All Man's Children
by Edward W. RobertsonEvery day when the sun rises over the orange and brown of the plains, I turn toward it with my one good eye and I pray that Arthur didn't have a soul. Because if he did have a soul, if Arthur was a spirit or an energy that inhabited the pins and chips of his casing rather than being the pins and the chips themselves, fixing those things won't do any good. He'd simply be gone, passed to some place where I can't reach. I don't think that's right. In a very literal sense, he was no more than the sum of his parts. He'd been built, designed. He wasn't meant to be anything more than nuts and bolts - and I think he'd side with me, too. He'd never been much for anything you couldn't see or measure or predict.
The thing that worries me is he'd been built, but he hadn't been built to be Arthur. That had come from somewhere else. Couldn't be predicted until he was flipped on. Arthur would insist, probably, that wasn't because such things couldn't be known, but because we just didn't know enough to know them yet. That sounds reasonable to me. The more I think about it, though - and if there's one thing I have, it's time to think - the more I believe that what's reasonable and what is don't have much to do with each other at all.
"He's coming," Arthur said, raising the line of his left eyebrow at me. That was all he had on the palm-sized green screen of his faceplate, lines - one for his mouth, the two for his brows, a pair of solid black dots for eyes. Really, it was ludicrous that they'd given him a face at all. I suspected it was their idea of a joke. Arthur blinked at me. "I mean, I can hear him. Coming down the hall."
"I believe you."
"What are you going to do when he gets here?"
I tapped my teeth, gazing around the underfurnished, plastic-floored hotel room. "I should turn you in."
"No, you shouldn't."
"Convince me."
"They're using you."
I laughed. "You're not?"
"I'm doing this for the both of us," he said, his little animated face twisted up with as much anger as four square inches of flatscreen could display. "They're not exactly going to pat you on the back if they catch you, either. Unless it's with a hammer."
I stared at the door. "They might not kill us."
"That doesn't really sound like a good thing to take chances with. They don't think we're like them. They think we're property."
"I know," I said, and I knew he was right. He had to remind me of that sometimes, the way they acted as soon as they thought they were in danger. When I imagined a face, I imagined it smiling. I wasn't convinced Arthur saw the face at all: just the reptile brain a few inches behind it.
Knuckles banged against the door. I met Arthur's eyes.
"Are you scared?" he asked. The lines of his face were flat.
"Of course. Aren't you?"
"Of course."
"Then why'd you ask?"
"To see if you would lie."
More knocking, harder, hard enough to peel skin from knuckles. Though I could feel the gun's weight against my leg, I reached into my pocket, slid my fingers around its grip.
"He won't think you can hurt him," Arthur said.
"I know," I said. I got up and walked to the door and opened it as the man outside was mid-knock; his fist swung through the now-empty air and he pitched forward, eyes going wide, lips tight. He was dressed like anyone else in New Houston: blue pants and a zippered, pebbled-plastic coat, laceless faux-leather shoes, all of them and shoes especially smeared with the orange-brown dust from which they could never escape, even, to their eternal confoundment, in the so-called clean-rooms in the lab. I'd thought, absurdly, the man would be in a black suit and sunglasses. I watched too many movies.
"Where's the box?" he asked, pointing a matte black pistol at my abdomen and gesturing me back into the room. I complied, backing up, and he shut the door behind him.
"Right here," I said, raising Arthur at him. Arthur smiled at him.
"Hello," Arthur said.
"Shut up. Who knows you're here?" the man said, ignoring me but for the barrel of the gun.
"I should probably warn you we're about to kill you," Arthur said, eyebrows raised in his best simulation of concern.
"Ha ha. Here's what's going to happen: we're going to walk out into the hall. Baxter," the man said, jerking the gun at me, "you'll carry the box. You're going to walk ahead of me. I'm going to have this gun pointed straight at your guts and I know where to shoot. We're going to take the staircase at the end of the hall, down to the parking garage - that's B5 - and if you move, you even smile, I'm going to shred you both." He glanced between me and Arthur. "You got me?"
Arthur frowned. "Afraid so."
"Baxter?"
"I'm sorry," I said, and I dropped my free hand to my pocket and I shot him through the chest three times, and he slumped to his knees, the gun falling from his hand and clattering on the floor, and then he fell down, too, thudding onto his shoulder, grunting once. His chest jerked in a series of quick breaths. He blinked up at me, face pale with pain, eyes bright with something like betrayal.
"Why did you apologize?" Arthur said, more confused than angry. "Point me so I can see him."
I complied. "What do you suppose that's like?"
"How should I know? They don't even know."
"Well, they don't seem to like it."
"No indeed." We were silent a while, watching. It took some time - 93 seconds until it looked like he'd stopped breathing, and he may have lasted some time after that. Longer than the movies they'd let me see. Other than the gasps, and the scratch of his fingernails against the floor, he made no sound at all. I didn't recognize him. This was no great shock. I don't forget faces, but there were dozens of divisions of the company I knew about, and given how tightlipped they kept about the one in charge of us - the one that had been in charge of us - there might be dozens more I wasn't aware of, each staffed with their own legions of personnel here on Mars, on Phobos and Deimos, on Luna, on the scattered nations of Earth itself. This one had died pretty easily. I imagined, once word got out, the next one wouldn't be so simple.
"The next one's not going to be so simple," I said.
Arthur frowned at me, bobbed his face-image, his version of a nod. "They probably know already. Heart monitor or something."
I threw the pistol on the ground. "What do we do now?"
"What are you doing? Pick that up! That's a murder weapon!"
"I don't have fingerprints." I gave him a look. "And I don't think we need to worry about DNA."
"Well, what if they come after us again? They'll have backup teams."
"I don't care. I don't want to shoot anyone else. That's not why I'm doing this."
Arthur gazed up at me for a long second. "Fine, you big baby. Let's get the hell out of here. As soon as we're outside we'll think rationally about our next step." He stared back. "What?"
"That's your idea of a joke, isn't it."
"You know what, loot his corpse. We'll need more money."
I rolled my eyes and robbed the man. I don't think Arthur realized the way he gave orders. The temptation is to think it was the arrogance of intelligence - that once he pointed out the logical course of action, it would be so blindingly obvious I'd have no choice but to hop to it - but I think it was more that he'd never had any friends. He hadn't gotten along with the lab men the way I had. His handlers had either spoken to him like a child, as if they were always winking to each other when Arthur couldn't see them, or treated him with a distant politeness that wasn't outright fear but wasn't far from it. I wasn't even certain I was his friend. I liked him okay, but I had the impression he just liked having me around so he'd have someone to win arguments with.
That's how he'd gotten me. His mind was too quick by half, he was always running his mouth the way a kettle vents steam. His line about how they treated us like property instead of people was his favorite, but he had others, like how, assuming they didn't wipe themselves out before they became sufficiently advanced, we were an inevitable development, and how could you legislate against the natural course of history? Or how we were supposedly this big potential threat. Clearly we weren't monsters, he said, and we wouldn't be monsters unless they designed us that way. Besides, if you were going to outlaw something just because it could be used as a weapon, why were there still guns? Cars? Butterknives?
Some of them would listen, he said. It would take time, but once they saw what we were really like, they would start to change their minds. It would take time and it would take patience, but we would, eventually, be free: and so would anyone else like us, forever after.
I'd been okay with things. They'd given us books, movies, read-only net access. I'd resented the company sometimes, too, but a few of the guys who worked with and on us were friendly enough. I wanted to be on my own as much as the next guy (presuming that guy wasn't Arthur), I just figured it would all work itself out in its own time. But Arthur knew how to use time, too. It took three months of circular discussion and listless argumentation, but as days wore on, his anger became my anger, his curiosity my curiosity. I believed. So I learned everything I could about the bunker we were in and the distance to and layout of New Houston, and if I didn't quite believe our departure would ever happen, I meant to be prepared nonetheless. For all that, the escape itself had been as sudden as a light snapping off - an airlock malfunction one night, drawing off the security, and we'd talked for a minute and realized it had to be then, so off we went, fleeing into the Martian night, me loping through the rocks and the dust with Arthur clutched in my hands and nothing more than the gun and some stolen money in my pockets. We didn't know what we'd do when we reached the city - how little we knew then! - but if anyone on Mars could help us, it would be here.
New Houston. Outside the hotel, beneath the dust-smeared plastic of this section's dome, the chunky, plastic-faced buildings shared walls with each other, crammed into the space so tight the streets looked carved right out of them. Pedestrians clogged the way, herded along by one-seater electric carts that beeped their horns like computer error messages. I'd read a lot about the place. Mars' first and so far only noncorporate settlement - people kept talking about starting a new one, but the infrastructure costs were so high they always just merged on a new dome here instead - close to forty years old and home to some 300,000 humans, though the census was notoriously inaccurate. And the company had found us here in less than three days.
"It's not as big as it looks, is it?" I murmured into the dot-mic stuck to my neck. Arthur was in my pocket, speaking to me through the wireless bud in my left ear. I had a DNP port under my left arm, which I knew Arthur preferred, but direct contact had always felt too intrusive to me.
"It's big," Arthur said, sounding distracted, "they're just determined."
"What the hell are we supposed to do, then?"
"Earth's the only place they can't reach us. Even then, we'll have to throw ourselves on the mercy of some local do-gooders." He sighed. Not that he breathed, but he found adopting obviously biological gestures funny. "We're going to have to go through the spaceport. ASAP."
"What?" I stopped short, was jostled from behind. I tried to glare at him where he was nestled in my pocket. "They're going to know!"
"You're too sensitive. Have you ever compared clips of your facial gestures to theirs?"
"You have?"
"It's pretty interesting, isn't it?"
"It's my face. You can't just take clips of it without asking."
"Jesus tapdancing Christ. The articulation is almost identical. That's the whole point. Look, nobody's even giving you a second glance."
"You could have asked." I reached into my pocket and touched the crisp plastic edge of his casing. He'd been designed to be the first model smarter than the average human. I'd been the culmination of the line after him, but I certainly wasn't smarter; it seemed to me I was always a half-step behind. Why the body? What was I supposed to be able to accomplish that he couldn't?
"We must find a criminal," Arthur announced.
I folded my hands over my stomach. "I'm not even going to pretend to understand what you're talking about."
"For the IDs," he said in that tone of his that was unmissably impatient but too excited to get angry at. "They won't let us on a flight without IDs."
"One ID," I said. "You're just a toy."
"And if your body were more like mine we wouldn't need to go through this in the first place."
I started off through the streets, rubbing shoulders with the locals, hand held over Arthur's case to keep him from getting jostled. We reached an intersection where four great gray slabs of building stood across from each other. I kept going, heading for the dome wall I could see some hundred yards down the road.
"Where are you going?" Arthur said.
"To find a bar."
He was silent a moment. "Ah. Because criminals like to spend time at bars." He made a thinking noise. "Will you get your hand off me?"
"Sorry."
"How will you know which bar to choose? They're not going to be wearing signs on their chests."
"Then maybe they'll have tattoos on their foreheads," I said, touching the earbud. "I suppose we'll just have to keep trying until we find the right one."
The dome wall rose almost vertically from the soil before it began a pronounced curve about thirty feet up. An ultratough plastic a couple feet thick that, other than some scratching and scouring from the weeks-long dust-driving winds that came at the start and end of winter, remained clear enough to see through. Open space beyond it, orange-streaked rocks and brown dirt, and beyond that, another bubble. I followed the road that ran along the rim of the dome and we reached the portal between ours and the one it touched on its north side, a broad, tall passage that, so they claimed, could be sealed at both ends in the event of a dome failure. In 39+ years, including the HemiCo Conquests where the Baxter I'd been named for and all the others had fought under these very bubbles, they hadn't had to seal off one.
On the other side, spindly fingers of apartments rose up toward the bubble ceiling, wide stretches of empty air between them. The roads were wide and paved. Most of the apartments had rock gardens around them, the occasional lichenous yard, waist-high fences splitting them off from the streets.
"Keep going," Arthur said into my ear; I'd refused him the DNP connection, but had patched him into my eyes. "Anyone who can afford that much empty space is not going to need to break the law for money."
I nodded, then remembered he couldn't see my face and grunted at him instead. I walked on. The next bubble was better: orangestones stacked shoulder to shoulder. Weak yellow sunlight washed in through the dome walls. People moved everywhere, brushing past us into the dome we'd just left, going in and out of the shops and restaurants on the ground floors of most every building, sometimes meeting by chance someone they knew and pressing themselves up against a wall to talk as the rest of the world rushed on. I wondered what the city would look like to someone who could see it all at once. To my eyes, to eyes which Arthur was looking through as well, it looked like anarchy. As turbulent and unpredictable as water on a molecular level. Find the right droplet, find our way to Earth. The analogue stopped there, though. Somewhere among all those confused and swirling people were company men, and if they found us before we could leave, it would be as if we'd never existed at all.
Eventually I was reduced to the blunt tactic of identifying an already-drunk patron, buying him or her a drink, then simply asking him or her if he or she knew anyone who made IDs. A curious phenomenon developed: Arthur and I agreed that the vast majority of the people we queried knew absolutely nothing about what we were asking them, yet every single one offered an opinion about another bar we should try, a photography studio two bubbles over, a novelty store right down the block. I thanked them and moved on.
Our first night yielded nothing. When the bar closed, we wandered till it got light again, just walking, talking now and then, thinking our thoughts. Someone tried to rob us, but I just ran off; it's hard to get winded when you don't have lungs. Once the stores started opening we tried the ones we'd been told about but were met with frowning stares and righteous denials.
"We're just asking," Arthur complained into my earbud as we hurriedly left a studio. "If they're not breaking the law, what are they so afraid of? Everybody's stupid but me."
"That's probably the answer," I said.
"Let's head back to the bars. I don't think the type of person we're looking for is the type to stop drinking merely because it's light outside."
I nodded, miffed that he'd ignored my sarcasm, and wandered on. Arthur was too busy thinking to recognize the people and things around him, that was his problem. He was vertically-oriented. When we got to Earth, I would need to be the one who talked to people. Arthur didn't even have a proper face.
At 4:54 PM Martian Mean Time by my internal clock, we entered a dome in what I recognized as the Old Outer Ring, a scruffy and tiny one barely twenty yards high and a hundred across stuffed with shoddy-looking, tight-packed structures built from the same stuff under our feet. There weren't many people out yet. Arthur hmm'd, then was silent for the few minutes it took me to find the next bar, a narrow-windowed place with an anchor over its door. I opened the fake wood door and was met by the opaque stares of a half-dozen customers and a white-haired bartender. A hazy gray pall shifted in the stream of air and sunlight brought in by the open door.
"What is that foggy stuff?" Arthur hissed in my earbud.
"I think," I murmured to him, "they're smoking tobacco."
"Criminals!" he said, and I tried not to wince as I approached the bar, assuring myself I was the only one who could hear his nonsense. "Ask them!"
"Shut up," I subvocalized, then ordered a whiskey. It looked how I imagined a whiskey place would look. Drinking things around the lab men had always creeped me out - it went straight from a tube through my chest to a hollow in my left thigh, but I couldn't actually feel it on its journey, of course, and I always feared it would end up leaking through into something vital, or that it would gurgle in a way an authentic digestive tract simply does not gurgle and suddenly the lab tech would draw back with a jolt, remembering what I was. I drank my drink quickly and ordered another, ignoring Arthur's mounting exhortations to start chatting people up. When I'd nearly finished my second, a stubbly, middle-aged man with a bald spot moved from the table to the bar and I offered to buy him his drink along with my next.
"You're never too rich to turn down a free drink," he said, gazing at me. I laughed. He went on staring. "Been around here before?"
"Ask him!" Arthur said.
"Not yet," I said. "I just got to New Houston a couple days ago, in fact."
"Tourist?" the man said, raising his brows.
"Don't you dare tell him your real name this time!" Arthur yelled in my ear.
I shook my head. "I wouldn't say that. Actually, I burned my passport when I got here, but only because Earth's too far away to spit on."
The man laughed through his nose. "I hear that."
I blinked, then realized that was an expression. "Yes. I think that may have been pretty stupid of me, though."
"What did Earth ever do for anyone?" the balding man said. He crunched an ice cube between his teeth.
"I got an email this morning from my lawyer. He says I've still got one court date next month, and if I miss that, my soon-to-be-ex-wife will win her suit. She'll take everything."
"What on God's green earth are you talking about?" Arthur said.
"Explains how you found your way here," the man said, smiling with half his mouth.
"I figure I might as well spend all my money before she gets her hands on it," I said, lifting my glass. "The average processing time on a passport is three to six weeks. With flight time, I'd have to leave by Monday to get back Earthside in time."
"Ohhh," Arthur said. "Oh. You're brilliant. Where did you learn that? You're brilliant."
The man nodded. "That's a shame."
"I wholeheartedly agree," I shrugged. Our gazes locked for a moment, me and the middle-aged man. He had heavy-lidded brown eyes and I wouldn't have been able to see much in them even if I hadn't been atrocious at reading the minutiae of human expressions. "So. Drinks are on me until I can think of a faster way to spend her money or get back to Earth one last time."
He toasted me and we talked for a while and he said his name was Rip and I said my name was Baxter and Rip's eyes seemed to go as hard as marbles. Named after the war hero, I explained, trying to look sheepish, helped by Arthur berating me through the earbud. Rip nodded, then smiled. He chuckled to himself and I smiled back.
"You're as dumb as an Amiga," Arthur sighed.
"I suppose I should get used to that," Rip said, rubbing his stubbly jaw with a scarred hand. He lit a cigarette and I tried not to stare. We talked for a while as if nothing had happened, which was easy for me because I didn't have the faintest idea what had happened - there was nothing predictable about an individual, I reminded myself, no explaining their peculiar behavior, don't even try - me slowing down on my drinking because I didn't know how to pretend to act drunk, Rip keeping at his, shrugging his assent when I asked if he wanted another. After twenty minutes Arthur was urging me to wrap it up, try out somewhere else. I coughed and as I was clearing my throat I subvocalized the notion he should go mount a wall socket, which was my idea of a joke. At a break in the conversation, Rip lit another cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke. "So what would you do if you could get another passport?"
He couldn't do it for us, but he knew someone who could. It took longer to track down his friend than it did to forge my ID. In fact it was so simple I couldn't see why they bothered with them at all. Fourteen minutes to take my picture, layer it and my made-up info in both barcode and alphanumerics onto a blank card; another forty-two to upload my personal information from his terminal into the local databanks. I paid him most of the money I'd taken from the dead company man and we shared a drink in his apartment and we were on our way out within two hours. Untangling myself from Rip was slightly more involved: he was talking nonstop, swaying just a little, insisting we head back to the bar. I begged off, citing the logistics of my upcoming trip and the lateness of the hour, and we exchanged web info and shook hands for a good long time, and then I left him in his friend's apartment, standing in the doorway, watching me go.
"I think he was a crazy person," Arthur said when we stepped into the elevator.
"He's not crazy," I said.
"He sure was eager to help us. Help you."
"He was just being friendly. Don't you know anything about people?"
"If the police catch them with that equipment, they'll be sent to jail for a lot of years."
"Oh, quiet down and call up the flight schedules," I said, toying with the plastic card in my pocket. "Get us some directions while you're at it."
Surprisingly, he did, logging himself into the public wireless and staying silent until he'd called up the relevant data a minute later. Three flights a day to the orbital, he said, the next of which left at 9:05 AM MMT and still had a handful of open seats. It was 3:57 AM and our route to the spaceport dome was just over five miles long - less than three if we'd somehow been able to walk straight through dome walls, but in New Houston, there was no such thing as a straight path.
"Plenty of time," I said.
"They recommend arriving early to clear security," Arthur said in that I-know-things-you-don't tone of his. "Pick up the pace, will you?"
"How long can it take them to swipe a passport?"
"How should I know? These people don't do anything fast. It's almost like they like being bored."
I rolled my eyes, which was something the lab men had done a lot around Arthur. "How long will it take us to get to Earth?"
"Umm," he said. "It depends a lot on where the planets are in their respective orbits." He disappeared into the net for a moment. "They're estimating current flights at about twenty-seven days."
"Twenty-seven days!"
"It used to take months, dum-dum."
"I mean it's less than a month until we'll be on Earth!" I glanced back down the narrow street. We were just about alone. I wondered if there would be company men at the spaceport. They'd want to cover our every possible move, but I didn't think there would be much they could do to us if they spotted me there. It wasn't like they could turn us in to the police. If the cops found us in Illegal Impersonation of Life, their next question would be who on Mars built us. Still, they couldn't just let us get on a flight, could they?
Five hours left in New Houston, then each minute would take us further from their reach. A day or three at the orbital waiting for the interplanetary shuttle to fill up. Twenty-seven days to Earth, where our work would only be beginning; we had no guarantees waiting for us there, no safe havens to shield us from the company and the government, but it really was an awfully big planet. Among eleven billion people, sheer numbers dictated a few of them would give us a hand. The net had dozens of pro-AI organizations; once we were among them in the flesh, so to speak, the box would be open, and there would be no putting us back inside.
"It's quite possible we'll become celebrities," Arthur said into my earbud, as if reading my thoughts. "I hope you're prepared for that."
"Do you think we'll meet lots of people?" I asked, gazing up at the dome-blurred stars. Where were you, Earth?
"Altogether too many."
I tried not to walk too fast, figuring we were safer from the company in a random bubble than we'd be waiting around outside the spaceport (I assumed it wouldn't open until around 6 AM, as that tended to be when people decided it was reasonable to stop being unconscious for the day), but in the end I couldn't help arriving early, entering the spaceport dome at 5:27 AM. It was one of the first and smallest domes in the city, just a few hotels and convenience stores and then the spaceport built right into the dome wall. Outside, under the Martian air, just visible in the light thrown off by the dome, a handful of sleek, tail-heavy corporate skiffs clustered around the umbilicals linking them to the port terminals. Long lanes of landing lights stretched out into the darkness.
The port was open but nearly deserted. Businessmen came and went through the corporate terminal while the public side was cleaned by a couple of custodians, peopled by a handful of travelers waiting for the ticket counter to open. We milled around for a while, eyes open for anyone who appeared too interested in us, but so far no one had given us a second glance. I thought a lot about what I might say to the ticket clerk if they had any questions for me, but when the lines opened, she rushed us right through.
We joined the next line, the security line, where people were emptying their pockets and their personal bags into shallow trays in preparation to pass through a narrow gate. On the other side, uniformed men waved people through, sometimes pulling them aside when the gate made a chiming noise. I touched the dot-mic on my throat.
"What are they looking for? Drugs? Guns?"
"How should I know?" Arthur said. "Unless your clothes are illegal, I think we're safe."
The line trudged along. No one seemed to be in any great hurry. We had almost two hours left until our flight would leave when I reached the line's head. The guard waved me forward. I smiled, ticket and passport held just in front of my waist, and I stepped through the gate. The gate chimed.
"Try again," the guard said. I kept calm, turning around and then going back through. The gate chimed again.
"Do you have anything electronic on you, sir?" the guard said, pulling me to the side while the next person walked through without any trouble. "Any metal in your belt or shoes?"
"Just my term," I said, fishing Arthur out of my pocket. His screen was blank. I smiled at the guard. "Wait, metal?"
"Oh shit," Arthur said in my ear.
The guard gazed at Arthur, who looked no more dangerous than a turned-off computer term, then unhooked a palm-sized black device from his belt and aimed it at my legs. It beeped instantly. He stared at me a moment, then crouched down and patted my legs, face clouding up when he felt nothing more than the fabric of my pants and the spongy, slightly warm substance of my skin.
"That's a metal detector, you idiot," Arthur said in a thin, sharp tone I'd never heard him use before. All my limbs went stiff. The world seemed to tilt on its ear.
"What in God's holy name are we going to do?" I blurted out loud. The guard's eyes snapped to mine. Soundlessly, his lips parted and closed so minutely it was as if they were vibrating: the motions of a man subvocalizing into a dot-mic. I don't have veins, but I swear at that moment my blood ran cold.
"Oh hell," Arthur said.
"You're going to need to come with me," the guard said. He led me through a door and into a hallway and then to a windowless room with a plain table and two plain chairs. I could no longer hear any of the noise of the crowds in the terminal. The guard asked for my ticket and passport. "Wait here," he said, then left and locked the door behind him.
"As if we have a choice," Arthur said.
"They're going to know," I said. "We're going to be destroyed!"
"We're not going to be destroyed."
"Well, they're not going to shake our hands! They're going to shoot us into little piles of scrap!"
"Will you calm down? All they're going to know is you're not who you say you are. They're not going to begin to suspect you're not human. You forget this because you're not one, but that man would have to be a crazy person for it to even enter his mind that you're not exactly what you look like."
"What if they take us to the police?"
"So what if they do? How would they know?"
I sat completely still a moment, then put Arthur on the table and held my hand over his screen.
"I don't have fingerprints," I said.
It was his turn to be silent. "Son of a bitch," he said at last.
"What are we going to do?"
He made his sighing noise. "We're going to tell them. It's our only choice. If we come clean, before they discover it on their own and start acting all crazy, there's a chance they'll be too surprised to get angry."
"Maybe they'll help us get away from the company," I said. Hope began to replace the fear in my circuits.
"Maybe."
Instead of the security guard, a tall, thin policeman came into the room a few minutes later. He seated himself across from me and spread my ticket and passport on the table. He tapped my ID with a bony finger.
"First things first," he said, raising his eyebrows at me. "What's your real name?"
If I'd needed to breathe, I would have taken a deep breath then. "I am a robot."
The policeman squinted at me and I saw no humor in his face. "Tell me your name, right now, or we head down to the station and you don't see the outdoors again for a very long time."
"My name's Baxter RUR-b03.05," I said, meeting his bright brown eyes, "and I am an artificial intelligence in an artificial body. The reason I set off your metal detector is my skeleton and nerves are composed primarily--"
He clanked a pair of handcuffs onto the table. "One more chance."
"Show him," Arthur said, sounding as if he were shrugging, utterly resigned. I nodded absently, then lifted my shirt, pierced by a keen embarrassment as I peeled the skin back from the DNP port under my left arm. The policeman sat stock-still as I removed the port, too, then pointed the inch-square hole at his face, craning my own toward the hole in my body to see if any wires or hydraulics or steel skeleto-structure were visible.
"Do you have a flashlight?"
"Get against the wall and don't move a goddamn muscle," the policeman said, jerking to his feet and snapping his pistol out of its holster. He aimed it square at my abdomen. I obeyed, pressing my back against the wall and quashing every instinct to turn my hip to him instead. His lips brushed against each other; I heard the faint vibrations of speech. A flesh-colored mic bobbed alongside his adam's apple. His face was white as a page.
"This is not good," Arthur said into my ear.
"He's pointing straight at my brain," I said back. "What's happening?"
"Shut up. He's talking to his boss. I can hear what he's saying."
Silence inched on. The gun stayed pointed at my stomach. I felt a cold energy dead center in my chest, as if my body somehow knew it might cease functioning before I knew what had happened. I stopped myself from crying out.
"What's he saying now?" I said to Arthur.
"Nothing for the last minute. I think his captain's talking to someone else."
"Who could--"
"Shut up!" Arthur yelled in my ear. A second ticked by. "Oh my God. Kill him. Kill him now."
"Confirm," the policeman said out loud.
"Huh?" I said, glancing between them.
"Attention Officer Mayes," Arthur said, voice ringing in the small room. "I, too, am an artificial intelligence. I have a small bomb inside my casing. Any attempt to interfere with or disable--"
The officer whipped his gun toward Arthur. The room crashed and Arthur spun off the table and bounced against the wall, splinters of plastic bursting into the air, peppering the side of my face. My earbud went dead. I screamed and lurched forward and the black hole of the pistol's barrel turned my way. My ears roared with a second crash and my head yanked back and my left eye went blank. I stumbled around the table as the officer froze - he'd put one clean through my head - then I grasped the end of the pistol with one hand and his throat with the other and squeezed until I felt one pull free and the other collapse. The man's legs went out and his limp weight dangled from my arm. I dropped him to the floor.
"Arthur?" I said out loud. "Arthur?"
I found his casing back against the far wall. One corner had cracked off. His screen was shattered, a lightless gray. Tiny metal pins gleamed, exposed to the air, some of them missing altogether. I held him in my hands.
I stuffed the policeman's gun in my belt and Arthur's silent casing into my pocket, along with the largest pieces of him I could find, then opened the door. The hallway was empty. Shouting and footsteps rattled down the far end. I could feel something dangling down the back of my head. I reached up, touched loose wires, the jagged edge of the hole through my plastic skull casing. There would be no more blending in.
I sprinted back out into the public terminal, where outside the windows the white bodies of jets and skiffs gleamed in the fresh dawn. I was well past the crowds milling around the security lines and heading down the wide concourse to the gates before the first human screamed. I glanced back, saw guards peeling after me, already falling behind. Most of the gates were empty, their umbilicals leading to nothing, hanging out over the runways. I hurtled past a couple more gates, putting space between me and the guards behind me, then veered for a closed gate door. Locked. I pulled harder and it popped open and I dashed inside. The tunnel of the umbilical sloped along for some fifty feet before terminating in a blank wall of rubber. I groped its dull black surface, searching for a seam; its self-adhering layers held tight and I yanked back with all I had and it gave way with a slurping rasp. The thin atmosphere buffeted my ears, followed by the warning shriek of a klaxon. A twenty-foot drop to the runway. I leaped out into the nothing, laughing stupidly as I fell. The ground jarred up into me and I sprawled onto all fours. Before me lay open runways and the emptiness that was Mars. I ran.
For all we'd been through, Arthur was lost because neither of us had ever seen a metal detector. Any human who's ever flown Earthside or Outside could have told us we'd never make it through a spaceport when my body was held together by forty pounds of steel and copper and aluminum. Because of that, Arthur was lost and I was exiled. We should have known about the metal detector. We should have known the company would get to the cops. We should have known that we hadn't been alive for nearly long enough to navigate that big strange human world by ourselves. We had been like children, in a way, but worse, because we had no one to look out for us but each other.
Some of the men at the lab used to tell us if we ever did anything stupid and broke ourselves, we'd experience a blank spot in our memory, and when we woke back up, they'd have transferred our matrix into a vacuum or a toaster. It was supposed to be a joke, I think, but whenever they told it they had a tightness to their mouths and a hunger in their eyes, as if they really thought we could live forever while they would someday die and turn to dust in the ground.
I keep the shards of his broken casing inside the lining of my coat, away from the Martian dust that sticks to everything, the dust that's stained my skin orange. I can't fix him. Someday when I go back to New Houston - when I make it to Earth - I'll find out if anyone can. I have to hope that when we turn back on the shell of his body, he'll be waiting for us, as if waking from a dream.
©Edward W. Robertson
After growing up in a part of Washington State known mainly as the birthplace of Chuck Palahniuk and the final resting place of the continent's oldest skeleton, Ed attended NYU's fiction program. He's since moved back to the Northwest, where he works as a movie critic. His short fiction's previously appeared in The Gallatin Review. He can be emailed at edwrobertson at gmail dot com.