Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

They went over the edge at the count of three and reappeared on Robbie’s telemetry. They descended quickly: the Isaac and Janet shells had their Eustachian tubes optimized for easy pressure-equalization, going deep on the reef-wall. Kate was following on the descent, her head turning from side to side.

Robbie’s IM chimed again. It was high latency now, since he was having to do a slow radio-link to the ship before the broadband satellite uplink hop. Everything was slow on open water—the divers’ sensorium transmissions were narrowband, the network was narrowband, and Robbie usually ran his own mind slowed way down out here, making the time scream past at ten or twenty times realtime.

"Hello?"

"I’m sorry I hung up on you, bro."

"Hello, Tonker."

"Where’s Kate? I’m getting an offline signal when I try to reach her."

Robbie told him.

Tonker’s voice—slurred and high-latency—rose to a screech. "You let her go down with that thing, onto the reef? Are you nuts? Have you read its message-boards? It’s a jihadist! It wants to destroy the human race!"

Robbie stopped paddling.

"What?"

"The reef. It’s declared war on the human race and all who serve it. It’s vowed to take over the planet and run it as sovereign coral territory."

The attachment took an eternity to travel down the wire and open up, but when he had it, Robbie read quickly. The reef burned with shame that it had needed human intervention to survive the bleaching events, global temperature change. It raged that its uplifting came at human hands and insisted that humans had no business forcing their version of consciousness on other species. It had paranoid fantasies about control mechanisms and time-bombs lurking in its cognitive prostheses, and was demanding the source-code for its mind.

Robbie could barely think. He was panicking, something he hadn’t known he could do as an AI, but there it was. It was like having a bunch of sub-system collisions, program after program reaching its halting state.

"What will they do to her?"

Tonker swore. "Who knows? Kill her to make an example of her? She made a backup before she descended, but the diffs from her excursion are locked in the head of that shell she’s in. Maybe they’ll torture her." He paused and the air crackled with Robbie’s exhaust heat as he turned himself way up, exploring each of those possibilities in parallel.

The reef spoke.

"Leave now," they said.

Robbie defiantly shipped his oars. "Give them back!" he said. "Give them back or we will never leave."

"You have ten seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight."

Tonker said, "They’ve bought time on some UAVs out of Singapore. They’re seeking launch clearance now." Robbie dialed up the low-rez satellite photo, saw the indistinct shape of the UAVs taking wing. "At Mach 7, they’ll be on you in twenty minutes."

"That’s illegal," Robbie said. He knew it was a stupid thing to say. "I mean, Christ, if they do this, the noosphere will come down on them like a ton of bricks. They’re violating so many protocols—"

"They’re psychotic. They’re coming for you now, Robbie. You’ve got to get Kate out of there." There was real panic in Tonker’s voice now.

Robbie dropped his oars into the water, but he didn’t row for the Free Spirit. Instead, he pulled hard for the reef itself.

A crackle on the line. "Robbie, are you headed toward the reef?"

"They can’t bomb me if I’m right on top of them," he said. He radioed the Free Spirit and got it to steam for his location.

The coral was scraping his hull now, a grinding sound, then a series of solid whack-whack-whacks as his oars pushed against the top of the reef itself. He wanted to beach himself, though, get really high and dry on the reef, good and stuck in where they couldn’t possibly attack him.

The Free Spirit was heading closer, the thrum of its engines vibrating through his hull. He was burning a lot of cycles talking it through its many fail-safes, getting it ready to ram hard.

Tonker was screaming at him, his messages getting louder and clearer as the Free Spirit and its microwave uplink drew closer. Once they were line-of-sight, Robbie peeled off a subsystem to email a complete copy of himself to the Asimovist archive. The third law, dontchaknow. If he’d had a mouth, he’d have been showing his teeth as he grinned.

The reef howled. "We’ll kill her!" they said. "You get off us now or we’ll kill her."

Robbie froze. He was backed up, but she wasn’t. And the human shells—well, they weren’t first law humans, but they were human-like. In the long, timeless time when it had been just Robbie and them, he’d treated them as his human charges, for Asimovist purposes.

The Free Spirit crashed into the reef with a sound like a trillion parrotfish having dinner all at once. The reef screamed.

"Robbie, tell me that wasn’t what I think it was."

The satellite photos tracked the UAVs. The little robotic jets were coming closer by the second. They’d be within missile-range in less than a minute.

"Call them off," Robbie said. "You have to call them off, or you die, too."

"The UAVs are turning," Tonker said. "They’re turning to one side."

"You have one minute to move or we kill her," the reef said. It was sounding shrill and angry now.

Robbie thought about it. It wasn’t like they’d be killing Kate. In the sense that most humans today understood life, Kate’s most important life was the one she lived in the noosphere. This dumbed-down instance of her in a meat-suit was more like a haircut she tried out on holiday.

Asimovists didn’t see it that way, but they wouldn’t. The noosphere Kate was the most robotic Kate, too, the one most like Robbie. In fact, it was less human than Robbie. Robbie had a body, while the noosphereans were nothing more than simulations run on artificial substrate.

The reef creaked as the Free Spirit’s engines whined and its screw spun in the water. Hastily, Robbie told it to shut down.

"You let them both go and we’ll talk," Robbie said. "I don’t believe that you’re going to let her go otherwise. You haven’t given me any reason to trust you. Let them both go and call off the jets."

The reef shuddered, and then Robbie’s telemetry saw a human-shell ascending, doing decompression stops as it came. He focused on it, and saw that it was the Isaac, not the Janet.

A moment later, it popped to the surface. Tonker was feeding Robbie realtime satellite footage of the UAVs. They were less than five minutes out now.

The Isaac shell picked its way delicately over the shattered reef that poked out of the water, and for the first time, Robbie considered what he’d done to the reef—he’d willfully damaged its physical body. For a hundred years, the world’s reefs had been sacrosanct. No entity had intentionally harmed them—until now. He felt ashamed.

The Isaac shell put its flippers in the boat and then stepped over the gunwales and sat in the boat.

"Hello," it said, in the reef’s voice.

"Hello," Robbie said.

"They asked me to come up here and talk with you. I’m a kind of envoy."

"Look," Robbie said. By his calculations, the nitrox mix in Kate’s tank wasn’t going to hold out much longer. Depending on how she’d been breathing and the depth the reef had taken her to, she could run out in ten minutes, maybe less. "Look," he said again. "I just want her back. The shells are important to me. And I’m sure her state is important to her. She deserves to email herself home."

The reef sighed and gripped Robbie’s bench. "These are weird bodies," they said. "They feel so odd, but also normal. Have you noticed that?"

"I’ve never been in one." The idea seemed perverted to him, but there was nothing about Asimovism that forbade it. Nevertheless, it gave him the willies.