Robin Wasserman: Shattered

Not that there were many birds anymore.

Especially where most of the AI planes were destined to fly, the poison air of the eastern war zones. This was military tech; action at distance was the only way to win without having to fight. Thinking planes, thinking tanks, thinking landcrawlers equipped with baby nukes saved orgs from having to think for themselves. Saved them from having to die for themselves. Not many had credit to spare to snatch up a smartplane of their own for peacetime purposes—but as far as Quinn was concerned, no luxury was too luxurious, especially when Jude was the one placing the request.

The ground was hidden beneath a thick layer of fog, and it was tempting to imagine it had disappeared. “Flying’s getting old,” I said, keeping my back to Jude.

“For you maybe.”

“We need to find something better.” More dangerous, I meant. Wilder, faster, steeper. Bigger .

“You want better?” He slipped a small, hard cube into my palm. “For later.”

“You know I don’t do that crap.” But I closed my fingers around it.

“For later,” he said again. So smug.

I just kept staring out the window, wondering what it would feel like if the plane crashed. How long would we stay conscious, our mangled bodies melting into the burnt fuselage? Would we be aware as fuel leaked from the wreckage, lit by a stray spark? What would it feel like at the moment of explosion, our brains and bodies blasted into a million pieces?

I would never know. The moment this brain burst into fire, someone at BioMax would set to work retrieving my stored memories, downloading them into a newly made body, waking me to yet another new life. That “me” would remember everything up to my last backup and nothing more. No flying, no crashing, no explosion.

For the best, I decided. Maybe when it came to dying, once was enough.

Orgs prefer not to think about it, but machines come to life all the time. Always have, always will. A machine’s not a machine without an engine, a power source, an on switch, something to turn screws and bolts and gears and whatever into purposeful motion. Mechanical life—it’s the difference between sculpture and machine . Coming to life is just what we do.

But some of us do it better than others.

In 1738, French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson built a life-size mechanical duck that could, supposedly, consume and digest food. The copper fowl crapped on command for admiring crowds all over Europe. But Vaucanson cheated. If anyone had bothered to look inside the defecating duck before its performance, they would have discovered that the duck—like its creator—was already full of shit.

Forty years later a mechanical wooden chess player known as the Turk faced off against Frederick the Great, Ben Franklin, and Napoleon. Checkmate, times three. The Turk wore a turban, puffed on a clay pipe, and was a suspected repository of mystical forces. It turned out to be the repository of a contorted chess-playing human, curled up in a wooden cabinet beneath the board, magnetically guiding the Turk’s every move.

The past is irrelevant—that was Jude’s law, and we lived by it. But he meant our past as living, breathing humans, the kind that were born from a womb and would end up rotting in the ground. There was no rule against exploring our other past, the toasters and steam engines and microchips strung up on our family tree.

There were the karakuri ningyō, eighteenth-century Japanese mechanical serving girls. “Dr. P’s fornicatory dolls”—mute and anatomically correct, just the way his nineteenth-century customers liked them. ELIZA, the twentieth-century computer that could analyze your dreams, and Deep Blue, not as good a conversationalist as the Turk, but better at chess. Forty years ago there were Spot and Patch, animatronic dog and cat, all the fuss without the muss; then came the Nanabots, mechanical nursemaids equipped to administer a feeding and change a diaper, popular with the weak and infirm on both ends of the aging spectrum. Two thousand years ago, there were mechanical birds that chirped, mechanical snakes that slithered, mechanical men that spoke and smiled. All of them an illusion of life—all of them hiding gears or cogs or wires or shit beneath their artificial skin.

And now there’s me.

There’s us.

“Organic isn’t better, it’s just different ,” I told the meek little group of mechs traipsing after me. Hard to believe I’d ever been like them, clueless enough to imagine I had a choice. “Orgs are weak in body and mind. Your new life may feel like a punishment, but it’s not. It’s a gift.”

The speech, like everything else, was getting old. I’d shown them the guest houses, the orchards, and the manor itself—steering clear of only the pool, full of zoned-out mechs tripping on digital hallucinations. I’d played the good little tour guide, a live-action pop-up for Jude’s estate. (True, it was Quinn’s fortune, Quinn’s property, but after all these months, none of us thought of it as anything but Jude’s.) They were intrigued, I could tell. Tempted, even if it meant giving up the last, desperate hold on their old lives. They just needed that one final push.

Thus, the speech. I gave it the way I gave the tour, mechanically, out of habit, the words dribbling out without my help. Sometimes it felt like this was all I did: tow new recruits across the estate, schooling them in life according to Jude. It seemed so quaint and retro now, the old way, infiltrating BioMax support groups to find the few and far between who weren’t interested in being normal . There were more of them, a lot more, now that the download had been reclassified as a voluntary procedure, easy to qualify for as a genetic tweak or a lift-tuck. At least, as long as you were between sixteen and twenty-one—above the age of consent, below the age when the download would fry your neural circuits and leave you a mess of frozen limbs and scrambled brains.

“The orgs demand that we imitate humanity, they designed us to do so—and then they attack us for claiming an identity that’s not our own. They call us skinners, mech-heads, Frankensteins.” The words bored me, but I kept going, because I was good at it, and because Jude trusted me enough to let me speak for him, and that gave me power.

And because the more I delivered the speech, the more I believed it.

“They tell us we’ve stolen the lives of the dead—that we’re nothing but a mechanical copy of the people we used to be. People who died so that we could live. Or whatever it is we do. And you know what? They’re right.”

There weren’t any gasps this time around. But of the six mechs following me through the grounds, four looked ready to bolt. The other two were calm; voluntaries always were. It’s easy to be calm when you don’t care. They were curiosity seekers, probably fame whores beaming back to their favorite stalker zones. Let them try. Jammers locked the whole estate behind an impenetrable priv-wall. We’d been burned by voluntaries before. Now, we let them in, we let them listen, but we never expected them to stay.

“You can tell yourself you’re the same person you always were. But you know that’s a lie. You know nothing feels the same. Sometimes it probably seems you barely feel at all.”

Feel . Such a ridiculously imprecise verb. What was a feeling? The scratch of something rough against your skin? The sensation of a toe dipping into water, the deep, wordless truth of this feels cold this feels wet. Then there were the feelings that happened inside your head, the whirring hamster wheel of happy sad angry bitter jealous bored scared happy .