Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

Outside the shell, things happened. Nine airplanes suddenly went dead-stick. Nine pilots glided downward, powerless, and some fell into the sea, and some struck the miraculous gray shell that loomed in place of an island; slid off and sank.

And ashore, a man named Wright sat in a car, half dead with fear, while government men surrounded him, approached cautiously, daring instant death from a non-dead source.

In a room deep in the White House, a high-ranking army officer shrieked, "I can’t stand it any more! I can’t!" and leaped up, snatched a red cube off the president’s desk, ground it to ineffectual litter under his shining boots.

And in a few days they took a broken old man away from the bank and put him in an asylum, where he died within a week.

The shield, you see, was truly impenetrable. The power plant was untouched and sent out its beams; but the beams could not get out, and anything powered from the plant went dead. The story never became public, although for some years there was heightened naval activity off the New England coast. The navy, so the story went, had a new target range out there – a great hemi-ovoid of gray-material. They bombed it and shelled it and rayed it and blasted all around it, but never even dented its smooth surface.

Kidder and Johansen let it stay there. They were happy enough with their researches and their Neoterics. They did not hear or feel the shelling, for the shield was truly impenetrable. They synthesized their food and their light and air from materials at hand, and they simply didn’t care. They were the only survivors of the bombing, with the exception of three poor maimed devils who died soon afterward.

All this happened many years ago, and Kidder and Johansen may be alive today, and they may be dead. But that doesn’t matter too much. The important thing is that the great gray shell will bear watching. Men die, but races live. Some day the Neoterics, after innumerable generations of inconceivable advancement, will take down their shield and come forth. When I think of that I feel frightened.

(1941)

Michael Swanwick(born 1950) sold his first story in 1980. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won a Nebula Award, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story "Radio Waves". He’s also picked up four Hugos for short stories. His novels include Vacuum Flowers (1987), a tour of the solar system in which humans have been subsumed by a cybernetic mass-mind. Recently Swanwick has concentrated on microfictions, collected in volumes like Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna & Five British Dinosaurs (2004) and The Periodic Table of Science Fiction (2005), comprising 118 "elemental" tales.

"Planning to live forever , Tiktok?"

The words cut through the bar’s chatter and gab and silenced them.

The silence reached out to touch infmity, and then, "I believe you’re talking to me?" a mech said.

The drunk laughed. "Ain’t nobody else here sticking needles in his face, is there?"

The old man who saw it all. He lightly touched the hand of the young woman sitting with him and said, "Watch."

Carefully, the mech set down his syringe alongside a bottle of liquid collagen on a square of velvet cloth. He disconnected himself from the recharger, laying the jack beside the syringe. When he looked up again, his face was still and hard. He looked like a young lion.

The drunk grinned sneeringly.

The. bar was located just around the corner from the local stepping stage. It was a quiet retreat from the aggravations of the street, all brass and mirrors and wood paneling, as cozy and snug as the inside of a walnut. Light shifted lazily about the room, creating a varying emphasis, like clouds drifting overhead on a summer day, but far dimmer. The bar, the bottles behind the bar, and the shelves beneath the bottles behind the bar were all aggressively real. If there was anything virtual, it was set up high or far back, where it couldn’t be touched. There was not a smart surface in the place.

"If that was a challenge," the mech said, "I’d be more than happy to meet you outside."

"Oh, noooooo," the drunk said, his expression putting the lie to his words. "I just saw you shooting up that goop into your face, oh so dainty, like an old lady pumping herself full of antioxidants. So I figured…" he weaved and put a hand down on a table to steady himself. "… figured you was hoping to live forever."

The girl looked questioningly at the old man. He held a finger to his lips.

"Well, you’re right. You’re—what? Fifty years old? Just beginning to grow old and decay. Pretty soon your teeth will rot and fall out and your hair will melt away and your face will fold up in a million wrinkles. Your hearing and your eyesight will go and you won’t be able to remember the last time you got it up. You’ll be lucky if you don’t need diapers before the end. But me —" he drew a dram of fluid into his syringe and tapped the barrel to draw the bubbles to the top "—anything that fails, I’ll simply have it replaced. So, yes, I’m planning to live forever. While you, well, I suppose you’re planning to die. Soon, I hope."

The drunk’s face twisted, and with an incoherent roar of rage, he attacked the mech.

In a motion too fast to be seen, the mech stood, seized the drunk, whirled him around, and lifted him above his head. One hand was closed around the man’s throat so he couldn’t speak. The other held both wrists tight behind the knees so that, struggle as he might, the drunk was helpless.

"I could snap your spine like that," he said coldly. "If I exerted myself, I could rupture every internal organ you’ve got. I’m two-point-eight times stronger than a flesh man, and three-point-five times faster. My reflexes are only slightly slower than the speed of light, and I’ve just had a tune-up. You could hardly have chosen a worse person to pick a fight with."

Then the drunk was flipped around and set back on his feet. He gasped for air.

"But since I’m also a merciful man, I’ll simply ask you nicely if you wouldn’t rather leave." The mech spun the drunk around and gave him a gentle shove toward the door.

The man left at a stumbling run.

Everyone in the place—there were not many—had been watching. Now they remembered their drinks, and talk rose up to fill the room again. The bartender put something back under the bar and turned away.

Leaving his recharge incomplete, the mech folded up his lubrication kit and slipped it into a pocket. He swiped his hand over the credit swatch and stood.

But as he was leaving, the old man swiveled around and said, "I heard you say you hope to live forever. Is that true?"

"Who doesn’t?" the mech said curtly.

"Then sit down. Spend a few minutes out of the infinite swarm of centuries you’ve got ahead of you to humor an old man. What’s so urgent that you can’t spare the time?"

The mech hesitated. Then, as the young woman smiled at him, he sat.

"Thank you. My name is—"

"I know who you are, Mr. Brandt. There’s nothing wrong with my eidetics."

Brandt smiled. "That’s why I like you guys. I don’t have to be all the time reminding you of things." He gestured to the woman sitting opposite him. "My granddaughter." The light intensified where she sat, making her red hair blaze. She dimpled prettily.

"Jack." The young man drew up a chair. "Chimaera Navigator-Fuego, model number—"

"Please. I founded Chimaera. Do you think I wouldn’t recognize one of my own children?"

Jack flushed. "What is it you want to talk about, Mr. Brandt?" His voice was audibly less hostile now, as synthetic counterhormones damped down his emotions.