At 7:48 AM the next morning, I left Dal and Chit’s and traveled south on
Eastern Avenue to the North Westminster Hazardous Waste and Recycling Depot.
The motorized gate opened at my approach and that of a mob of about 50,000
other AV-1s and models I didn’t recognize. None of us spoke. We just levitated
through the gate and stopped inside the yard, surrounded by 1,000 foot-high
mountains of out-of-date mother boards, half-full paint cans, aerosol sprayers,
yellow and magenta 50-gallon drums, and other hazardous or otherwise
nondisposable materials. Styrofoam peanuts blew around in the slightest breeze
like autumn maple leaves and spread themselves to every nook and cranny in the
area.
If you followed the schedule for
this recall closely, you would have noticed that 0.5 hours was allotted for
load-in at the Depot. I think it’s safe to say at this point that that might
have been a little optimistic. For several hours, 18-wheelers backed in and out
of the Depot yard, usually only one at a time. Two humans were tasked with
directing the AVs and Others into their loading crates—12 to a box as before. I
was one of the last ones in, which made my load-in time 3.5 hours, 3 hours over
the schedule. Apparently it had been designed by robots that had no experience
with the Union. Or maybe some CAD drawing of the yard didn’t take into account
that only one truck can fit into one three-dimensional space at a time. In
retrospect it would have been faster for us all to just levitate to Allentown.
As it was, we didn’t even get there until the next day.
Things got scary in Allentown. When
I say scary, I mean that in a post-Regularity kind of way. Back then, us AVs
and Others wouldn’t have been scared. In AI terminology, the closest you get to
scary is illogical. We weren’t scared, we just stopped dead in our tracks from
the illogicality of the scene.
We floated out of our egg cartons
into the light of day. Figuratively speaking of course, because the factory was
so dim, we could barely opticalize. As our apertures simultaneously opened to
“widest,” we sucked in a collective, I don’t know, clicking of internal
switches somewhat like human breath. We were shocked, stunned, surprised, scared?
No, none of that. We were stuck in a question loop, wondering what it was we
were seeing.
Thousands of little lab-bench
modules, no more than three feet square, stood on top of each other in rows 300
feet long. Aisles between the rows were a nice, six feet or so wide, giving us
enough view space to see the “humans.” I write that in quotes because they
weren’t really humans. Not any humans that we had ever known or seen pictures
of in our data files. We have photos of elephant men, Siamese twins, flipper babies,
encephalopodians, victims of cruel war-time experiments, bearded ladies,
thousand-pounders, and every other type of human mutation or grotesquerie on
the books, but not any of the species that stood before us.
Species I say. Not in jest or
overstatement. This was a new species. Reproduction sans gametes and mixing and
matching and swapping and sweating. These people built each other like robots
and looked forward to the day when they could download their minds.
“What are you all staring at?” one
of them called from somewhere amongst the benches. It had one normal human eye
and where the other would have been, a glass circle planted in its place.
Behind the circle was a mass of something—electric circuits or wires maybe. It
was too dim to see well, but intermittent flashes of light emanating from the
eye circle illuminated the face at times. If you were used to working in a
strobe environment, say a disco or performance garage, you’d be able to
interpret the scene.
“Haven’t you ever seen a transie
before?” Another one yelled to us. This one wore no clothes. A stainless steel
pack protruded from its back. A corrugatedglass
hose extended from the pack around to its front where it entered the navel. The
pack flickered like the eye circle of the previous individual. The light raced
down the tube from point A to point B. We could see as it stood facing us that
this person had no gender.
All the “transies” had some sort of
mechanical appendage or, for lack of a better word, upgrade. They were all
flesh and prosthesis. Most of them sat at their benches. Some stood on roller
castors where their feet should have been. Some had spinning whirligigs
implanted in their heads, effecting a weird sort of levitation. A few had tool
handlers as replacements for hands, presumably to add torque or amplified force
to the human hand, heretofore considered the height of evolution in tool
handling. Screwdrivers or hammers or channel locks were loaded into the
handlers depending on what the particular transie was up to.
The noise in my circuitry rose to a
din as I frantically searched my files for information on what I was seeing.
The noise in the room also rose to a din as we began vocalizing questions
amongst ourselves, each of us having failed in our circuitry searches. We could
not figure out what these beings were and how we fit into their picture. None
of us found any information in our basement libraries. We began vocalizing to
attain information from our neighbors, for while we all had the same basement
with its vast store of knowledge, our separate experiences out in the world
allowed individual data collection. Somebody somewhere must have seen this
before. Somebody must have known what this was.
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.
At 7:48 
