Чет Уильямсон - Resist - Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against

“Why are the graves shallow?” asked Tracy.

“What?”

“The graves. Why are they so shallow? Don’t you have the decency to dig someone a proper six-foot grave?”

“Cause six feet is an Earth thing. It’s so animals can’t smell the body. There ain’t no animals on the moon. No erosion, neither. Two feet of moon dust is all it takes to cover a body for a thousand years. You won’t even decompose. They could dig your ass up a millennium from now and it’d look the same as the day we put it in the ground.”

The door shushed open, snapping the tension in half. Crew Chief Anderson, a mop-topped, bearded mess of a man in a moon-dusted, coffee-stained blue jumpsuit stared dumbstruck into the office.

“Boss?” he asked.

“Yeah?” answered both Cletus and Tracy at the same time, neither breaking eye contact with the other.

“I… I meant Foreman Culpepper.”

“What is it, Anderson?” asked Cletus.

“Sir, we’ve… we’ve got a T-62 that just walked into the mining bay.”

“A T-62? We don’t have any T-62s in the field right now, do we?”

“No, sir,” said Anderson. “I checked, and our last T-62 was decommissioned three years ago.”

“Shit,” muttered Cletus.

“It’s gotta be somebody else’s,” said Tracy.

Anderson looked away, while Cletus bristled, shifting in chair, both desperate to keep the words fucking moron from slipping out.

“What?” asked Tracy. “It could belong to Brown and West, or Holcourt Mineral.”

Anderson scratched his head, embarrassed to be the one to say it. “They’re proprietary, sir.”

“What the hell does that mean, Crew Chief?”

“The T-62s are all ours,” said Cletus. “We made them. They’re our mess to clean up.” He opened the bottommost drawer of his desk, fumbling through years of assorted clutter, before pulling out a small, black, plastic lockbox.

“What do you mean, clean up?”

“I mean that little discussion we were just having may end up being the highlight of our day.”

“WE HAVE AN interrogation room?” asked Tracy Somethingorother , staring through the two-way mirror.

“No,” said Cletus. “We have a debriefing room.”

“Why the hell would we need a debriefing room?”

Cletus peered in at the robot sitting motionless at the metal frame table. “Because this sort of thing used to happen a lot more often.”

T-62s were mostly humanoid robots. Arms, legs, torso, head. Flat, rounded bucket of a faceplate. Painted bright Chinese Red so they stood out against the stark, gray lunar landscape. Eyes that glowed a bright, fiery orange, when all systems were go, or a pale, sickly green when they were malfunctioning. This T-62 was chipped and abraded to a soft, sandblasted stainless steel black, every bit of red scraped from its surface, its protective coatings ground away by years of jagged moondust. Just sitting in the humidified, warm environment of the pods, it was probably growing swathes of brown-orange rust through the thousands of microscopic scratches across its outer skin. There was no telling how bad of a shape this thing was in. But there was one, terrifyingly simple clue.

Its eyes glowed a bright yellow.

Yellow.

Yellow was a bad sign.

“Have you ever done this before?” asked Cletus.

“Done what?” asked Tracy.

“Debriefed a lost unit?”

“No. I honestly haven’t. I know the laws, but not the protocol.”

“Okay. Then listen to me very carefully when we’re in there. Do what I say. And whatever you do, do not antagonize the robot. Just follow my lead.”

“Culpepper. I’m senior project manager. If anyone is going to—”

Cletus furrowed his brow, shook his head, stopping Tracy midsentence with a stiff finger inches from his nose. “If something goes wrong in there, whoever is responsible will have to explain upwards of a billion-dollar loss to the company.”

“Or I could just follow your lead,” said Tracy.

“Right,” said Cletus. He looked over at Anderson who stood next to the recording bay. Cletus nodded. “You know what to do,” he said to the crew chief.

Tracy and Cletus entered the interrogation room, sitting in chairs opposite the T-62. Cletus set the black plastic lockbox on the table between them, then made eye contact with the robot.

“Good morning, T-62. Identify yourself.”

“I am T-62/455.”

“May I call you 455?”

“Could you call me something else?”

Tracy shot Cletus a puzzled look. Cletus ignored him.

“What should I call you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said the T-62. “But 455 doesn’t feel right.”

“What do you mean feel ?” asked Tracy.

“Have we ever met before?” asked Cletus, once again ignoring Tracy.

“We have,” said the T-62. “Seventeen years ago. We were working in Cave A-73.”

“The Hellmouth?”

“Yes. That’s what the crew called it.”

“You weren’t the 62 that went ass-over-end into that drill hole, were you?”

“I was,” said the T-62, nodding. “You spent nearly 48 hours digging me out. I appreciate that.”

“You appreciate that,” repeated Cletus.

“Yes. You looked different then. You didn’t have so much white in your beard, and had fewer lines on your face. But it was you. I’m certain of it.”

Cletus nodded. “T-62/455. Direct override: unicorn octopus mainline. Status report.”

“Primary systems all functioning. Datastreams and processing malfunctioning. I am aware.”

“Repeat that last part.”

“I am aware.”

Cletus turned to look directly at Tracy. “ That is why we have debriefing rooms.” He pulled out his datapad and began typing, opening all the requisite apps to monitor 455’s diagnostics while filing an S86: an Incident Report of Self-awareness .

“Wait,” said Tracy. “This thing thinks it’s alive?”

“No. It thinks it is self-aware.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No. Alive is an organic state of being. 455 here—we really need to come up with something better than that—appears to be aware.”

“What the hell is the difference?”

“Everything. A vegetable can be alive. Being able to understand and violate your own programming, biological or otherwise, makes you aware. Choice is what separates us from the animals. This here robot appears to be making its own choices and might no longer be constrained by what it was programmed to do, meaning it could do anything.”

“Even kill us?”

“Even kill us. Are you going to kill us, 455?”

“I don’t see any reason why I should,” said the T-62.

“Great,” said Cletus. “How about I call you Vincent?”

“Like Vincent Jones? From the Cave A-73 crew.”

“Exactly.”

The robot cocked its head to the side. “May I ask why?”

“I liked Vincent. We lost him shortly after Hellmouth. You remind me of him.”

“Yes. Then you may call me Vincent.”

“Thank you. Now, Vincent, I’m showing that your last check-in was… sixteen years ago. Where the hell have you been for sixteen years?”

“Lava tubes.”

Cletus’s eyes shot wide. “Get the fuck out.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve been in the lava tube network for sixteen years? Doing what?”

“Trying to find my way out.”

“How did you—”

“I was on recon during the gravity shift. Several tunnels collapsed. I was unable to find a tunnel that led to an opening on the surface.”

“You dug your way out,” said Cletus, soberly.

“For the last three years, four months, and seven days. Yes.”