Kir Bulychev - Alice - The Girl From Earth

The Robot General rose to his full height. His rusty joints screamed.

“Damnable Rust!” It said. “There are no lubricants. Tomorrow on the march you will capture lubricants and machine oil. Tomorrow the prisoners will be put to work on the construction of fortifications. That is all. I have spoken. That is my order.”

“I serve you!” The other robot answered.

“Take this medal and weld it to your chest. You are now awarded.”

“A joy to serve you, sir.” The robot answered and clutched the top of the tin can to its chest so it would not fall, and started to lead the lead the prisoners outside.

Turning, Alice saw that the general had seated itself before the bag again and was again cutting up pieces of tin cans.

“Stop.” The general’s voice brought them to a halt before the door. “I have entirely forgotten. It’s the damned rust. Humans, do you want to serve me? Will you serve faithfully. I will give you medals.”

“No, we don’t.” Alice answered for both of them. “We’re not going to serve anyone, and we’re not afraid of anyone.”

“We will see what tale you sing tomorrow,” The General said, “when an iron arrow pierces your soft human hearts. Go.” But the prisoners and their guard had only moved a few more steps when the general’s scratchy voice ordered them back. They had to return.

“Again I have forgotten.” The General said. “Is Moscow very far from here?”

“Far enough.” Alice answered. “You’d never get there on foot. But they can carry you there in a freight train and turn you into giant candle holders. The latest fashion.”

“Shoot them immediately!” The robot general said.

“We cannot.” The subordinate robot said. “It’s grown dark. We might miss.”

“Those of you who would bring terror to all, turn on the floodlights in your heads!

“Impossible. You ordered us to economize on energy, Chief.”

“Then to the lock-up. To the lock-up!”

“I’ve had enough of your pointless noise; you’re just getting me angry; go to your lockup yourself!” The old man said. “I’m going to shoot you now with my own stick.”

The old main raised his walking stick to his shoulder and took aim with it as though it were an old style rifle, straight at the Robot General. Either the old man had totally lost his robot reason from fear, or he really did not know the difference between a rifle and a walking sick, or he just wanted to frighten the robot, but the results turned out disastrous for him.

The General-Fatalist grew terrified and collapsed on the floor with a loud clang but the second robot struck the old man on the forehead with his own iron fist.

The head of the old man shattered, scattering the tiny workings of his electronic brain. The old man staggered back and forth, made several uncertain steps, but his coordination centers had already been destroyed, and he collapsed on the floor beside the Robot General.

Alice froze from terror and grief. The old man, even if he had not been a real flesh and blood human being, had been her lone defender on this wild island and she had come to think of him like she would her own, living grandfather. And then they killed him. Even worse, the robot who killed him thought he was a human being, and that meant that something very terrible had taken place. These robots could kill people.

Alice knew robots very well; they were a part of the world in which she lived. When Alice had been very young, she had had a robot baby sitter; it knew all sorts of stories and was even able to change diapers. House robots to make the beds, pick up children’s toys, prepare breakfasts were very common. But most of all robots were used in the places where people were not interested in working. Industrial robots had little in common with human beings they were more thinking machines and tools who laid down roads, mined ore, and swept streets. The taxi cab that Alice had called to take her around the city and to Bertha’s was also a robot programmed with street maps and the traffic code. The day before Alice had flown to the Crimea she had seen a robot space ship on the television. It not only carried freight to the Lunar stations but it loaded itself as well, fly to the moon, land in the spot ordered by the dispatcher, and deliver the precise number of containers to the lunar colonists.

Robots had first put in their appearance long ago, at least two hundred years back, but only in the last hundred years Alice had studied all of this in the first grade had they taken such an enormous place in people’s lives. There were as many robots on Earth as there were people, but there had never been an instance where robots had risen up against the human race. That was impossible. Unthinkable. It was like a frying pan the most ordinary frying pan refusing to heat soup, or attacking its user with its cover. It was people who made the robots, and it was people who had programmed into robots the special programs called the Laws to defend the human race from its creations. No matter how large a robots electronic brain might be, that brain could not conceive of disobedience.

This meant the robots on the island had all succeeded in getting broken in a way no other robots had ever before been broken in the past, or and Alice did not even think of this possibility they had been constructed by people who for some reason decided that the robots should lack the Laws that defended the human race.

It grew quiet. The General lifted his head and saw the old man lay broken beside him. The General turned on the light from his own head lamp and saw the old man was made not from flesh and blood, but from electronic components.

“Treason!” It shouted. “They have betrayed us! Gather everyone for a meeting.”

“What about the other human. Perhaps it too…”

“The lock-up for now. There is no time to learn the details now. Tomorrow the human will be questioned with all severity. But…”

The second robot inclined its head and, pushing Alice toward the exit, strode forward, propelling her from behind with its dirty finger.

The lock-up turned out to be a pit with sharp walls. The robot just pushed Alice over the edge, and she landed painfully on stones and dirt, but she did not start to cry. What had happed to her and to the old man-film robot was so serious that it was simply impossible to cry.

Alice had never heard about Cape San Bonnifaccio, nor are any of this story’s readers likely to know the Cape’s turbulent history. Cape San Bonnifaccio rises out of the Mediterranean Sea like a shark’s fin; the surrounding lands are parched and uninviting. Once upon a time, about six hundred years ago, the pirate armada of Hassan Bey, comprising some twenty-three quick moving galleys, lay in wait for and smashed a Genoese squadron to smithereens. Hassan Bey himself fastened the noose around the neck of the Genoese admiral before he strung him up from the yard arm. Or so it’s described in the three volume “History of Lawlessness in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic,” by the famous Argentinian historian of piracy don Luis de Diego.

Since then History has passed Cape San Bonnifaccio by. One can hardly consider the construction of a castle at the edge of the cape by an eccentric English baronet an historic event. The Baronet dreamed of having his own Ghost.

But a true ghost would only put in an appearance once the requisite castle had been constructed, however small. Naturally, a real castle would have been best, but the baronet found the English climate cold, wet, and unhealthy, so instead he built his castle on the Mediterranean sea, almost real, with a draw bridge and a not very deep moat where he put the swans. The baronet settled in, and waited for the ghost to begin to clank his chains. Perhaps a ghost did arrive, but only after the baronet grew sick and died. The castle remained masterless. Who in their right mind would settle in this empty corner of the coast?