“Turn right.”
I could hear again. I had reached a fork in the duct, and I veered to the right. As I crawled forward, my bare knees banged on the thin metal floor and I wondered how all the other robots that must be in the building wouldn’t hear it. When we finally exited the duct, they would be there. Waiting. Patiently, as all robots do. As all robots must—could a robot even be impatient? Can you program something to be impatient?
I was not patient. I’d always wanted everything now, if not earlier. When I was younger, I wanted to do everything my older brother could do—play the video games Mom and Dad would let him play, watch the movies he could watch. I always wanted to use my dad’s latest phone or computer, even though I knew I’d have to wait to use his hand-me-downs.
Dad huffed along behind me, squeezing his large body through the narrow tube. He was in okay shape for a person his age, but it always seemed like he struggled to keep up with me, whether we were going for a run, playing basketball or soccer, or being chased by killer robots. He fell farther behind as I continued on, and I heard his wheezing voice: “Wait up!”
We came to a cross where we were presented with three directions to choose from. “Stop,” Dad spluttered. I held still, and he as well, though as we listened for pursuers all we could hear was his labored breathing. Somewhere far below us, we heard a door slam. We listened. Dad’s breathing had calmed, and now, just barely, we heard voices. In a room below us.
Sir, they’ve disappeared. Dr. Fineman thinks they went up into the HVAC system, but the two grunts he sent up didn’t come back.
Send more up. Try to direct them toward the experimentation rooms.
The father has a gun.
A pause.
And that concerns me… how?
But sir, do we want to send more men up if they just get shot?
Another pause.
Very well, sir.
Robots called themselves men. I don’t know why—even if they looked like people, they weren’t. They were programmed. They had metal bones, metal skulls, fiber optics in their brains and nerves.
But they bled.
A few years ago, I watched the Terminator movies with my brother when Mom and Dad were out on a date. Our robots were kind of like those movie robots, but ours were way more real. More human. Grittier, funnier, kinder, and deadlier. And they weren’t all evil. At least, I don’t think so.
I met one once, in school. The principal had arranged an assembly, and a robot came to speak to us. He was nice, even funny, even if the humor seemed forced. Staged. He said he was part of a group of robots that believed that humans and his kind could live in harmony, despite our recent history. He said there were some groups of robots that wanted the world to themselves, but most were peaceful. Our principal said it was kind of like the problem we’d all had with jihadists a few decades ago. Most Muslims were peaceful, even though a few wanted to kill us all.
But a Muslim couldn’t punch his fist through a human torso.
The speaking had stopped. Dad pointed to the right again and I crept forward as quietly as I could. I can’t remember how large the building was—it just looked like a police station—but we had been crawling for several minutes.
Dad and I had been hiding in a dumpster last night when they picked us up. We thought they were the police, and they said they could take us to a safe place. When they brought us in the building, they separated us, and one officer asked me the strangest questions for about an hour before Dad showed up in the office and blew the man’s brains out. Questions like, Have you ever wanted to kill a loved one? Were you ever attracted to your mother? If a stranger offered you candy to stab him, would you do it? If a group of babies was about to be crushed by a falling building, how many would you save, knowing that each additional child you saved increased the chances of all of you dying by ten percent? Have you ever heard voices in your head telling you to do things? I didn’t know how to answer some of them, and it started feeling really creepy.
We entered a stretch of tubing that had short branches going off to the right every ten feet or so, and with my light I saw that they all ended in vents after a few feet. Each branch must have terminated over a separate room. I pointed down one of them.
“How about here?” I whispered.
Dad hesitated, but said, “Okay. But let me go first.” I crawled ahead a few feet to let him open the grate, and after a minute he crawled through into the dark room. I followed. The space was filled with a long table surrounded with chairs. Some kind of conference room. There were a few whiteboards with diagrams and equations on them, and lots of Spanish.
The robots all spoke perfect Spanish. It made sense, since the first robots had been made by a team at the University of Buenos Aires, and that was the language they coded in. When the robots started to learn on their own and reached the singularity, they preserved Spanish as their main language, but most robots seemed to speak English just fine, too. Just another program to upload, I supposed.
The singularity was a lot less awesome than some people thought it would be. The idea was that mankind would build smarter and smarter computer programs, until finally, the programs themselves could design an even smarter program—without the help of a human. That program would then design an even smarter one, in less time, and the smarter one would build an even more advanced one in even less time, and so forth—until the time between one generation and the next would be so small that overnight there would be superintelligent computers. It didn’t happen quite that way—certain laws of physics took over, I didn’t really understand it. But robots did start to build other robots, until one day they started to look and sound just like humans.
Dad put the grate back and tiptoed to the door. He put his ear up to it and listened for several minutes, his breathing assuming a regular pace now, and then motioned that I was to follow him. I cracked the door open and looked out into the hallway. It was lit, but we didn’t see anyone there. Down the hallway to the right we spotted a small room where we could hear a copy machine hard at work.
Dad motioned to the left with his head and I followed him. He glided quickly down the hall and opened the next door down. We entered and shut the door as quietly as we could behind us. In this room was another table, but this one was set as if for dinner. There were place settings, cups, plates, butter, pitchers of water, and in the middle, a basket of fruit.
My parents found me on their doorstep in a basket. I was nearly one, and they never found out who left me. My mom, my new mom, had been in a car accident the year before that left her unable to have any more kids—just Charlie, who’s four years older than me—so she called me her miracle baby. They never told me about it though, until a few years ago, and I was always the type to have irrational fears about being different anyway. For years, until I was ten or so, I thought I was retarded. Like, literally retarded. My reasoning was that a retarded person wouldn’t know they were retarded, so because I thought I was normal, that meant I was retarded. It affected how I talked, and gave me serious self esteem issues—so bad that lots of other kids probably thought I was retarded. Then last year I thought I was gay because a kid on the bus said “That’s so gay!” after I told him something—which I can’t even remember now, I just remember being petrified when he said it since the gays at my school weren’t treated very well by the other kids. Not until I kissed Suzie Wilkinson a few months later did that fear get put to rest.