this place might not even have needed to exist.”