Robots vs. Fairies(76)

“You won’t find him in our cemetery, though. He disappeared one day, in old age, and after he had begat two children, a little girl and a little boy. It was on a salvaging expedition out on the plains, and some say he died at the hands of the rogue machines that still lived there, but some say he finally found that which he was looking for, and he went back to his perfect home, and had one last childhood in that town where the past is eternally preserved. But that, I think, is just a story.”

“But what happened to the robot?” asked Mowgai. “Did it go back?” and there was something lost and sad in his little face. I remember that, so vividly.

And Elder Simeon shook his head, and smiled, and pointed beyond the house, and he said, “The story says that the manshonyagger, seeing that its young charge was well and sound—and being, as I said, so very tired, too—lay down on the ground, and closed its eyes, and slept. And, some say, is sleeping still.”

We looked where he pointed, and we saw the angled hills, and their curious contours; and if you squinted, and if you looked hard enough, you could just imagine that they took on a shape, as of a sleeping, buried giant.

“But . . .,” I said.

“You don’t—” said Mowgai.

And Elder Simeon smiled again, and shook his head, and said, “But I told you, children. It’s just a story.”

*

The days grow short, and the shadows lengthen, and I find myself thinking more and more about the past. Mowgai is gone these many years, but I still miss him. That summer, long ago, we spent days upon days hiking through the curious hills, searching and digging, the way children do. We hoped to find a giant robot, and once, just once, we thought we saw a sudden spark of turquoise light, and the outline of a little girl, not much older than we were, looking down on us, and smiling; but it was, I think, just a trick of the light.

Some say the giant’s still there, lying asleep, and that one day it will wake, when it is needed. We spent all that summer, and much of the next, looking for the buried giant; but of course, we never found it.





TEAM ROBOT




* * *



BY LAVIE TIDHAR

I cheated, in a way, and batted for both teams. You can’t beat giant robots—I have friends who work in medical robotics, and despite my pleas, they keep insisting on building delicate knee-surgery robots rather than the city wreckers I keep asking them to, which, one feels, is very inconsiderate. Robots aren’t really fiction anymore, are they? But I was very taken with the story of Pinocchio (the original, not the movie), which is of course a sort of robot story, and I wondered what happened if you reversed it, in a way, about a real boy who wants to become a machine like his parents . . . and of course that story has a fairy in it, though I suppose my one is also, in her own way, a robot. So . . . go robots?





THREE ROBOTS EXPERIENCE OBJECTS


LEFT BEHIND FROM THE ERA OF HUMANS FOR THE FIRST TIME


by John Scalzi





OBJECT ONE: A BALL.




* * *



K-VRC: BEHOLD THE ENTERTAINMENT SPHERE.

11-45-G: It’s called a ball.

K-VRC: I mean, I know it’s called a ball. I’m just trying to get into the whole “we’re experiencing these human things for the first time” vibe. Jazz it up.

Xbox 4000: What did humans do with these things?

11-45-G: They’d bounce them.

Xbox 4000: And that’s it?

11-45-G: Basically.

K-VRC: These were humans. Bouncing things was close to maxing out their cognitive range.

11-45-G: To be fair, sometimes they hit them with sticks.

Xbox 4000: What, when they misbehaved?

K-VRC: “Bad ball! Think about what you’ve done!”

11-45-G (hands ball to Xbox 4000): Here.

Xbox 4000: What am I going to do with it?

11-45-G: Bounce it.

(Xbox 4000 bounces the ball; it rolls off the table.) K-VRC: How was that for you?

Xbox 4000: Anticlimactic.

K-VRC: Yeah, well, welcome to humans.





OBJECT TWO: A SANDWICH.




* * *



K-VRC: My understanding is that they would shove these into their intake orifices for power.

Xbox 4000: Why would you need an entire orifice for that?

11-45-G: Hey, they had all sorts of orifices. Things went in. Things went out. It was complicated.

Xbox 4000: I have an induction plate.

11-45-G: We all have induction plates.

Xbox 4000: My point. What more do you need? So, they’d shove these into their intake orifices, and then?

K-VRC: Their intake orifices had rocky pegs that would crush them into paste, and then the paste would be forced into an internal vat of acid.

Xbox 4000 (throws up hands): Well, of course! That makes perfect sense.

11-45-G: They could have just dumped this thing into an exterior vat of acid to begin with, and then they wouldn’t need the rocky pegs. They could just directly process the acid-based slurry.

K-VRC: I agree with you, but look. We’re dealing with beings who have internal vats of acid to start with. Expecting logic out of this system is a little much.

Xbox 4000: Who even designed them?

11-45-G: It’s unclear. We checked their code. No creator signature.