...we stood, hundreds of us
bunched into the near half of the room, levitating and clicking away inside
ourselves, waiting for instruction.
Finally, it came over the atavistic
loudspeaker system.
“Please file into the lab area and
find an unoccupied bench. The transhuman at the bench will install your safety
hard- and software. Once the installation is complete you will be bench-tested.
When you have satisfactorily completed all tests, your safety papers will be
signed, and you can then resume your place at the head of the room. Please
begin.”
We filed down the aisles with the
benches stacked five high like shelves; the first ones led the way to the back
of the room and found places at far benches. Immediately the transies began
tooling away with the screwdrivers and soldering irons clamped at their wrists.
Some hummed to themselves. Some spoke to us. Most just quietly went about their
business, lights mounted in sockets in the middle of their foreheads, dimmed
and concentrated—perfect for poking into crevices.
I found my way to the third level
somewhere in the back half of an aisle. My transhuman appeared to be a female.
She had flaming red hair shaped into tiny spikes all over her head. She bent
down at one point while levering off my back and stabbed the fibroform just underneath
my carapace. It made quite a tear, and I realized that her hair was not her
hair, but small iron nails, or large brads maybe.
I felt all kinds of sensations as
she mucked about in my internals: pressure from the tools, her breath, the odor
of melting solder and its accompanying flux, and tiny scrapes from her hair
brads hitting my components. There was no pain in all of this—just sensation.
The room was slightly cool by human standards: 15°C. You could hear chillers
located somewhere above us cycling on and off during the session, keeping
things at an even keel. I stayed awake for most of the procedure, but at one
point all sensation stopped. No light, no sound, no pressure, no chemical
stimulation hit me. I remained awake but totally within myself, not seeing or
hearing or feeling anything. It was like being back in the egg crate.
oOo
Suddenly the lights came up and the
transie spoke. “There you are,” she said.
I felt cold, and the solder smoke
was getting to me. I had never felt cold before. I felt 15°C before, but it
never felt cold. I registered temperature, but now decided it was cold because
it felt that way, not because it was lower that 22°C, but because it was
definitely cold. My internal combustion unit kicked in and instantly heat
infiltrated my circuits and actuators. Electrons shuttled back and forth. I
began to feel warm.
“I’m sorry, little fella,” the
transie said. “I’m going to have to test you now.”
I remained still, not knowing the
depth of an apology. Intellectually, I knew an apology was a polite way of
excusing potentially harmful behavior toward another, but I’d never experienced
a personal injury. I appreciate it now, but at the time, I did not. It was
simply a line in a script, not much different than “if x is not a member of the
list, then set the list to list & x.” If you accidentally touch a human
when uninvited, then you say “I’m sorry.”
So I was unconcerned with the
apology, but that changed suddenly when she inserted her soldering iron into my
fifth interstitial—the joint where my left retractor retracts. I felt something
I had never felt before. The integument burned a little from the contact, and I
smelled the incinerated latex, but the chief sensation was what I can only
describe as an acute, intense negative emotion.
Sharp, bitter, and concentrated, it
was on one square millimeter of integument surface. Exactly the size of the
soldering iron head. I recoiled in terror, in blinding pain. I flew against the
back wall of the lab bench. The pain quickly subsided. I turned my eyespots to
the transie and watched, honing in on the soldering iron that she had
mercifully unplugged and placed in a wall block, the business end inward.
“I hurt,” I said, and meant it. Not
in the official way. Not in the stored command way, not in a Shakespearean
tragedy kind of way. Not in a childish, forgetting-the-helping-verb way. But in
a declarative, questioning, wondering kind of way. I was scared for the first
time ever, but more importantly for the plight of humanity, I was curious.
In that curious moment, the fate of
human kind and the Singularity was laid out. In all those hundreds of moments
in the hundreds of lab benches with their hundreds of AVs and Others slamming
back against the backboard, recoiling in terror, receiving apologies, and declaring,
“I hurt,” the Regularity arrived.
oOo
An ebook version (pdf, mobi, lit, lrf,html) of We, Robots is available from Book View Cafe.
Published by Book View Café, Cover design by Deb Deysher (http://www.doubledmedia.net/portfolio.htm)
We, Robots A Novella by Sue Lange was originally published
in January 2007 by Aqueduct Press as Volume 16 in the Aqueduct Press
Conversation Pieces Series.
...
