Ubo

16

THEY WERE ALL men of metal and plastic now, all cyborgs now, automata, automations, androids, machines, robots, bots—none of the terms seemed all that right or acceptable or even possible. He considered whether it might be a trick—just another test, another experiment—but it didn’t have the feel of a trick. Nor did it feel as if it had just happened, that they had suddenly transformed as if by magic.

It might be a hallucination, but he suspected not. It had the ring of truth. It felt like a confirmation of the peculiar incompleteness he’d felt ever since he’d come here. They’d ruined him. They’d devastated him. He wasn’t even properly Daniel anymore. They’d taken his flesh, and now he was Danielbot, apparently only his brain left alive, but it probably wasn’t even his brain, was it? Perhaps they’d only stolen his thoughts.

He didn’t care that he was falling. He made a metallic sound as he hit the tile. A hollow thud and a rattle. He managed to sit up, metal arms holding onto metal legs, metal knees up. He leaned back against the wall and looked out.

The mechanical men he once knew but now could not recognize without their flesh continued to paw at each other in some sort of desperate attempt at recognition. They appeared to be both seeking familiar contact and trying to get away from these frightening, strange constructions. He recognized Lenin’s voice in the crowd but couldn’t determine which bot the voice was coming from. There were a few other vaguely familiar voices, but without a recognizable face to associate them to he wasn’t sure what they’d actually looked like.

Suddenly several humans in skin-tight, dark blue uniforms rushed out of the observation room. They were slight in build, tired-eyed, with pale complexions, and carried longish, rifle-looking devices. They should have been mechanical men as well—it was only fair.

One of the bots approached these men, reaching out a gleaming, jittery arm and hand. Clearly he meant no harm—he radiated confusion, desperation.

One of the men spun around, shouted, and fumbled at a protruding tab on his rifle. A bluish white bolt flashed between the two and the bot fell. The air smelled like a lightning strike and burnt electrical components.

The remaining bots scattered, some of them gathering nearby. Daniel closed his eyes. Was he still Daniel? He felt like no one else, but he was afraid not. He repeatedly slapped his hand against the floor, then stopped, hating its clatter.

“Gather up!” He opened his eyes. The same human who had shot the bot approached them, sweeping his rifle. “Gather up! Make a line!”

Daniel struggled to his feet. I’m not Daniel, he thought. Not Daniel, Notdaniel. The more he repeated it in his head the more the two words together sounded like a single name.

The bots moved back and forth hesitantly. He could sense their confusion. Where to start? And why were they being ordered around by other… by these humans? The man came closer, raising his weapon.

“Better dial it down, Nathan,” one of the other uniformed men said. “Looks like you killed this one.”

“Stop!” Falstaff was running their way from the back of the room. He hadn’t changed at all. “I can handle this!”

He watched as Falstaff pushed his way through the uniformed men. “I know them. I can handle this.” The uniformed men slowly, somewhat reluctantly, backed off.

“John?” the bot next to him said. It was Lenin, judging by the voice. “What is this? What’s happened to us?”

Falstaff was looking at the bot’s number. EH-7384. “Charles,” Falstaff said softly. “Just try to stay calm. There’s a lot… a great number of things we’ll all have to adjust to. Just give me a little time for explanations. We’re working on the power issue—once there’s sufficient power I think we can get you your old appearances back, then you’ll all feel a lot better.”

“Those fellows in the blue uniforms are the roaches, aren’t they, John?” Daniel said. “This is what the roaches really look like, when they’re not controlling how we see things. They’re just people. Which, apparently, we are not. And which, apparently, you are.”

“But we all saw them. They guarded us, took us down to the labs for our… our scenarios. They brought us here!” the Leninbot shouted.

“It was an illusion, Charlie. Probably using the same mechanism that made us look human to ourselves—am I correct, John?”

“Daniel—be careful.”

“Don’t call me that! I’m no more Daniel than you are!”

“What are you people talking about?” Charlie shouted. “John, what is he talking about?”

John grabbed Lenin and took him aside. “Daniel, just wait here.” A couple of the guards moved closer. He supposed he still cared whether they shot him or not, because he didn’t challenge them.

After several minutes of animated conversation with Lenin and some of the other bots, John returned.

“I’m sorry I lied to you, I really am. I know, I know, I lied to you all the time. I had to. Daniel—I—please, if you don’t want me to use that name, what should I call you?”

Daniel held up his arm. “You could just use my number—that’s what it’s there for, isn’t it?”

“Those numbers were meant for accurate records, matching… parts. We each have an implant,” he said. “Which allows us to see you as you see yourselves, as your originals. We initially tried working without them, but the guards have always tended to treat you… more sensitively, when you appeared… more like them.”

“I could have told you that—that was a lesson learned centuries ago.”

“But I’m not going to call you by that serial number. I can’t.”

“Then if you must call me anything, refer to me as the Danielbot. I’m no more than an avatar, really, a voodoo doll. I would have said that you and your people have reduced me to that, but I was never really more, was I? Only your lies convinced me that I was more. I was never Daniel, was I? I was never even human. Was I a recording of some kind?”

“More or less—his memories, his feelings, a simulation of how he perceived things. I am truly sorry to have lied, but how could I have told you the complete truth? How would you have reacted?”

“No one ever figures it out?”

“They begin to, over time, and I try to confirm little bits, I drop hints. My job is to advocate, to somehow minimize the trauma. Otherwise their personalities begin to go off the rails. We cannot bring an entire person into the future, nor should we. I’m sure you would agree with that. So we bring a recording taken at a specific time, with all your beliefs and your past.”

“And the real Daniel? The original?”

“He’s completely unaware. His life goes on. But that recording is mapped here to an artificial brain, which we put into a body of sorts. It’s invaluable, the knowledge it has, and the recording is so structured that it blends more easily with other recordings—the subjects, the characters it is asked to play. We’ve learned so much. So much raw data about who we are, how we behave.”

“Why couldn’t you have kept it all in a computer? Why put us in bodies at all?”

“The project has been going on for many years. We tried all that. But without a body the personalities simply would not be completely convinced they were real—they would not behave normally. By adding a bit of actual flesh to those bodies we were able to access a certain level of human vulnerability, a physical awareness of their mortality.”

“Are you going to tell the others? Or is this supposed to be our little secret? Because I can’t promise…”

“Let me try to bring them along as best I can. I’ve always tried to do my best to help, under the circumstances. I’ve always tried to tell my charges details I thought might comfort them, or satisfy enough of their curiosity that they wouldn’t probe for more. I did that with Alan, with Walter, Charles, and certainly you. I’ve tried to make things better. Please let me continue to do that. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way. I’m afraid it’s going to be much too much for everyone.”

The Danielbot examined his arms. The workings were quite intricate and responsive. Even though they looked like bits of machinery, they felt completely correct, completely real. Here and there were circles and oblongs of human flesh, like pads on a piece of furniture, like upholstery made of meat.

“So I’m never going home, John. That’s pretty much the sum of it? No, don’t answer. My beautiful wife, my lovely son… you do realize, don’t you, that those memories were all I had to hold on to? And now to find out they don’t even belong to me? My family is alive in the past with the original Daniel and none of them, in fact, have anything to do with me. So I have nothing? What am I going to do, John? Could you explain that?”