Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“Hugo! Blast it!” he called out.

Can a house gasp in dismay? Bruno’s seemed to for a moment. Beneath him there was the crackle of programmable matter shifting substance at maximum rate; he landed on a thick, yielding carpet of foam rubber. Not real rubber, of course, but wellstone rubber, a structure of designer electron bundles alternating with superfine silicon threads. Presently, the foam grew patchy beneath him, as if dissolving; two seconds later he lay in a Bruno-shaped depression, his left side resting directly against the granite of the house’s foundation. A cloud of silicon dust rose up all around him.

The foam had yielded too far, lost structural integrity, broken the fine mesh of circuits that gave it the illusion of substance. Had the floor changed to iron instead, he’d have been the one to yield, but as it was he’d probably been saved from a cracked elbow. Of course, in the Queendom of Sol “breaking the floor” was the very metaphor for foolish clumsiness. Or had been, once upon a time; he didn’t get down there much anymore.

“Declarant-Philander!” the house cried out, using the longest and most formal of his titles, though he’d told it a thousand times not to. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

He didn’t speak at first, fearful of inhaling the fine silicon dust. Instead he sat up, brushing himself off, breathing lightly—experimentally—through his nose. At once, small multilegged robots scuttled forth from the shadows, undulating, wrapping sinuously around him and racing over his skin and clothing with tiny vacuum-cleaner probosci. They raced around the edges of him as well, finding the dust where it lay. Two seconds later they were finished and gone, scuttling back into hiding like fast-motion figments of his imagination.

“Sir?” the house prompted again, anxiously. “My humblest, humblest apologies, sir. Are you all right? I tried—

Bruno sighed. “I’m fine. Hugo?”

The robot he’d tripped over, perched there in the darkness on its hands and knees, looked up slowly at the sound of its name. Its neck joints clicked, golden bands sliding one inside the other, as it turned its blank metallic face toward him. A faint mewling sound emanated from somewhere in the vicinity of its nonexistent mouth.

“Your robot is in need of recycling,” another voice, a female voice, said from deeper in the living room’s darkness.

Startled, Bruno rose to his feet, spied a silhouette there on the divan. Long hair, long dress, a sparkle of diamonds at the waist.

“Lights,” he said, though he knew at once who it must be.

“I tried to tell you, sir,” the house complained. “You have a visitor.”

The lights came up softly, illuminating the form of—who else?—Her Majesty Tamra Lutui, the Virgin Queen of All Things. Bruno had known no other visitor for years, and even she’d been here only the once. She’d been desperate, then, in need of his help. And in the here and now, her posture gave the impression that she’d been sitting there in the darkness for some time. Fair enough; the house had standing orders never to disturb him in his study unless his safety or his work were in immediate danger. Had it made her wait? Had she agreed to, when Royal Overrides could compel any software to her immediate bidding?

“ Malo e lelei ,” he said, as prelude to his many questions.

She inclined her head slightly, acknowledging the greeting. No crown adorned her tonight; her black hair spilled out over bare, walnut-colored shoulders. Her dress was of crimson suede, with round black shoes sticking out underneath. Casual attire, even for a figurehead ruler of billions. Especially for a figurehead, he supposed. The only concession to her station was a wide bracelet of porcelain bearing the traditional plus sign and six-pointed star of Tongan heraldry, half smothered in laurels and filigree.

“You’re quite welcome here, Highness,” he went on, now a bit testily. “I’m at your disposal, as always, but I’m afraid I wasn’t prepared for a visitor this evening.” He glanced around at the floor and furnishings. “I see the house has cleaned up, at least. By choice, I wouldn’t inflict my usual housekeeping on you.”

“Your robot,” she said, pointing, “is defective. I nearly tripped over it myself.”

Beside him, Hugo had moved, slowly, to the side of the Bruno-shaped dent in the floor, and was probing the edges of it with slow, tin-gray fingers capped in gold. The faint mewling sound had never quite stopped.

“Not defective,” Bruno said wearily. “Free. I wanted one animate object around here that wasn’t simply a house appendage. Do you realize there isn’t a single animal on this planet? Not a bird to sing, not a fish to poke ripples in the water’s smooth surface. Did I really do that, craft an entire world, landscapes and biomes and evaporation cycles, and then forget to populate it? Someone gave me a little toy ocean once, alive with miniature creatures, and even then I didn’t take the hint. I suppose I sought to correct the oversight. I have entirely too many servants as it is, so I decided to free one.”

She frowned. “Free it?”

He nodded. “Yes. I severed its link to the house software.”

Her Majesty looked aghast. “Robots have no volition, Declarant, no desire to do anything but fulfill . Nor do they possess intelligence, unless you’d count raw intuition as such. You severed the link to its processor, its ability to grasp and assess the very needs it must fulfill?”

He nodded again. “Just so.”

“How… unkind. You leave it helpless and confused, in an environment beyond its comprehension.”

Bruno shrugged. “Such is the nature of freedom, Highness. I’ve often said that life is nothing more than the choices thrust upon us when ability and incident collide. Which of us truly knows our course? Generally, we don’t even know the landscape beneath our course. It’s a terrible gift, in some ways, but a great one as well. Hugo is more fortunate than some.”

Bruno was intrigued even as he said the words, because there’d been no one to ask him these questions before, and he hadn’t really reflected on them himself. Freeing Hugo was something he’d simply done one day, and never reconsidered. After all, what software existed to tell him what to do next? None. And if it came about somehow, if some master house intelligence could plot the course of his life, or even his afternoon, would he listen? He’d never expected to wind up out here, in the Queendom’s upper wilderness, with only the collapsium for company, but at least he could look back and know that for whatever inane reasons, he’d done this to himself. Such was the nature of freedom.

It was sort of a grim thing to inflict on a robot, he supposed.

Hugo, once again looking up at the sound of his name, mewled and fell face first into the hole in the floor.

“Ahem,” Her Majesty said.

“Oh, bother it.” Bruno sighed and took a seat across from her. “Where are your robots, Tamra? Your guards. You’re never without them. And how did you get in here, anyway? I’d have detected the approach of a ship.”

One of Hugo’s graceful cousins slipped briefly into view then slipped out again, leaving a tray of food and drink on the table between them.

“Your fax,” Tamra said, pointing at the dark orifice around which the little house was built. “It is the usual mode of travel, Bruno.”

He pursed his lips. “Eh? My network gate is down, Highness. Nonfunctional, for years.”

It was Tamra’s turn to shrug. “I had it repaired last time I was up here.”

“Really. Ah. Nice of you to inform me.”

“You needn’t be so offended,” she said, with an air of both guilty humor and bruised camaraderie. “I’ve kept the secret, kept the override to myself. It’s as I found it, with the exception that I can get word to you when circumstances demand it.”