Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

We were to go. Prospero wrote in the dust, WE ARE READY TO GO NOW.

Elkanah bent to read. Then he pointed up to the full Earth in the dark Moon sky (we were using infrared) and moved his hand in a dismissing motion.

"R," he obviously said, but there was no sound.

He looked at us, came to attention, then brought his broom to shoulder-arms and saluted us with his other three hands.

We climbed up onto the module. "I think I’ll ride back up out here," said Prospero, "I should like an unobstructed view."

"Make sure you hang on," I said.

Prospero stood on the platform, where the skull-shape of the crew compartment turned into the base and ladders and legs.

"I’m braced," he said, then continued:

"My Ariel, chick, that is thy charge; then to the elements be free, and fare thou well.

Now my charms are all o’erthrown

And what strength I have’s mine own.

Our revels now are ended."

There was a flash and a small feeling of motion, a scattering of moondust and rock under us, and we moved up away from the surface.

The last time I saw Elkanah, he was sweeping over footprints and tidying up the Moon.

We were on our way back to Earth when we decided to go to Mars.

(2000)

Active as a writer for less than a decade, Peter Phillips(1920–2012) wrote around twenty short stories, blurring science fiction with fantasy in the oddest ways. For example "Manna" (1949) tells the story of the ghosts of two medieval monks trapped in the ruins of an old monastery – a situation which Phillips explains "scientifically" by means of time travel and super-foods. In "Dreams are Sacred" (1948), one of the genre’s first forays into virtual reality, a man enters the mind of a writer in a coma in order to combat his mental demons. Adapted as "Get Off My Cloud" (1969), the story appeared as an episode of the BBC television series Out of the Unknown .

I collapsed joints and hung up to talk with Dak-whirr. He blinked his eyes in some discomfort.

"What do you want, Palil?" he asked complainingly.

"As if you didn’t know."

"I can’t give you permission to examine it. The thing is being saved for inspection by the board. What guarantee do I have that you won’t spoil it for them?"

I thrust confidentially at one of his body-plates. "You owe me a favor," I said. "Remember?"

"That was a long time in the past."

"Only two thousand revolutions and a reassembly ago. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be eroding in a pit. All I want is a quick look at its thinking part. I’ll vrull the consciousness without laying a single pair of pliers on it."

He went into a feedback twitch, an indication of the conflict between his debt to me and his self-conceived duty.

Finally he said, "Very well, but keep tuned to me. If I warn that a board member is coming, remove yourself quickly. Anyway how do you know it has consciousness? It may be mere primal metal."

"In that form? Don’t be foolish. It’s obviously a manufacture. And I’m not conceited enough to believe that we are the only form of intelligent manufacture in the Universe."

"Tautologous phrasing, Palil," Dak-whirr said pedantically. "There could not conceivably be ‘unintelligent manufacture.’ There can be no consciousness without manufacture, and no manufacture without intelligence. Therefore there can be no consciousness without intelligence. Now if you should wish to dispute—"

I turned off his frequency abruptly and hurried away. Dak-whirr is a fool and a bore. Everyone knows there’s a fault in his logic circuit, but he refuses to have it traced down and repaired. Very unintelligent of him.

The thing had been taken into one of the museum sheds by the carriers. I gazed at it in admiration for some moments. It was quite beautiful, having suffered only slight exterior damage, and it was obviously no mere conglomeration of sky metal.

In fact, I immediately thought of it as "he" and endowed it with the attributes of self-knowing, although, of course, his consciousness could not be functioning or he would have attempted communication with us.

I fervently hoped that the board, after his careful disassembly and study, could restore his awareness so that he could tell us himself which solar system he came from.

Imagine it! He had achieved our dream of many thousands of revolutions—space flight—only to be fused, or worse, in his moment of triumph.

I felt a surge of sympathy for the lonely traveler as he lay there, still, silent, non-emitting. Anyway, I mused, even if we couldn’t restore him to self-knowing, an analysis of his construction might give us the secret of the power he had used to achieve the velocity to escape his planet’s gravity.

In shape and size he was not unlike Swen—or Swen Two, as he called himself after his conversion—who failed so disastrously to reach our satellite, using chemical fuels. But where Swen Two had placed his tubes, the stranger had a curious helical construction studded at irregular intervals with small crystals.

He was thirty-five feet tall, a gracefully tapering cylinder. Standing at his head, I could find no sign of exterior vision cells, so I assumed he had some kind of vrulling sense. There seemed to be no exterior markings at all, except the long, shallow grooves dented in his skin by scraping to a stop along the hard surface of our planet.

I am a reporter with warm current in my wires, not a cold-thinking scientist, so I hesitated before using my own vrulling sense. Even though the stranger was non-aware—perhaps permanently—I felt it would be a presumption, an invasion of privacy. There was nothing else I could do, though, of course.

I started to vrull, gently at first, then harder, until I was positively glowing with effort. It was incredible; his skin seemed absolutely impermeable.

The sudden realization that metal could be so alien nearly fused something inside me. I found myself backing away in horror, my self-preservation relay working overtime.

Imagine watching one of the beautiful cone-rod-and-cylinder assemblies performing the Dance of the Seven Spanners, as he’s conditioned to do, and then suddenly refusing to do anything except stump around unattractively, or even becoming obstinately motionless, unresponsive. That might give you an idea of how I felt in that dreadful moment.

Then I remembered Dak-whirr’s words—there could be no such thing as an "unintelligent manufacture." And a product so beautiful could surely not be evil. I overcame my repugnance and approached again.

I halted as an open transmission came from someone near at hand.

"Who gave that squeaking reporter permission to snoop around here?"

I had forgotten the museum board. Five of them were standing in the doorway of the shed, radiating anger. I recognized Chirik, the chairman, and addressed myself to him. I explained that I’d interfered with nothing and pleaded for permission on behalf of my subscribers to watch their investigation of the stranger. After some argument, they allowed me to stay.

I watched in silence and some amusement as one by one they tried to vrull the silent being from space. Each showed the same reaction as myself when they failed to penetrate the skin.

Chirik, who is wheeled—and inordinately vain about his suspension system—flung himself back on his supports and pretended to be thinking.

"Fetch Fiff-fiff," he said at last. "The creature may still be aware, but unable to communicate on our standard frequencies."

Fiff-fiff can detect anything in any spectrum. Fortunately he was at work in the museum that day and soon arrived in answer to the call. He stood silently near the stranger for some moments, testing and adjusting himself, then slid up the electromagnetic band.