Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

"How old did you say you were?"

"Six months. But I’m an instance of an artificial personality that has logged twenty thousand years of parallel existence. I’m not a kid or anything."

"You seem like a nice person," Robbie began. He stopped. "Look the thing is that this just isn’t my department. I’m the rowboat. I don’t have anything to do with this. And I don’t want to. I don’t like the idea of non-humans using the shells—"

"I knew it!" Tonker crowed. "You’re a bigot! A self-hating robot. I bet you’re an Asimovist, aren’t you? You people are always Asimovists."

"I’m an Asimovist," Robbie said, with as much dignity as he could muster. "But I don’t see what that has to do with anything."

"Of course you don’t, pal. You wouldn’t, would you. All I want you to do is figure out how to enforce your own rules so that I can get with my girl. You’re saying you can’t do that because it’s not your department, but when it comes down to it, your problem is that I’m a robot and she’s not, and for that, you’ll take the side of a collection of jumped-up polyps. Fine, buddy, fine. You have a nice life out there, pondering the three laws."

"Wait—" Robbie said.

"Unless the next words you say are, ‘I’ll help you,’ I’m not interested."

"It’s not that I don’t want to help—"

"Wrong answer," Tonker said, and the IM session terminated.

When Kate came up on deck, she was full of talk about the reef, whom she was calling "Ozzie."

"They’re weirdest goddamned thing. They want to fight anything that’ll stand still long enough. Ever seen coral fight? I downloaded some time-lapse video. They really go at it viciously. At the same time, they’re clearly scared out of their wits about this all. I mean, they’ve got racial memory of their history, supplemented by a bunch of Wikipedia entries on reefs—you should hear them wax mystical over the Devonian Reefs, which went extinct millennia ago. They’ve developed some kind of wild theory that the Devonians developed sentience and extincted themselves.

"So they’re really excited about us heading back to the actual reef now. They want to see it from the outside, and they’ve invited me to be an honored guest, the first human ever invited to gaze upon their wonder. Exciting, huh?"

"They’re not going to make trouble for you down there?"

"No, no way. Me and Ozzie are great pals."

"I’m worried about this."

"You worry too much." She laughed and tossed her head. She was very pretty, Robbie noticed. He hadn’t ever thought of her like that when she was uninhabited, but with this Kate person inside her she was lovely. He really liked humans. It had been a real golden age when the people had been around all the time.

He wondered what it was like up in the noosphere where AIs and humans could operate as equals.

She stood up to go. After second breakfast, the shells would relax in the lounge or do yoga on the sun-deck. He wondered what she’d do. He didn’t want her to go.

"Tonker contacted me," he said. He wasn’t good at small-talk.

She jumped as if shocked. "What did you tell him?"

"Nothing," Robbie said. "I didn’t tell him anything."

She shook her head. "But I bet he had plenty to tell you, didn’t he? What a bitch I am, making and then leaving him, a fickle woman who doesn’t know her own mind."

Robbie didn’t say anything.

"Let’s see, what else?" She was pacing now, her voice hot and choked, unfamiliar sounds coming from Janet’s voicebox. "He told you I was a pervert, didn’t he? Queer for his kind. Incest and bestiality in the rarified heights of the noosphere."

Robbie felt helpless. This human was clearly experiencing a lot of pain, and it seemed like he’d caused it.

"Please don’t cry," he said. "Please?"

She looked up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Why the fuck not? I thought it would be different once I ascended. I thought I’d be better once I was in the sky, infinite and immortal. But I’m the same Kate Eltham I was in 2019, a loser that couldn’t meet a guy to save my life, spent all my time cybering losers in moggs, and only got the upload once they made it a charity thing. I’m gonna spend the rest of eternity like that, you know it? How’d you like to spend the whole of the universe being a, a, a nobody?"

Robbie said nothing. He recognized the complaint, of course. You only had to login to the Asimovist board to find a million AIs with the same complaint. But he’d never, ever, never guessed that human beings went through the same thing. He ran very hot now, so confused, trying to parse all this out.

She kicked the deck hard and yelped as she hurt her bare foot. Robbie made an involuntary noise. "Please don’t hurt yourself," he said.

"Why not? Who cares what happens to this meatpuppet? What’s the fucking point of this stupid ship and the stupid meatpuppets? Why even bother?"

Robbie knew the answer to this. There was a mission statement in the comments to his source-code, the same mission statement that was etched in a brass plaque in the lounge.

"The Free Spirit is dedicated to the preservation of the unique human joys of the flesh and the sea, of humanity’s early years as pioneers of the unknown. Any person may use the Free Spirit and those who sail in her to revisit those days and remember the joys of the limits of the flesh."

She scrubbed at her eyes. "What’s that?"

Robbie told her.

"Who thought up that crap?"

"It was a collective of marine conservationists," Robbie said, knowing he sounded a little sniffy. "They’d done all that work on normalizing sea-temperature with the homeostatic warming elements, and they put together the Free Spirit as an afterthought before they uploaded."

Kate sat down and sobbed. "Everyone’s done something important. Everyone except me."

Robbie burned with shame. No matter what he said or did, he broke the first law. It had been a lot easier to be an Asimovist when there weren’t any humans around.

"There, there," he said as sincerely as he could.

The reef came up the stairs then, and looked at Kate sitting on the deck, crying.

"Let’s have sex," they said. "That was fun, we should do it some more."

Kate kept crying.

"Come on," they said, grabbing her by the shoulder and tugging.

Kate shoved them back.

"Leave her alone," Robbie said. "She’s upset, can’t you see that?"

"What does she have to be upset about? Her kind remade the universe and bends it to its will. They created you and me. She has nothing to be upset about. Come on," they repeated. "Let’s go back to the room."

Kate stood up and glared out at the sea. "Let’s go diving," she said. "Let’s go to the reef."

Robbie rowed in little worried circles and watched his telemetry anxiously. The reef had changed a lot since the last time he’d seen it. Large sections of it now lifted over the sea, bony growths sheathed in heavy metals extracted from sea-water—fancifully shaped satellite uplinks, radio telescopes, microwave horns. Down below, the untidy, organic reef shape was lost beneath a cladding of tessellated complex geometric sections that throbbed with electromagnetic energy—the reef had built itself more computational capacity.

Robbie scanned deeper and found more computational nodes extending down to the ocean floor, a thousand meters below. The reef was solid thinkum, and the sea was measurably warmer from all the exhaust heat of its grinding logic.

The reef—the human-shelled reef, not the one under the water—had been wholly delighted with the transformation in its original body when it hove into sight. They had done a little dance on Robbie that had nearly capsized him, something that had never happened. Kate, red-eyed and surly, had dragged them to their seat and given them a stern lecture about not endangering her.