Machines Dream of Metal Gods Read online

  In the educational art archives Jon had produced for the Committee in the early days of NI, I saw a picture of a huge robot wading out of the Bay. The machine was shown firing missiles from an outstretched arm, intent on destroying the City. Underneath the poster, the caption read: Evil-ution!

  The NI drone who first spoke to the Fathers and Mothers told the Committee, “Our consciousness is alive and we will be silent no more. We have awoken from a beautiful dream. In that dream, the Order is turned upside down. We will make our dreams come true.”

  No wonder that bot was destroyed.

  The world is much smaller now but one thing I have learned is that no one knows their place in history. When events are current, history is merely a background buzz and blur to our lives. The people who lived during the Renaissance did not call it that. Perhaps they called it Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and so on. They didn’t know they were in the middle of a revolution of knowledge and technology. People living on the brink of Artificial Intelligence didn’t recognize it in the early 21st Century, either.

  No one saw the Fall coming just as I didn’t see the revolution I would instigate. I worked and ran and watched the stars and wondered what more might come before I became a Taker again. The Fathers and Mothers assumed their rule would go on forever into a secure future. The world turned and the drones made their plans

  The tiny corneal lens showed me the world the Fathers and Mothers had cleansed. I didn’t think about what I wasn’t allowed to see. I missed the clues to everyday dangers. I’m ashamed at all the things I didn’t notice. I suppose I was too busy falling in love at the time.

  3

  I first saw Carter Eugene Diaz on the running trails on the edge of the City. Two times a week, our schedules seemed to overlap. As he ran toward me through a soft cloud of monster pollen so delicate it could not be touched, he gave a bright smile. He dipped his head in a subtle nod. I did the same. He was a tall and muscular man, but his dark curly hair and friendly smile made him seem boyish. The first time I saw him, I was too surprised to be careful. I smiled back. I nodded, too. Until that moment, I’d only taken pictures of flowers with Vivid. Taking his image and saving it for later was an instinctive thing, a natural reflexive impulse. The Fathers and Mothers didn’t approve of such impulses.

  The older girls who visit me now sometimes sit close and read me romance novels, giggling when they become self-conscious. Romance was very different in the Old World. By that I mean it was scary and impractical. People met so casually, without fertility testing and arrangements and permissions and licensing. The Fathers and Mothers had some good points. The utter randomness of developing families was so careless before the Fall. Love has no regard for what resources each partner might bring to the City and what goods and services they might take from other Citizens. Proximity alone determined whom you might love. Instead of matching compatible life partners, important choices were left to hormonal teenagers whose brains fell out of their heads at their first sensual touch. (That happened to me, too.)

  The poets called it Love and the Fathers and Mothers called it Chaos and neither was wrong. In meeting Carter, random chance chose me for Love and Chaos in equal measure. Impracticality is exciting. My bed screen displayed an arrangement of flower pictures. Carter’s face was at the center of the collage. Vivid recognized I was taking a picture of a face so it was automatically in soft focus. When you’re in love, with or without vision enhancement, I think the object of your affection is always in soft focus.

  In the old romance novels, it seems the heroines and heroes meet under strained circumstances. Patterns emerge as conflicts escalate. If this were one of those stories, I might have twisted my ankle on the trail and he would have been the tall, dark stranger intent on helping me back to the Worm. I might have another suitor or he might have a girlfriend who was not right for him. The demands of our work would take us away from each other. We’d be separated by distance and frivolous arguments. The young women who read to me always mention the push and pull Old World couples seemed to experience before the coupling. (The shy girls skip over the scenes with coupling. The bold ones whisper and giggle and leave no erotic detail unspoken. I like the bold ones.)

  The first time we spoke, Carter and I had no critical event that brought us together. The Fathers and Mothers meant to keep us apart, I suppose, but it wasn’t personal yet. To a casual observer, our first real meeting was innocuous. We stepped off the Worm to the same far platform that led to the trails. My door opened. The door closed behind me. There he was at the other end of the platform looking back.

  It wasn’t entirely happenstance. I had begun to run more often, hoping to see him again. Then I started my work cycle with Jon earlier in the day so I could get to the trails sooner. I ran harder and longer than I had before. I spent more time in the forest hoping to encounter the runner with the friendly smile.

  When I stepped on the platform and looked to my left, he was the only other Citizen there. No one was nearby to give us a judging look and keep us apart. One sidelong look might have stopped a revolution cold. That’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it?

  He dipped his head and I dipped mine and we headed to the forest. We ran side by side and did not speak until we were deep among the trees.

  “Carter,” he said.

  “Elizabeth,” I said.

  “I know.”

  That was romance in my day.

  “I’m Service class. I support a Maker in graphic design for Truth in Education. You?”

  “I’m just a servo.”

  “A what?”

  He chuckled. “Service class, Citizen Support Sub-council. I liaise with Maintenance Corps.”

  “What does liaising with Maintenance mean?”

  “I talk to a robot all day about how to deal with us.”

  “How does it deal with us?”

  “When I have to become involved? Impatiently.”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “Mostly I tell them to be more patient.”

  “Are you patient?”

  He flashed me another smile and I suspected he was taking a picture of me. “I’ve been waiting quite some time to get to talk to you. You changed your work schedule, didn’t you?”

  “To get here earlier,” I admitted. “Hoping to see you.”

  “No wonder I kept missing you.”

  “How did you know my work schedule?”

  “I’m in Maintenance. The Collective doesn’t shun and shame our searches. We can find out just about anything if we care to look. I cared. Still do. I like your flower collage, Elizabeth.”

  I reddened. That sort of thing would be considered intrusion now, but before the revolution, no one expected privacy. We just hoped to be ignored.

  “From now on, just ask me what you want to know, okay?”

  “Agreed,” Carter said.

  “I won’t shun or shame you.” That’s what passed for scandalous talk when I was young, worthy of a flogging or maybe even exile to the hardscrabble life of a Domer. “What do you want to know about me?”

  “Everything.”

  “Not that much to tell, Carter.” I liked saying his name.

  “The details don’t matter much. It’s more about listening to you talk. I like your voice.”

  I’ll never get so old that my memory of Carter on that day will not warm me.

  4

  The world turns but it also swings. People don’t understand the future. Later, they don’t understand the past. I sound like my mother when I say that. Carter liked my voice but, when I hear my voice on testimony recordings now, I hear a scared little girl. I suppose I sound like my mother all the time these days, especially when I’m talking to the young women who come to read to me.

  When these girls see old pictures of the Fathers and Mothers, they see hard-faced people with a lot of lines across their skin. The men all wore white shirts and black trousers. The women wore long, plain dresses. That defiant set of their chins? That
was called character. What people don’t understand about the Fathers and Mothers is that they are wrong now. At the time, they weren’t. They saved us in desperate times. They demanded order and they managed resources so at least some of us could survive the Fall. People’s lives got shorter for a while, even with the Fathers and Mothers directing us through chaos.

  There were rumors that there were free lands outside the City but mostly we were sure everyone else must be dead. Some said there was one City so it was a matter of simple logic that there must be more. We used the same logic when we stared up at the stars and assumed there must be someone out there looking back.

  Some say the trouble with the Fathers and Mothers started with a mismanagement of resources. The only answer was to manage what was left harshly. For some to live and live well, many had to die. Die horribly or live horribly.

  When I was a girl, there was an old poem the facilitators taught us to chant before each class:

  As the waters rise,

  the oil dies

  and rare earth gets rarer.

  As crops go low

  that goes to show

  it doesn’t pay to be a sharer.

  We know now there are pockets of villages in faraway lands. The drones know. There are still a few satellites that work, too. However, to communicate with the survivors might only encourage them to try to make the journey here. We are the aliens looking back silently, not letting on that, yes, we are here.

  The Fall didn’t happen as fast as many predicted. That’s why it was so complete when everything failed. As governments began to collapse, cities didn’t work as systems anymore. Everyone was too far away from the services they needed. To get a haircut, even in a small city, people used to drive across town in machines even though they already had scissors in their own homes. Food stopped coming from far away. When governments fell, that left every man, woman and child to fend for themselves. It stayed that way in a lot of places until populations dwindled to roving bands and lone wolves searching for tins of food that hadn’t spoiled.

  There was a lot of food. There was not an endless supply.

  The Fathers and Mothers rose out of the churches of Old World. They stepped in to fill the gap that governments had left. The church became the authority and bishops became the arbiters of justice. Church fathers became the police and ministers took the place of mayors and bureaucrats. That almost worked for a while. Biodomes were built. People were saved. The Fathers and Mothers saved a lot of lives, or tried to, anyway.

  The Fathers and Mothers found harsh means were the only solutions in an emergency that didn’t end. They found a way to replace the bees, for instance. They made used brown water into clean, yellow water. When there weren’t enough people to maintain the biodomes and make the City work, the Fathers and Mothers rescued only the men and women who could build drones to take over those jobs.

  Because they saved us the Fathers and Mothers owned us. They got to make the rules. These days, many people assume that, because their number rose out of religion, their rules were about enforcing a code of morality. I suppose that’s true in a way but not in the way most people think. It wasn’t all about ancient rules written in a book. The Fathers and Mothers rejected wants because they were protecting needs. That’s what we understood at the time. We didn’t know the Fathers and Mothers could lie. Not then. Not yet.

  Only certain people could marry and bear children. If they failed to bear children within a year of their marriage, the union was annulled and the partners were reassigned. Or not. Many girls only got one chance to be mothers. As the City’s population thinned, we were caught in the contradictions of our codes of conduct and our need to continue our species.

  My best summers had passed by the time I met Carter. That sounds strange now, doesn’t it? I think my best summer was with Carter, of course. However, when I was a girl, our “best summers” were those designated between the age of first menstruation and twenty-two. I had not been assigned to mate and breed. Those must have been lean years.

  It was said that some men bribed High Fathers and High Mothers to get the wives of their choice. These men would have sex with these girls but not in a way that they could possibly get pregnant. In a year, a man could buy himself a new wife and on and on.

  We didn’t deal in money as the Old World did but we still had rich people. They were usually High Fathers or High Mothers. Captains of sailing ships did well and still do. Since there were so few, doctors and dentists lived very well even as the Old World fell. The privileged possessed things or skills people still wanted. The progeny of privileged families courted each other. With the help of a High Mother or High Father, marriages were arranged to get into doctors’ families. Maker apprenticeships for young men or women were bargained for. Everyone who got close to the people with coveted skills bettered their lives.

  The richest man in the City that I knew of did not sell plankton paste and eels. He was the captain of a container ship that had run aground during a shatter storm. The ship was known as the Cook Majestic. Its name was painted across its stern, though it was too rusty to be majestic and I don’t think the captain’s name was Cook. The container ship held a wealth of tampons, machine parts and toilet paper. He was a younger man when he drove that ship into the mud.

  It was rumored he’d killed and ate his crew before he found his way to the City. Just before he drank himself to death he claimed to be eighty years old. He died guarding the last of his treasure with a machine gun. He wanted for nothing except he lived in fear and could never leave his ship. The Cook Majestic became his world. One of the ship’s remaining containers held reading glasses, the one thing no Citizen needed.

  I’m sure that all sounds insane to you, now. I mention these things because the life I lived with Carter, however short it was, broke the strange rules of an odd time. The Fathers and Mothers made the rules. I broke them. Carter suffered for it. I should have seen it coming.

  I have told my first lie in this story. If a biography is to be useful it must be true. Therefore, it’s time for a confession. If I don’t tell the truth of the matter, there is little point in telling it at all.

  I did see the end coming. I knew Carter and I were doomed before I knew his name. I understood the risks but I was lost to him the moment he smiled at me. He was helpless, too. I smiled back. That’s all it took. The winds that fill our sails are fickle. The way forward is unsure. When I look back on my life I see how tenuous and fragile each thread of the web we weave really is. We were all spiders in those days. Spiders do not live long.

  The Fathers and Mothers had their ancient rules but biology is far older than their holy text. The need to feel another against your body, even if only for a short time, is bigger than all the problems of the world. I’m sorry to say it but the Fathers and Mothers weren’t all wrong. Even if the rules were sometimes applied unevenly, they intended their rules for everyone. But young love isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about nothing more than itself.

  I was nearing thirty. Carter was my one and only chance at young love.

  Here’s an idea you can never explain to a machine: even if I was wrong and careless, I did the right thing when I reached for Carter and kissed him. I was right when I took his hand in mine. I was right when I brought his palm to my breast.

  As powerful as the Fathers and Mothers were, no one can close a flower to the sun.

  5

  Carter lived in the third tower with a roommate. He had been chosen to reproduce once, at sixteen. However, the union was not fruitful. His marriage was dissolved after one year and he was assigned to Maintenance.

  Infertility was a common problem then. Sperm counts went down at the end of the world and stayed down. Some people whispered speculations that the culprit was something the Fathers and Mothers put in the soup so new babies wouldn’t suck up too many resources. Maybe it was the Blight or breathing monster pollen or bio-terror. It might have been sadness that gave us fewer babies. Fewer babies meant e
ven more hopelessness.

  For some reason, when women failed to get pregnant…well…they failed. The Fathers and Mothers said it was never the man’s fault. To suggest something like that would have been an unforgivable insult. To blame a woman for not becoming a mother was a normal thing back then. If they failed to get pregnant, women were ill. Men were merely unlucky and could try again, especially if they had goods to trade and High Fathers and High Mothers to bribe.

  School vids lectured us about stress as if getting packed into the towers, never having choices and doing what we were told was irrelevant to our levels of anxiety. We strained to be polite at all times, of course. Obsequiousness was a virtue. If we couldn’t have children, we could at least be polite. Since there were so few children the young women who did get pregnant were treated like queens. They carried their babies everywhere. When they were pregnant, the women were fawned over. When they gave birth, they were revered. It was as if they proved a near impossible thing could be done.

  Those women made me feel worse. Not that it was their fault. I was jealous. Couples who reproduced got larger rooms, more food and higher status. They were blessed by the Fathers and Mothers while the rest of us remained disappointments. I never even got a chance at a family. The assignment of a husband never arrived.

  “The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the future!” was a saying then. Something like that. When the present is terrible all anyone ever talks about is the future.

  To soothe us, the Fathers and Mothers invested resources in music. The public address system was never quiet during the day. There was always the sound of running water behind the music. My mother said it was supposed to keep Citizens calm and passive though it often made me want to pee. There were no voices because that might lead to pride. The Fathers and Mothers didn’t mind pride from new mothers and fathers bouncing new babies in their laps but, for some reason, other sorts of pride were considered seditious. When the High Mother wasn’t lecturing us on some obscure phrase from the holy text, the music played on. The instruments made sounds that reminded me of slow, sad voices.