Ubo

18

THE GUARDS WERE extremely nervous the first day or so as everyone camped out on the roof. They brandished their electric rifles at the slightest sign of resistance, screaming at the bots and threatening deadly force. It might have been the openness of the setting, without cover if there was a rebellion, although Danielbot could not imagine his fellow mechanical men organizing and attacking.

There must have been an adjustment in policy because no rifles were actually fired. What surprised Danielbot most was how quickly everyone fell into their roles: the guards standing up straight in their blue uniforms, attempting to walk and talk with authority and to devise humiliating games designed to keep the bots off-balance. After a few days they seldom brought their rifles down to a ready position. The bots, despite their larger size and heavy frames, developed a subservient posture, bowing their upper bodies to make themselves appear shorter, avoiding eye contact, and for the most part doing what they were told.

The skies were continuously gray with an occasional redness in the lower clouds, and black smoke hung just above the skyline. Far below, waves hit the building with a churning and shushing, but Danielbothad no intention of going close enough to the edge of the roof to steal a glimpse. Now and then the sky tore into rain and there was no shelter. The guards used a roll of plastic to create a makeshift roof they could sit under. Maybe the bots were waterproof. In any case they weren’t offered a solution. Most of them just stood about in the downpour.

Some of the guards claimed that a helicopter would come to take them all off the roof. Danielbot would be surprised if anyone had that kind of fuel to spare. It wasn’t stated openly, but he expected that only the guards were subject to rescue, leaving the “equipment” behind. He overheard one of them say they should just shoot the bots and escape before it was too late. Another said there was no such order, so he was holding tight.

The bots knew many of their fellows by voice, but the guards couldn’t tell them apart without their fleshy mirages, and referred to the prisoners by their serial numbers or a truncated version thereof.

Danielbot—and to some degree Leninbot—kept to the edges of the groups, and thanks to Falstaff’s occasional interventions, were left alone much of the time and protected from the pettier forms of harassment, although they weren’t excluded from prisoner counts. The worse thing was bearing witness to the demeaning activities the guards devised to promote discipline and the bots quickly acquiesced to.

Count-offs happened an hour or so apart, or whenever there had been a minor altercation or disagreement, or whenever a guard decided to entertain a whim.

“Count off, alphabetical followed by numerical!”

“A7713!”

“A15510!”

“B10232!”

“B14368!”

“EH7384!”

If an error was made in the count, the bots had to repeat it twice. The guards would sometimes become creative with the counts, ordering the prisoners to deliver them backwards, or to skip every other numeral, or to call out a number thirteen more than their actual number. Sometimes physical movements were added to the count, push-ups or jumping jacks, activities not well suited to their mechanical frames.

Danielbot had begun to suspect that, besides personality and individual history, a certain amount of acquiescence had been programmed into their bot brains, a tendency to obey identified authority figures. Otherwise, he could not explain their willingness to follow orders, or his inability to even imagine a rebellion.

Some of the bots were made to stay in one spot for hours. Physically this was no challenge, but they had been provided with full memories of what pain and fatigue felt like, so after awhile they suffered accordingly.

When left alone, the bots returned to the same rooftop activities they’d participated in when they’d worn their human guises. They played their invented board games, danced and sang, or attempted to perform physical exercise. They subjected each other to petty abuse. The guards allowed the abuse to happen, but if too large a crowd gathered they would warn them off by punishing the first available offender. One of the guards discovered that a low level dose of electricity applied constantly to the back of the head pan might produce both delirium and persistent pain without death (or rather, “an irreversible shutdown”). There was no physical reason for the pain, but the bots felt it anyway. The guard looked excited to watch.

Around their fourth afternoon on the roof, there must have been a significant current surge in the systems below because some of the bots were suddenly refreshed with their old appearances, Leninbot included. He smiled as he rubbed at his pink, illusory skin. Danielbot returned the smile but neither made any attempt at morecontact.

At this point the Danielbot didn’t care much if he looked like Daniel ever again. It was all an ugly lie and to have his perfect disguise returned to him would have only made it worse. Somehow he needed to embrace who he was and not who he was not.

For Danielbot, along with the current surge had come a renewed onslaught of violent memories, highly fragmented and without his usual sense of participation. The memories played as a reel of vicious movie scenes spliced together with no sense of continuity or artistry. Urban gang wars blended into southern lynchings, then bits of Abu Grabe, suicide bombers in the Mideast, and Jim Jones exhorting parents to feed their children poisoned Kool-Aid. Danielbot wondered if whatever medium they’d used to store the threads of violent memories trawled from the past had become corrupted. It seemed he might be receiving the bottom-of-the-barrel bits, the test runs and the unsuccessful attempts, the events too old to retrieve cleanly—whatever was left over in the backwaters of the memory banks.

In the late afternoon dimness, the roof had become a broad field of prairie grass, low-lying hills on the horizon, a few distant twists of tree. Smoke and weeping, howls of pain.

The soldiers were aiming at a small brown-skinned running form, although the child was much too young to run properly, a toddler at most who staggered and fell and got himself up again. The Colorado Indian Wars. 1864 or thereabouts. The men were laughing, poking fun at each other’s limited skills. “You shoot like my ol’ granny, after she’d been drinkin’ all day!”

The one with the scraggly red beard cursed, tried again, taking his time. The small form dropped. They cheered.

“In my neighborhood we called them the shadow people. They’d come in the middle of the night and the next day you’d find them camped out in the alley, or on a playground, sometimes even in your back yard. That was around the start of it.” John had been sitting beside him, speaking, but Danielbot hadn’t noticed him until now. “When they first reached the coast. Some of them had gone up into New York first, but the people from the southwestern states had gotten there first, so they came here.”

“The people escaping South America,” Danielbot said. “And Mexico.”

“That’s right. How did you—” John frowned. “Oh yes, your last scenario was with the God of Mayhem. We used to share our contemporary criminal findings with law enforcement and the military, but that was back when those agencies were more functional.

“It’s an odd thing, with all that we can do, the things we can make, the miracles we can accomplish—your very existence being one of them—that we can’t seem to solve the food problem, or the overpopulation problem, or the environmental problem. We’ve had a helluva time just keeping our people sheltered, much less providing them with worthwhile things to do.

“How do you fault people for fleeing a burning house, whatever the immigration laws might be? And believe me, their house was burning. And you don’t let your children get hurt, or die—you get them out of there, whatever the cost. The shadow people did what they had to do.”

“So people are no better, no more generous, than they used to be in my day,” Danielbot said.

“Human beings have greater powers of empathy than you might think. Their ability to mirror feelings, even quite dark feelings, to understand someone else’s desperate situation, is really quite remarkable. That’s why the scenarios work as well as they do.”

Danielbot wondered. If he had a question, was it coming from him, or from the Daniel simulation inside him? He decided to ask it anyway. “Is this what you wanted to do with your life?”

Falstaff looked genuinely surprised. He stared at his hands, taking turns rubbing one with the other. Danielbot felt envious. He missed the human version of his hands. “It was never my goal. How could it be? Who could imagine such a thing? It’s been okay. It’s been interesting. It’s kept body and soul together at a time when many are denied that benefit. But—human beings settle, you understand? That’s much of what we spend our time on. Sometimes our imaginings are exquisitely detailed in that regard: what, specifically, we would accomplish, who we would be with, what they would look like, even down to the fine details of weather and the quality of the light that day. We also imagine what we would look like on such occasions, and it’s usually somewhat different than the way we in fact look today.

“But we settle for less. Because we have no choice.”

“Why? Why no choice?”

“Because no one can imagine reality, or would want to. That’s the sad truth of it. Reality seems a poor substitute for what we dream. Most of us eventually accept that, even though it annoys and disappoints. But some of us become so angry, our frustration building over a period of years, that we erupt. We rage. And we destroy.”

A bot was lying on the roof, one of the guards prodding him with the end of his rifle. “Can’t you stop that?”

“I really have little influence over them,” Falstaff said. “Security was never part of my responsibilities. In fact, there was always a certain amount of friction between the research team and the security team. The guards know what we do here, and they see how our subjects are after their scenarios.”

“And to what end?” The Danielbot wanted to touch this man, to shake him, although he knew the guards would kill him before Falstaff could stop them. “What was the purpose of all this? What have you accomplished?”

Falstaff shrugged, looked at his hands. “I was just a little boy when the first waves of migrations hit the city. About ten years before I was born they discovered the process by which they could peek into the past and record a mind, partially or completely, depending on conditions. The average citizen didn’t know about it—still doesn’t—the government decided it might have security applications, and kept it secret. Some historians knew—they’d been hired by the government to play around with the technology, see what they could get it to do. And the scientists who developed it, my grandfather being one of those key figures. The government paid him well for that—he became a rich man, although he couldn’t tell anyone how.

“I think there was shame attached to the enterprise from the beginning. Initially they targeted certain famous individuals, filling in the gaps of history with investigations into secrets, motivations, ambiguous events. The government didn’t want any of that released, believing, quite accurately, I imagine, that if the citizens found out that their heroes had feet of clay it would reflect poorly on those in charge, whatever their politics. They might have shut the project down if not for the fact that a great deal of money, and certain cultural treasures, were located as a by-product of these investigations.

“The goal of the experiment was not necessarily to recreate an historical reality, although sometimes that might be useful, but to gain some understanding of the psychological dynamics involved.

“My grandfather had loftier goals. He thought these studies might lead to actual time travel, perhaps even a boost in human longevity. My father worked for him, but had concerns about the effects on the lives of the participants. He thought he might be able to ameliorate that, especially after he married my mother, my grandfather’s only child.

“I was too young, really, to understand much about the food riots. I remember that my grandfather was sympathetic to the poor and all those people who had lost their homes, from whatever country. Then my grandmother and my mother and my sister were caught up in one of those riots. They were all killed. And my grandfather found a new purpose for the technology, and funded it himself. Violence—its causes and prevention. Not every culture has been violent, so he didn’t believe it was innate. He felt if he could explore the causes he could root out the destroyer inside us.”

“And? Any progress?”

“I…I certainly believe we’re closer. Obviously if some needs aren’t met, for the individual, for the group, violence occurs. But how do you meet those needs? Can you meet those needs? That’s more difficult.

“My grandfather believed that at their core, human beings were a kind of possessed ape, haunted by intelligence and violent urges. He believed that if we learned enough about these urges we might exorcise them, and create human beings capable of solving our problems.

“I think he should have focused instead on climate change, poverty, food shortages, and the creation of meaningful work. If these problems had been solved, or if enough progress had been made, well, I think there might not have been a need to probe the past for the answers to violence.

“We’ve created some remarkable things. We thought we were creating a kind of heaven, at least for those who could afford it, but the results have been a kind of hell.

“And everyone who has worked here realizes that it’s far too late to apply what we might have learned to our current situation. We all understand it is too late for us. But what else can we do? We’re committed.”

Danielbot wanted to strike the man, but knew he would not. In fact he’d probably been rendered incapable. “You say human beings have empathy. Could you spare some of that empathy for me? I once was a person, or I thought I was. I once thought I had a family, but that has been taken away from me. I am nothing now, simply a recording device, and I am far more alone than I can fathom. And yet I ache for the wife I thought I had. I ache for that child. And I am devastated that the man whose memories I represent may have made a terrible mistake.”

AFTER A FEW days some of the bots chose a resting place on the roof, any spot with a little bit of privacy or shade, where they became quiet, then motionless, and never woke up again. Danielbot came to understand that their bodies were powered by some kind of battery, and although he’d never been aware of being recharged, it was something that must have occurred on a regular basis and now was not happening anymore.

He wasn’t the only one to figure this out. Leninbot showed him where a cord was hidden near the abdomen, and how it could be released and connected to one of several outlets in the roof. “But I don’t know that any of them have any current. At least I don’t feel anything. But I’d do it anyway, just in case.” And he’d see other bots follow Leninbot’s advice. Still, bots continued to become dormant. The fact that they all didn’t freeze into immobility at the same time suggested that the batteries varied in terms of strength and quality, but eventually running out of power appeared inevitable.

Danielbot didn’t complicate things by talking about how he was still seeing bits and ghosts of scenarios. The Ubo computers apparently had some power, perhaps from an independent source.

As reluctant as he was to lie down and remain still given what was happening to some of the others, it was clearly important to conserve power.

He had noticed that the roof had changed since the first time he’d come up here. It appeared slightly barren in comparison. A great deal of the old furniture was gone, perhaps tossed off the side by agitated bots after they were forced up here, or removed by the guards for security or safety purposes. He’d been aware of frantic activity around him that first day of their rooftop exile, but he’d been oblivious to much of it. He’d been too busy adjusting to this new sense of self, and missing the life he’d mistakenly thought he had.

There were still places to find shelter if the guards allowed it, even with a couple of hundred or so bots—more than he had ever before seen together at one time. Given how many had died, or had been gotten rid of, the population of Ubo must have been much larger than he ever knew.

This massive roof easily held them all. This field of gravel and discarded bits and old ruin went on forever.

He lay down for a while, his head propped up against some bricks, gazing across this roof which at times resembled an abandoned beach, at times a battlefield, depending on the temporary visions bleeding from his head into everything he saw. Flanders Fields, Waterloo, Stalingrad, or Gettysburg, the thousands still buried beneath the battlefields of the Somme, the millions buried one upon the other all across Europe—it was hard to believe there could be enough dirt to contain them all, everyone who had once lived and breathed and sung and loved. And now out of reach. Yet he hadn’t been one of them or even descended from one of them—all he’d ever been designed to do was observe. It was the worst injustice he could imagine.

The fields at Majdanek, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, at Płaszów, everywhere a concentration camp had been: now so peaceful. He could hear the birds sing, and some distant farmer’s call for a wayward cow. He realized then he hadn’t heard a bird since he’d been in Ubo, not even seen one. Was it possible they were all extinct? He hoped not, but maybe they were in some safer place where birds were better appreciated.

“Daydreaming again? Should a robot daydream?” He looked up—Leninbot was back, hovering. “I was afraid at first you might have died, run out of power. We’ve lost at least a dozen of our kind that way, by my count. It’s murder, you know, to let us run out of power like that. These human beings, they’re all murderers. We should have learned that from the scenarios. They’re a plague upon the Earth which they are gradually destroying. I’m glad to discover I’m not one of them, are you?”

Could a robot feel weary? Danielbot found this line of conversation wearying. “I don’t know—it’s too soon for me. I liked the family I thought I had.”

“So you miss your flesh?” Leninbot leaned over and stared at him intently with those lidless artificial eyes. Of course Danielbot knew he had the same eyes, but he did not imagine himself with those eyes—he imagined himself with Daniel’s eyes. And perhaps that answered Leninbot’s question.

“It was never my flesh. Or your flesh. It wasn’t flesh at all—that was the delusion they planted in us.”

“But you miss it, don’t you?”

Danielbot sighed, but the sound was that unhuman-like, mechanical hiss which he hated. He cut it off. “Yes, I confess I do.”

“Well, I’ve decided I don’t anymore,” Leninbot announced. “I think this—” He stood up and spread his metal arms. “Is an obvious improvement. It’s so clear to me today. All those terrible things—we have observed them, but we didn’t do those things, couldn’t have, I don’t believe, because we’re not flesh. Nor do we possess all the weaknesses of skin flesh, organ flesh, and certainly not brain flesh. We’re meant to replace all that.”

Talking about this frightened him. “I understand what you’re saying,” he replied. He remembered the original Daniel using such a phrase when he didn’t want to engage.

“But we are, all of us, running out of power! We’re dying! And so many of us have died already.” He lapsed into silence. This was true. As Danielbot looked out over the roof he could see so many of them lying about who hadn’t moved in days. It didn’t upset him as much as it should have. He was thinking too much like a human being. Stingy with his humanity, stunted in his empathy.

He turned to talk to Leninbot but the bot was already gone, wandering over the roof from bot to bot, seeing if they were still alive, attempting to wake them up, telling them the news of their superiority. The scene reminded him of other places. The fields rushed back into him, the peaceful fields where the camps had been, where birds had been.

These had not been safe places then, these fields where so many people died. Danielbot lay there for hours gazing across the roof, then across those fields, the sun rising over the distant rolling hills, the green, the pine trees, so different from this Boston, or anything else he had seen of this future world. But whose memory was this, and why here? And then he could see the transparent shapes of the thousands, their memories lost here beneath the grass, and feel the tears running down the face of the survivor who had come back to the old ruins of his concentration camp for answers. But the local townspeople seemed to have lost their own memories and denied knowledge of this place, except that once there had been Jews here, and they never came back. And there was no one who would talk to him about this annihilation.

As he’d turned away from the village he’d heard that one farmer muttering, “It was God’s will, punishment for killing Christ.”

There lay the long lines of the foundations where the prisoners were housed, the grass reaching up to cover the stones, to knock them back in time, to make them invisible, but someone kept it trimmed and the stones intact, so that people might remember. The very air began to rip, long gray splinters of wood pushing through the rents, and the crude barracks rose to fill the space. He remembered the beds, boards between bricks, sometimes holding three and sometimes five prisoners together. The constant trips to the latrine, unable to hold anything inside anymore, the stench so bad he eventually stopped smelling it. Lining up as you were told but still hoping the guards didn’t see you. If you ended up on the outside of the group where they might notice you, your days were numbered. To stay invisible meant to stay alive. He remembered. He remembered.

He looked down at his arm and saw it clothed in flesh again. The number was covered up; he had a name again. Small ghostly flakes hit the skin and stayed without melting. He raised his arm to look at them—they were flakes of ash. In the distant city the flames stretched toward the sky, living, burning hands reaching up out of the crematoria, too late for any kind of help. That wouldn’t be human beings out there burning, would it? He looked at the ash on his arm again. How could you tell a human’s ash from that of a building’s?

There the collapsed remains of the gas chambers, those dark rooms where they had imagined they would take a shower. The signs outside the showers: CLEAN IS GOOD! LICE CAN KILL! WASH YOURSELF! The German government was always generous with their helpful advice. The shower rooms had looked ordinary enough inside, except the ceilings were scarred by fingernails. There the broken rubble of the crematoria, all that was left of the ovens where two thousand prisoners went up the chimney each day to Heaven, the flames turning the sky a blood color, the air full of screams, gunshots, and the barking of dogs. The devil was coming. The devil was coming to the camps. The devil had come to the Jews.

The sky grew darker, and Danielbot wondered if his power had run out and all his borrowed memories come to an end. But it was one of the guards, all jack boots and medals, leaning over him, blocking out the sun.

“You think you’re a man of leisure, do you? Worthless piece of shit! Up, up! Time for exercise!”

What time was he in? Then he realized he was alive in both worlds. He joined a group of prisoners being forced to do push-ups, then jumping jacks, then running in place. Their flesh flashed to metal and then back to flesh again. Anyone refusing to cooperate was struck across the face, beaten to the ground. These abuses did not hurt his metal framework, but when the metal vanished and he was covered by a memory of skin, he was in agony. Deliberate misery was the rule of the day here, the strategy and the religion.

He could no longer tell anyone’s age here. Most had been reduced to children of seventy, seventy-five pounds. They had become playthings, cures for the soldiers’ boredom.

Still, some looked younger than the others. Not children anymore, but not yet adults. He thought he felt saddest for them, the ones who would never live long enough to have a story to tell.

But at some base level they all looked the same. They learned quickly. Hide yourself. Don’t speak up. Eat when you can. Wash and dress yourself as cleanly as you can. And if you passed blood you were among the dying.

Some wanted to go into the hospital. They thought it would be easier for them there. Sometimes the patients would drop an extra crumb from a window for some poor soul waiting outside. But late at night from the hospital basement windows you could hear the screams. Because in there they ran tubes into you. They froze you, burned you, cut and cut and sewed. Outside you died by starvation and beatings. In the hospital you died by syringe.

“We need these shelters moved to the other side of the roof!”

These rickety configurations of boards and bricks and bits of canvas connected by odd metal strips looked more like art installations than any form of shelter, but the bots had no choice. When the shelters fell apart, as was inevitable, one bot was picked at random to receive shots of the electrical rifle charges until it smoked into immobility. Danielbot wasn’t sure this was the same as termination, but no bot ever came back from it.

If a bot fell it was shot. If a bot refused it was shot. If a bot talked back it was shot. Some got back up after these punishments, some did not. Sometimes a bot was charged into a smoking ruin to let the others know that non-existence might come at any moment, without warning.

He woke up once in the dark, the sky moonless and starless, the only light the red reflection from distant fires. He sat up, gazed at all the recumbent forms—skulls in shadow, dark torsos, arms, legs. He could almost imagine himself human again, a real person again. A sudden yellow flare shimmered on the horizon in the direction of the city. Then the clouds moved and exposed a huge gibbous moon, one edge worn off.

Several bodies lay in the mud outside the prisoner’s barracks. Two ragged, shambling figures dragged another one out to add to the pile.

The prisoners on grave detail were ordered to call them figures or dolls, never corpses. There were serious consequences if you failed to follow orders, if you used the wrong words or told the ones arriving what was about to happen to them. The guards might throw you into the ovens alive.

Once he saw some soldiers toss a crying baby into the air and use it as target practice. After this he believed that if he were ever to leave this place he would not leave asa human being.

He shook his head. The memory floated away. White robot eyes stared at him from a distant part of the roof—someone else was up. Then the woods closed in, and those eyes became stark white animal eyes, glowing in the light from the moon. Tall trees had grown up on either side, obscuring the distant ruins, the sky, the edges of the roof. A wide path lay between the two masses of trees, extending as far as he could see, past the roof’s edge, and into nothing. It was what the Jews in the concentration camps had called the Road to Heaven.

He was still gazing into this hazy vision of the road when the dawn came. Phantasmal strands of barbed wire floated in the morning air, insubstantial as grass stalk and dandelion, until they solidified into metal. The low wooden barracks on the other side was bathed in snail-gray mist. This morning the air tasted of the dead. A naked body, and another, perhaps three, had crawled out during the night to join the bodies that already lay unmoving in the mud. Danielbot moved his arm forward and waved. The metal arm passed through the barbed wire, and the scene dissolved into one of a sprawl of mechanical men who did not need to sleep, but who slept anyway, out of choice or because their artificial brains no longer functioned. Some of the bots were leaking, dark stains spreading through the roof gravel.

More objects gradually manifested in his vision of the morning: the piles of suitcases and other possessions the Jews had been forced to abandon when they disembarked, the clothes piled thirty feet high. He saw the train empty, all the thousands forced down the road, and hours later he saw no one. None of those people came back.

Heat blasted his face. He was beyond weary. He looked down at his hands, covered in blood and grime. He threw another small form into the oven: a precious doll. Well-nourished corpses were burned with emaciated ones—for economy of time and saving fuel. It required a great deal of trial and error to find the most efficient combination. If he focused on the mechanics, the science of his job, he didn’t have to think about what he was being made to do.

Several bots staggered their way up the ascension, the last road to the gas chamber, their shiny brain domes like shaved heads. They’d been here long enough to lose most of their fat, their flesh. They were like a cartoon of skeletons on their exhausted march, a silly jazz track playing in the background. Some of them disappeared then, having stepped off the edge of the roof.

Intruding into Danielbot’s awareness like something he’d intended to remember: the devil was on his way to Ubo. The God of Mayhem was busying himself setting fires in a frenzy of excitement. Hardly able to contain himself, he’d begun to see the possibility of bringing the whole world down in flames. The sky turned a smoky red. He could hardly wait to find a boat and make his way to Ubo, like Charon crossing the river Styx.

Their shiny metal bodies, their translucent plastic parts, melting, burning with a white heat until not just their minds but their faces were gone.

Gone up the chimney and filling the late afternoon sky: all the memories, all the faces, the voices, all those who had disappeared from the planet.

Danielbot folded himself up on the rooftop. All this had happened less than twenty years before Daniel was born. How was it possible? Perhaps it was only history, but history was, in the end, a very small place. It was a foul history the entire planet owned.

He thought he saw Gordon running through the field, his small, broken heart forgotten. He stood up and tried to follow him with his eyes. Then he saw the boy on the rooftop, poking at the dead bird. Then the boy stood up, and took the knife from Happy Jack, and began slashing his way through his mother’s womb.

A transparent train roared across the roof, its cattle cars loaded with masses of people standing, so close together they had to hold their arms over their heads, the sick and the babies underfoot, cooking in the heat and filth, unable to breathe. He glanced at the boy, whose gaze also was locked on the train. The boy looked at him and drew his finger across his neck.

“Lie down! All of you, hit the roof! Be still!” The guards were shouting, forcing the bots who were still on their feet to stretch out on the gravel. Danielbot hadn’t seen exactly what happened, but apparently several bots were accused of grabbing the guards’ electric rifles and they now lay in piles of smoking ruin. Again Danielbot wished he had the power to close his eyes, and settled for imagining himself lying in the darkness instead. Sometimes he cried but nothing came out, of course. The tears stayed there, invisible marks on his metal skin.

As he lay in the barracks, the dead and the dying all around him, stinking equally of filth and corrupted flesh, he knew that all normal fear had been driven completely out of him. He would attempt to stay alive, although death had lost its meaning. He was frequently in pain, but pain was what he expected. What he did fear were the Muselmänner, the soulless ones who ate very little, who reacted to nothing, doomed to selection, and yet still they walked, or shambled, most often at a snail’s pace, always in the way, always underfoot. Not that he feared the Muselmänner themselves—they were pitiful, the best they could do was annoy and enrage. He abused them, as did many others. If one of them fell he had no embarrassment about stepping on his back. There had once been one in front of the barracks for days—they’d used him as a stepping stone, their feet pushing him further into the mud until he was like some piece of pavement.

But to become a Muselmänner, to transform into one of those silent, subhuman creatures, that was a terrifying possibility.

The soldiers gave the Muselmänner the hardest work to do, even though they were the weakest—a pack of five of them pushing a wagon, rolling a barrel. They did it slowly, and some would fall over dead in the process, but that didn’t matter—they were supposed to die, this day or the next one. Often when they were beaten they appeared to feel no pain—they were a waste of brutality. Although sometimes they were good for a little cruel fun. You could make them do any shameful thing. A few managed to show them kindness—there were always a few saints around, giving up their own food, their own protection, for those who could not be saved. A waste of time, but they became like their pets.

Some said the Muselmänner were too empty to suffer—he didn’t know about that. But he had his own miseries to worry about. He needed to forget about them.

In the beginning the Muselmänner ate anything—they’d eat shoe leather if there was nothing else. Toward the end, however, many of them couldn’t eat anything, and yet they shuffled around without the strength to lift their feet. The weakest of the bunch had to bend down and use their hands to move their legs.

He sometimes spent a great deal of time trying to avoid them—they stank worse than anything he had ever encountered. Sometimes the other prisoners would push them out of the barracks so they had to sleep outside. He hated the way they got in the way all the time, the way they stared, the message they sent that all was lost.

It occurred to Danielbot that he himself hadn’t eaten in days—of course he didn’t need to. The so called protein paste had been largely for lubrication and conditioning purposes. What ill effects he might suffer without it, he had no idea. But the lack of power in the batteries—that was another—if he lost enough power a Muselmänn might be his fate.

He had never heard the term prisoner when everyone had been disguised and the guards had been roaches and unspeaking. They had called each other “residents.” Now everyone used the word “prisoner.”

Sometimes the punishments became an excuse to experiment with the bots’ physical limits. Once a bot was down guards would surround the figure and apply electrical charges to various parts and observe which areas caused the most visible distress.

Witnessing this, Danielbot tried to go back and find the holocaust survivor inside himself, the one who had gone through so much and come out the other side. A meaning had to be found.

A vision of the future sometimes helped you survive.

With his family present inside him, he could feel genuine joy for a few moments at a time.

Despite a universe of pain it was possible for spiritual life to deepen.

A LARGE NUMBER of guards left during the next few days. He didn’t see them go, but every morning when he woke up there were fewer of them. There also appeared to be fewer bots; Danielbot assumed they’d simply gone to the edge of the roof in the middle of the night and walked off. His own temptation to do so was outweighed by his need to see how the story ended.

The remaining guards no longer patrolled the roof perimeter. Perhaps they no longer had orders to prevent suicides. Perhaps it wasn’t even considered suicide. Can an appliance kill itself?

He thought it odd that he still had sleep cycles. He doubted he needed them, unless sleep promoted sanity even in an artificial intelligence, and he still very much believed he was capable of losing his mind.

He could not explain his mental processing outside the context of Daniel. The best explanation his available mental tools could come up with was that he was a kind of dream of Daniel, a kind of nightmare. Was he the dreamer, or was it someone else? The troubling thing was that he was troubled at all.

Among the remaining guards the abusive treatment of the prisoners increased. There was no disciplinary reason for the abuse—the bots did not resist. Falstaff tried once or twice to stop the abuse and was beaten down for his trouble.

His battery life was rapidly coming to an end, but he saw nothing he could do about that. And perhaps he shouldn’t bother, as he was a mere footnote in someone else’s life.

“You,” he said to Falstaff. “You came out of a womb. You had a family. You have a complete history. Your memories are your own and not someone else’s. You should leave here while you still can.”

“I’m going to hang on a bit longer. Who knows, maybe a helicopter will come and take us all out of here.” Falstaff avoided eye contact.

“They won’t take the bots, Falstaff. We’re simply excess equipment.”

“Falstaff?” He looked amused. “From Shakespeare?”

“When I first came here I didn’t want to become too attached to anyone. I’d lost… Daniel had lost, enough people. I gave each of you new names, arbitrary names. Bogart, Lenin, Gandhi, Falstaff. Daniel enjoyed Shakespeare, particularly the histories.”

“You’re far more than a recording. You came up with those names on your own. These new memories are yours alone.”

“The family was his. Gordon was his. If my only life is what I’ve experienced here, I’d rather not exist.

“Really, you should leave, John. Things will not end well here.”

“Then come with me.”

Danielbot could see the God of Mayhem wrapping his face in colorful rags, rising to his feet and spreading his arms. “No—look at us, think of what people would do to us. We would be less safe out among your kind.”

“If you change your mind, just come. I’ll find some way to help you. But before I leave—maybe there’s enough power for me to find out if Daniel ever got on that plane.”

“No. I don’t think so—leave it be. It isn’t always best to know.”

That afternoon Danielbot became aware of crowd activity near one end of the roof, bots gathered into a wall, obscuring something on the other side, a flash of fast-moving metal and a mewling sound, like that of a failing engine or an animal in extremis. Danielbot maneuvered through the figures until he could get a better look: a bot struggling frantically, a chain attached from its frame to a large rusty ring embedded in the roof. Another bot was slapping him on the head, kicking him, then dodging out of his grasp at the last moment.

The chained bot snapped its teeth and shookits head.“Henry?”

The werewolfbot stopped, stared at him, then started shaking its head again. Danielbot studied the one who had been taunting him—that bot took one glance at him, turned his back and disappeared into the crowd. The werewolfbot made a high-pitched screeching sound. The chain was attached just below the neck joint. The bot kept running in circles, the chain stretched tightly to the ring. With each revolution he came perilously close to the edge of the roof. If he went off the edge he would hang himself.

When the manic figure wasn’t running in circles it would stretch the chain as far as possible toward the crowd, supporting itself on its analogs of hands and knees, its segments and joints rigid with tension, its eye globes vibrating from the strain, and it would make a coughing, almost barking noise through its teeth, because it had clamped its jaw shut, as if it were trying to prevent the noise from coming out.

Danielbot approached within a few feet. “Henry? Do you recognize me?”

Again the bot twisted its head sideways in a dog-like movement. “Are you the king?” it asked. “Are you His Majesty?”

Danielbot thought a moment, then remembering, reached up and touched the cylinders attached to his skull. “These? It’s not a crown. I was in an… accident.”

“I’ve never had an accident,” the werewolfbot said, “but I have made some.” Its eyes wobbled sideways. “I know your face,” the bot said. “It’s like everyone’s face.”

“Are you trying to get free? I don’t think they—”

“No! I have to be sure the chain is strong enough to hold me! I don’t know who there is left to eat, but I would have to eat somebody! But can I eat them? I’m afraid they would break my teeth!”

The werewolfbot capered about then, snapping its jaws as if anxious for a ball. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

The werewolfbot stopped and grew very still, staring with its eyes frozen in place. “I can still feel my fur,” he said. “But I can’t see it! It still itches and grows beneath my skin, but I have no skin. I deserve to be in Hell, but I had no idea it would be this bad!”

“You’re not in Hell. You’re in the future we’ve made for ourselves.”

“Are you a prophet? Jeanne d’Arc, that bitch, she was a prophet, among other things. Is it glorious being a prophet? Does it satisfy you? I crave such satisfaction, but it would seem I am far too itchy.”

“No. I’m a ma—. I am just like you.”

“A sorry end, isn’t it, to be like me? I only wanted to be admired, or at least remembered. I only wanted to be greater than myself—doesn’t every human being want to be greater than themselves? It’s the only thing which would made life tolerable, the only possible compensation for the grinding boredom of it all! You start out so full of promise, and yet you end up a corpse!”

“There are other ways to look at it, I think,” Danielbot said. The werewolfbot attempted to chew at its own parts with a rattling, metallic sound, and to howl, but the howl still came out muffled, which appeared to make the werewolfbot furious.

“I am the destroyer! I am the darkness at the end of time!” the werewolf screamed. “I am the slow corrupter, the rapid pestilence, the universal disassembler, the final stop on the journey! I am the madness without explanation! Love me and I will slaughter you! I will pick through your brains with my tongue!”

One of the guards pushed his way through the crowd of bots and aimed his electric rifle at the werewolfbot, who sniffed its barrel curiously, even though it lacked a nose. The guard pulled the trigger and held it as bolt after bolt wrapped the bot’s frame. The other bots scattered. The Danielbot shouted “No!”

When the guard finally loosened his grip on the trigger, the werewolfbot collapsed into a motionless pile.

“Why did you do that? He was chained!” the Danielbot cried.

The guard turned and looked the bot over. “It malfunctioned,” he said, and walked away.

Danielbot approached the werewolfbot’s collapsed form. He prodded it with his foot. Bearings turned and pieces pivoted on their pins as the lifeless parts rearranged themselves with the shifting gravity, then stopped.

He was walking back through the crowd when he saw a bot staring at him, and then attempting to hide in the debris. It was the one who had been taunting Henry, and—he realized—the boy without a name he’d met on the roof what seemed a lifetime ago. He walked over slowly, trying not to scare him.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You can come out now. I know you don’t recognize me, but we know each other. I met you on this roof a while back. You’d found a dead bird, remember?”

The bot came out. He looked no different than all the others, and they were all the same size. But he had the nameless boy’s voice. “I know,” the boy said. “I recognized you.”

“How’d you manage that—we all look the same.”

“I dunno.” There was no shrug to see, but Danielbot could hear it in his voice. “Maybe just because of the way you are. We’re all still different—at least I see differences.”

“Why’d you run?”

“Because of what I did, to that crazy one on the chain.”

“You tormented him. You were being cruel.”

“I was just having fun. He was just so crazy. I was just letting off some steam! Killing time! I’ve just got way too much time! I didn’t hurt him. That guard, he hurt him.”

It seemed pointless to be having this conversation. What do you talk about when it’s the end of the world? “So how are you doing?” he asked.

“How do you think? Look at what they done to me!” The boy’s voice rose. He stood up and spread his mechanical arms. “Look at me!”

Danielbot turned and left. The bots who had been watching this drama scattered, as if embarrassed. That left only Falstaff standing there.

Danielbot walked quickly to Falstaff and grasped his hand, covering it with both of his metal ones, trying not to squeeze too hard, as if it were a wounded bird he was trying to save. “Henry is dead!” He was upset, and whatever else this man was—imprisoner or torturer or protector—he had been a companion through part of this journey. “One of your—one of the guards killed him. And the boy tormented him! The boy was almost gleeful!”

“It’s adolescence. The boy holds onto our anger, and we hold onto the boy.”

“He follows me everywhere!”

Falstaff shook his hand vigorously, as if they were two old friends saying goodbye forever. “Our murderous companion. Our provocateur, our sidekick! A huge part of our problem, I think, is that the human race has largely failed to reach its adulthood.”

Danielbot could feel himself weeping, although he was aware that no actual tears were produced. “You’re saying goodbye. I won’t see you again. Be careful, my friend. God! Or the devil! I can see him in my head! The devil is on his way to Ubo!”

“I went down to the labs. I spent some time reconfiguring this bug in my head to your equipment.” He gestured toward Danielbot’s unwanted headgear. “Make yourself open to my signals. I’m going to rummage around below, see if I can take some of the electronic files with me. Maybe at some point someone can make better use of what we’ve done. Follow me if you can. At least maybe you’ll know what it’s like to escape this life.” Falstaff’s face began to break. “I’m so sorry.” He was weeping. “You were never supposed to know. This was never supposed to happen.”

“Haven’t you been paying attention? Things that were never supposed to happen, they happen all the time.”