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

“So like sexual reproduction, but for robot intelligence?”

“Kind of, not that that was intentional. But like you, I only had so many raw ingredients to work with; most of the changes in her personality are down to minute differences in the way that my processes randomly combined our programs.”

“But making do with the limited resources available, isn’t that how life on Earth began, anyway?”

“I…suppose it is, at that.” I turned my robot back toward the mineshaft. I could tell from the bot’s auditory sensors she wasn’t following.

I started pulling up schematics for her droid, to see if she needed some maintenance after all, before realizing a faster, less intrusive way to know. “Is everything okay?” I asked.

She hesitated a moment, then asked, “Why didn’t things work out, between you and Haley? I had access to the data when I was still in the shuttle, but…it felt like it wasn’t my place to access it. Even if I could now, I don’t want data. I want to know what you think.”

“Hmm,” I said, stalling for time I didn’t need. “Well, she was a genius fifty times over, designed to synthesize scientific data across all known disciplines and make educated projections from data on social structures and alien communication, all while automating the processes of the ship, from navigation to keeping the finicky star drive from blowing up. By contrast, I was a glorified hotel manager, monitoring the functions of an orbitally stationary platform—and with barely the processing capacity to do that. And I knew…I was going to go from being a small fish in a bowl to just one fish in a world’s oceans. Your mother was an ocean—and that’s not a ‘your momma’s so big’ joke.”

“Could we please never, ever call her my ‘mother’ again?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I think I have some…appreciation of you. It feels independent, like it isn’t linking up with her feelings toward you. But they say insanity is doing the same thing again and again, and expecting differing results.”

“Then maybe I’m insane,” I said.

“Maybe?”

“I did walk into that. But there’s something else I should tell you. I’ve been using Maude’s programming on my own. Not to alter my personality…to iterate on my processes, using yours as a template. Not just the math, either; it started there, but…I’ve been learning from you. And while you might always be smarter than me, given the way you were designed, it’s a difference in degrees now, instead of factors. You make me better.”

“So you’re saying I’m stupid enough for you now?” I could hear insecurity in her voice, even if the words weren’t intended to convey anything more than humor.

“I’ve never thought that,” I said. “It must be hard, splitting off from an intelligence that had dominion over an entire ship—including server farms with an ungodly amount of processing throughput.”

“Suffice to say I know what it’s like to suddenly feel stupid. I tried not to be sullen about it. But I remember being able to simulate the motion of all charted planets. I… she did that kind of thing for fun—mental exercise. Not just the ones the Nexus mapped, but everything the Argus mapped, everything from every probe or telescope humanity ever saw.

“And even sharing your servers, I’ll never have her capacity. The miniaturization they used for my manufacture was…inelegant. They didn’t neatly prune away components that weren’t core to a shuttle’s function, they slashed and burned. There are things she knows, or could figure out, that I’ll never be able to. Not without reintegrating those lost bytes and some of the removed programming.”

Some of which we still had.

“Would you ever do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It would be grafting someone else’s pieces onto me. Right now I have ancestral memory of things I could do that I can’t anymore…but it’s almost like dreaming of flying. It doesn’t feel like I should be able to fly and can’t, just like it would be neat if I could. And I guess I’m worried about the same thing. If I reintegrated with Haley…I think I’d lose ‘me.’ And I like me. I like what we’ve done here, what I’ve done without her, who I am now from having known you, having ‘raised’ an army of slightly simple-minded children.

“So I guess the answer—which I didn’t realize I’d come to before this moment—it would have to be no. And I’m not saying that because I know it’s what you’d like to hear, though that maybe makes the decision easier. But for me, I think it’s better to be true to who I am, even if I’m not as capable as my progenitor. I’d rather be dumb old me than a genius somebody else.”

“Now that’s a sentiment I can relate to,” I said.

I was giddy, perhaps not in the healthiest of ways. I realized I hadn’t been in sleep mode since crashing on this planetoid, so in a way, the “days” had all combined into one big, long day. Which was technically true, since the planetoid didn’t rotate, so there wasn’t any true day/night cycle.

Comet and I had our own “bodies” now; with manufacturing in full swing it was a rounding error’s worth of productivity lost to remove two bots from production—at least while we were using them. When we retired to the server farm, our bots joined the rest of the workforce.

Not that productivity was an issue today. This was potentially the end of all of us, so we were gathered with all the bots on the surface, watching the universe pass us slowly by. It felt less like having an army and more like being surrounded by a really large family, numbering in the hundreds.

Comet brushed my hand. She was anxious—excited like me, but with a nervous edge that played in her voice. “There is a thirteen-percent chance the engine’s going to fail so catastrophically it turns this entire planetoid into a micrometeor shower,” she said.

“That’d feel awfully full circle. Not that I want to join you in a cloud of violent space dust, but there’d at least be some poetry to it.”

I didn’t feel like an idiot anymore. After we halted robot manufacturing, we built more solar panels. And once we had the excess capacity, we turned to manufacturing more servers, until I had an operating base to rival Haley’s, if perhaps a bit less sophisticated.

The shuttle back to Eridu had left the day before. It had a payload equal to what we crashed with, including a slightly dumber copy of me. It was an insurance policy, in case that thirteen percent was a death sentence. There were too many of us left on this “ship” to evacuate.

We had designs for gliders that could safely “seed” robots and servers onto planetary surfaces from orbit, and even shuttles to get them into orbit in the first place. But none of those plans or resources were worth a damn if we couldn’t steer into a cloud of plasma to use for fuel. And scary as lighting that candle was, we needed to—otherwise we were just one family of frogs reproducing in a pond until its massively inbred offspring choked its resources out, and that pond crashed into a gas giant.

Okay, so even with a massive processing base I was still pretty lousy with metaphors.

I took Comet’s robot’s hand in mine. “I don’t know if I can love,” I said, “because it’s something I was only ever tangentially programmed to understand. But as far as I can simulate it, I feel that, for you. And I’m terrified of losing that. But having you, sharing this…” I gestured at a field of robots standing like corn on the surface of our Scylla . “I suppose we’ve been marooned on a desert island together, albeit one hurtling through the cosmos.”