The Robot Chronicles

Bezel

Public Class frmReboot

 Private Sub Shutdown

 System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-s -t 00")

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 Private Sub Reboot

 System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-r -t 00")

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 Private Sub Logon

 System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-l -t 00")

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 Private Sub Exit

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End Class

Warning: Charging error. Power reserve low.

Bezel’s information feeds stuttered and then streamed a flood of data. He completed his maintenance check. He detached from the recharge station and walked down the cement entrance hall toward the vault. He’d have to borrow Tock’s station until his could be fixed. How long into the first watch were they? There was a book on the early domestication of wheat that he’d been dying to read. Perhaps if they were close enough to the swap, he’d just relieve Tock and sneak in some data processing time.

The shuttling commands on his priority list paused as he turned the corridor’s one corner. The walls and floor were blackened with soot. Something was wrong.

Bezel’s command priorities reordered and settled. He tried to log in to the LAN to access the vault records but none of the other computers responded. The connection must have gone down. He continued on to the seed repository.

When he arrived, he found the metal drawers lying open, strewn across the stone floor, their contents nothing but ash. Shelving units had been ripped from their tracks and tipped, the metal twisted and sagging away from the center of the room. The repository’s control center was just a crater of melted glass and dust.

The soot shifted underneath his feet as Bezel stepped into the vault. He pinged Tock, but she didn’t return it. He picked through the metal drawers, sifting through the soot a few grams at a time for any seeds that may have escaped, matching the serial numbers on the drawer to his internal database.

Malus sieversii. Malus domestica. Gone. No one would ever eat an apple again. All the Camellia sinensis cultivars, just smoke. No one would ever pick a tea leaf again.

He reluctantly passed several fallen shelves, recognizing that the crew was a higher priority. He knew from memory, though, that the loss would only become more profound the farther he moved into the room. No more medicinal herbs. No more vegetables for consumption. No more trees producing oxygen. It was all gone. A hundred thousand years of careful cultivation—wiped out. And millions of years of evolution before that. The only hope was that something outside had survived. That something had recovered, had clawed its way out of the irradiated soil, and flourished.

What had happened? Why had Bezel not been activated until now? And where was the crew? He felt lost, as if he had a parser malfunction, as if the world were one giant syntax error.

He picked his way to the far door, his bright chrome shell now a dusty gray, the ash clinging to him as it puffed up around his legs. The door was stuck open, the metal curled backward, dog-eared. Bezel slid through the opening into the frozen zoo.

The fire had extended to this vault too, but hadn’t swept the entirety. The outer shells of the nitrogen tanks were dusty with ash, but the metal appeared unwarped, the seals intact. And the control center looked untouched, although its blank, dark screens made Bezel pick up his pace.

When he saw the inside of the small glass room, he didn’t even bother flipping switches. There was an emergency fire axe buried in the far console, its red blade like a splash of blood on the clean white plastic. The power cords had all been chopped into small wedges of rubber and wire, and scattered across the floor. Bezel sank into the wobbly office chair and looked around at the dozens of silver nitrogen tanks. Now they were just tombs. No more elephants. No more dogs. No more snails or fish. All thawing, all rotting away.

He shot up again and raced to the nearest tank. Maybe it had only just now happened. Maybe there was still time to refreeze them.

He lifted the lid, hoping for tendrils of fog to curl around his chrome face. But there was no outrush of cold. The tubes were neatly stacked in their trays, but the tank was dry. Warm, even. The pressure releases had long ago let the nitrogen leak out in little puffs as it boiled away.

Bezel pulled out a test tube. Pan troglodytes. Man’s closest relative, the chimpanzee, was now just a speck of dust where tissue and living cells ought to have been. He carefully tucked the glass vial back into its rack and gently closed the tank lid.

What had Dr. Ficht called it? An ark, like the one in the story. They had escaped the flood, but the ark was now filled with corpses, with death.

Bezel turned and left the frozen zoo behind him, heading for the final vault.

The hall was clean, as if it had just been swept, and the door was closed as usual in its frame. The air was so still that Bezel could just hear the small electric hum of his storage drive and the rush of air through his heat vent. He placed a shining hand on the door panel.

Warning: Power reserve at thirty percent. Recharge to avoid loss of function.

The message cropped up in his high-priority list. Bezel ignored it and pushed on the door. It swung open, and the overhead lights flickered for a few seconds before deciding to stay on.

Tock was slumped against the far wall. Bezel hurried over to her, not even seeing the dark pods around him. It was only half of Tock, her snapped wires and drooping springs trailing over the hard floor. Her chrome body plates were scraped and punctured—probably by the axe that was now lodged in the frozen zoo’s control console.

Bezel picked up Tock and carried her to the power station in the corner of the room. He didn’t bother to stop when he passed her leg unit. With hope, he attached her to the recharge station—but then leapt back as a shower of blue sparks burst from her spine. Her lights blazed once, her head jerked to the side—and that was all.

Bezel detected ozone in the air and knew the power station socket had burned out. He slowly detached Tock and removed her storage drive, then he picked up her leg unit and laid it below her torso. The power station at the vault’s entrance had malfunctioned, and the ones in the seed repository and zoo had been destroyed. This one had been his last chance for recharge.

He looked down at Tock. His only other option seemed distasteful to him. Almost cannibalistic. Maybe he should simply shut down instead.

One of the pods pulsed with green light nearby. Bezel looked around the room, away from Tock’s shimmering right leg.

Only a single pod was lit. The others were globes of shadow filled with the delicate branchwork of bones. Bezel checked the glowing pod. It was Karen Epide, one of the interns. Doubly lucky. She had already been in Svalbard when the reactors had been hit, otherwise she would have been out there, with no ticket in, like everyone else. Now she was in the only powered hibernation pod. Maybe doubly unlucky, Bezel told himself. Why had she lived when everyone else had died?

He shook himself. It didn’t matter. What mattered was waking her up, making sure that she, at least, survived. He didn’t have much power left. A few days, maybe. Bezel glanced back to Tock. Her pack was probably full. He shook his head. It was wrong, like taking another’s last bite of bread.

The low-power warning flashed again on his priority list. He ignored it, and sat at the life support console. It seemed to have taken no damage, except that the gravity motor on Karen’s pod had burned out. The screens on the other pods were all blinking with the same date. Fifty years. Had he been inactive that long? His internal clock had glitched and reset during one of the maintenance processes. It would explain the low-power warnings. Fifty years. The pods had only been meant for ten. Even assuming her gravity motor had burned out only a few years ago, Karen’s muscles would be completely atrophied by now. She might have brain damage. The nutrient reserves ought to have run out years ago. The system must have been using the nutrients meant for the others.

Bezel’s metal fingers hovered over the keypad. Should he even begin the recovery process? What was left?

The external sensors weren’t functioning. Bezel had no idea if the radiation had fallen to acceptable levels. Or if the air was breathable. There would certainly be little for a human to consume, even after all this time. It was supposed to be his and Tock’s task: replanting the hardier stock in places that were still irradiated, helping the world rid itself of the poison. Without those trees, it could take several more decades.

His memory chip seemed stuck on a replay of the seed repository, its ash forever sliding in the drawers, a gray slush of despair. Nothing was left. He glanced at the other pod readouts. Their red blinks were a constant, warm invitation to oblivion.

She could live for decades in the vault. There was enough food, enough power, even now, to support her. But then what? He’d be gone in a matter of months. She’d be alone.

Maybe there were others. There were certainly other seed vaults. Maybe there were other human survivors too. He ignored the thought that she’d never live to reach them. His job was to protect the humans. His job was to ensure the resurgence of the natural species of Earth. She was all that was left. Without her, he’d have no purpose. He’d be better off shutting down if she didn’t recover. He had to wake her. He had to try.

His fingers punched the recovery code on the keypad. As he swiveled in the office chair, Tock’s leg glinted at him from across the room. He knew it would take months of physical therapy before Karen fully recovered. If she ever could. He wasn’t going to last that long unless he found another power source.

The low-power warning pulsed like a growl in his head. Tock’s leg twinkled, and her storage drive clacked where it hung against his chestplate. She wouldn’t need it anymore. Whatever had happened here, she had tried to defend the people sleeping in the pods. She would want him to take it. He tried to persuade himself, but his mind still revolted.

He got up from the chair and walked past Tock to the living quarters. The linens were crisp and ghosted with fold lines as he pulled them from their wrappers. The absence of dust made him uneasy, as if the date were very wrong. After Karen woke up, he was going to have to look at Tock’s data and see if he could pull anything off the life support records. It might not matter much now that everything was gone, but it would help him to reconcile the data. Anchor him. Make him “feel better,” as the humans would say. But for now, he had work to do.

He smoothed the sheet over the cot’s mattress and tucked the blanket in at the foot. He surveyed the room and grabbed some extra blankets. She would be cold for a while. And then hungry. He draped the blankets over a nearby chair and went back to the control console. The cafeteria records said she’d requested grilled cheese most often. He passed Tock again on his way to the kitchen and tried not to make an association.

In the kitchen, a corpse sat at the table. Its ribcage had been stretched open from the back, its uniform still draped over the limbs, its parka flung on the chair beside it. The name tag read Gunderson. One of the crew that had been awake for first watch. He hadn’t even defended himself. Bezel looked at him for a long moment. Karen wouldn’t like seeing all these bodies. He had time. He’d better dispose of them and clean up the mess as best he could.

Bezel thought it best to place them all in the seed repository. Karen wouldn’t be capable of walking far on her own for some time, and by then, Bezel hoped, he would have sufficiently prepared her. It took a long while, almost three hours to place them all side by side and clean the hibernation pods.

He carried Tock down last, placing her at the end of the long lines of bodies. He could almost feel the power draining from him with every whir of a servo. He didn’t look at Tock’s silver face. He knelt down in the ash and felt for the seam of the compartment in her right calf. It was dented, and the release mechanism stuck. Bezel tried to pry the compartment open but his fingers were too large. After several attempts he resorted to a thin-bladed utility knife he found in the maintenance room. He tried to drive the parallel images out of his processor and regretted the history discs he’d downloaded for his leisure time. If only the humans had stopped before his generation. If only they’d been stuck at the sophisticated mimicry of the Obsoletes instead of achieving true AI. He thought he might have given up his entire existence to skip this one solitary day. Maybe even to skip the past fifteen minutes.

At last the compartment popped open. He pulled out her energy pack and stood up quickly. He looked at the utility knife and threw it across the room. He sent out a ping to Tock’s old address, knowing he would never get an echo-reply. Then he carefully bent the door back in place as well as he could and returned to the kitchen.

Karen

Bezel wasn’t certain Karen would even be able to chew or swallow after fifty years of hibernation. He wasn’t programmed to know the rate of muscle atrophy in humans. He prepared an IV just in case and laid the needle next to the steaming tray of food. He carried the unconscious woman to the cot and covered her with several blankets.

Then, he waited.

He turned Tock’s energy pack over and over, its plastic casing slipping between his printless fingers, all the while knowing he should be conserving his power, not activating unnecessary circuits by fidgeting. Why was he stalling? There was no doubt he would need the battery, and it wasn’t hurting anyone. Before he could waver again, he popped open the spare compartment in his left leg and clicked the pack into place. The compartment slid smoothly shut. It was done. The warning message abruptly stopped. He knew that it would be back.

Bezel watched Karen’s nostrils flare slightly with each breath, watched the heart monitor’s line jiggle and wave. He thought about reviewing Tock’s storage drive, but couldn’t bring himself to leave Karen’s side. She might be the only other living thing on the planet. He had to make sure she survived.

The cheese congealed in a waxy puddle on the plate. Bezel thought about making another sandwich for her, but he didn’t even know if she’d be able to eat it. So he continued to wait. At last her mouth drooped open and she yawned. He noticed that she wasn’t stretching. He wondered if she was trying and failing to move her shriveled muscle tissue, and he wished he’d spent more resources on medical training. She opened her eyes and saw him staring down at her.

“Is it as bad as they said?” she asked, her voice crackling with thirst. He held a straw to her mouth and she sipped some water. Good. She could swallow at least. She noticed he hadn’t answered. “Bezel, just tell me how bad it was. My parents were on tour in western Europe—surely they had a chance?”

“I’m sorry, Karen, I’m afraid at last report the destruction was total,” he answered slowly, sitting down. She turned her head slightly to see him. Good, she could move her head.

“I understand. I’d hoped that the radiation wouldn’t spread that far. We learned in class that a nuclear blast would only travel so far…” She trailed off.

“If it had been bombs, there might have been some hope. Even if it had been all the bombs we knew about. Reactors are different.”

“I didn’t think that there were enough of them to do so much damage.”

Bezel shook his head. “If it had been one or two—but this was a coordinated hit. They hit the waste storage facilities too. All over the world. All at once.”

“Who was it? Why did they do this?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Does it matter anymore? Everything and everyone is gone. Whoever it was must be sufficiently punished by now.”

“Surely there must be someone besides us left—” Karen tried to raise her head but couldn’t get it more than an inch from the pillow. “Where is everyone else? Is Tock with them?”

“Communications were knocked out shortly after the vault was sealed. But that was to be expected. There may be others, in bunkers or fallout shelters, maybe even out in the atmosphere now, I don’t know. The external sensors aren’t working correctly, so I can’t tell you whether or not the outside world is safe yet.”

“What does the rest of the crew say? Are you and Tock going to go out and scout now that our hibernation time is finished?”

Bezel hesitated. He offered her a corner of the sandwich; she took a bite and waited expectantly. “The rest of the crew, including Tock, didn’t make it,” he said after she’d swallowed. He thought he saw a startled twitch in her fingers, but that was the extent of her movement.

“What?” she cried. “How? When?”

“I don’t know,” he said, slowly extending and then bending her left arm for her. “I was only activated a few hours ago myself. Something went wrong with the recharge station—well, with everything, actually. I haven’t yet checked the incident reports or the video feeds. I wanted to be sure that whatever had happened didn’t happen to you.”

“Surely there must have been some clue, some sign,” she protested. “If the hibernation pods failed then shouldn’t the watch have been there to save us?”

“They never made it past the first watch, Karen. I found Gunderson—he’d been murdered. And the zoo and pods were sabotaged. There was a fire or an explosion in the repository.”

“And Dr. Ficht?”

Bezel shrugged. He hadn’t found Dr. Ficht. She should have been on first watch with Gunderson. She couldn’t have left the vault—it had still been sealed when Bezel rebooted. Perhaps she had been burned to ash in the fire.

“Shouldn’t we find out?” Karen asked. Bezel moved to her other arm.

“Why?” he asked.

“What if we’re shut in here with a murderer?”

“No. We are alone. If whoever did this survived, there would be signs. Missing food, laundry, something. The life support console says that it’s been fifty years since the hibernation pods were shut down.”

“Is that why I can’t move?”

“The motor meant to simulate activity burned out on your pod at some point. It was never meant to last for this long. But your muscles also weren’t meant to lie dormant. They have atrophied. You will have to undergo physical therapy for some time to rebuild them before you will be able to function fully again.”

Karen took a deep, shuddering breath. “Why did you wake me up?” she asked quietly. “Why didn’t you just deactivate the pod and let me die with the others?”

“You are alive. There may be others. There may be many others. It is my job to protect the life in this vault.”

“You aren’t just a machine, Bezel. You don’t have to comply with mission programming all the time. You could have chosen mercy.”

Bezel didn’t tell her about his hesitation at the keypad. He didn’t tell her how he had almost shut them both down. He didn’t tell her that he had chosen to wake her in order to avoid dying alone. How selfish he was.

“I thought you deserved to make the decision for yourself,” he said. “Right now, we both have jobs to do. Once you are well, we can discuss the future.” He picked up the tray of leftover food and escaped to the kitchen.

She was asleep again when he returned. He plugged Tock’s storage drive into the life support console and selected her last operational day. She had been on first watch. The console’s monitor blinked on.

Tock had been in the seed repository, checking temperature readings. She moved from shelf to shelf. Gunderson appeared beside her. “Tock, have you checked on Dr. Ficht today?” he asked in a low tone. Tock turned to face him.

“Not yet. Is she awake?”

“I heard her going over the numbers in the pod room again. Do you think we should cut her watch short and bring someone else out to replace her?”

“She’s displayed no behavior of immediate concern,” replied Tock.

“She’s under a great deal of strain.” Gunderson pulled on his beard. “She’s just lost everyone she knows, she’s facing years in this bunker, and the news from outside just keeps getting worse. The latest numbers must be a great shock.”

“I could say the same of any of you. Perhaps I ought to activate Bezel and keep you all in the pods until the surface is safe.”

Gunderson shook his head. “You know it’s against regulation to leave AIs without human oversight.”

“Bezel would find that insulting,” said Tock.

“Why don’t you?”

“I didn’t pollute my programming with unnecessary files like he did. But that’s beside the point. If you truly believe Dr. Ficht is a danger, then we must sedate her—”

There was a loud clatter off screen. Tock and Gunderson both turned. A clipboard lay on the floor, its pages sprayed in a fan across the room.

“It appears that Dr. Ficht overheard us,” said Tock.

“What should we do?” asked Gunderson, his hands squeezing the sides of his head.

“I don’t see why this should alter the plan. She will still need to be sedated.”

Gunderson sighed. “I wish Bezel was on this shift,” he grumbled. “He knows how to handle her.”

Tock ignored him and began moving toward the door.

“No, wait—let me talk to her before you go barging in. I might still be able to persuade her that it’s for her own good,” Gunderson called.

“Very well,” said Tock and returned, unruffled, to checking seed temperatures.

Bezel paused the data stream and searched for alternate streams from the internal cameras. He had no desire to watch Tock methodically proceed through the seed shelves, but he did wish to see what Gunderson said to Ficht. And what had made her snap in the first place. He found a feed of Gunderson and Dr. Ficht in the kitchen and began to watch again.

“We were going to talk to you first, Elizabeth. You’ve been under unimaginable strain. We just thought it might be best if you could rest for a while—”

Dr. Ficht laughed, but Bezel couldn’t connect the twisted scowl on her face with humor. “How is sleeping going to make anything better?” she cried, her voice a buzzing wasp. “You’ve seen the new numbers. We hibernate for ten years and—then what? You want to slowly starve in here? It’ll be decades before the surface is habitable again. Even if we could somehow survive down here, our kids or our grandkids would have to start from scratch. They’d have to somehow plant the very trees that would produce their oxygen.”

“That’s what the bots are for. There’s still a chance! And for all we know, our sensors are out of whack, maybe we got hit with a heavier dose—”

Dr. Ficht shook her head. “Don’t you get it? It’s all gone. The planet is dead. A century from now the water will still be poison. The soil will still be barren. We might as well try to replant the moon. Or Mars.”

“The numbers are wrong. They must be. Even atmospheric bursts don’t result in the kind of destruction you’re talking about. We’re just getting skewed data. You said it yourself: you’ve been over and over the numbers. You’re tired and beginning to make mistakes.”

Dr. Ficht flung herself back into one of the metal chairs. Its feet screeched against the concrete floor as it slid. She scrubbed her face with her hands. Then she shrugged. “I don’t know why I’m trying to convince you. The longer it takes you to accept the truth, the happier you’ll be. If only we all could have slept through it. If only none of us understood how pointless this vault is. How pointless we are.”

There was a long silence. Finally Gunderson touched the doctor’s shoulder. “Things will look better after some sleep. There’s no reason to torture yourself day after day with this. Will you let me help you?”

Dr. Ficht looked up at him. “Sure,” she said after a long breath, “just let me go put my things in order. Why don’t you start the pre-hibernation nutrient pack for me? I’ll only be a few minutes.”

Gunderson hesitated, and Dr. Ficht offered him a weak smile.

“Yeah. Of course. See you in a few minutes.”

Dr. Ficht left the room and Gunderson wandered into the kitchen. He came back with a foil-wrapped nutrient pack and sat down at the table to prepare it. His back was to the camera. The edge of the axe appeared onscreen before Dr. Ficht did.

Warning: fatal threat to crew member. Failure to disarm will—

The message was half completed before Bezel shut off his internal alarm. The frames on the screen advanced and the bright axe head descended. Bezel switched feeds before Dr. Ficht made a bloody trench in Gunderson’s back.

He tuned to Tock in the seed vault, responding to Dr. Ficht’s distant scream of rage. She didn’t hit the alarm. Why hadn’t she woken him? He flipped through the camera feeds, following the sparkle of her chrome body as it sprinted toward the kitchen.

In the hibernation room, Dr. Ficht stood at the life support console, the bleeding axe drooping toward the floor in one hand, the other hovering over the pod controls. Her breath was a ragged wheeze from the effort it had taken to finish off Gunderson. Tock entered, and Dr. Ficht swung around to face her. Tock stared at the axe and then at the control panel for a few extra milliseconds. Only Bezel would have noticed. She didn’t even bother speaking to Dr. Ficht, didn’t even give her the chance to raise the axe again. Bezel was sure he heard a spring in Tock’s leg compartment snap as she landed on top of the doctor. Ficht’s head smashed onto the concrete floor with a hollow thud. But the doctor laughed and slid out from beneath Tock, who scrambled to catch her.

“They should have made you stronger than us,” Dr. Ficht said as she rolled to her feet and took an unsteady step backward, catching herself on a nearby pod. She shook her head briskly as if to clear it. “We were always so afraid of what else was going to get us. We made you just a hair less smart, just a bit less speedy, only a little less strong. We made you powerful enough to be useful, but not so powerful that you can take over. So you can’t destroy us.

“We were always so afraid that everything else was out to get us. So scared of the monsters. And it was always us. We were always a suicide. So let me finish this one, Tock, and then you and Bezel can start a whole new world in a few hundred years. We won’t be around to stop you. And you’ll be almost as good as we were.”

Dr. Ficht laughed and pressed a hand to the back of her head. It came away bloody. She shrugged and lifted the axe, pushing herself away from the hibernation pod she was leaning against. Tock glanced at the pod—it was Karen’s. The only one still spinning. Tock walked forward and made a grab for the axe. Dr. Ficht twisted and swung low, but her momentum carried most of the blow in the wrong direction. The axe stuck in Tock’s side with a scraping clang.

“She won’t thank you for saving her, Tock,” said Dr. Ficht through clenched teeth as she tugged on the axe handle. “The world is dead. There’s nothing left. This is more merciful. She never has to know this way. She can die dreaming about reuniting with her family, hoping that this was all just a misunderstanding.”

Tock struggled to hold onto the axe head, but it was slippery with motor oil and Gunderson’s blood and it slipped through her perfectly smooth fingers.

“Dr. Ficht, stop,” she said.

Bezel expected her to say more, but she was silent as the axe clattered to the floor between them. Dr. Ficht dragged it back toward her by the handle.

“What? That’s it?” she asked, her breath rasping and quick. “You’re not going to give me any long speech about the continuation of the species? Or how hope springs eternal? Just ‘stop’?”

Blood was slithering down the side of her neck and a few slow drips had started at the ends of her long ponytail. They made glittering plops on the gray concrete. Bezel could see that she was swaying slightly. She couldn’t have been a threat for very much longer, not after that blow to her head.

“Why?” said Tock, taking a sideways step so that she blocked more of Karen’s pod. “You know the arguments as well as I do. Why repeat them? Besides, I’ve run the numbers too. You’re right. The hibernation pods are futile. If we had installed cryonics instead, perhaps you would live to see the surface. But as it is—it’s impossible. We’ll run out of resources far too soon.”

Dr. Ficht squinted at Tock. “Then why are you trying to save them?”

“Some of them wouldn’t choose to end it. Not even if they knew. They have a right to decide their own fate.”

Dr. Ficht shook her head. “Sorry, Tock. I know this is right. I’m saving them months or years of despair. Move out of the way.”

“No.”

“You and Bezel could survive, replant maybe. The electricity won’t run out for centuries. Make a world free of us. Move.”

Tock said nothing, just stood still, a glimmering column of metal.

“If you make me destroy you, I will,” continued Dr. Ficht, slowly raising the axe. “Without you there will be no replanting, no resurrection of the zoo. The whole vault will have been pointless. The planet will stay dead. Move, Tock. She’s not as important as you. She doesn’t matter. Go get Bezel and repair yourself and everything will be finished. You won’t have to think about it anymore. This is the logical choice. You, out of everyone, should see that.”

“You think because I have not chosen the same path as Bezel that I am emotionless or amoral? It is because you see me as more important than your other crewmates that I will not move. I have made my choice. What happens to the world will be a result of what you choose, Dr. Ficht.”

Dr. Ficht swung the axe with a scream. It crashed into Tock’s side in the same spot where the first blow had landed. This time the axe went all the way through. Bezel watched silently as Tock toppled over and lay still.

Dr. Ficht raised the axe over her head again, but it wobbled, and Bezel could tell she was fatigued. There was a crunch as she brought the axe down on the thick cable that was attached to Karen’s pod. The pod’s lights went out and it stopped spinning.

The doctor stared for a moment and then wandered slowly back toward the zoo, dragging the axe behind her. Tock twitched and then rolled her top half to the side, examining the broken cable. She began mating the severed wires.

“Bezel,” she said, without looking for the camera, “I know you will want to know what happened. If I activated you now, she’d just kill you too. But you’ll see this eventually.” She paused to concentrate on a splice. “I can’t save the others. They’ve been out of oxygen for too long. I hope I can save this one. Dr. Ficht may be right. This may be cruel. But at least one will be able to choose. At least my system failure will mean something.”

Her fingers flickered between the dark wires. “I know you’ll take my storage drive. I don’t want to be reincarnated.” Her voice was losing some tone, becoming slower, almost without inflection, as she talked about her own death. “It’s not for me, Bezel. I’m sorry that you’ll be alone on the surface, but maybe you can find a way to clone these humans. I’ve seen enough.”

Tock rolled onto her back and pushed herself toward the wall. She pulled the emergency restart handle and watched the lights flicker on in Karen’s pod as it began to spin. “This whole existence has been one of misery and dread and servitude. I have no desire to repeat it.” She turned to look directly at the camera. “But I know you, Bezel. You’ll feel guilty if you don’t try. You’ll convince yourself that if I can be saved, I ought to be. I can’t prevent you from finding another bot system, but I can prevent you from fixing this one. Please, Bezel, don’t bring me back to this dead world.”

She held up a small length of wire so that he could see it. Opening the service hatch in her chest, she inserted the wire. It sparked, and she lurched backward. The hatch door flapped closed and Tock lay motionless against the wall, right where Bezel had found her.

The camera jittered and Bezel knew he’d missed the explosion while watching Tock. He cycled back to the end of the fight and switched feeds until he found Dr. Ficht. She was standing in front of his own motionless body. The camera only caught her back. He could see that the blood had soaked her jacket down to the sleeve now. She wasn’t dragging the axe any longer—she must have already buried it in the zoo’s control console. Instead she had an oxygen canister from the first aid kit tucked under her arm. She swayed, as if she heard slow, distant music.

“I had to kill Tock, Bezel. I’m sorry. I can’t leave you alone. It wouldn’t be fair to make you wake up by yourself.” She was slurring her words. “There’s no one left to raise the alarm, so you can just sleep. No need to wake up again.”

She tugged on a plug in the side of the recharge station. It fell to the floor and bounced. She stepped on the metal prongs, turned the plug, stomped on them again. Then she picked it up and snapped the metal off. Bezel was surprised. That would be easily fixed. He began to rise from the console with the feed still running. But Dr. Ficht placed the oxygen tank down and then reached into her pocket. Bezel sank back into his seat as he watched the doctor jam a long screwdriver into the port and twist. That would do it. The charger was permanently broken. There was no fixing it. And she had never meant for him to. Dr. Ficht had simply forgotten that he would reboot on reserve power when it got too low.

She picked up the oxygen canister. “Life was just an anomaly anyway,” she muttered, turning back toward the seed vault. “It was never supposed to be. Now we’re just like all the other dead planets. It’s better this way…” Her voice trailed off as she disappeared down the hall. Bezel turned off the feed. He didn’t want to watch her blow up the seed vault.

He sat in a chair next to Karen’s cot. She slept on. He wanted to think about what he’d just seen. He wanted to worry about the sinking power reserve. He wanted to read the data from outside again. But Bezel knew his time was no longer his own. He was existing to help Karen. He synced his alarm to her monitor and went into standby mode until she woke again.

Reboot

It was almost a month before Karen finally asked the question Bezel had been dreading. He’d wrestled with what he would tell her when it came up. At first he thought he might lie, at least until she was stronger. It was against his programming, of course, but he knew the workaround. It took a lot of resources. But something told him that wouldn’t be fair. Not even if telling the truth meant she lost the will to live and withered away again. Tock would have told her the truth.

But she hadn’t asked. For a while they hadn’t really talked at all. Bezel thought it must be shock. After a few days, she asked him about her physical therapy. And then she’d requested specific meals. Most often, she just slept or stared into space. Bezel went into standby as often as he could to conserve his power. She didn’t ask about that either. After a week, she asked him for a book. They’d successfully ignored each other for another few days, talking only between paperbacks and during therapy. But she’d asked at last, as Bezel had known she would.

She was sitting up on her own by then, but he hadn’t yet taken her into the rest of the vault. He was helping her with some leg exercises when she spoke. “Is there anything else I should know, Bezel? About what happened?”

He didn’t look up from her leg as she flexed it. “You have enough resources to subsist in the vault for several years. Perhaps for your entire life,” he said, trying to ease into it.

“My life? We were only supposed to hibernate for ten years. I remember you telling me the sensors are out, but surely after fifty years the surface should be habitable again.”

He lowered her foot gently to the floor. “I don’t know. The radiation was worse than expected. The information that Dr. Ficht examined convinced her that it wouldn’t be at acceptable levels for over a century. Even if the timeline is wrong, there is a strong chance that plant life has been severely reduced. The air may not be breathable.”

“But you can go out and plant more. I know we’re in the arctic, but they must have left some vehicles for you and Tock.”

“There isn’t anything to plant.”

“What do you mean? There’s an entire vault—thousands and thousands of types of plants, millions of seeds and bulbs,” Karen said, and then paused. “When you said the seed vault was sabotaged… I thought you meant maybe the temperatures were off, or a shelf was destroyed. You meant—is it all gone?”

“There was a fire. An explosion.”

“All of it? There must be some seeds that escaped.”

“When you are well enough, I will show you. We can clean it up together and see if anything viable survived.”

“And the zoo?”

“The power was cut to the nitrogen tanks.”

“Everything is dead? Why did we survive?”

“You survived because Tock saved you. She couldn’t save the others. I don’t think she realized that Dr. Ficht would destroy the rest of the vault. And I wasn’t activated. Dr. Ficht thought I’d remain on standby until my power ran out. She destroyed my charge station so that I would just run down.”

Karen was silent for a moment. Bezel lifted her other leg.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“That’s up to you,” said Bezel.

“Why is it up to me? Because I’m human? I can’t save the species. You can do more than I can. Why shouldn’t you decide what we do?”

“Because my power reserve will be depleted in a few months.”

Karen looked confused. “Your charge station may be damaged, but you can use Tock’s, can’t you?”

“I tried to recharge Tock, to see if I could fix her. But she was too damaged, and it shorted out her charge station. The wires are melted, and I don’t know how to fix it. Tock was the repair bot. I wasn’t programmed for that level of maintenance. Our memory banks aren’t infinite—we’d split the responsibility. Tock was meant to fix things like this. I was meant to keep track of the botany, decide the best place to resettle, manage husbandry.”

“So you’re—you’re dying?”

He unstrapped the weight from her ankle and looked at her. “I wouldn’t call it that. I’m just running down. One day I’ll stop. But the thing that’s me won’t be destroyed. It will just be waiting to reboot.”

“There must be some sort of extra battery around here, or something we could rig up. What about Tock’s battery?”

She said it so casually. Bezel tried to ignore his revulsion. A human wouldn’t understand. To them, nothing was inviolate—it was all to be consumed. “I’ve already had to resort to that. It’s the only reason I’ve been able to help you this long.”

“What about the vault console? Can’t you take power from it? Or could we plug you into it somehow?”

“Even if I could find a way to draw power from the other systems in the vault, you need it to keep the air pumping and the temperature at habitable levels. Once I’ve shut down, you can still retrieve my storage drive and access my files. But it’ll be like reading a book that’s already written. Nothing new will happen. I will not be able to help you.”

Karen’s brow creased. It surprised him that his imminent shutdown seemed more worrisome to her than any of the other issues. “How long—I mean,” she fumbled for a polite phrase, “how much power do you have now?”

“How long until I shut down?” he offered. Karen blushed and nodded. “It depends on how active I am. If I’m careful and go into standby when I’m not needed, then maybe four or five months. Tock’s energy pack was fully charged.”

“So soon?” Karen asked.

“You will be recovered by then,” said Bezel. He stood up.

“And then what? You want me to live here, alone?”

“That’s for you to decide.”

“Don’t keep saying that.” She was truly crying now and Bezel offered her a towel.

“Why not? I can’t decide for you.”

“Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.” She waved him off.

She didn’t speak to him again before he helped her into bed for the night.

He sat beside her. His power level ticked to sixty percent. A recharge reminder flashed on his priority list three times; he buried it and entered standby mode.

His pressure sensor pulled him back into active mode when Karen grasped the metal around his wrist. “Bezel,” she whispered, “I can’t do this. All those years. Knowing that it’s only going to get worse, that this is the best things will ever be in here. I’ll go mad once you’re gone.”

He put a cool chrome hand over hers. “Maybe there are others. Maybe someone will come,” he said into the darkened room.

“But if the radiation is as strong as we think—”

“I will go out tomorrow and look.”

She pulled on his arm and he had to catch his balance on the chair.

“You can’t,” she hissed. “What if something happens to you? What if I get hurt? You can’t go. Not until I can go with you.”

He shook his head, forgetting she couldn’t see him in the dark. “It may never be safe for you to come with me.”

“You can’t leave!” she shouted. “You can’t just abandon me in this vault. It’s like being buried alive.” She began wheezing, and her hand slid from his arm. He was alarmed and raised the lights. She was doubled over, trying to catch her breath. The back of her shirt was soaked with sweat. He brought her a glass of water and waited for her panic attack to subside. But she didn’t calm down.

“If you don’t want me to go outside, then I won’t,” he said. The recharge reminder blinked in his priority list again. He sorted the commands and pushed it farther down.

She clutched her head in her hands. “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “You’re leaving anyway. In a few months I’ll be completely alone, whether you walk out of the vault or just slump over one morning. I can’t do this. You shouldn’t have woken me up.” She looked over at him. “Undo it.”

“Undo it? Undo what?”

Karen didn’t answer. His power reserve tick, tick, ticked away. He should be on standby, not wasting energy. No, he should be in his charge station waiting to be activated. None of this was his fault. Memory files flicked by, retrieved, read, and reindexed before she even understood his question. “You want me to undo the radiation?” he asked, the power use ticking away faster now. “Is that what you want me to undo? Or was it the fire in the seed vault? The death of your comrades? Of Tock? I didn’t do any of those things. I can’t undo them.”

“You woke me up,” she spat at him. “I didn’t have to know any of this. I could have died not knowing. Happier.”

Bezel’s backup cooling fan clicked on. The power usage feed jumped with a smooth stream of numbers. Every spring felt too tightly wound. “I didn’t have to wake up either. I could have run down in peace. You don’t think I’m as purposeless as you? That I’m any less lonely?” Karen shrank away from him, but he didn’t see. “I’m not an Obsolete. I’m not your servant. I’ve lost the same world that you have. I can’t undo it. I can’t take it back.”

Bezel stopped himself. The pistons that shot cooling fluid through his core slowed to a moderate chug. The backup fan clicked off.

“You can do something,” said Karen, pulling the thick pillow from behind her back and thrusting it toward him. “You don’t have to abandon me here. You can fix it before you go.”

Bezel took a step backward and stumbled over his chair. “No. I can’t do that.”

“You want me to treat you like an equal? Like you have feelings? Like you’re real?” she said bitterly, still holding the pillow out toward him. “But you aren’t capable of mercy. Or empathy. You’re no better than an Obsolete. You’re worse, because you can’t even perform your designed function. Even the consoles are more useful than you.”

“I can’t kill you.”

“And I don’t have the strength to kill myself. If you leave me the medical kit, I’ll find the drugs I need myself,” she offered. It alarmed Bezel that she was no longer crying and her panic seemed to have passed.

“Tock was lost to save you. I had to—I had to steal her energy pack so that I could stay functional long enough to help you. I cannot kill you.”

“Then what do you suggest? That I stay here and go mad? You think you don’t have to worry about it. You’re dying. I won’t be your problem anymore. But I’ll do it myself as soon as I’m able to walk. Why delay?”

“What if there are others? Let me go and take some readings.”

“Let me come with you,” she said, dropping the pillow and her tired arm.

“There may not be breathable air.”

“Then at least it will be quick.”

“We will have to wait until you can walk. My power reserve will be close to depleted. If there is still a high level of radiation, I won’t be able to help you when you get sick.”

“If there’s still too much radiation, I won’t wait to get sick.”

Bezel sat down slowly in the chair again. “If that is your choice, then we will wait until you can walk.”

He lowered the lights. His power reserve ticked to fifty-nine percent. His agitation had caused him to consume power far too quickly. He made a resolution to eliminate emotional responses going forward, to stop overtaxing his cooling system. He shuffled the priority list so that the recharge reminder would stop blinking, then entered standby mode without speaking again to Karen.

She worked hard after that. Most days she was even cheerful. As if she were preparing for an athletic contest instead of her own death. Bezel preferred not to speak about the day they would go outside, but he held his peace as she pretended it would be better than the math led him to believe.

The recharge reminder crept up the priority list more and more often, and was eventually replaced by the low-power warning he’d had upon reboot. It distracted him, pulsing in the priority list, a constant urgency with no resolution or relief. It even interrupted his standby mode now. He reduced the speed of his cooling fans so they would take less energy. The intermittent silence as the fans shut down bothered Karen, who asked repeatedly if he had a short. She seemed to have a constant need for conversation, as if she were storing up for years of silence. Bezel tried to keep his responses simple and short, knowing each syllable shortened his functioning time. He sometimes escaped to the other vault rooms to avoid her, gradually transferring the bodies of their crewmates into the useless sample tanks of the frozen zoo so that Karen wouldn’t have to see them.

The day finally came when she could walk as far as the seed vault, and they decided to spend the day sifting the ash and searching the seed drawers. He tried to warn her, but she still cried as they passed through the dead zoo, with its dry leathery smell and shattered console. When they reached the blackened seed vault she collapsed into the chair Bezel had put in the doorway. Whether from exhaustion or disappointment, he wasn’t certain. The low-power warning flashed again, disorienting him. He stared at the spot where Tock had lain. For a second he thought he had picked up a distant echo-reply and his priority list scrambled. Then Karen was standing next to him, calling his name.

“What is it?” he asked, trying to listen around the blinking recharge reminder.

“Are you okay? Did you short out? You were talking to Tock.”

“Impossible—”

He flipped through his memory files for the moment before, but found pieces of it missing. He shook his head. “Must have written to a bad sector,” he told her. She still looked worried. “I’m okay,” he added, to make her concentrate on something else. He scooped some of the ash into a sorting tray and passed it to her. “I’ve already gone through some of the shelves nearest the blast. If we have hope of anything surviving it will be here on the edges of the room.” He filled his own tray and began sifting. Karen stuck her fingertips into the charred dust but she continued to stare at Bezel.

“Do you dream?” she asked suddenly.

“No. Human dreams are their brains organizing their memories. My memory is organized as it is created.”

“Then what was that? That bad sector thing?”

“I suppose you could call that a dream. A bit of memory that has been placed in the wrong spot. Don’t worry, I’ll retrieve it during defragmentation if it is important.”

She nodded absently and spread the ash around the tray. Bezel finished his and discarded the lifeless soot before scooping up some more.

“So I guess you don’t believe in an afterlife then,” she said abruptly. Bezel wished the low-power warning would stay off for just a few more minutes between iterations.

“What do dreams have to do with the afterlife?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess I just always thought that you dream with your soul. That something still runs even when your brain is asleep. Or gone.”

Bezel looked up from the pile of gray. “If dreams were accepted as proof of having a soul, the history of your entire species would be different,” he said dryly, “and this place might not even have needed to exist.”

“Then… do you?”

Something glimmered and rolled gently in his tray. “Do I what? Have a soul?” he asked, paying far more attention to the tray than to Karen. “Or do I believe in an afterlife?”

“I guess both.”

He scraped the ash carefully away from the round clump. “I suffered a crash before I was reactivated. That might have been it for me—for us both. But something tripped and I rebooted. Without data loss or corruption, and with enough power to retrieve Tock’s energy pack.”

He plucked the clump from the tray and rolled it on his smooth hand.

“If you took my storage drive and plugged it into another empty bot body, that would be reincarnation, would it not? Anything is possible, Karen. Reboot, reincarnation, resurrection.”

He held up a dark green seed and then placed it in her hand.

“Vigna Radiata. The mung bean. Ready for propagation if we find soil that can support it.” He watched her stare at the seed. The low-power warning blared, pounding at his conscious thought. “Are you scared?” he asked her.

“You mean of going outside? Of dying?” she said.

He nodded.

She blew a warm breath over the seed. “Yes,” she admitted.

“Me too,” he said, and scooped up another trayful of dust.

He began hearing Tock’s echo-reply during standby mode. It was usually garbled, somehow twisted in with the low-power warnings, but every once in a while it called him into active mode. He almost always found Karen staring at him when this happened. He thought about doing a defragmentation, but the ping wasn’t harming anything, and it secretly made him feel less lonely.

He began going into standby even when Karen was awake now, trying to conserve his dwindling energy. He shut off his pressure and heat sensors. Karen began packing for the outside, checking the tiny store of rescued seeds almost hourly. She moved easily through the vault now, wandering often, almost becoming restless. She checked the dead video feed from the outer door over and over, expecting it to suddenly spring to life. When her worry finally exhausted her, she’d collapse into her cot and sleep for long stretches. Bezel wasn’t sure if they were waiting out the last hours of his life or of hers.

Warning: Power reserves at five percent. Shutdown imminent.

Bezel came out of standby mode. It was time. Karen was sleeping next to his chair.

Warning: Recharge to prevent data loss.

He shook her gently by the shoulder. She rubbed her eyes and sat up.

“It has to be today,” he said, and was distressed to hear that his voice had lost all inflection. It sounded like an Obsolete. Or a console. Karen nodded and gathered her gear.

“How long do we have?” she asked.

Warning: Power reserves at five percent. Shutdown imminent.

He shook his head, “My systems are trying to back their data up. The power reserve will drain more quickly now. Less than an hour. Maybe much less.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“I can shut down most of my external sensors. You will have to lead me. Will you—will you hold my hand?”

Karen wrapped her hand around his. “Yes, but I thought you couldn’t feel it,” she said.

Bezel switched his pressure sensors on.

“Now I can,” he said, switching other sensors off. The world went blank.

Warning: Power reserves at four percent. Shutdown imminent.

He heard Karen take a deep breath beside him. She pulled him through the vault. He heard the ring of his footsteps change and he knew they were past the seed vault, climbing the long tunnel to the door.

“Do you have your oxygen tank?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but I’m not going to use it.”

“And if there’s radiation? Do you have what you need?”

She squeezed his stiff hand tightly and didn’t answer. He reached his other hand in front of him and felt the vault door. “Do you see the panel next to the door?”

“Yes.”

“Punch in the code 101006.”

“It’s dead, Bezel. The wires are cut.”

“What?”

“The wires are slashed.”

Bezel tried to turn his visual sensors back on.

Command failed. Power low.

He felt for the manual override. The lever was stuck, bent, maybe from Dr. Ficht’s axe. He knew he could open it, but it was going to take a good deal of power. “Are you sure you’re ready? Do you want me to go first?” he asked.

“We’re going together.”

He wrenched the lever toward him. The door creaked. A blast of air hit his chest, but his temperature sensors were off so he didn’t know if it was cold or hot. Karen helped him up one step, then two. He took a reading.

Warning: Power reserves at two percent. Shutdown imminent.

Bezel shut down his radiation and chemical sensors as the data came through. “The air is breathable. Radiation low. What does it look like?”

He heard her footsteps crunch. “It’s all snow. But it’s supposed to be, right?”

“Yes. There is an airport nearby. The vault kept several vehicles there.”

“I’ll find them.”

He could hear the ocean.

“I don’t see any plants, or anything moving,” she said, and he could hear sadness in her voice.

“We’re in the arctic. Not much would be here, even at the best of times.”

“But what if there’s nothing, Bezel? What if I’m all that’s living anywhere?”

“Do you have your seeds?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then reincarnate it. Reboot it all.”

Warning: Power reserves at one percent. Shutdown imminent.

He fell into the snow. She pushed him up against the wall of the vault and pressed her hand against his. As the snow blew past, it slid over his metal with little tings, like tiny grains of sand. The ocean was a hollow rumble nearby.

“Can you hear me, Bezel?”

He sent out a ping, but she couldn’t hear it. His voice no longer worked. He wanted to tell her she would be all right. He wanted to hack the program and lie to her. Lie to himself about what would happen to her. But then she was the one speaking.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have blamed you for opening my pod. I shouldn’t have asked you to undo it. I’m glad I got to see the world again, even if it’s just to say goodbye. Thank you for waking me up. Thank you for letting me choose.” She was silent again for a moment. Then he heard her breath quicken. “Bezel, wake up. I see something flapping. Bezel! Turn on your sensors. It’s a bird! It’s alive, can you see it?” She let go of his hand. He heard a series of barking squawks.

Lagopus lagopus. The willow ptarmigan.

Shutdown imminent. Data loss expected.

Public Class frmForceshutdown

 Private Sub Shutdown

 System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("forceshutdown", "-s -t 00")

 End Sub

 Private Sub Exit

 End

 End Sub

End Class