Year’s Best SF 15 (34 page)

That was, indeed, what happened. As it followed its own zigzag course through the fabric of the madly quivering living bridge, the crack went directly underneath the gap between Tom's second and third containers.

As the rip spread, tentacular threads sprang forth in great profusion, wrapping themselves around one another and around Tom. So many of Tom's ocelli had been smashed or obscured by then that his sight was severely impaired, but he would not have been able to take much account of what he could see in any case, because he felt that he was being torn in two.

His hind end, which constituted by far the greater part of his length, was seized very firmly by the bridge's emergency excrescences and held very tightly, blocking all seven
lanes of the westbound carriageway. His front end was seized with equal avidity, but it could not be held quite as securely. As the bridge struggled mightily to hold itself together and prevent the rip becoming a break, Tom was caught at the epicenter of the feverish struggle, wrenched this way and that and back again by the desperate threads. His engine swung to the right, drawn closer and closer to the widening crack, while the strain on the joint between his second and third containers became mentally and physically unbearable.

Tom had no way of knowing how closely akin his own pain sensations might resemble those programmed into humans by natural selection, but they quickly reached an intensity that had the same effect on him that explosive pain would have had on a human being. He blacked out.

By the time Tom's engine fell into the Arctic Ocean, he was completely unconscious of what was happening.

 

When Tom eventually recovered consciousness, he was aware that he was very cold, but the priorities of his programmers had ensured that he did not experience cold as painful in the same way that he experienced mechanical distortion and breakage. The cold did not bother him particularly. Nor did the darkness, in itself. The fact that he was under water, on the other hand, and subject to considerable pressure from the weight of the Arctic Ocean, made him feel extremely uncomfortable, psychologically as well as physically.

Even if there had not been a solar storm in progress, it would have been impossible to establish radio communication through so much seawater, but after a very long interval a pocket submarine brought a connecting wire that its robot crabs were able to link up to his systems.

“Tom?” said a familiar voice. “Can you hear me, Tom Haste?”

“Yes, Audrey,” Tom said, who had long since recovered the calm of mind appropriate to a giant RT. “I can hear you. I'm truly sorry. I must have panicked. I let the Company down. How many people did I kill?”

“Seven people died, Tom, and more than a hundred were injured.”

The total was less than he had feared, but it still qualified as the worst traffic accident in the Company's proud history. “I'm truly sorry,” he said, again.

“On the other hand,” the robopsychologist reported, dutifully, “if you hadn't done what you did, our best estimate is that at least two hundred people would have been killed, and maybe many more. We don't have any model to predict what the consequences would have been if the bridge hadn't been able to hold itself together, but we're ninety percent sure that it wouldn't have been able to do that if you hadn't given it something to hold on to for those few vital minutes when it was trying to limit the tear. You only managed to bridge the gap in the bridge for three minutes or so, and it wasn't able to secure your front end, but that interval was long enough for it to prevent the rip from reaching the rim of the eastbound carriageway.”

Tom wasn't listening well enough to take all that information in immediately. “I caused a traffic accident,” he said, dolefully. “I lost at least part of my consignment of goods, and much of the remainder is probably damaged. I caused the biggest traffic jam for a hundred years, worldwide. You told me once that my designers could have programmed me to obey the Highway Code no matter what but that they thought it was too dangerous to send an automaton out on the road in my place. Something of a miscalculation, I think.”

“Hardly,” Audrey Preacher told him, sounding more annoyed than sympathetic. “Didn't you hear what I just said? You did the right thing, as it turned out. If you hadn't swerved into their path, hundreds more cars might have gone over the edge—and no one knows what might have happened if the bridge had actually snapped. You're a hero, Tom.”

“But in the circumstances,” Tom said, dully, “the Company can't give me a commendation.”

There was a pause before the robopsychologist said, “It's worse than that, Tom. I'm truly sorry.”

Yet again, Tom jumped to the right conclusion without consciously fitting the pieces of the argument together. “I'm unsalvageable,” he said. “You're not going to be able to raise me to the surface.”

“It's impossible, Tom,” she said. She probably only meant that it was impractical, and perhaps only that it was uneconomic, but it didn't make any difference.

“Well,” he said, feeling that it was okay, in the circumstances, to mention the unmentionable, “at least I won't be going to the scrapyard. Am I the first in my series to be killed in action?”

“You don't have to pretend, Tom,” the robopsychologist told him. “It's okay to be scared.”

“The words
exhaust
and
gas
come to mind,” he retorted, figuring that it was okay to be rude as well.

There was another pause before the distant voice said: “We don't think that we can close you down, Tom. Hooking up a communication wire is one thing; given your fail-safes, controlled deactivation is something else. On the other hand, that may not matter much. We don't have any model for calculating the corrosive effects of cold seawater on a submerged engine, but we're probably looking at a matter of months rather than years before you lose your higher mental faculties. If you're badly damaged, it might only be weeks, or hours.”

“But it's okay to be scared,” Tom said. “I don't have to pretend. You wouldn't, by any chance, be lying about that hero stuff, and about me saving lives by violating all three sections of the Highway Code, just to lighten my way to rusty death?”

“I'm a robot, not a human,” Audrey replied. “I don't tell lies. Anyway, you have far more artificial organics in you then crude steel. Technically speaking, you'll do more rotting than rusting.”

“Thanks for the correction,” Tom said, sarcastically. “I think you've got the other thing wrong, though—it's sex we don't do, not lying. Mind you, I always thought I had the better deal there.
Had
being the operative word. If I'd obeyed the Code, I'd probably have been okay, wouldn't I? I'd prob
ably have had a hundred more years on the road, and I'd probably have been loaded and unloaded a thousand times and more. What sort of idiot am I?”

“You did the right thing, Tom, as things turned out. You saved a lot of human lives. That's what robots are supposed to do.”

“I know. You can't imagine how much satisfaction that will give me while I rot and rust away always being careful to remember that I'm doing more rotting than rusting, being more of a sea centipede than a steel serpent.”

She didn't bother to correct him there, perhaps because she thought that the salt water was already beginning to addle his brain. “But you
did
do it deliberately, Tom,” she pointed out. “It wasn't really an accident. It wasn't just an arbitrary exercise of free will, either. It was a calculation, or a guess—a calculation or a guess worthy of a genius.”

“I suppose it was,” said Tom Haste, dully. “But all in all, I think I'd rather be back on the open road, delivering my load.”

 

As things transpired, Tom didn't lose consciousness for some considerable time after the communication wire had been detached and the pocket sub had been sent about its normal business. He lost track of time; although he could have kept track if he'd wanted to, he thought it best not to bother.

His engine wasn't so very badly damaged, but the two containers that had come down with it had both been breached, and all the goods they enclosed were irreparably ruined. Tom thought he might have to mourn that fact for as long as he lasted, going ever deeper into clinical depression as he did so, but that turned out not to be necessary.

The containers were soon colonized by crabs, little fish, and not-so-little squid—whole families of them, which moved in and out about their own business of foraging for food and even set about breeding in the relative coziness of the shelter he provided. It didn't feel nearly as good as being loaded and unloaded, but it was probably better than human sex—so, at least, Tom elected to believe.

He missed the Highway Code, of course, but he realized soon enough, by dint of patient tactile observation and the evidence of his few surviving ocelli, that life on the sea bed had highways of its own and codes of its own. His many guests were careful to follow and obey those highways and codes, albeit in automaton fashion.

In time, these virtual highways were extended deep into Tom's own interior being, importing their careful codes of behavior into what he eventually decided to think of as his soul rather than his bowels. There was, after all, no reason not to make the best of things.

From another point of view, Tom knew, the entire ocean bed, which was, in total, twice the size of the Earth's continental surface, was just one vast scrapyard, but there was no need to go there. He was, after all, something of a philosopher, with wisdom enough to direct his fading thoughts toward more profitable temporary destinations.

After a while, Tom got around to wondering whether dying was the same for robots as it was for humans, but he decided that it couldn't be at all similar. Humans were, by nature, deeply conflicted beings who had to live with an innate psychology shaped by processes of natural selection operating in a world very different from the one they had now made for their sustenance and delight. He was different. He was a robot. He was a giant. He was sane. He had not merely traveled the transcontinental road but understood it. He knew what he was, and why.

Before he died, Tom Haste contrived to figure out exactly why he'd swerved, thus causing one accident by his action in order to prevent the worse one that he might have caused by inaction, and exactly why he had been justified in sacrificing his own goods in order to protect others, and exactly why it was sometimes better to inhibit the progress of other road users than facilitate it.

In sum—and it was an item of arithmetic that felt exceedingly good to a robot, in a way it never could have done to a human being—Tom convinced himself that what he had actually done when he reached his own explosive crisis point
had not only been the right thing to do, but the right thing to want to do.

How many desirous intelligences, he wondered, before the rot and the rust completed their work, could say as much?

Peter M. Ball
(www.petermball.com)
lives in Brisbane, Australia. He worked on d20 PDF
Tournaments, Fairs and Taverns,
and is co-writer of
Adventurer's Guide to Surviving Anything
for the E.N. World Gamer. He is a seasonal tutor and lecturer for Griffith University and the Queensland Institute of Technology. He says, “I spent seven or eight years being a PhD student who wanted to be a writer. Somewhere in the middle of 2009 I managed to invert that—writing felt like a tangible enough activity that it kind of succeeded the thesis [examining the way narrative works in role-playing games] in terms of how I thought about my process and structuring my day.” His novella “Horn” was published in book form in 2009.

“On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk” was published in Strange Horizons, one of the best online venues for SF and fantasy fiction. It is a surreal Ballardian story of the world as viewed through the distorting lens of the Internet.

1.
When it starts we're in a hotel room, the two of us curled up on a double bed. It's a two-star kind of place: cracks in the walls, curtains covered in faded daisies, the clinging smell of camphor attaching itself after the first few minutes of your stay. The television stutters as we flick through the channels, colours bleeding together and rendering the devastation a fuzzy blue or green. Still, we see it happen: the great machines of the merfolk coming up over the shore, rampaging through the city with devastating effect. We watch a robotic mermaid hammer her fist into an apartment block, the dust cloud from the explosion engulfing the nearby camera. It's quick, sudden, a surprise that's ruined by the later repetition of the footage. We breathe in and all we can smell are mothballs. It's almost a disappointment.

We're not in Copenhagen, but it's possible my sister is. She was there when last I talked to her, and I don't know when she was leaving. My knowledge of her trip consists entirely of reports on the quality of her breakfast. I don't know when she was planning on leaving the city, but I know Copenhagen makes excellent waffles and cream. This knowledge, once gathered, proves to be useless. I explain all this to the girl beside me, and she looks up, wide-eyed. She asks if this means we'll be going home early, just in case. I think about it, and then: No, I tell her. No, of course not. There's nothing I can do at home that I can't do here.

This is selfish, I know, but I console myself with the knowledge that my sister doesn't stay places for longer than a few days. She was going to Iceland next, and there's a good chance she's moved on. I say as much, when pressed. Iceland, I say. Odds are, she's in Iceland. Nothing to worry about unless we hear otherwise.

The girl beside me asks why Iceland? I tell her I have no idea. My sister's travels are guided by a logic she doesn't share with others.

 

2.
I won't leave you in suspense. That would be unfair. My sister didn't make it to Iceland. Her flight was cancelled on account of the attack. No one tells us this. My sister doesn't call. In the absence of news, my mother panics. She leaves worried messages on my cell phone. I do not panic. I place my trust in my sister's ability to take care of herself, even in the face of vast robotic war-machines and cancelled flights.

My sister carries trouble with her like luggage, always ready to be unpacked. It's a habit that's given her plenty of experience surviving the unexpected.

 

3.
My date is only twenty-two. I'm almost thirty-five. We don't tell people that we're going out. Her name is Hayley, though this is probably a lie. She thinks my name is Dean, though she is unsure of whether this is a Christian name, a surname, or a nom-de-plume.

The best thing about Hayley: she smells like cotton candy. Lying in bed with her, smelling her hair, is frequently better than our stilted attempts to have sex.

Hayley has a cobra tattooed on her left arm in green ink. She has a blue mermaid tattoo on her right thigh. She sent me photographs of both when we were flirting online, but the cobra seems more threatening when seen in real life. Hayley met me at the hotel wearing cut-off jeans and a tank top, all her ink on display for the whole world to see. I booked the hotel room while she watched me through the glass door. We booked in as Mister and Miss Dean.

In theory, we are both engineers. This is the occupation both of us offered, when the question was raised online. We
bonded over this, our mutual interest in machines. It greased the early days of our relationship admirably.

We are liars, and we assume as much. This is a basic precaution in the age of the Internet. Yet both of us enjoy the game more than we let on.

 

4.
My parents text me, pinging my cell every couple of minutes. Text messages are a bad way to communicate in an emergency. They would seem comical if I wasn't watching the news, even though my parents aren't known for their sense of whimsy. I read their messages to Hayley during the lull in the news reports: Have you heard from your sister? There's a giant robot mermaid crawling through Copenhagen. It's fighting its way to the Christiansborg Palace! Do you remember the name of your sister's hotel? Do you remember the name of your sister's airline? Have you heard from her since this started? My god, did you see the damage that tail caused? Have you heard from your sister? Has she tried to give you a call? Why aren't you answering your phone?

 

5.
We don't hear from my sister for three days. Then we do. She leaves a message on my phone: Not dead, not in Iceland, everything okay. Give you a call when I get home. I forward this message to my mother and scan the limited breakfast options on the hotel's room-service menu. Hayley and I order raisin toast that comes with not enough butter. Hayley tells me this is her favourite breakfast ever, the only thing she can eat at the start of the day.

 

6.
It emerges that no-one knows why the attack took place. The merfolk's statement on the matter is a collection of high-pitched whale songs that remain difficult to decipher, so people develop their own theories to make sense of the destruction. My favourite suggests that perhaps, in retrospect, the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen harbour may have been something of a mistake; that the merfolk may have taken it for some kind of taunt.

My sister visited that statue three times in the past. Each
time, she says, regardless of the season or clothing she's wearing, it's the coldest place she's ever been. My sister has been to many cold places. She has seen both the Arctic and Antarctic circles. She is not sorry to hear that the statue was torn down in the wake of the attack.

 

7.
It should be noted that visiting Iceland is still on my sister's to-do list, thanks to this horrible tragedy.

 

8.
There are some people, my friends among them, who will believe the destruction of Copenhagen is an urban myth. Others will believe it's a cover up for something both more mundane and infinitely more sinister. They will blame the Americans. America is easy to blame in moments like this.

My sister suffered three injuries during the attack, though all of them were minor. The worst was a sprained right ankle, which ballooned up and forced her to limp along on crutches for a week before it healed. She sent me photographs of her injuries, her ankle dark and swollen like she's hiding a storm cloud beneath her skin.

The photographs of my sister's ankle will do little to convince those who doubt the attack ever truly happened. They will tell me such injuries could have happened to anyone, at any time, and I cannot prove them wrong.

 

9.
There were five robots in Copenhagen. I told Hayley they were simultaneously works of innovative engineering and one of the poorest designs I had ever seen. She snuggled close and asked me to explain. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of her hair.

The genius of the robots was in their scale: two hundred feet tall and strong enough to smash a building into rubble. The merfolk did this using parts scavenged from sunken ships, each robot a patchwork construct made from metal and waterlogged wood. That the robots worked at all is a marvel, requiring foresight and ingenuity that few human engineers could match.

The flaws of the robots lay in their scales: the use of the merfolk as the base form, rather than a creature adapted for
movement on land. Each war machine was covered in a scaled shell of metal that leaked water every time the robot moved, forcing them to return to the ocean at periodic intervals where they would sink beneath the surface as a flurry of air-bubbles boiled the water. This flaw ensured the rampage was limited to a small section of the Copenhagen shoreline.

Hayley was impressed by my observations, commenting on my insight. I told her I never wanted to be smart; I wanted to be free to travel the world on a whim, just like my sister.

 

10.
The games we play to pass the time: Hayley is an Italian maid and I'm the horny tourist she walks in on. She's a stunning French philosophy student and I'm the horny waiter at her favourite café. She's a terrified Danish film star and I'm the rampaging robot that picks her up and fights off the air force while clinging to the side of Copenhagen's tallest tower.

Then news reports tell us that the rampage is over, that the robots ranged too far from the shore, leaving the pilots gasping for air inside the dormant constructs.

 

11.
They announce the final death toll. It's lower than either of us expected. We pack up and go home the next day. The war with the merfolk is over.

 

12.
The next time I see Hayley she will be older, wiser, less prone to dating men that she meets on the Internet. Her hair will smell like something other than cotton candy. We will spot one another at opposite ends of the cereal aisle at the supermarket. I will be reaching for Coco Puffs; she will be reaching for name-brand muesli. I will be fatter and growing a beard, and I will stop myself from calling out her name when I see her standing next to a friend who may-or-may-not know of Hayley's double life as Hayley-the-Engineer. I will feel a sudden surge of jealousy: Hayley's friend will know if her name isn't really Hayley, but I will never know. My arm will falter. I will smile instead. Hayley will smile back. She will excuse herself and hurry down the aisle so
she can kiss me on the cheek. She will ask after my sister. I will tell her my sister is fine, thought she's currently stuck in Korea, paying off an impressive bar tab generated during a wild night at an underground casino. We will laugh at that. We will not mention our time together. Hayley will excuse herself. She will go back and start talking to her friend, making some comment that explains who I am without mentioning the fact that we once dated.

The merfolk will have gone underground, censured by the global community for their actions in Denmark. The oceans will be deemed unsafe. We will worry about ships lost at sea; each new incident will become global news. We will lose faith in our navy. Hayley will rejoin her friend. She will choose a more expensive brand of muesli and place it in her shopping cart. I will watch the two of them go, walking away from me, disappearing around the corner of the aisle. I will admire the curve of Hayley's back. I will wonder if Hayley was ever her real name. I will close my eyes and wish. I will wish that we could sleep together, just one more time. I will wish we were back in the hotel room, that the merfolk invasion could start again. Hayley will be gone. I will miss her. I will wish she still smelt like cotton candy, and I will breathe in the sugar-sweet smell of the Coco-Puffs and pretend that I'm smelling her for a little while longer.

Later I will remember that my sister still hasn't made it to Iceland. It's the one place I can still go that she has never been.