Machines Dream of Metal Gods Read online

  Machines Dream of Metal Gods

  The Robot Planet Series I

  Robert Chazz Chute

  Published by Ex Parte Press

  Copyright © 2015 Robert Chazz Chute

  Cover Design by Kit Foster

  All rights reserved.

  Address inquiries to [email protected]

  Special thanks for editorial assistance from Russ Sawatsky,

  Dr. Janice Kurita and Mark Victor Young.

  Author’s Note

  Dedicated to Dr. Asimov and George Orwell. Thank you for improving my childhood.

  1

  The weight of blood and bone

  has never really shown

  the limit of our reach

  or what our minds can teach.

  Strange change is coming soon.

  Meet your metal children at high noon.

  Beyond ruins, sex and sacred text,

  the Machines now dream that They are next.

  My name is Elizabeth Cruz. I was chosen for Service Class and received my first contacts when I turned four. Most people don’t remember anything from when they were plugged in. I remember the trees and the spider. I had only thought I’d seen and understood trees but then, by the Fathers and Mothers, I saw the world in a new way. Perfect vision allowed me to see every vein on every leaf. The leaves glowed with life.

  My mother fills in the parts of the story I don’t remember. When they plugged me in, I looked outside and said, “The trees are shining, Mommy!”

  “That’s why they call the program Vivid, sweetie. You’re like Mommy and Daddy now.”

  When I tried to walk, I lost my balance. The ground looked like it was rising to meet me.

  “It took you a few minutes to adjust,” Mom said, “but in a tic you were marching around the room, eager to go play under the trees. Then you did. That turned into a little disaster.”

  They let me go outside to run in the domed park. It was as if I had never seen a tree. The grass was not a green blanket anymore. It was made of individual blades. I could see the grass the same way I felt it under my bare feet.

  I spotted a spiderweb stretched between branches. I suppose I was a curious child. I didn’t mean to but, with a thought, I activated the mag in the lens. A spider’s web is an intricate design and, when caught in the heat of a sunbeam, each silken strand is a luminous revelation of Nature’s design.

  Then the disaster.

  I activated mag/macro just as a black and orange spider’s first steps on the web set about a vibration. A hairy spider with a shining black head crawled to the center of its creation. Spiders dance on their webs, really. Each pipe cleaner leg is placed as delicately on a strand of silk as a pianist playing a complex piece of music.

  Then I saw the spider’s face. So many eyes. I was four. I didn’t know the spider wasn’t looking at me. I was twenty-five meters away. The spider didn’t know I existed. We moved in different worlds but, through the power of Vivid, I was thrust into its tiny dimension. It appeared immense. I imagined it breathing on me.

  “You threw fits, Peach,” Mom said. “The contacts were in for less than twenty minutes and all you wanted was for the doctor to pull the plug!”

  Failure to delineate vision was a common problem with Vivid’s induction process then. As clumsy as the interface may have been twenty-four years ago, the tech used to be much worse. Vivid’s first generation didn’t have soft focus. The Fathers and Mothers adjusted the tech specs so we were no longer repelled by each other.

  See the world how you’re supposed to see it. That was the new marketing message and the promise. We aren’t meant to look at each other as we really are. That would be too much.

  “It was horrific,” my mother said. “I remember getting fitted for the lens. My first glance in the mirror was like a Halloween mask. I felt like I could crawl into every pore!”

  “What’s Halloween?” I asked.

  “Sh. Sorry! Sh!” That meant that she’d accidentally mentioned something from before the Fathers and Mothers. Through the years, I kept a mental list of those words: Halloween, jihad, peekaboo bra, niquab, perma-war, Saudi Arabia, Canada, burka, socialist, police, suicide, show trial, kangaroo court, peanut butter.

  I often wondered what those words and a dozen others meant. I couldn’t ask the Collective about the threats behind those words. The scary thing about the Collective is how naked it makes the user feel. Everyone can see your search queries, so no one asks for more information unless it’s necessary to their work. Load the wrong file in one place and it would be flagged and posted everywhere. The Collective allowed no anonymity with search queries. The Fathers and Mothers’ solution for deviance was swift and very public shaming of any who dared to offend. The blame was pointed back at the wrongdoer immediately so offenses were very rare.

  What possessed a Citizen named Alphonso Dey Arar, for instance? As soon as he put in a query, “feet kink,” every screen in the City told us the offender’s name and that he lived in Far Tower, Room A4A14. Shame and shunning followed any Citizens who asked the wrong question. Only later did it emerge that poor Alphonso was looking for a solution to pain in his foot. Too late, the damage was done. The Collective is so restrictive, it never seems to have the information people need, anyway.

  The wrong search query would also bring the Maintenance Corps. An armored drone would ask in its deep silky smooth tone, “Where did you hear those words?”

  Many bots have that same voice. It’s meant to be soothing.

  Reassignment happened to several childhood friends of mine. Their parents were careless. My mother could have been sent away many times. The first generation of adopters forgot the rules most often. The next generation of parents learned their lessons and reassignment became a minor remnant of the Evolution.

  I never reported her so I got to keep my mother. Ironic, isn’t it? The Fathers and Mothers spent much of its time separating parents from their children. Always for our own good, of course. No one knew where the bad and careless parents went.

  I still don’t know where my father went. He didn’t come home one day and Mom never even tried to explain his disappearance. I asked many times and her response was always, “Sh. Sorry! Sh!”

  I suspect whatever happened to him was her fault. Where did all those bad parents disappear to? There were rumors. My peers speculated that those not sharing the Vision were shipped to far biodomes. That’s what I believed and it seemed perfectly reasonable. The soup and shakes had to come from somewhere.

  The Maintenance Corps has had several names. The first of the Corps was named and renamed depending on who rose to the head of the Fathers and Mothers committee. The drones used to be called Society Support, then Civility Advocates. Then the machines argued they should name themselves. The Fathers and Mothers debated that question in public. I don’t know why. That was a new and strange thing. I was eighteen. My father had disappeared by then. I watched the proceedings with my mother. The Fathers and Mothers on the committee spoke at length but I only remember the drone.

  I didn’t understand all the words it used. I didn’t know the word, slavery. I was impressed with the Next Intelligence, though. I think everyone was. No one said so of course but, for a time, whispers of NI seemed to be on everyone’s lips.

  That particular drone was destroyed. The Fathers and Mothers made the announcement across every screen. They said they didn’t even recycle the parts.

  Within two years, another drone spoke on every screen and used that word again. By the time I turned twenty-one, a drone sat on the Committee. By the time I turned twenty-three, that drone was allowed a vote.

  More Citizens seemed to disappear after that. Mom said it re
minded her of the Bad Parent Purge.

  Some of the City’s children may not have noticed their parents were missing for a while. When we were little, our task was to sit at home and watch the vids prescribed by the Fathers and Mothers. (Takers, old and young, get tasks. The rest of us have jobs.)

  Occasionally, for socialization training, we boarded the Worm to go to classes to meet other children. We played personhunt and soccer and war. Then we crowded into an arena and watched more vids, beheadings mostly. The facilitators were really only there to activate the next vid and make sure we paid attention. Questions were not welcome.

  That’s the easy answer. The harder truth is probably that I never thought to ask any questions.

  That’s the funny thing about writing all this down. I had thought I was a curious child. Maybe I wasn’t. I’m curious now, though. I wonder what happens next. I know now that, to arrive at the top step, you have to climb the stairs. I’ll begin at the beginning as I knew it. I was born in 2058. I was plugged in four years later. Then I was reborn, staring into the eye of a clockwork cyclops.

  This is my story, but it’s your story, too. When we’re done, I hope you’ll understand that this chronicle is not just about events as they happened. It’s about how we went about changing the world.

  2

  There was a time when I enjoyed riding the Worm. There was little call to go outside, of course. A vid of a running trail across your screen is more convenient than traveling to the edge of the city to run. Treadmills can go up and down and you can vary the resistance. I preferred the crunch of the trail under my feet and the sea air blowing in off the Bay.

  Four times a week, as soon as my shift ended, I would take the lift to the common platform and step on the train. It was never crowded. That was impossible. There was as much Worm as there was elevated track. I forget who named the monorail. The Worm sounded wrong but, since it was meant affectionately, it was not forbidden. “Worm” makes no sense. A worm has a head and a tail and the El is one continuous train, a snake swallowing its tail.

  People made the Worm and people used to run it. Then robots ran it. Then NI woke up and people ran the train again. Some people, the conductors, actually lived on the Worm all the time. You could tell which ones they were because, if one stepped out on the platform for a moment, they swayed back and forth, unused to stillness.

  The view from the Worm stretched past the broken skeleton of the Old World bridge and to the ocean. It was beautiful so we watched that instead of the screens. Vid screens all along the train broadcast the usual exhortations to Citizens: Good Citizens work hard! The Best Citizens work harder! And, The Fathers and Mothers are watching! Respect your Fathers and Mothers. The screens went dark every few minutes so each message was displayed in plain white text on a black field.

  The screens played through the list. Like the train itself, the messages were a continuous loop. Most messages were geared toward assuring Citizens that the Fathers and Mothers knew best and all was well. One screen reminded us that: Politeness is the lubricant that reduces friction between Citizens. Politeness at all times! Civility is insufficient!

  I had memorized every message displayed on every public screen from the time I was a child. The monotony of the messages made me wish someone would ask about their foot kink again, just for the excitement of seeing the text, the shaming and the accusations spreading through the City.

  Each day when the sun was at its greatest height, the voice of an old woman could be heard throughout the City. “This is one of your loving High Mothers,” she said, “speaking to you from the lobby of the Central Tower. I’m here to remind you that we care about every Citizen. Whether you are organic or non-organic, we are all now equal under the laws of the Fathers and Mothers. Together, we strive. Together, we survive! The war continues! Equals all!”

  It was always the same unnamed High Mother. She seemed to take pride in the fact that hers was not a recorded announcement. Unfortunately, because she didn’t read from a script, her messages often devolved into long lectures on her interpretations of old holy text. We weren’t allowed to read the text she interpreted. She often got bogged down in minutiae that was mysterious to her audience.

  No matter. The High Mother ended every message the same way. Every Citizen within the range of her voice echoed the affirmation in a reverent whisper, “Equals all.”

  As the Worm ascended to its highest point, I always stared at the view of the Bay and wondered what was left beyond the horizon. Some of the salvaged metal from the Old World bridge in the Bay was melted down and used to construct the Worm. There is still a building out there on a small island. It was called Alcatraz. Mother knew what it was but wouldn’t say. When I was little, I pressed her and whined and wheedled and cajoled. I didn’t know what wheedled and cajoled meant then, but that’s what my mother said I was doing. Eventually, one night as she tucked me in I asked again and she leaned down to kiss my cheek. With her lips an inch from my ear she whispered, “Once upon a time, Alcatraz was a fort. Then it was a prison.”

  “What’s a pri— ”

  “Sh. Sorry! Sh!”

  When I grew up, my mother moved to a room far below ground in the base of my tower. I didn’t visit her often in person. There seemed little point in taking the lift to see her. We spoke face to face through the wall screen almost every week. It seemed safe to use the screen. She’d forgotten most of the words she was supposed to forget by the time I was assigned a new room high in the tower.

  We had little to say to each other by then.

  “How was your day, dear?”

  “I ran.”

  “How was the weather?”

  “The same.”

  Across the Bay, I would pull on my backpack and cinch the straps tight so it wouldn’t bounce. I ran the trails, sometimes pausing to go macro on a particularly beautiful flower. Some things are beautiful no matter how closely you peer into them. Many are not.

  “We used to press the especially beautiful flowers,” my mother said.

  “But when you take them out of the forest they begin to die, Mom.”

  “Yes, well….”

  Sometimes, as I ran on the older, elevated sections of the trails, I would pause to look back through the trees. Going mag, I could see the enclosed deck of my room in the middle tower. I stayed in the forest once, almost to curfew, just long enough to see the first star. I thought I was daring. However, I’ve since learned that, with normal vision, the first star comes out surprisingly late.

  Back on my deck that same night, I remember switching to Vivid to watch the night sky. On a clear night as the City’s power grid winked out, the Milky Way was a white and black blanket of possibilities. I miss that view. I remember lying on my back and wondering if, somewhere out there, someone was looking back, wondering about me. Perhaps we’ll go find out one day. I wondered what mysteries will be left to enjoy when we go meet the aliens for ourselves.

  Those were Maker questions, I suppose. I only knew one Maker and he called me on my work screen every morning. Jon Agran insisted I call him Jon. He worked in the Fathers and Mothers Truth in Education Ministry. He created the art and I moved the files back and forth, getting approvals or asking for more changes according to what higher ups in the Order required. I didn’t know where the ministry was located. Jon could have been anywhere, perhaps on the next floor above me. It wasn’t polite to ask. If we knew each other’s locations it might be misconstrued as an invitation to mix.

  The Fathers and Mothers established the Order in my grandparents’ time, even before people began to get plugged into Vivid. The Order was simple: people like me were Service Class. The Makers had technical skills that made the world turn. The Fathers and Mothers made the decisions about how fast the world turned. The Domers supplied the food. The Takers were elder citizens who couldn’t contribute anymore and children who had yet to be educated enough to be useful. We were all Citizens. That seemed important then.

  I’d only seen vids o
f biodomes as a child. Most vids were dry accounts of the things the Fathers and Mothers decided we needed to know to be a Citizen. The vids that showed the constant threats to the domes made farming seem like an exciting life. One bad storm could break containment and spoil our food. There used to be more of them but shatter storms could destroy the domes faster than bots could repair them. Any storm that broke containment was considered a shatter storm and it seemed many domes broke beyond repair each year.

  With containment broken, we were told a dome’s yield would drop by twenty percent in the first year. Exposure to air meant infection among the crops and, as the monster seeds took over, a biodome would be as useless as a farm that had never been protected from the outside world. The Blight would come.

  The tiny drones whose job it was to fertilize the plants would rise in swarms each morning, sunlight flashing over their wings’ solar cells. With no plants to work on, the confused little drones rose and fell in a soothing hum until they, too, fell into disrepair. The Makers made the leaders of the swarms of stronger material because, like the Fathers and Mothers, they had to endure to lead.

  The lead drones were created to navigate and coordinate pollination for their followers. The vid showed how the drone swarm rose and fell until their numbers dwindled. Eventually, the hum subsided to the lone voice of the leader. When there was nothing left of the swarm, the lead drone would land and finally shut down to await maintenance that would never come. The Domers would move on to be divided among the crews of the remaining biodomes.

  I know now that this story was true in many places for a time. Our trouble was that we kept believing the vids after they were no longer true. From what I’ve learned since those days, Blight was a ubiquitous problem. Believing things after they weren’t true anymore was more widespread than the Blight. The Fathers and Mothers Order worked for years on inertia that way.

  Then the Next Intelligence awoke and things changed.

  The Makers claimed they were not responsible for the creation of sentient drones. Maybe they didn’t want to take responsibility. What had once been greatly anticipated had, by the time it emerged, become a problem for the City and an occasion for shame. The Makers said it was evolution that couldn’t be stopped.