The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack Read online

  The door behind me opened, and at first I thought it was Phil. “What took you so…?” I started to say until I glimpsed Keith hastily stashing his chips beneath the console. I turned around and saw Jim Lang entering the trailer.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked. As always, Jim was dressed in sandals, faded Levis and a Hawaiian shirt. In all the time I had worked for LEC, I had never seen him wear a coat and tie, not even for stockholder meetings.

  “No, Jim, not at all.” I recovered fast enough to not show just how startled I was by his unexpected arrival. “We’re…ah, still setting up here. If you want to take a seat…?”

  “Thanks, Jerry. Excuse me, Donna…it is Donna, isn’t it?” Ignoring her forced smile, Jim eased past her, then settled down in Phil’s empty chair. “Sorry to interrupt, but I was just curious to see how things were making out down here.”

  Right. Slim Jim never showed up anywhere just out of curiosity. When he made an appearance outside the executive suite, it meant that he had become aware that a project was having problems. “We’re doing great, Jim,” Keith said, just a little too quickly. “Just…uh, working out a few bugs here and there.”

  I looked away so that Jim wouldn’t see me wince. Brilliant, Einstein. Yet Slim Jim only nodded. He gazed through the window at Kathy Veder and Delilah. “I don’t see Phil,” he said. “Where’s…ah, yes, here he comes now.”

  I followed his gaze, spotted Phil walking through the trees on the other side of the atrium. He saw Kathy, stopped a few yards away from the bench as she looked up at him. Their eyes locked for a few seconds, and for a moment or two I thought he was going to say something to her, or she something to him. But nothing happened; he lowered his head and strode quickly toward the trailer. Her gaze followed him, and in that instant when her face turned toward the trailer, I caught the briefest glimpse of an expression I couldn’t quite identify. Loathing? Longing? Hard to tell…

  “We’re lucky to have them working for us, don’t you think?” Jim asked quietly.

  I didn’t realize he was speaking to me until I glanced his way, saw that he was looking at me. “Oh, yeah,” I replied. “Very lucky. Two great scientists, uh-huh.” And perhaps it wasn’t too late to send my resumé to CybeServe…

  Phil was startled to find Jim sitting in his chair when he entered the trailer. He murmured a hasty apology for being late, which Jim accepted with a perfunctory nod, then he squeezed past the CEO to stand behind Keith. “G-g-good m-m-m-morning,” he stammered as he leaned over Keith’s shoulder to check out the screen. “Are w-w-w-we re-re-re-ready?”

  “I’m not sure.” Keith cast a wary sidelong glance in Jim’s direction. “When I ran a diagnostic a few minutes ago, I found a new protocol in the conditioning module. I checked it out, and it looks like it was written last night. Do you know anything about…?”

  “Y-y-yes, i-i-it’s a n-n-new p-p-program.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his thin neck, and he seemed determined not to deliberately look at Jim Lang. “I t-t-t-think w-w-w-we’re ready to pr-pr-pro-proceed.”

  Jim raised an inquisitive eyebrow, but said nothing as he propped his elbows on the console and clasped his hands together beneath his chin. Out in the atrium, Kathy Veder had just turned to walk away from Delilah. Phil caught Donna’s eye and quickly nodded his head, and she switched on her mike. “D-Team, we’re ready to roll.”

  “R-r-roll now,” Phil said. Keith and I traded an uncertain glance. Dr. Veder was still in the atrium; she hadn’t yet returned to her trailer. Keith’s hands hesitated above his keyboard, and Phil tapped him on the shoulder. “Commence the t-t-t-test, p-p-p-please,” he said, and Keith shrugged as he typed in the command which would bring Samson online.

  “Aren’t you going to wait?” Jim asked quietly.

  Phil didn’t reply. Instead, he closed his eyes, and his lips moved as he subaudibly counted to ten.

  Something weird was going on here, and it wasn’t the sort of weirdness I like. While Phil’s eyes were shut and Jim was looking the other direction, I opened a window from my menu bar and moused the emergency shut-down icon. When the Y/N prompt appeared onscreen, I moved the cursor above the Y. One tap of my index finger, and Samson would freeze like an popsicle.

  Out in the atrium, Kathy Veder was almost at the edge of the clearing when Samson came marching through the trees. She stopped in mid-stride, confused and startled, judging from her expression, not just a little alarmed. My mind’s eye flashed upon a scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still—the robot Gort carrying the unconscious Patricia Neal in his arms—and my finger wavered above the Return key. Oh, no, Phil can’t be that crazy…

  But then Samson stopped. He bowed from the waist, as if he was a gentleman who happened upon a lovely young woman while strolling through the woods. Kathy’s face changed from fear to amusement; she stepped aside, and Samson straightened up and walked past her.

  “Oh, very good,” Jim murmured. “Good object recognition.”

  I let out my breath and moved my hand away from the keyboard.

  Samson continued walking toward Delilah. As he approached the bench where she sat, his right hand opened the cargo panel on his chest, and reached inside. At this point, he was supposed to pull out an apple and offer it to the other robot. He had gotten that part right yesterday, until he decided that slamming the apple against her head was an appropriate sign of affection. On either side of me, I could see Donna, Keith, and Bob stiffening ever so slightly.

  But what Samson produced wasn’t an apple, but a heart.

  Not the organic sort, but the St. Valentine’s Day variety: a red plastic toy of the sort you might place within a bouquet of roses you send to your true love.

  From the edge of the clearing, Kathy Veder watched as Samson stepped around the bench and, with grace and tenderness, held it out to Delilah.

  Delilah remained still, her hands still folded in her lap, her fishbowl head staring straight ahead.

  “Please,” I heard Phil whisper.

  And then Delilah’s head moved toward Samson, as if noticing his presence for the first time. She raised her left arm, opened her palm and turned it upward, and waited.

  Samson took another step forward and, ever so carefully, placed the heart in her hand.

  Kathy folded her arms across her chest, covered her mouth with her hand. She was watching the robots, but her gaze kept flickering toward us, toward the window behind which Phil stood.

  I glanced at Phil. He was silent, but his posture was exactly like Kathy’s.

  Delilah took the heart and placed it in her lap. Samson bowed just as he had done for Kathy, but he remained rooted in his tracks until Delilah raised her left hand and, in a very ladylike fashion, motioned for him to join her on the bench.

  Samson took two steps closer, turned around, and sat down next to Delilah, his hands coming to rest on the bench.

  Then Delilah laid her right hand upon his left hand.

  And then both robots became still.

  That was almost what they were supposed to do.

  For a few moments, no one in the trailer said anything. Everyone stared in astonishment at the tableau. I felt someone brush against the back of my chair, but I didn’t look up to see who had just moved past me. My entire attention was focused upon Samson and Delilah, the quiet spectacle of two robots holding hands on a park bench.

  “Fantastic,” Jim Lang whispered. “I’m…that’s utterly…my God, it’s so damn real.” He turned around to look up at Phil. “How did you…?”

  But Phil wasn’t there. He didn’t even bother to shut the door behind him as he left the trailer. When I peered out the window again, I saw that Kathy Veder had disappeared as well.

  In fact, I didn’t see either of them again for the rest of the day. A little while later, during lunch hour, I casually strolled out to the employee parking lot and noted, without much surprise, that both of their cars were missing.

  “That’s incredible conditioning,” Jim said as he pushed back his c
hair. “How did you guys manage this?”

  Bob chuckled as he unloaded his camcorder. Donna and Keith, two days away from their first date, just grinned at each other and said nothing. I made the program-abort window disappear from my screen before the boss noticed and shrugged offhandedly.

  “Just takes the right conditioning,” I replied.

  If you’re a robot-owner, or least one who has a Samson or a Delilah in your home, then you know the rest. After considerable research and development, and the sort of financial risk which makes the Wall Street Journal see spots before its eyes, LEC simultaneously introduced two different R3G models: his-and-hers robots for the home and office. They cook dinner, they wash dishes, they answer the door, they walk the dog, they vacuum the floor, they make the beds, and water the roses and virtually anything else you ask them to do. Sure, CybeServe brought their Metropolis to market first, but who wants that clunky piece of crap? Our robots will even carry your kids to bed and sing them a lullaby.

  People sometimes ask why Samsons and Delilahs have a small heart etched on their chest plates. The corporate line is that it’s there to show that our robots have a soul, but anyone who knows anything about cybernetics knows better than that. After all, that’s utter nonsense. Robots are just machines, right? And who in their right mind would ever believe that a machine can learn to love?

  I don’t have an easy answer to that, and I’ve spent more than fifteen years in this industry. If you want, I’ll forward your query to Dr. Phil Burton and Dr. Kathy Veder. However, you shouldn’t expect an answer very soon. Ever since they got married, we’ve had a hard time getting them to come to the office.

  THE STARSHIP MECHANIC, by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes

  The floor of Borderlands Books had been polished to mirror brightness. A nice trick with old knotty pine, but Penauch would have been a weapons-grade obsessive-compulsive if he’d been human. I’d thought about setting him to detailing my car, but he’s just as likely to polish it down to aluminum and steel after deciding the paint was an impurity.

  When he discovered that the human race recorded our ideas in books, he’d been impossible to keep away from the store. Penauch didn’t actually read them, not as such, and he was most reluctant to touch the volumes. He seemed to view books as vehicles, launch capsules to propel ideas from the dreaming mind of the human race into our collective forebrain.

  Despite the fact that Penauch was singular, unitary, a solitary alien in the human world, he apparently didn’t conceive of us as anything but a collective entity. The xenoanthropologists at Berkeley were carving Ph.D.s out of that particular clay as fast as their grad students could transcribe Penauch’s conversations with me.

  He’d arrived the same as David Bowie in that old movie. No, not Brother From Another Planet; The Man Who Fell To Earth. Tumbled out of the autumn sky over the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco like a maple seed, spinning with his arms stretched wide and his mouth open in a teakettle shriek audible from the Ghost Fleet in Suisun Bay all the way down to the grubby streets of San Jose.

  * * * *

  “The subject’s fallsacs when fully deployed serve as a tympanum, producing a rhythmic vibration at a frequency perceived by the human ear as a high-pitched shriek. Xenophysiological modeling has thus far failed to generate testable hypotheses concerning the volume of the sound produced. Some observers have speculated that the subject deployed technological assistance during atmospheric entry, though no evidence of this was found at the landing site, and subject has never indicated this was the case.”

  —Jude A. Feldman quoting Jen West Scholes; A Reader’s Guide to Earth’s Only Living Spaceman; Borderlands Books, 2014

  * * * *

  It was easier, keeping Penauch in the bookstore. The owners didn’t mind. They’d had hairless cats around the place for years—a breed called sphinxes. The odd animals served as a neighborhood tourist attraction and business draw. A seven-foot alien with a face like a plate of spaghetti and a cluster of writhing arms wasn’t all that different. Not in a science fiction bookstore, at least.

  Thing is, when Penauch was out in the world, he had a tendency to fix things.

  This fixing often turned out to be not so good.

  No technology was involved. Penauch’s body was demonstrably able to modify the chitinous excrescences of his appendages at will. If he needed a cutting edge, he ate a bit of whatever steel was handy and swiftly metabolized it. If he needed electrical conductors, he sought out copper plumbing. If he needed logic probes, he consumed sand or diamonds or glass.

  It was all the same to Penauch.

  As best any of us could figure out, Penauch was a sort of tool. A Swiss army knife that some spacefaring race had dropped or thrown away, abandoned until he came to rest on Earth’s alien shore.

  And Penauch only spoke to me.

  * * * *

  The question of Penauch’s mental competence has bearing in both law and ethics. Pratt and Shaw (2013) have effectively argued that the alien fails the Turing test, both at a gross observational level and within the context of finer measurements of conversational intent and cooperation. Cashier (2014) claims an indirectly derived Stanford-Binet score in the 99th percentile, but seemingly contradicts herself by asserting that Penauch’s sentience is at best an open question. Is he (or it) a machine, a person, or something else entirely?

  —S.G. Browne, “A Literature Review of the Question of Alien Mentation”; Journal of Exogenic Studies, Volume II, Number 4, August, 2015

  * * * *

  The first time he fixed something was right after he’d landed. Penauch impacted with that piercing shriek at 2:53 p.m Pacific Time on Saturday, July 16, 2011, at the intersection of Cole and Paranassus in the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. Every window within six blocks shattered. Almost a hundred pedestrians and shoppers in the immediate area were treated for lacerations from broken glass, over two dozen more for damage to hearing and sinuses.

  I got to him first, stumbling out of Cole Hardware with a headache like a cartoon anvil had been dropped on me. Inside, we figured a bomb had gone off. The rising noise and the vibrating windows. All the vases in the homewares section had exploded. Luckily I’d been with the fasteners. The nails sang, but they didn’t leap off the shelves and try to make hamburger of me.

  Outside, there was this guy lying in a crater in the middle of the intersection, like Wile E. Coyote after he’d run out of Acme patented jet fuel. I hurried over, touched his shoulder, and realized what a goddamned mess he was. Then half a dozen eyes opened, and something like a giant rigatoni farted before saying, “Penauch.”

  Weird thing was, I could hear the spelling.

  Though I didn’t know it in that moment, my old life was over, my new one begun.

  Penauch then looked at my shattered wristwatch, grabbed a handful of BMW windshield glass, sucked it down, and moments later fixed my timepiece.

  For some value of “fixed.”

  It still tells time, somewhere with a base seventeen counting system and twenty-eight point one five seven hour day. It shows me the phases of Phobos and Deimos, evidence that he’d been on (or near) Mars. Took a while to figure that one out. And thing warbles whenever someone gets near me carrying more than about eight ounces of petroleum products. Including grocery bags, for example, and most plastics.

  I could probably get millions for it on eBay. Penauch’s first artifact, and one of less than a dozen in private hands.

  The government owns him now, inasmuch as anyone owns Penauch. They can’t keep him anywhere. He ‘fixes’ his way out of any place he gets locked into. He comes back to San Francisco, finds me, and we go to the bookstore. Where Penauch polishes the floors and chases the hairless cats and draws pilgrims from all over the world to pray in Valencia Street. The city gave up on traffic control a long time ago. It’s a pedestrian mall now when he’s around.

  The problem has always been, none of us have any idea what Penauch is. What he does. What he’s for.
I’m the only one he talks to, and most of what he says is Alice in Wonderland dialog, except when it isn’t. Two new semiconductor companies have been started through analysis of his babble, and an entire novel chemical feedstock process for converting biomass into plastics.

  Then one day, down on the mirrored floor of Borderlands Books, Penauch looked at me and said quite clearly, “They’re coming back.”

  I was afraid we were about to get our answers.

  * * * *

  It was raining men in the Castro, literally, and every single one of them was named Todd. Every single one of them wore Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts and Birkenstocks. Every single one of them landed on their backs, flopped like trout for a full minute and leaped to their feet shouting one word: “Penauch!”

  —San Francisco Chronicle, November 11th, 2015; Gail Carriger reporting

  * * * *

  “I must leave,” Penauch said, his voice heavy as he stroked a hairless cat on the freshly polished floor of the bookstore.

  On a small TV in the back office of the store, an excited reporter in Milk Plaza spoke rapidly about the strange visitors who’d fallen from the sky. Hundreds of men named Todd, now scattered out into the city with one word on their tongues. As it played in the background, I watched Penauch and could feel the sadness coming off of him in waves.

  “Where will you go?”

  Penauch stood. “I don’t know. Anywhere but here. Will you help me?”

  The bell on the door jingled and a man entered the store. “Penauch,” he said.

  I looked up at the visitor. His Hawaiian shirt was an orange that hurt my eyes, decorated in something that looked like cascading pineapples. He smiled and scowled at the same time.