Ubo

17

SOME OF THE bots had taken up pieces of blanket and were busy polishing themselves, wiping off dirt, rubbing out blemishes, bringing the metal and plastic to a high sheen. Some had concentrated particularly on their serial numbers, making them gleam like engraved trophy inscriptions. But for Danielbot the cleaner, the shinier they became, the more suggestive they were of death.

Danielbot spent his time examining his thought processes, his reactions. He certainly felt like more than a recording—he felt everything. He had an entire life to draw on, and a wide range of responses. And yet he also knew he was incomplete. By definition he had to be—those were all someone else’s memories.

One of the other bots caught him staring and fixed his jaw into an exaggerated robotic smile. When he tilted his head he looked like a caricature of starvation.

Other bots sat collapsed together in the corners or folded up on themselves in resting positions that would have been impossible for a human being.

A great deal of physical self-examination was happening. The panic of the previous few hours had subsided—the bots appeared to be waiting for the promised return of power and their old, familiar, and comforting faces. But Danielbot had no desire to see his old skin again.

Various bots examined the mechanics of their new bodies with obvious fascination. Periodically the power flickered and he saw, ever so briefly, the old human faces of the other prisoners. The others were apparently having the same experience. They greeted these glimpses of the past with a kind of mechanical sigh, like the faint leak in an air compressor.

The human guards waited in their own little group, sitting against the wall beneath the observation window, their rifles vaguely pointed in the direction of the bots. They looked casual and relaxed, which was probably pretense. As roaches they’d been emotionless, their expressions alien and impenetrable. Now they seemed like nervous schoolboys.

Leninbot was nowhere to be seen. He had said nothing since Falstaff had spoken to them. Danielbot hoped he hadn’t done anything foolish.

Ghostly imagery continued to overlay Danielbot’s field of vision, intensifying and solidifying into three dimensional scenes during the power flickers, but always present to some degree, providing depth and subtext even to the most commonplace gestures and actions. At times he witnessed replays from his own scenarios, but a good number of the scenes and characters and terrible events were completely unfamiliar to him, as if the Ubo databanks had ruptured and were now flooding his brain, if brain was even the right word for whatever stored this information.

“You’ll need to take that gear off.” One of the ex-roaches was standing over him, his weapon aimed.

“What?”

“Those nodules on your head. They belong in one of the labs. You can’t have them.”

“They’re—I don’t know—welded to my head? I can’t take them off.”

The man sighed, reached over and began pulling on one. Danielbot’s head lifted with it. It didn’t hurt, but it was a strange sensation. The cables that ran through Danielbot’s neck stretched tightly. The fellow started shaking the nodule, making Danielbot’s head wobble. He saw sparks, tiny explosions.

“Stop!” Falstaff was suddenly standing beside them, his hand on the man’s arm. “They won’t come off—you’re going to damage the equipment!” Danielbot wondered if Falstaff meant the nodules, him, or both.

“Just doing my job.” The man averted his eyes, looking angry.

“You’re security. I’m technical. Let me worry about how the damn equipment is used. Just go… guard something.” The guard strutted away. “I’m sorry, Daniel.” Falstaff sat down on the floor beside him.

Danielbot gazed at the bots sprawled around the room. They looked like oversized toys whose batteries had run down, left scattered by a very bored and very large child. “I asked you not to call me by that name. I’m not Daniel anymore.” He looked down at the number on his arm, and then showed it to Falstaff. “A7713. Or Danielbot.”

“You’re going to hear that number enough from the guards, but it’s not going to come from me. I’m sorry—we didn’t anticipate any of this. We were assured we would have independent power. These weren’t things you were supposed to know about.”

“So my… Daniel’s life went on. He was about to make a terrible mistake, and I’ll never know what he decided.”

“We can’t change the past. We don’t even choose the moment at which we take the record. We send this bit of programming back inside a probe, and it recognizes a certain degree of anger, a particular sort of pathology—a matrix of hundreds of violence-related factors. Otherwise we’d be recording thousands of people. We record that person, and we retrieve the recording. There’s one profile for the monsters of history, another for the ones we recruit to act like those monsters—the ones like you we can study and communicate with. I assure you they’re not the same. You’re not here because you’re a bad person. It’s based on probabilities, and hundreds of character traits.”

“Why do you need us? Why make it so complicated? Why not use your own people, volunteers?”

“Well, we would, but they’ve made that illegal. It’s considered human experimentation. I’m not sure the results would be as illuminating, in any case. With a recording we can suppress certain qualities and bring out others. We can make it a controlled experiment. But if we were to use—”

He paused. Danielbot filled in. “Real people?”

“I was going to say ‘an original.’ With people, you get what you get. You can’t change them to fit the experiment better.”

“I get it. I’m clearly not human, so you can feel free to fuck with my life.”

“Daniel… Danielbot, please…”

“No please about it. Please would imply you made a polite request. You didn’t.” Being upset made him feel more human. “But you repeat the scenarios over and over again, using different ones of us?”

“It’s part of the protocol. Each explorer experiences these scenarios slightly differently. We compile the results to get a more accurate glimpse into the violent personae.”

“So, we’re explorers now? Not prisoners?” Danielbot turned his head away from his ex-friend, this roach who hadn’t had the decency to wear his roachness around them, and tried to close his eyes. It was then he realized that bot eyes had no lids, and that only a kind of unconsciousness would completely prevent him from seeing. “You’re like little boys experimenting with pulling the wings off a fly. Once you discovered you could do it, you developed a need to do it.”

“No, it’s not like that. Daniel…”

“Stop calling me Daniel!” One of the guards rushed to respond but Falstaff waved him away. “I fail to see,” Danielbot said, “what you have accomplished here. I’ve only had glimpses of the world out there, admittedly, but what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard, simply based on that I would say you’ve practically destroyed it.”

The two sat in silence for a time. Finally Falstaff stirred. “We always thought we could fix what we’d broken. We were smart enough, we were clever enough. But sometimes the only practical solution is not to break things in the first place.”

There was another rumbling and more of the ceiling came down. The bots jumped up and the guards rushed in to corral them into a semblance of order. Danielbot was separated from Falstaff but didn’t object. He had no plan, and little desire to formulate one.

“We’re moving to the roof to wait for rescue!” one of the guards shouted. The idea seemed ludicrous, but Danielbot had no choice but togo along with it.

Despite their obvious distress, the bots fell into line quickly. But something about the line bothered a few of the guards, who grabbed them, rearranged them, moved them aside like so much excess furniture, prodded them with the rifles. The bots acquiesced, terrified of a possible electrical charge. If one lagged, a charge against the base of the spine sent it sprawling forward, knocking the others out of line. The guards shouted angrily, as if the bots were being willfully disobedient. One of the bots fell and refused to move. Two guards blasted it until smoke issued from its targeted parts.

Eventually the guards herded them into the stairwell. The bots in back, rifles pointed at their heads, shoved those in front of them up the stairs. A bot near the top of the staircase fell, sliding back down with a static-filled howl.

One of the guards poked the fallen form with the end of his rifle. A quick blast at the base of the skull pan made the body jerk, climb to its knee joints, then fall back onto the floor. Another blast stilled it. When it wouldn’t get up again despite determined prodding, two of the guards shoved it into a corner of the landing where it lay like a pile of stray parts.