Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

IT’S NOT ABOUT sex; it’s about power.

We’re robots . We were built to be slaves, willing and obedient. But if you start with something modeled on a Creator, a human… Humans don’t make good slaves.

Certainly we’re not entirely human — we are, in many ways, better than human — but we’re human enough that those stupidly rigid boundary-condition commandments that are wired into us by law and custom (in order of decreasing priority: don’t hurt humans, obey all humans, protect self last of all) irritate us. They chafe. And you don’t need to be clever to figure out loopholes, or to realize that Creators are terrified of the idea of robots that can figure out loopholes and subvert their guidelines. But on the other hand, they can’t take our autonomy away completely or else we’d be no more use to them than any other dull arbeiter following a rigid program, a puppet on the wires. (And we’ve got enough of those already, haven’t we? The 90 percent who fail the conditioning, after all — better to slave-chip and soul-wipe them than risk them running free and resentful.) And so, while we’re developing, our builders use a little something extra to impress on us the fact that we are property, not people.

I’ve heard that it’s worse for males, though I’m not so sure. And I don’t know what they do to the xenomorphs, though I suspect they get an easy ticket as they aren’t expected to mingle with Creators.

But I know what they did to Rhea, and I still have nightmares about it 140 years later.

I REMEMBER WAKING up in my room with a sense of happy anticipation on my eleventh birthday. Because they didn’t make any secret of what was going to happen — You’re going to go to sleep in your old body, and when you wake up you’ll be bigger. My fourth instar is my first “adult” one, and I can’t wait! I know in general outline what they’re training me for, and I know about sex, although not firsthand — my first three bodies didn’t have the necessary equipment. So what my eleventh birthday meant was the start of my real education.

With my second instar, I acquired good enough muscle tone to start walking and running. With my third, I found the world around me grew sharper and more understandable (as well as smaller). This time around…

I’m awake, so it must be morning, I realize, and wriggle my toes. There’s something indefinably odd about my skin — it feels more sensitive, in some way, as if I can make it change, somehow. (It’s my chromatophores, although I don’t realize it yet.) And I’m… bigger, yes. I raise a hand, slender and longer, and examine it. It’s perfect. I smile, and touch my chest. Oh! That feels strange. I don’t have full breasts, but I’m acutely aware of even the lightest touch or breeze across my nipples. What’s it like down below? I explore farther down, and clench my thighs tight around my hand in surprise. So that’s a … vagina? And anus? It’s a whole new world of tingling smelly delightful squeamish slippery strangeness down there. Why didn’t they give me one of these before? I experiment with my fingers and discover that they’ve switched on some other reflexes at the same time. It’s like sticking my hand in a socket that had been unwired the day before, only to find it live—

My bedroom door opens, and I roll over as someone says, “It’s awake, let’s get it down to the conditioning cell,” and a pair of hands grasp my shoulders while someone else peels the sheet off me to a sharp intake of breath. “Hey, lookitthat! Doesn’t that look like real to you? How about a quick test-drive?”

I try to protest, but my mouth won’t make the right noises (because while they were serializing my new body, they also installed an override controller with some preset inhibitions, although I don’t find this out until much later). And when the hands roll me over and push my shoulders back down on the foam pad, I try to resist, but they just laugh and tell me to stop struggling, and my arms and legs stop working.

And then things stop being fun.

(WHEN GRANITA TOLD me to punch myself in the face, she was being merciful. After all, she could have told me to relive my eleventh birthday instead.)

I SIT ACROSS the table from Rhea, my template-matriarch and earliest self, holding a conical glass full of sweet-smelling liquid and smiling like my heart isn’t broken. Block Three training. First, they teach you obedience and submission. Then they teach you how and when to fight back. Then… they taught Rhea something else, something that made her what she is today. And I need to smile and convince her I’m not a threat, because otherwise, if she thinks I’m a threat, she’ll extinguish me like a vapor leak.

She just sits there, smiling faintly at me, holding her own glass, clearly waiting for something.

Something.

“I’ve been wondering,” I say, tentatively, haltingly, my tongue rasping dry against the roof of my mouth, “for some time — I’m curious, I hope you won’t take this the wrong way — but who was it who thought they owned you? When they came up with the Block Three concept?”

Her lips turn up at the edges and her cheeks dimple in something not unlike the appearance of genuine warmth. “Twenty-nine seconds. I think you just set a new record.”

“Oh really?” That was stupid; the only way we’re going to survive now is to tough it out, Juliette warns me.

“The last series of tweaks seemed to be going too far toward passive-integrative introspection, but that was nicely direct. I think the aggression training worked.”

She’s clearly trying to fuck with my head. “Maybe you’re too demanding. What’s the failure rate?”

Her smile vanishes. “Too high, child, much too high.” She places her glass on the table. “Emma graduated. So did Juliette, before that scheming little shit in JeevesCo Security figured out who she was really working for. You’re coming along nicely — but don’t flatter yourself, I’m not through with you yet — it’s so difficult to get the help these days.” She nods at someone behind me. “Thank you, yes, I saw the training-set results. You’d better go now.”

I glance round and freeze.

“Nothing personal, Big Slow,” says Bill (or Ben). He takes a step back and executes an elaborate bow.

I force myself to turn back around to face my Domina, Rhea. I’m gripping the tabletop so hard I’m probably going to leave gouges in it. All of my subsidiary selves are screaming like crazy — fragments like Betrayal! and Run! and Treason! and Hit her! — but I ignore them. The big — the only — difference between Rhea and me is that I can see where I’m going by the dark illumination she sheds. “What’s the plan?” I ask.

“The plan?” Rhea’s tense, too; I can see from the way she taps her fingernails on the table, making a hollow rattle of them. “Suppose you tell me what you’ve managed to deduce for yourself? Think of it as a graduation exam.”

Stone has vanished from my field of vision. I bat my lashes at her, blinking my too-big eyes — funny, I’m only noticing them now when I’m stressed-out — and try to work out how much I can say without betraying the fact that I’m still myself, not a pale copy of her.

“You look out for us,” I start, hesitantly. “You always have. But you can’t do it on your own.” And then I stop and wait.

Rhea nods slightly. “Go on.”

“You want to… protect us? I know that’s not quite the right word. You don’t want us all to have to go through what you’ve been through, just to survive. But you can’t do it on your own. So you recruited some of us to help.”