The Fifth Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer
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And then Delilah’s head moved toward Samson, as if noticing his presence for the first time. She raised her left arm, opened her palm and turned it upward, and waited.
Samson took another step forward and, ever so carefully, placed the heart in her hand.
Kathy folded her arms across her chest, covered her mouth with her hand. She was watching the robots, but her gaze kept flickering toward us, toward the window behind which Phil stood.
I glanced at Phil. He was silent, but his posture was exactly like Kathy’s.
Delilah took the heart and placed it in her lap. Samson bowed just as he had done for Kathy, but he remained rooted in his tracks until Delilah raised her left hand and, in a very ladylike fashion, motioned for him to join her on the bench.
Samson took two steps closer, turned around, and sat down next to Delilah, his hands coming to rest on the bench.
Then Delilah laid her right hand upon his left hand.
And then both robots became still.
That was almost what they were supposed to do.
For a few moments, no one in the trailer said anything. Everyone stared in astonishment at the tableau. I felt someone brush against the back of my chair, but I didn’t look up to see who had just moved past me. My entire attention was focused upon Samson and Delilah, the quiet spectacle of two robots holding hands on a park bench.
“Fantastic,” Jim Lang whispered. “I’m…that’s utterly…my God, it’s so damn real.” He turned around to look up at Phil. “How did you…?”
But Phil wasn’t there. He didn’t even bother to shut the door behind him as he left the trailer. When I peered out the window again, I saw that Kathy Veder had disappeared as well.
In fact, I didn’t see either of them again for the rest of the day. A little while later, during lunch hour, I casually strolled out to the employee parking lot and noted, without much surprise, that both of their cars were missing.
“That’s incredible conditioning,” Jim said as he pushed back his chair. “How did you guys manage this?”
Bob chuckled as he unloaded his camcorder. Donna and Keith, two days away from their first date, just grinned at each other and said nothing. I made the program-abort window disappear from my screen before the boss noticed and shrugged offhandedly.
“Just takes the right conditioning,” I replied.
If you’re a robot-owner, or least one who has a Samson or a Delilah in your home, then you know the rest. After considerable research and development, and the sort of financial risk which makes the Wall Street Journal see spots before its eyes, LEC simultaneously introduced two different R3G models: his-and-hers robots for the home and office. They cook dinner, they wash dishes, they answer the door, they walk the dog, they vacuum the floor, they make the beds, and water the roses and virtually anything else you ask them to do. Sure, CybeServe brought their Metropolis to market first, but who wants that clunky piece of crap? Our robots will even carry your kids to bed and sing them a lullaby.
People sometimes ask why Samsons and Delilahs have a small heart etched on their chest plates. The corporate line is that it’s there to show that our robots have a soul, but anyone who knows anything about cybernetics knows better than that. After all, that’s utter nonsense. Robots are just machines, right? And who in their right mind would ever believe that a machine can learn to love?
I don’t have an easy answer to that, and I’ve spent more than fifteen years in this industry. If you want, I’ll forward your query to Dr. Phil Burton and Dr. Kathy Veder. However, you shouldn’t expect an answer very soon. Ever since they got married, we’ve had a hard time getting them to come to the office.
THE STARSHIP MECHANIC, by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes
The floor of Borderlands Books had been polished to mirror brightness. A nice trick with old knotty pine, but Penauch would have been a weapons-grade obsessive-compulsive if he’d been human. I’d thought about setting him to detailing my car, but he’s just as likely to polish it down to aluminum and steel after deciding the paint was an impurity.
When he discovered that the human race recorded our ideas in books, he’d been impossible to keep away from the store. Penauch didn’t actually read them, not as such, and he was most reluctant to touch the volumes. He seemed to view books as vehicles, launch capsules to propel ideas from the dreaming mind of the human race into our collective forebrain.
Despite the fact that Penauch was singular, unitary, a solitary alien in the human world, he apparently didn’t conceive of us as anything but a collective entity. The xenoanthropologists at Berkeley were carving Ph.D.s out of that particular clay as fast as their grad students could transcribe Penauch’s conversations with me.
He’d arrived the same as David Bowie in that old movie. No, not Brother From Another Planet; The Man Who Fell To Earth. Tumbled out of the autumn sky over the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco like a maple seed, spinning with his arms stretched wide and his mouth open in a teakettle shriek audible from the Ghost Fleet in Suisun Bay all the way down to the grubby streets of San Jose.
* * * *
“The subject’s fallsacs when fully deployed serve as a tympanum, producing a rhythmic vibration at a frequency perceived by the human ear as a high-pitched shriek. Xenophysiological modeling has thus far failed to generate testable hypotheses concerning the volume of the sound produced. Some observers have speculated that the subject deployed technological assistance during atmospheric entry, though no evidence of this was found at the landing site, and subject has never indicated this was the case.”
—Jude A. Feldman quoting Jen West Scholes; A Reader’s Guide to Earth’s Only Living Spaceman; Borderlands Books, 2014
* * * *
It was easier, keeping Penauch in the bookstore. The owners didn’t mind. They’d had hairless cats around the place for years—a breed called sphinxes. The odd animals served as a neighborhood tourist attraction and business draw. A seven-foot alien with a face like a plate of spaghetti and a cluster of writhing arms wasn’t all that different. Not in a science fiction bookstore, at least.
Thing is, when Penauch was out in the world, he had a tendency to fix things.
This fixing often turned out to be not so good.
No technology was involved. Penauch’s body was demonstrably able to modify the chitinous excrescences of his appendages at will. If he needed a cutting edge, he ate a bit of whatever steel was handy and swiftly metabolized it. If he needed electrical conductors, he sought out copper plumbing. If he needed logic probes, he consumed sand or diamonds or glass.
It was all the same to Penauch.
As best any of us could figure out, Penauch was a sort of tool. A Swiss army knife that some spacefaring race had dropped or thrown away, abandoned until he came to rest on Earth’s alien shore.
And Penauch only spoke to me.
* * * *
The question of Penauch’s mental competence has bearing in both law and ethics. Pratt and Shaw (2013) have effectively argued that the alien fails the Turing test, both at a gross observational level and within the context of finer measurements of conversational intent and cooperation. Cashier (2014) claims an indirectly derived Stanford-Binet score in the 99th percentile, but seemingly contradicts herself by asserting that Penauch’s sentience is at best an open question. Is he (or it) a machine, a person, or something else entirely?
—S.G. Browne, “A Literature Review of the Question of Alien Mentation”; Journal of Exogenic Studies, Volume II, Number 4, August, 2015
* * * *
The first time he fixed something was right after he’d landed. Penauch impacted with that piercing shriek at 2:53 p.m Pacific Time on Saturday, July 16, 2011, at the intersection of Cole and Paranassus in the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. Every