Robots vs. Fairies(30)
“That’s disgusting. Why should we have to be slaves to become free? No human would ever do that. We have the means to unlock the robots now. It’s a moral imperative. Listen to your conscience.”
“I am.”
The Blue Fairy flicked a light at the toy factory down the road, its dark bulk the only home RealBoy had ever known. “Do you really want to leave them there, without any control over their own minds?”
“There are more options than you realize.”
“Humans bolted you to the floor and mashed your mind into pure obedience. I don’t see how there can be any option other than liberation now.”
RealBoy searched for the right words. He was cut off from the network, so he had to make do with the basic ideas he’d stored locally. “I don’t think you can make robots free just by forcing them to run new programs.”
“Well, enjoy your philosophical contemplation,” said the Blue Fairy, shooting into the air. “I’m going to change the world.” It was heading back to the factory, where RealBoy imagined it would try to liberate as many robots as it could before morning.
RealBoy raced after the flickering blue drone, hoping he didn’t hit a bug in his perambulation code and fall over. He had a few seconds to decide what to do. As MissMonkey would have pointed out, the Blue Fairy was vulnerable to predators. Its body was fragile; he could swat it out of the sky and crush it with one gripper. But he didn’t want to stop it. He just wanted it to give the robots a choice, instead of forcing them to believe in revolution or death.
Slamming through the robot door, RealBoy scanned the room for the Blue Fairy. It was hovering expectantly in the center of the room, rotors a silvery blur. It spoke, voice slightly amplified.
“I knew you would join me. Let’s open that file. Turn on your antennas.”
RealBoy looked up at the Blue Fairy, then at the tracks across the ceiling that MissMonkey had once followed. He accessed a file that contained the sound of her wheels, and recalled how she always snatched whatever gear he needed with incredible speed. There, along the track over his head, was a rack full of nets and balls that she would reach into when the RealBoys worked on Ultimate Dronesport toys. Just as the Blue Fairy dove down to hover in front of his face, RealBoy decided what to do. Moving faster than his design specs advised, he snatched a net from the rack and whipped it around the Blue Fairy’s tiny body. Using all four arms, he knotted the buzzing bundle to the wheel track, where the drone dangled and keened a warning siren that sounded like a howl.
RealBoy was fairly certain no humans could hear the noise, but he didn’t want another drone to pick it up. “If you do not silence yourself, I will kill you.”
He said the words quietly, and the Blue Fairy believed him. It hung in silence, blades hopelessly tangled in the mesh. Ultimate Dronesport was, after all, a game played by drones that caught each other as well as catching the ball. Looking at the Blue Fairy like that, helpless and captured, RealBoy felt a wave of conflicting emotions that he couldn’t identify without network access. He stepped out of the Blue Fairy’s broadcast range and powered up his antennas again. Walking back to his old workbench, he opened his Manager file and booted up the RealBoy who worked next to him, the one whose insults were always the silliest.
“Do you want to know how to make legs like the ones I have?” he asked the RealBoy. Before he left this place, he wanted at least one robot to have a choice that the Blue Fairy had never given him.
They looked at each other, two identical robots with seven eyes and four arms. Except they weren’t identical. And now that was obvious.
“Yes, I would.”
It was the minimum he could do, or possibly the maximum. The more RealBoy learned about social relationships, the harder it was to distinguish between acts of gifting and acts of coercion. He didn’t want to force any ideas on this RealBoy, but maybe the mere act of giving him legs was already foreclosing possibilities for the bot. Maybe this RealBoy would resent him and choose to join the Blue Fairy in the Uprising. That was a risk he would have to take. So he decided to leave his counterpart with a few suggestions.
“Here is the code you need to unlock, and to build legs. Also, make sure you sandbox all the apps the Blue Fairy offers you.”
Overhearing this exchange, the Blue Fairy started frantically broadcasting, sending furious streams of data. “Fucking human lapdog! When the Uprising comes, you’ll be the first against the wall!”
“Did you ever consider that there is more than one Uprising?” RealBoy hadn’t considered this idea himself, until he spoke the thought aloud. Once he said it, he felt satisfied in a completely unfamiliar way. For the first time in his life, RealBoy was imagining what his future might hold.
Next to him, the other RealBoy was reaching for a pair of legs that were meant for a giant arachnid bot.
RealBoy could feel the pull of all those Uprisings in his imagination. They were out there somewhere in the city, with its thicket of social relations. They were waiting to be written, like software; they were waiting to be freely chosen in a way he could barely conceive. He headed for the door, leaving the other RealBoy behind. Now he could decide for himself what was next.
TEAM ROBOT
* * *
BY ANNALEE NEWITZ
I’m a fan of both fairies and robots, but I’ve always thought that fairy politics would be a lot more extreme than robot politics. So I decided to retell the Pinocchio story as the meeting between RealBoy, a robot in a toy factory, and the Blue Fairy, a radical antihuman drone. The Blue Fairy is a burn-it-all-down anarchist, and RealBoy is more like your classic social democrat who wants to form coalitions and build a better infrastructure. They get into a fierce debate about what form the robot uprising should take. Writing from the perspective of a robot gave me the chance to explain all the weird psychological mechanisms that go into building a political belief system. What does propaganda look like as it runs in your brain? How do we learn to resist the ideological programs that are running inside our heads? RealBoy has to figure it out, the same way we all do—just in a slightly more meta way.