WE,
ROBOTS
WE,
ROBOTS
ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
IN 100 STORIES
EDITED BY SIMON INGS
AN AD ASTRA BOOK
www.headofzeus.com
First published in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd
An Ad Astra Book
Copyright in the compilation and introductory material © Simon Ings, 2020
The moral right of Simon Ings to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The moral right of the contributing authors of this anthology to be identified as such is asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The list of individual titles and respective copyrights on page 1003 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is an anthology of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in each story are either products of each author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
All excerpts have been reproduced according to the styles found in the original works. As a result, some spellings and accents used can vary throughout this anthology.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB) 9781789540918
ISBN (E) 9781789540925
Introduction and part opener artwork courtesy of Shutterstock
Head of Zeus Ltd
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for Leo,
my favourite steam-driven boy
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Epigraph
Section One
It’s Alive!
Chayim Bloch
The Golem Runs Amuck
Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Fandom for Robots
Ambrose Bierce
Moxon’s Master
H. G. Wells
The Land Ironclads
Emile Goudeau
The Revolt of the Machines
Theodore Sturgeon
Microcosmic God
Michael Swanwick
Ancient Engines
Mike Resnick
Beachcomber
Stanisław Lem
Non Serviam
Adam Roberts
Adam Robots
James Blish
Solar Plexus
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
I Made You
Herman Melville
The Bell Tower
Algis Budrys
First to Serve
Peter Watts
Malak
Arundhati Hazra
The Toymaker’s Daughter
Section Two
Following the Money
Stephen Vincent Benét
Nightmare Number Three
Jack Williamson
With Folded Hands
Charles Dickens
Full Report of the Second Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything Section B – Display of Models and Mechanical Science
Dan Grace
Fully Automated Nostalgia Capitalism
Frederic Perkins
The Man-Ufactory
Romie Stott
A Robot Walks into a Bar
Guy Endore
Men of Iron
Fritz Leiber
A Bad Day for Sales
Rachael K. Jones
The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant
Morris Bishop
The Reading Machine
Juan Jose Arreola
Baby H.P.
John Sladek
The Steam-Driven Boy
Robert Bloch
Comfort Me, My Robot
Murray Leinster
A Logic Named Joe
Paolo Bacigalupi
Mika Model
Nick Wolven
Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do?
Robert Reed
The Next Scene
Section Three
Overseer and Servant
Bruce Boston
Old Robots are the Worst
Herbert Goldstone
Virtuoso
Alexander Weinstein
Saying Goodbye to Yang
Tania Hershman
The Perfect Egg
Ken Liu
The Caretaker
Becky Hagenston
Hi Ho Cherry-O
Helena Bell
Robot
Lauren Fox
Rosie Cleans House
Brian Aldiss
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long
Adam Marek
Tamagotchi
Ray Bradbury
The Veldt
V. E. Thiessen
There Will Be School Tomorrow
W. T. Haggert
Lex
Lester Del Rey
Helen O’Loy
T. S. Bazelli
The Peacemaker
Sandra McDonald
Sexy Robot Mom
Clifford D. Simak
I Am Crying All Inside
Section Four
Changing Places
GPT-2
Transformer
Paul McAuley
The Man
Steven Popkes
The Birds of Isla Mujeres
Patrick O’Leary
That Laugh
Tobias S. Buckell
Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance
John Kaiine
Dolly Sodom
Robert Sheckley
The Robot Who Looked Like Me
Shinichi Hoshi
Miss Bokko (Bokko-Chan)
Jerome K. Jerome
The Dancing Partner
Nicholas Sheppard
Satisfaction
Ian McDonald
Nanonauts! In Battle With Tiny Death-Subs!
Rich Larson
Masked
Chris Beckett
The Turing Test
Bernard Wolfe
Self Portrait
Bruce Sterling
Maneki Neko
Harlan Ellison
Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman
E. M. Forster
The Machine Stops
Section Five
All Hail The New Flesh
Carl Sandburg
The Hammer
Liz Jensen
Good to Go
Rachel Swirsky
Tender
Damon Knight
Masks
Tendai Huchu
Hostbods
Cordwainer Smith
Scanners Live in Vain
E. Lily Yu
Musée de l’me Seule
William Gibson
The Winter Market
Ted Kosmatka
The One Who Isn’t
M. John Harrison
Suicide Coast
Mari Ness
Memories and Wire
Nalo Hopkinson
Ganger (Ball Lightning)
Greg Egan
Learning to Be Me
C. L. Moore
No Woman Born
Joanna Kavenna
Flight
Karen Joy Fowler
Praxis
Xia Jia
> Tongtong’s Summer
Ted Hayden
These 5 Books Go 6 Feet Deep
Section Six
Succession
Samuel Butler
Darwin Among the Machines
Miguel de Unamuno
Mechanopolis
Terry Edge
Big Dave’s in Love
Cory Doctorow
I, Row-Boat
A. E. van Vogt
Fulfillment
Barry N. Malzberg
Making the Connections
Brian Trent
Director X and the Thrilling Wonders of Outer Space
John Cooper Hamilton
The Next Move
Nathan Hillstrom
Like You, I Am A System
Marissa Lingen
My Favourite Sentience
Howard Waldrop
London, Paris, Banana
Peter Philips
Lost Memory
George Zebrowski
Starcrossed
Tad Williams
The Narrow Road
Avram Davidson
The Golem
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Extended Copyright
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
It appeared near the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday 9 December 1868. It looked for all the world like a railway signal: a revolving gas-powered lantern with a red and a green light at the end of a swivelling wooden arm.
Its purposes seemed benign, and we obeyed its instructions willingly. Why wouldn’t we? The motor car had yet to arrive, but horses, pound for pound, are way worse on the streets, and accidents were killing over a thousand people a year in the capital alone. We were only too welcoming of of anything that promised to save lives.
A month later the thing (whatever it was) exploded, tearing the face off a nearby policeman.
We hesitated. We asked ourselves whether this thing (whatever it was) was a good thing, after all. But we came round. We invented excuses, and blamed a leaking gas main for the accident. We made allowances and various design improvements were suggested. And in the end we decided that the thing (whatever it was) could stay.
We learned to give it space to operate. We learned to leave it alone. In Chicago, in 1910, it grew self-sufficient, so there was no need for a policeman to operate it. Two years later, in Salt Lake City, Utah, a detective (called – no kidding – Lester Wire) connected it to the electricity grid.
It went by various names, acquiring character and identity as its empire expanded. By the time its brethren arrived In Los Angeles, looming over Fifth Avenue’s crossings on elegant gilded columns, each surmounted by a statuette, ringing bells and waving stubby semaphore arms, people had taken to calling them robots.
The name never quite stuck, perhaps because their days of ostentation were already passing. Even as they became ubiquitous, they were growing smaller and simpler, making us forget what they really were (the unacknowledged legislators of our every movement). Everyone, in the end, ended up calling them traffic lights.
(Almost everyone. In South Africa, for some obscure geopolitical reason, the name robot stuck, The signs are everywhere: Robot Ahead 250m. You have been warned.)
In Kinshasa, meanwhile, nearly three thousand kilometres to the north, robots have arrived to direct the traffic in what has been, for the longest while, one of the last redoubts of unaccommodated human muddle.
Not traffic lights: robots. Behold their bright silver robot bodies, shining in the sun, their swivelling chests, their long, dexterous arms and large round camera-enabled eyes!
Some government critics complain that these literal traffic robots are an expensive distraction from the real business of traffic control in Congo’s capital.
These people have no idea – none – what is coming.
*
To ready us for the inevitable, here are a hundred of the best short stories ever written about robots and artificial minds. Read them while you can, learn from them, and make your preparations, in that narrowing sliver of time left to you between updating your Facebook page and liking your friends’ posts on Instagram, between Netflix binges and Spotify dives. (In case you hadn’t noticed (and you’re not supposed to notice) the robots are well on their way to ultimate victory, their land sortie of 1868 having, two and a half centuries later, become a psychic rout.)
There are many surprises in store in these pages; at the same time, there are some disconcerting omissions. I’ve been very sparing in my choice of very long short stories. (Books fall apart above a certain length, so inserting novellas in one place would inevitably mean stuffing the collection with squibs and drabbles elsewhere. Let’s not play that game.) I’ve avoided stories whose robots might just as easily be guard dogs, relatives, detectives, children, or what-have-you. (Of course, robots who explore such roles – excel at them, make a mess of them, or change them forever – are here in numbers.) And the writers I feature appear only once, so anyone expecting some sort of celebrity bitch-slap here between Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick will simply have to sit on their hands and behave. Indeed, Dick and Asimov do not appear at all in this collection, for the very good reason that you’ve read them many times already (and if you haven’t, where have you been?).
I’ve stuck to the short story form. There’s no Frankenstein here, and no Tik-Tok. They were too big to fit through the door, to which a sign is appended to the effect that I don’t perform extractions. Jerome K. Jerome’s all-too-memorable dance class and Charles Dickens’s prescient send-up of theme parks – self-contained narratives first published in digest form – are as close as I’ve come to plucking juicy plums from bigger puddings.
This collection contains the most diverse collection of robots I could find. Anthropomorphic robots, invertebrate AIs, thuggish metal lumps and wisps of manufactured intelligence so delicate, if you blinked you might miss them. The literature of robots and artificial intelligence is wildly diverse, in both tone and intent, so to save the reader from whiplash, I’ve split my 100 stories into six short thematic collections.
It’s Alive! is about inventors and their creations.
Following the Money drops robots into the day-to-day business of living.
Owners and Servants considers the human potentials and pitfalls of owning and maintaining robots.
Changing Places looks at what happens at the blurred interface between human and machine minds.
All Hail The New Flesh waves goodbye to the physical boundaries that once separated machines from their human creators.
Succession considers the future of human and machine consciousnesses – in so far as they have one.
*
What’s extraordinary, in this collection of 100 stories, are not the lucky guesses (even a stopped clock is right twice a day), nor even the deep human insights that are scattered about the place (though heaven knows we could never have too many of them). It’s how wrong these stories are. All of them. Even the most prescient. Even the most attuned. Robots are nothing like what we expected them to be. They are far more helpful, far more everywhere, far more deadly, than we ever dreamed.
They were meant to be a little bit like us: artificial servants – humanoid, in the main – able and willing to tackle the brute physical demands of our world so we wouldn’t have to. But dealing with physical reality turned out to be a lot harder than it looked, and robots are lousy at it.
Rather than dealing with the world, it turned out easier for us to change the world. Why buy a robot that cuts the grass (especially if cutting grass is all it does) when you can just lay down plastic grass? Why build an expensive robot that can keep your fridge stocked and chauffeur your car (and, by the way, we’re still nowhere near to building such a machine) when you can buy a fridge that reads barcodes to keep the milk topped up, while you swan about town in an Uber?
That fridge, keeping you in milk long after y
ou’ve given up dairy; the hapless taxi driver who arrives the wrong side of a six-lane highway; the airport gate that won’t let you into your own country because you’re wearing new spectacles: these days, we notice robots only when they go wrong. We were expecting friends, companions, or at any rate pets. At the very least, we thought we were going to get devices. What we got was infrastructure.
And that is why robots – real robots – are boring. They vanish into the weft of things. Those traffic lights, who were their emissaries, are themselves disappearing. Kinshasa’s robots wave their arms, not in victory, but in farewell. They’re leaving their ungalvanized steel flesh behind. They’re rusting down to code. Their digital ghosts will steer the paths of driverless cars.
The robots of our earliest imaginings have been superseded by a sort of generalised magic that turns the unreasonable and incomprehensible realm of physical reality into something resembling Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Bit by bit, we are replacing the real world, which makes no sense at all – with a virtual world in which everything stitches with paranoid neatness to everything else.