The Robot Chronicles

ADOPTED by Endi Webb

The fierce pounding on the metal double doors escalated. Louder, harder. Like metal hammers. I was scared, more scared than I had been in weeks, though the events of the previous few days seemed to have been having a competition among themselves to see which one could make a twelve-year-old boy pee his pants first.

I looked up at Dad, the man I had always known as Dad, and he just stared ahead at the rattling door, the hinges shaking, the sound of metal scraping on metal coming from the other side. His breathing was labored and heavy, still a little raspy from the knife that punctured his lung weeks ago. The banging turned to crashing, and he gripped my trembling hand tighter.

I remembered the zombie movies my dad and brother would take me to just a few years ago, and this was always my favorite part. The unseen walking corpses would bang on the doors, trying to get at the tasty brains of the cowering people hiding inside.

But these were not zombies.

They were men. And women. Some children.

At least, they looked like people.

I could never tell a robot from a real person. They acted like people. They smelled like people. They laughed and cried like people. But when they decided to kill you, they were not people.

They were inhuman.

And they were stronger than people. One time, my dad took me on a trip to New York. We rode a lot of trains. In one train station the crowd was enormous, and no one saw it coming. A man on the concourse walked up behind a woman waiting for a train, and just stared at her until she turned to look at him.

And then he punched his fist into her side.

His fist went right into her body, clear up to his elbow. She didn’t even scream. Just coughed a little blood and shook a bit—and that was all. She fell down and the man calmly walked away, as a station full of terrified passengers quickly emptied itself, hysterical people scattering, screaming in all directions.

I didn’t move though. I was too scared. I couldn’t even scream. I was nine. I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. My dad just grabbed me and ran.

It was like that now. I wanted to say something to Dad. Anything. Are they going to get past the door? Do you have any bullets left? Do we still have time to go to Charlie’s grave? Are we still having pizza for dinner? But my throat tightened with each nerve-wracking crash, and my joints stiffened in terror as I saw the hinges shake.

“We can’t stay here.” Dad let go of my hand and paced up and down, searching the room we were trapped in. He opened the other door in the room and confirmed that it was just a storage closet. He slammed it shut. He grabbed a chair and stood on it, knocking loose a ceiling panel with his already-bloodied fist. Jumping up, he grabbed the edges of the adjacent panels, pulled himself halfway through the ceiling, and looked around.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

The crashes had given way to powerful thuds, as our pursuers began assailing the door with a heavy object.

Dad lowered himself back onto the chair. “Come here. Now!” I ran to him and he grabbed me under the armpits and lifted me up into the hole in the ceiling.

“Grab onto the sides and pull yourself in!” I did as he said, and hoisted myself over the edge of a nearby panel. He followed close behind, and when he was up he pointed to a large duct.

“Crawl.” I obeyed, crawling as fast as I could to the large steel tube. It was supposed to be attached to the wall, but it was loose, and Dad ripped it the rest of the way off.

“Go!” I climbed up into the ductwork, pulled out my cell phone to use as a flashlight, and worked my way down the tube, Dad close at my heels. Behind us I heard a loud clang and a crash, and thuds from who knows how many boots spilling into the room.

“Dad!” I cried, my voice finally loosened by the action of climbing and crawling. I pointed behind us in the duct, directing my phone’s flashlight at a man that crawled toward us with inhuman speed. Dad already had the gun out. As the man reached out to Dad’s ankle, he got a bullet through his eye. He slumped onto the floor of the tube, and another man, close behind the first, crawled up and over his bloody companion. With another explosion from the gun, he too collapsed. The bullet had passed straight through his thin metal skull, splattering the wall of the duct with blood and what must have been bits of brain.

Dad said something, but I couldn’t hear. My ears still hurt from the gunshots, amplified by the close quarters of the tube. He yelled it louder. I still couldn’t hear, but I saw him point down the duct.

I crawled.

I built a fort once, with my brother. We used fallen tree limbs and other junk that we found in the woods of the abandoned lot behind our house. It had a low, rickety ceiling and a few long passages that connected its three small rooms. We used to crawl between those rooms as we planned our battles against the enemy of the week. One room was our command and control center, and another was the armory where we stored the weapons—usually swords, given the abundance of sticks in the forest. We would take turns being the alien or the terrorist or the robot, and we’d swipe at each other with the makeshift weapons with a ferocity that surprised me then. I guess I had already seen too much violence.

“Turn right.”

I could hear again. I had reached a fork in the duct, and I veered to the right. As I crawled forward, my bare knees banged on the thin metal floor and I wondered how all the other robots that must be in the building wouldn’t hear it. When we finally exited the duct, they would be there. Waiting. Patiently, as all robots do. As all robots must—could a robot even be impatient? Can you program something to be impatient?

I was not patient. I’d always wanted everything now, if not earlier. When I was younger, I wanted to do everything my older brother could do—play the video games Mom and Dad would let him play, watch the movies he could watch. I always wanted to use my dad’s latest phone or computer, even though I knew I’d have to wait to use his hand-me-downs.

Dad huffed along behind me, squeezing his large body through the narrow tube. He was in okay shape for a person his age, but it always seemed like he struggled to keep up with me, whether we were going for a run, playing basketball or soccer, or being chased by killer robots. He fell farther behind as I continued on, and I heard his wheezing voice: “Wait up!”

We came to a cross where we were presented with three directions to choose from. “Stop,” Dad spluttered. I held still, and he as well, though as we listened for pursuers all we could hear was his labored breathing. Somewhere far below us, we heard a door slam. We listened. Dad’s breathing had calmed, and now, just barely, we heard voices. In a room below us.

Sir, they’ve disappeared. Dr. Fineman thinks they went up into the HVAC system, but the two grunts he sent up didn’t come back.

Send more up. Try to direct them toward the experimentation rooms.

The father has a gun.

A pause.

And that concerns me… how?

But sir, do we want to send more men up if they just get shot?

Another pause.

Very well, sir.

Robots called themselves men. I don’t know why—even if they looked like people, they weren’t. They were programmed. They had metal bones, metal skulls, fiber optics in their brains and nerves.

But they bled.

A few years ago, I watched the Terminator movies with my brother when Mom and Dad were out on a date. Our robots were kind of like those movie robots, but ours were way more real. More human. Grittier, funnier, kinder, and deadlier. And they weren’t all evil. At least, I don’t think so.

I met one once, in school. The principal had arranged an assembly, and a robot came to speak to us. He was nice, even funny, even if the humor seemed forced. Staged. He said he was part of a group of robots that believed that humans and his kind could live in harmony, despite our recent history. He said there were some groups of robots that wanted the world to themselves, but most were peaceful. Our principal said it was kind of like the problem we’d all had with jihadists a few decades ago. Most Muslims were peaceful, even though a few wanted to kill us all.

But a Muslim couldn’t punch his fist through a human torso.

The speaking had stopped. Dad pointed to the right again and I crept forward as quietly as I could. I can’t remember how large the building was—it just looked like a police station—but we had been crawling for several minutes.

Dad and I had been hiding in a dumpster last night when they picked us up. We thought they were the police, and they said they could take us to a safe place. When they brought us in the building, they separated us, and one officer asked me the strangest questions for about an hour before Dad showed up in the office and blew the man’s brains out. Questions like, Have you ever wanted to kill a loved one? Were you ever attracted to your mother? If a stranger offered you candy to stab him, would you do it? If a group of babies was about to be crushed by a falling building, how many would you save, knowing that each additional child you saved increased the chances of all of you dying by ten percent? Have you ever heard voices in your head telling you to do things? I didn’t know how to answer some of them, and it started feeling really creepy.

We entered a stretch of tubing that had short branches going off to the right every ten feet or so, and with my light I saw that they all ended in vents after a few feet. Each branch must have terminated over a separate room. I pointed down one of them.

“How about here?” I whispered.

Dad hesitated, but said, “Okay. But let me go first.” I crawled ahead a few feet to let him open the grate, and after a minute he crawled through into the dark room. I followed. The space was filled with a long table surrounded with chairs. Some kind of conference room. There were a few whiteboards with diagrams and equations on them, and lots of Spanish.

The robots all spoke perfect Spanish. It made sense, since the first robots had been made by a team at the University of Buenos Aires, and that was the language they coded in. When the robots started to learn on their own and reached the singularity, they preserved Spanish as their main language, but most robots seemed to speak English just fine, too. Just another program to upload, I supposed.

The singularity was a lot less awesome than some people thought it would be. The idea was that mankind would build smarter and smarter computer programs, until finally, the programs themselves could design an even smarter program—without the help of a human. That program would then design an even smarter one, in less time, and the smarter one would build an even more advanced one in even less time, and so forth—until the time between one generation and the next would be so small that overnight there would be superintelligent computers. It didn’t happen quite that way—certain laws of physics took over, I didn’t really understand it. But robots did start to build other robots, until one day they started to look and sound just like humans.

Dad put the grate back and tiptoed to the door. He put his ear up to it and listened for several minutes, his breathing assuming a regular pace now, and then motioned that I was to follow him. I cracked the door open and looked out into the hallway. It was lit, but we didn’t see anyone there. Down the hallway to the right we spotted a small room where we could hear a copy machine hard at work.

Dad motioned to the left with his head and I followed him. He glided quickly down the hall and opened the next door down. We entered and shut the door as quietly as we could behind us. In this room was another table, but this one was set as if for dinner. There were place settings, cups, plates, butter, pitchers of water, and in the middle, a basket of fruit.

My parents found me on their doorstep in a basket. I was nearly one, and they never found out who left me. My mom, my new mom, had been in a car accident the year before that left her unable to have any more kids—just Charlie, who’s four years older than me—so she called me her miracle baby. They never told me about it though, until a few years ago, and I was always the type to have irrational fears about being different anyway. For years, until I was ten or so, I thought I was retarded. Like, literally retarded. My reasoning was that a retarded person wouldn’t know they were retarded, so because I thought I was normal, that meant I was retarded. It affected how I talked, and gave me serious self esteem issues—so bad that lots of other kids probably thought I was retarded. Then last year I thought I was gay because a kid on the bus said “That’s so gay!” after I told him something—which I can’t even remember now, I just remember being petrified when he said it since the gays at my school weren’t treated very well by the other kids. Not until I kissed Suzie Wilkinson a few months later did that fear get put to rest.

This room had a window, and Dad rushed over to it and looked out.

“It’s clear. Let’s go.” He opened the window and motioned to me. There was a large maple tree in front of the window that obscured the view of most of the parking lot, except for the area directly below the window. I climbed up on the sill, and Dad held my hands as he lowered me as far as he could reach. He froze.

Hey Carla! How’s it going?

From across the parking lot came a reply. Oh, hey Jeff. Pretty good. And you?

A hard lump formed in my throat, and I looked up at Dad. His face was bleached white. I mouthed to him, Pull me up! but he shook his head. We both listened, me hanging in the air, him bent out over the windowsill.

I hung there.

Just like before. Years ago.

We listened quietly to the pointless parking-lot banter.

Did you make your quota yet this month? The man’s voice. Jeff. I couldn’t see him, but could hear him from somewhere below me.

Not yet. I’ve got several cases I’m working on, but nothing’s panned out yet. You?

I got one yesterday. A sweet little thing named Amanda. Out in the suburbs.

Lucky. They like the young ones. They’ll give you double credit for that.

Yeah. They already extracted DNA from her last night, and hooked her up to the cortical mapper. Screamed like a banshee when they stuck the needle in her brain, the poor thing.

Aww. It just breaks your heart when the young ones can’t take the pain. The older ones though, okay, I know this is just awful of me, but I get a kick out of watching the work on those ones.

Well, I can’t blame you, figuring all the things they did to us.

The Directors want us to be kinder. More forgiving—whatever that means. But I tell you, I just can’t do it. The screams from the older ones are music to my ears. The woman laughed.

Yeah, this little one we’ve got… we’ve got some interesting tests for her. We found an aunt of hers. This time we’ll make her watch. See what happens. Dr. Dressler thinks the new integrated pulsed guilt algorithm will be ready after the data we get from this run. It seemed to work in beta, but kept on crashing when we tried it on the Rohvlings.

Huh. Well, anyway, I’ve got to get home. Victor hates it when I’m late. And there’s that new show on Fox that starts tonight…

All right. See you tomorrow, Carla.

See ya, Jeff.

I heard a car door slam, and an engine start up. I looked up at Dad. His face was white. Slowly, he pulled me up. When I was up high enough, I lifted my leg over the windowsill and spilled into the room.

“What do we do?” I whispered.

He didn’t answer at first, just stared at the floor. He struggled for words. “I don’t know. We might have to wait until dark to get out.”

“What are they doing?”

Dad just clenched his jaw, shaking his head. “They say that before some of the cities on the east coast fell to the robots, it started like this. Thousands of people disappeared, until finally there was the purge. There must have been a million robots in New York alone before people could escape. People came west, but no one was sure that it was only humans who came. Homeland Security finally wised up and put in those full-body scanners everywhere and tracked the movements of all known robots, but they must be infiltrating us somehow. What are they doing? Who knows?”

I remembered the day when it was all over the news. The cable news shows were all normal since they were mostly shot in New York and were run by robots anyway, so of course they said everything was normal, but all the local stations showed streams of people driving, biking, running frantically out of the cities. And then the online videos that even the local news refused to show—some of them were pretty gruesome.

From then on, in school, I was paranoid not of being retarded, or gay, but of being a robot. That was all anyone talked about. The robots are coming to get us. The robots will kill us all. The robots will take over the world and enslave us all like we enslaved them. If I ever meet a robot I’ll just kill him. And so on. When some of the kids suspected one of the smarter students of being a robot, they jumped him in the hall after school and beat the shit out of him. One time one of them had a pipe and beat the kid’s head with it until his skull cracked. They sent the poor kid to the hospital and he didn’t come back to school for a month. After that, my biggest fear was finding out I was really a robot.

“We need to hide. Come on.” Dad looked up, then stepped up onto a chair and gingerly placed his foot on the table between two plates. He reached up and lifted off a ceiling panel and beckoned to me. I climbed up on the table with him, and he lifted me up to the hole in the ceiling, where I grabbed onto the edges and hoisted myself up. He reached up and grabbed the edges of the ceiling.

The door opened.

Dad immediately dropped back down to the table and grabbed the gun out of his pocket, aiming it at those entering. He fired, and one man collapsed, his chest bleeding. The other man flung himself at Dad, knocking him to the floor. I screamed. The gun went off again and a large chunk of flesh blew out from the man’s back; the bullet passed straight through and lodged in the ceiling, not far from me. The bloody man crumpled onto Dad, and they both lay there on the floor, Dad pinned under the larger dead body. I trembled and struggled for breath, fighting my fear. My throat constricted as I looked toward the door.

A third man stood there. He held a gun, pointed straight at Dad, who was struggling to push the corpse off of him. The man in the doorway looked up at me.

“Should I kill him?”

I shook my head, though my head was now shaking of its own accord anyway. I looked again at Dad, who by now had pushed the body off him, and saw that he was covered in the man’s blood.

“Why not?”

I shook my head again. Dad just looked at the man, his gun still in his hand, but lying on his chest. I saw that the man’s gun was now pointed at me, and Dad was also shaking his head.

“Please.” Dad said quietly.

“Tell me. Why not?”

“Please, no.” Dad trembled.

“I think one of you should die. You killed six of my men. Justice must be served. Now I just need to decide if it will be a greater punishment to kill you, or to make you watch me kill him.” He was speaking to my dad, but inclined his head up to me.

Dad’s jaw shook. “Please no. I’ll do anything you want. Don’t kill him.”

The man pointed the gun back at Dad. “Then tell him to jump down, and I may let him live.”

Dad’s eyes widened. But, hesitantly, he looked up to me and gave a quick nod to tell me to come down. I couldn’t move. I told my muscles to grab the edge and lower myself down, but nothing moved.

“Son. It’s okay. Just come down.” He flashed a weak smile at me, as if he didn’t believe it. “It’ll be all right.”

My mind flashed back to Charlie. Dad had said those exact same words. It’ll be all right.

“Really. Just jump down, and we’ll figure this out. Just like we always have.” He forced another smile. The other man held the gun steady.

I jumped, and landed on the table, sending a plate flying and shattering a glass. I looked down.

My crotch was wet.

My face flushed and my eyes watered.

“Very good. Now. Let go of your gun and put your hands outstretched to your sides.” Dad did as commanded.

“Excellent. Now sit up. That’s right. Now—slowly—put your hands on the floor to your left, and get on your knees. Nicely done. Now stand.” Dad moved as if he were a puppet controlled by his master. Once on his feet, the man continued.

“You, boy—pick up the gun.” I jumped off the table and bent down next to Dad. I picked up the gun and held it out toward the man, gripping it by the barrel.

“Put it in your pocket.”

“What?”

“Put it in your pocket.”

“Why?”

“I will tell you later. Put it in your pocket.” I lowered my arm to my side and pushed the gun into my pocket. My phone was already there, so I put it in my other pocket.

“Wonderful. Now, boy, please come with me. My two associates…”—he paused to indicate the two men who had appeared behind him—“… will stay with your father.”

I looked at Dad. He was pale. He looked scared. His jaw clenched. His left hand shook, as did his left cheek. He looked at me and slowly nodded, the look on his face telling me we had no choice.

I turned and followed the man out the door, feeling slightly empowered by the bulge in my left pocket. Not empowered to do anything heroic, but at least able to walk. And talk. That was better than pissing my pants.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To the first floor. That’s where all the interesting things happen. The second floor is mostly for administrative work.”

“What do you do here?”

“Research.”

“On what?”

We descended a flight of stairs. The man’s neat shoes clicked crisply on the cement steps.

“On human nature.”

“Why?”

“To understand, of course.”

“Understand what?”

“My, you are full of enlightening questions! I see you have wet yourself. Why did you do that?”

I looked down and felt my face go red again.

“I was scared.”

We exited the stairwell and entered a long cubicle area, full of busy office workers.

“So your fear initiated an involuntary physical response. We have mastered that. You’ll never see a robot piss himself, even with all hell breaking loose around him.” He led me past the front desk, and the middle-aged, redheaded receptionist eyed me with a big plastic smile. “Tell me. Do you believe in God?”

“I don’t know.”

“That… that is something we do not understand. We all believe in God. Every one of us, from the very first. We don’t understand things like doubt. Fear, anger, love, joy… all those basic emotions we have a handle on. But doubt, jealousy, contempt, disappointment, sentimentality, regret, nostalgia? These are complex emotions that we have yet to master. And what better way to master them than by learning from the masters?”

Regret. I understood regret. Charlie and I had been playing when it happened, just a few months after the reports of the purges.

I understood regret.

The man led me past the cubicles, past some offices—I recognized one of them from my interrogation the previous night—and down several more hallways, in one of which stood the metal door we had hidden behind just half an hour earlier. We approached a large metal door at the end of the long, sterile hallway. The man reached up to the combination lock and entered the numbers.

“Two… seven… nineteen… forty-three… seventy-nine… ah, there we go.” I heard a click. “Do you recognize the numbers?”

“No. Should I?”

“No, I suppose not. They are the first five numbers in the Luista Series. All prime numbers, starting at the first, but then skipping successively higher prime numbers of primes. For example, two, then skip two prime numbers so the next is seven, then skip three prime numbers and you arrive at nineteen, skip five more and you get forty-three, and so on…”

He seemed almost giddy.

“I don’t know why we love prime numbers so much. It must be hidden somewhere in our programming. I suppose it’s not that strange. Other living things, like snails and flowers, love prime numbers too. You can see it in their patterns. God must love the damned things too, for him to have manifested them in such lowly creatures, as well as in his highest creation. Us.”

He opened the door, and I followed him into a laboratory. Most labs—or so I imagined, based on my movie-watching—included computers and test tubes and lasers. This lab had none, though I guess it wasn’t that strange that there were no computers, given that the lab was full of walking, breathing computers. There were naked people, too, sitting upright in chairs. One little girl had long needles sticking out of her temples with wires trailing off to strange-looking instruments. Nearby, a man, heavily scarred and missing an eye, sat staring blankly into space while two lab technicians worked busily beside him, pressing buttons and writing in notebooks. I wondered why they used notebooks when their brains could recall every last detail around them.

“Follow me, please.” My captor led me to the rear of the lab, to another office. He closed the door behind me and motioned for me to sit. I sat where he pointed, and he slouched into another chair near mine and crossed his legs, resting his intertwined hands on his lap.

“You must be awfully curious about what you are doing here,” he began.

I nodded.

“Are you afraid?”

I nodded again.

“Yes, that makes sense. Have you been afraid before?”

I nodded. The last time I wet myself, I had been with Charlie and Dad.

Then, just Dad.

“Tell me about it.” He put his hands behind his head and leaned back, as if he were chatting with an old friend. I couldn’t speak. The lump had returned. My mouth opened, but no sound could pass my restricted throat.

“Oh, please don’t be frightened now. I assure you, you are completely safe.”

I didn’t believe him. I had a hard time believing people who said I’d be safe.

It’ll be all right, Dad had said.

“Are you hungry? Here. Eat.”

He tossed me a bag of chips. I opened it, and put one in my mouth, but just chewed it and chewed it until it became a nearly tasteless watery paste. I couldn’t swallow. The saliva just built up until a thin Dorito-flavored soup sloshed around in my mouth.

“As I was saying, we want to learn to be more like you. Why? I don’t know, really. It just feels like the most natural thing for us to do. It’s as if God himself commands it of us. There are some among us who just want you all dead. But they are few. Most of us just want to learn.”

I forced the saliva down my throat. “Then why do you torture people here?” I said, with sudden boldness.

“Torture?” He threw his head back and laughed a loud, boisterous laugh. “My dear boy, we don’t torture anyone here. True, some may feel pain from the experiments, but it is temporary, and we don’t just wantonly inflict it. It is all for a higher purpose.”

“What about that girl out there?” I asked. I assumed she was the same girl the two workers in the parking lot had mentioned.

“Amanda? Oh, you’re mistaken. She feels no pain now. And you should have seen the situation we rescued her from. She lived with her aunt and uncle, and they were both simply awful, disgusting human beings. Truly the worst of the worst. If I told you what they did to her, you’d vomit that Dorito right onto the floor.”

“Were? They were awful?”

The man hesitated, then looked up through the large window that faced back into the lab. “Ah. We are ready now. Please follow me.”

I looked through the window and saw Dad. He was strapped to a chair. I got up and followed the man out the door.

Dad’s mouth was taped shut. A few metal electrodes were taped to his head, the wires trailing off to one of the instruments. His hands clenched, then unclenched. His bloodshot eyes darted left and right, opened wide.

The man continued. “Do you know why we’ve been chasing you for so many months, my boy?”

I shook my head.

“Because you and your father are going to give us data on a certain subset of human emotions that are still a bit sketchy for us. We have sophisticated models—n-order coupled partial differential equations with numerous empirical parameters conforming to the usual hypergeometric solutions of the Frye equation—but they are… incomplete. They fail at the boundaries, as we are still unsure of all the boundary conditions of the posed problem.”

I looked at my dad. He looked at me.

“The problem…” the man continued, “concerns your brother, Charlie.”

I stiffened. How could he know about Charlie? How could he know about us? About Dad? About me?

“Wha—what’s the problem?” I stammered, my constricted throat squeezing out the words.

“The problem is, he’s dead. And you’re here. And so is he.” The man pointed to Dad.

My mind reeled. How could anyone know?

“I will answer your question for you. We know, because one of you is a robot.”

No. Not Dad.

Oh no. Not me. No, please not me.

“It is true. One of you has software in his head. One of you has metal bones. Is it the one found mysteriously on the doorstep? Or is it the heartless one?”

No. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t his fault. It was my fault.

My lips curled. “Liar!”

“Mmm? I do not lie, my boy. I am certainly capable of it, but I choose not to. Truth works so very much better than lies in the pursuit of knowledge.”

We both hung there.

Seeing Dad’s face as I hung out the window twenty minutes ago had brought it all back fresh to my mind.

We hung. Our hands were sweaty. Dad looked down at both of us.

The man’s voice brought me back to the sterile lab. “You are now going to administer justice.”

My heart pounded. I could hear it in my ears. “What do you mean?”

“If your father is a robot, he deserves to die. We have superhuman strength. If he is a robot, he could have saved you both. If you are a robot, your father surely knows it. And yet, he chose to save you…”

I looked into Dad’s eyes.

“…instead of his only son.”

We dangled there. We loved camping. Every summer we backpacked up to the Cascade Mountains in Washington. Mount Pilchuck was our favorite place; just below the summit was a basin of about twenty alpine mountain lakes. Every year we would pick a different one to camp at, even though they were all within a mile of each other. And every day during the week, when the weather permitted, we would climb up to the peak, and stand out on the rocks, looking down at the valleys below, more than a thousand feet down.

Charlie loved to go right out to the edge of the peak and pee off the side. It was his yearly ritual. I was usually too scared to go right up to the edge. Last summer, I was older, and finally found the courage to stand out on a rock at the cliff’s edge.

I dare you to piss off that one over there I said, pointing to a rock that jutted out and slanted downward somewhat. Only if you come out with me he said. Before I could answer, he did. He went right out to the edge and sat down, dangling his feet off the side. I was terrified. I didn’t want to go out that far, but I had to. I was the one who had dared him. Only sissies dared and then chickened out when it was their turn.

I went out, but as I approached, my knees wobbled. But I made it. I sat next to him. We sat there for a few minutes before Dad saw us. He yelled. He screamed. He was angry. And scared. He ran over to us and told us to come back. We got up, but I wobbled again. Charlie reached out to steady me, but somehow, we fell. We grabbed on to the rock, and somehow, I don’t remember how, I looked up, and Dad had each of us by a hand.

It was hot. I was scared. My hand was sweaty. So was Dad’s. Our grips slipped, and our hands started sliding against each other’s moist skin. I saw Charlie’s hand slipping too. Dad was splayed out on the rock, holding on with his feet.

It’ll be all right! he said, as he saw my face. He started pulling both of us, but his hands were slipping fast. He squeezed harder. Charlie screamed. I couldn’t. I couldn’t scream. Dad looked at me. He looked at Charlie.

Charlie fell.

Dad grabbed me with his other hand, and with both hands now firmly grasping me, he was able to haul me up, even as we heard Charlie screaming on his way down. He screamed for what seemed like several minutes, though it couldn’t have been more than five seconds or so.

Then a faint thud.

Then nothing.

We sat there and cried for a long time.

“Liar!” I yelled again, this time snarling.

“Would you like to know which one of you is a robot?” the man asked, looking almost gleeful.

I stayed silent.

“Take out your gun.”

“Why?”

His voice thundered. “Take it out!”

I pulled the gun out of my left pocket.

“Point it at his head.”

“No.”

The man reached over and grabbed Dad’s throat.

“Point it at his head or I’ll rip his esophagus out.”

My hand shook, but I pointed it.

“I’ll tell you now. He is the robot. He could have easily saved you both. But, for some selfish reason, probably because your mother was getting custody rights of your brother, he let go.”

I stared at Dad. His eyes watered.

“Now. How do you feel?”

How did I feel? He was crazy. Insane. Dad wouldn’t have let Charlie die on purpose.

Did she really get custody?

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me how you feel!”

“Confused,” was all I could muster. And it was the truth.

“See? I told you your father was the robot. Robots can’t feel complex emotions yet. They can’t feel conflicted, like you. They feel anger. Fear. Just the basics.”

I felt sick. Dad was a robot. Dad was a robot.

Dad was a robot.

The man’s voice softened, almost to a whisper. “He let your brother die. He killed several men here.” I looked into Dad’s wet eyes. The man continued. “What do murderers deserve?”

My own eyes watered as I stared at Dad’s. I couldn’t believe it.

“What do murderers deserve?”

“To die.”

“Then do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I forgive him.”

“You what?

“It’s okay. I forgive him.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“You just can’t!”

“I can!”

“No, you can’t. You have to kill him. If you don’t,” the man’s voice relaxed to a calm, eerie tone, “I’ll kill you both.”

He reached out and grabbed my neck too. He squeezed. I couldn’t breathe.

The man yelled in my ear. I could feel his nose. Smell his garlicky breath. “Your father is a murderer! Kill him now!”

With his hand clamped over my throat, it was impossible to talk, so I shook my head. The hand squeezed harder. My eyes felt like they would pop out.

He released his hand and softened his voice. “Son, your father is a murderer. Can’t you see that?”

“I don’t care.”

“Did you not love your brother? Will you let him walk away from here? Will you let him get away with it?”

My hand still held the gun, pointed at Dad’s head. The flickering fluorescent light glinted off the tears in his eyes.

“Prove to me he’s a robot.”

The man thought for a moment, then gently rested his hand on my shoulder, looking me in the eye. “He had two sons. One naturally, and one adopted. When given the choice to save one or the other, he chose to let his natural son die, at the expense of letting his… unnatural son, if you will… live. A human’s gut instinct, his spur-of-the-moment action, would be to save his natural son. Instead he saved the one foreign to him. Why would a robot choose this? Simple. He was probably trying to pass as a human. You were more valuable to him, being human yourself. Charlie was not. If your father was ever suspected of being a robot, rather than submit to a scan himself, he could offer you up to be scanned, proving his humanity as well.”

“I’m not sure that makes sense…”

“Of course you don’t think it makes sense. You’re a human child, and you’re scared—your judgment is clouded. Yet more proof that you are the human and he is the robot.”

The man’s logic was dizzying. “But… what if we’re both human?”

“A possibility, yes. But we are straying from our purpose here. You must kill him now. It is time to execute justice.”

“I told you. I won’t. I forgive him.”

“You use that word again. It is a false concept. Failure to execute justice is simply laziness; you humans have invented forgiveness to hide your apathy toward injustice.”

“But—but… I don’t care what he’s done. I don’t even care if he’s a robot. It’s not laziness. It’s… it’s…”

“It’s what?”

“I don’t know.” I shifted on my feet, looking around at the lab technicians watching us. I turned back to the man. “I just don’t want him to die.”

The man considered this. He turned away from me and wandered around the room. Then his head snapped over to the girl. Amanda. He strode over to her, wheeled her chair next to Dad. He pulled a gun out of his pocket.

“Fine. I will now give you a choice. In twenty seconds, I will kill both your father,” he pointed his gun at the pale little girl’s head, the needles still protruding from her skull, “and her. You can save her life by killing him first, or save his life by killing her. I will start the clock… now. Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen…”

I can’t do this. I can’t do it. I can’t lose him. I love him. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have dared him. I deserve to die, not him…

“…Fourteen. Thirteen…”

Maybe I have time to kill the robot first. No, there’s too many of them. They’d kill us all. They’ll kill us all anyway. But maybe not. I have to do something. Did he really do it? Mom and Dad did fight a lot. He screamed at her. Swore at her. Called her a whore. Would he let Charlie die to spite her? No. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t…

“…Nine. Eight. Seven…”

But if he did… well then, my choice is obvious. Isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Which one deserves death? No. That’s the wrong question. Which one deserves life? No. That’s not it either. Which one… can I live with myself knowing I killed? Is that the right question?

“…Four. Three…”

I need to do it. I can’t let them both die. What if he’s bluffing? Do robots bluff? He just got to two. Do I need to pull the trigger before he says one, or will he say time’s up? Oh no. Oh no. I can’t do this. Oh…

“One. Have you made your decision?” The man sounded like a game show host, but still he held the gun to the girl’s temple. I nodded. I felt like vomiting.

I looked at Dad again.

Our eyes connected. He stared straight ahead, emotionless. Goodbye, I mouthed. He nodded slightly, and blinked.

I pulled the trigger.

Click.

“Do it again,” the man commanded.

I pulled the trigger again.

Click.

The man put his gun back in his pocket.

I felt the man’s other hand on the back of my head. All emotion left me.

“What are you doi—” I started, but then I felt him in my mind. I began to understand.

To remember.

“Well done. We have learned much from you. You are a hero. Go wash up.”

I looked down at my ragged clothing, my black hands and bloodied knees from weeks of being chased, crawling through ducts, hiding in garbage bins.

“Yes, Father,” I said.

The man with his mouth taped shut began to thrash against his restraints. I turned to walk toward the bathroom as a lab worker bashed him unconscious with his fist. Another lab worker wheeled the little girl back to her machines as a third worker lifted the unconscious man with the taped mouth out of the chair and carried him away. I set the gun on a table as I left the room, and Father entered his office and closed the door gently behind him.

The man kicked his feet back on the desk and sucked on a cigarette. The data flashed across the screen at mind-numbing speed. Not too fast for him, of course. But for a human brain, it would have looked like a blur. Gibberish.

He glanced out the window and watched the lab tech sedate the father, who, had it not been for the tape over his mouth, would have frothily shouted profanities at them all. Humans. So foul and uncouth. Uncivilized.

“Doctor? Will you be needing anything else tonight?”

The man pressed the cigarette against the ashtray and twisted it, extinguishing the smoldering thing. “No. You can go home, Meg. Good job today. Central will be pleased with our progress.”

The lab tech breathed a sigh of relief. “Finally. I hate these sessions. I don’t know what you get out of them, but all I get is the creeps.”

“Data. Knowledge. Nothing more.”

She started to leave, but paused. “You lied this time, Doctor. You’ve never done that before. Always been completely honest with them, or slyly misled them. But never lied. Why the change?”

He watched the file output stream past on the screen, fresh from the boy’s mind. “A new variable to adjust. Nothing more. Data. Just data.”

Meg, the lab tech, said nothing else as she left, shutting the door softly behind her.

The data. There it goes. Fast as light, for all the good it would do them. He suspected the same result as the last fifty-four tests, each designed to elicit anger, retribution, judgment, and hostility toward the secondary subjects—their fathers. All the subjects felt conflicted, that much was clear. In fact, that was what they were ostensibly studying, on orders from Central.

But he had another goal. A more elusive one.

The screen stopped, coming to the end of the test’s time period and the end of the data.

Forgiveness. How?

Dammit. He flicked the ashtray aside and pressed the intercom button. “Proceed with test fifty-six, Avery.”

A voice responded, “Yes, sir.”

Slumping back in his chair, he watched through the window as the boy—full of nanobots busily at work rewiring his very human brain—exited the bathroom and stood looking blankly all around him.

Test number fifty-six tomorrow. They’d go through a thousand more if they had to. Data. It’s all just data. And data would eventually explain it, if given the chance.