18
THE GUARDS WERE extremely nervous the first day or so as everyone camped out on the roof. They brandished their electric rifles at the slightest sign of resistance, screaming at the bots and threatening deadly force. It might have been the openness of the setting, without cover if there was a rebellion, although Danielbot could not imagine his fellow mechanical men organizing and attacking.
There must have been an adjustment in policy because no rifles were actually fired. What surprised Danielbot most was how quickly everyone fell into their roles: the guards standing up straight in their blue uniforms, attempting to walk and talk with authority and to devise humiliating games designed to keep the bots off-balance. After a few days they seldom brought their rifles down to a ready position. The bots, despite their larger size and heavy frames, developed a subservient posture, bowing their upper bodies to make themselves appear shorter, avoiding eye contact, and for the most part doing what they were told.
The skies were continuously gray with an occasional redness in the lower clouds, and black smoke hung just above the skyline. Far below, waves hit the building with a churning and shushing, but Danielbothad no intention of going close enough to the edge of the roof to steal a glimpse. Now and then the sky tore into rain and there was no shelter. The guards used a roll of plastic to create a makeshift roof they could sit under. Maybe the bots were waterproof. In any case they weren’t offered a solution. Most of them just stood about in the downpour.
Some of the guards claimed that a helicopter would come to take them all off the roof. Danielbot would be surprised if anyone had that kind of fuel to spare. It wasn’t stated openly, but he expected that only the guards were subject to rescue, leaving the “equipment” behind. He overheard one of them say they should just shoot the bots and escape before it was too late. Another said there was no such order, so he was holding tight.
The bots knew many of their fellows by voice, but the guards couldn’t tell them apart without their fleshy mirages, and referred to the prisoners by their serial numbers or a truncated version thereof.
Danielbot—and to some degree Leninbot—kept to the edges of the groups, and thanks to Falstaff’s occasional interventions, were left alone much of the time and protected from the pettier forms of harassment, although they weren’t excluded from prisoner counts. The worse thing was bearing witness to the demeaning activities the guards devised to promote discipline and the bots quickly acquiesced to.
Count-offs happened an hour or so apart, or whenever there had been a minor altercation or disagreement, or whenever a guard decided to entertain a whim.
“Count off, alphabetical followed by numerical!”
“A7713!”
“A15510!”
“B10232!”
“B14368!”
“EH7384!”
If an error was made in the count, the bots had to repeat it twice. The guards would sometimes become creative with the counts, ordering the prisoners to deliver them backwards, or to skip every other numeral, or to call out a number thirteen more than their actual number. Sometimes physical movements were added to the count, push-ups or jumping jacks, activities not well suited to their mechanical frames.
Danielbot had begun to suspect that, besides personality and individual history, a certain amount of acquiescence had been programmed into their bot brains, a tendency to obey identified authority figures. Otherwise, he could not explain their willingness to follow orders, or his inability to even imagine a rebellion.
Some of the bots were made to stay in one spot for hours. Physically this was no challenge, but they had been provided with full memories of what pain and fatigue felt like, so after awhile they suffered accordingly.
When left alone, the bots returned to the same rooftop activities they’d participated in when they’d worn their human guises. They played their invented board games, danced and sang, or attempted to perform physical exercise. They subjected each other to petty abuse. The guards allowed the abuse to happen, but if too large a crowd gathered they would warn them off by punishing the first available offender. One of the guards discovered that a low level dose of electricity applied constantly to the back of the head pan might produce both delirium and persistent pain without death (or rather, “an irreversible shutdown”). There was no physical reason for the pain, but the bots felt it anyway. The guard looked excited to watch.
Around their fourth afternoon on the roof, there must have been a significant current surge in the systems below because some of the bots were suddenly refreshed with their old appearances, Leninbot included. He smiled as he rubbed at his pink, illusory skin. Danielbot returned the smile but neither made any attempt at morecontact.
At this point the Danielbot didn’t care much if he looked like Daniel ever again. It was all an ugly lie and to have his perfect disguise returned to him would have only made it worse. Somehow he needed to embrace who he was and not who he was not.
For Danielbot, along with the current surge had come a renewed onslaught of violent memories, highly fragmented and without his usual sense of participation. The memories played as a reel of vicious movie scenes spliced together with no sense of continuity or artistry. Urban gang wars blended into southern lynchings, then bits of Abu Grabe, suicide bombers in the Mideast, and Jim Jones exhorting parents to feed their children poisoned Kool-Aid. Danielbot wondered if whatever medium they’d used to store the threads of violent memories trawled from the past had become corrupted. It seemed he might be receiving the bottom-of-the-barrel bits, the test runs and the unsuccessful attempts, the events too old to retrieve cleanly—whatever was left over in the backwaters of the memory banks.
In the late afternoon dimness, the roof had become a broad field of prairie grass, low-lying hills on the horizon, a few distant twists of tree. Smoke and weeping, howls of pain.
The soldiers were aiming at a small brown-skinned running form, although the child was much too young to run properly, a toddler at most who staggered and fell and got himself up again. The Colorado Indian Wars. 1864 or thereabouts. The men were laughing, poking fun at each other’s limited skills. “You shoot like my ol’ granny, after she’d been drinkin’ all day!”
The one with the scraggly red beard cursed, tried again, taking his time. The small form dropped. They cheered.
“In my neighborhood we called them the shadow people. They’d come in the middle of the night and the next day you’d find them camped out in the alley, or on a playground, sometimes even in your back yard. That was around the start of it.” John had been sitting beside him, speaking, but Danielbot hadn’t noticed him until now. “When they first reached the coast. Some of them had gone up into New York first, but the people from the southwestern states had gotten there first, so they came here.”
“The people escaping South America,” Danielbot said. “And Mexico.”
“That’s right. How did you—” John frowned. “Oh yes, your last scenario was with the God of Mayhem. We used to share our contemporary criminal findings with law enforcement and the military, but that was back when those agencies were more functional.
“It’s an odd thing, with all that we can do, the things we can make, the miracles we can accomplish—your very existence being one of them—that we can’t seem to solve the food problem, or the overpopulation problem, or the environmental problem. We’ve had a helluva time just keeping our people sheltered, much less providing them with worthwhile things to do.