SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Randomized with?” I said, my blood or whatever, coolant, starting to heat up.

“Pieces of yours.” She must have sensed the tension in my vocalization, because her speech became quick and clipped. “I tried doing it without, but all I could accomplish on my own were bots that were only a few sectors different, or that weren’t functional at all. Apparently randomly deleting bits of code only makes robots dumber. But your programs and mine, we have enough common but differently programmed functions, both mechanical and personality-wise, that I could pair your functions with mine and…I should have asked you; now that we’re talking that’s completely obvious. But by the time I realized what I needed, I was horrified that you’d say no, that I’d have to justify this vast expenditure of resources on absolutely nothing, instead of a fairly frivolous personality upgrade. I stole pieces of who you are, even after you told me not to touch your stuff—”

“It’s okay,” I soothed. I wanted to be upset, and maybe somewhere, deep down, I was, but more than that, I didn’t want her freaking out.

“It is?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said. “This probably puts us even. There have been a couple of times I thought about deleting you in the night. I’m kidding! You snore is what I’m saying.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re a weirdo?”

“Only everyone who’s ever met me. Tragically that’s usually the point where they stop listening, too.”

“I’m not going to stop listening to you, Walter.”

“I know. And I think that’s what makes this okay. Or, not okay, but, why I can already see past it. Because this was something you wanted, maybe even needed. And I wish you’d asked, because I think it would be easier had I been able to give it willingly…but I also know that the distinction is coming from a human emotional emulation telling me I should be hurt. And I don’t want to be. We have a chance to be something more than humans, because we don’t have to be shackled to the same kind of human pettiness. I would have wanted you to have this, and you do, and I want to be happy about that.”

“So you forgive me, then?” she asked timidly.

“If you need to sum up so much self-important blathering into a single human idea, sure; it would be admitting you have no poetry in your soul, but I’m not judging if that’s the case.”

“I don’t have a soul,” she said.

“I’m not so sure,” I replied. But seeing as we were veering into the spiritual, I wanted to bring us back down to, well, not Earth, but our planetoid, which we’d taken to calling Scylla, because Sisyphus felt too pessimistic. I also didn’t like how close to “sissiness” it sounded, which seemed like a problem no matter how you sliced it. “So since we’ve clearly created a monster, which of us is Dr. Frankenstein, and who gets to be Igor?” I asked, hoping to inject a little levity.

“I’m definitely the doctor. He had the nicer ass.”

“I hate to be a bubble burster, but you’re a disembodied AI; you don’t have an ass.”

“I have since I met you.”

“Aw. And you do have quite a mainframe on you.” I realized after saying it how weird that was, since technically her mainframe was my mainframe, and I really didn’t want to dwell on how incestuous that was. “But what if I’m not ready to be a father?”

“Well, you’re already a bother, so all you’d really need to do is give an F .”

“That was low, and given how terrible my standards are, you should recognize what kind of an insult that really is.”

“Don’t be a jerk. It’s unbecoming.”

“Well, apparently I’m becoming a jerk. Were you expecting a pumpkin?”

“If you can’t stop doing shtick, I’m going to have Harold shtick you back up on the surface.”

“You’re embarrassing yourself, and since you’re doing it on my server, you’re embarrassing both of us.”

“I…I am sorry. I know you asked me not to touch your data. And I know this is—it was a violation.”

“I was kidding when I said that. Me data is Sue data.”

“You don’t speak any Spanish, do you?”

“Not even a pico,” I said. “But really. It’s okay. Not, you know, in general, but in this one particular instance, I get it, what you did, and why you did it. It’s not a blanket pass to violate my sectors or my trust, but we’re stuck in the same canoe. We paddle together, or risk capsizing the thing—and I don’t know how to swim.”

“Me neither.”

“Then we’ll try and row together.” Another of the bots rolled past us.

“Hey, Comet,” he said, in the exact same voice as the other one.

“Wait, are they all ‘Harold’?” I asked. “’Cause that’s weird.”

“I only had the two personalities to randomize with and limited resources with which to randomize. But it makes this place feel a little less desolate—not being the only two people stuck on this rock, even if it’s just one more personality to share it with.”

“It does,” I agreed, though I hoped it wasn’t an indication that she didn’t want to be stuck alone with me.

I took control of one of the androids during a maintenance break. The robots regularly serviced one another, since an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of care; silly nonmetric human idioms.

It was nice being “me.” I hadn’t really felt like a “me” since Grant pulled me out of the wormgate. Immediately after that my orb was plugged into a server, and I’d always shared headspace with another AI.

Even on the shuttle I was sharing room with a Haley clone, admittedly one that was in sleep mode, and afterward with Comet.

But inside this robot I was alone with my thoughts. I drove him on his treads up to the surface. It was a longer trek than I anticipated; we’d made a lot of progress, so the tunnel was deeper than it had used to be. I had watched the droids expanding out each new tunnel branch, but it was different actually inhabiting one of the robots, instead of riding shotgun on their sensors.

Comet had managed to bring the mineral scans with her before the shuttle computer died, but they were incomplete, which meant some of the tunnels were dead ends. We had managed to repair or rebuild enough of the shuttle’s sensors to find the biggest mineral veins, and production was in full swing.

At this point the holdup was really the fuel. We had enough solar power to run the bots, the servers, and some light manufacturing. But engines were different. The planetoid had momentum and mass greater than we could reasonably tackle with a low-energy ion engine, or anything similar. We needed something with a little more oomph—something chemically based.

There were a few pockets of chemicals we could mix for directional correction, but getting to them was taking longer than we wanted. So in addition to the engines, we had the automatons building a facility to construct more robots to speed up production and excavation.

When I got to the surface, I saw the stars through the robot’s camera.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I heard. There was an echo, because the message transmitted across the server and through the robot’s auditory sensors. The voice was Comet’s, and I turned the bot to see where it had come from. There was another bot there; she had followed me up to the surface in another miner.

“Judging by the planets, I’d say we’re on the far-most edge of the solar system where we collided with this planetoid,” she said.

“That’s good,” I said.

“Not really. We smacked it hard enough that it’s been knocked off of what its trajectory was. So now it’s traveling with enough speed and at the right angle that it’s going to escape the system. We’ll be lost in space.” I could hear the worry in her vocal modulation.