Analog SFF, April 2010 (24 page)

"We've seen the past,” he said, drawing back. “Just SWH1942 left. Their star is about to inflate into a red giant. That solar system,
our
solar system, is dying."

"Humans mightn't even be left on Earth!” I cried. “They could've moved to the dwarf planets to prepare for the doom, or escaped to another solar system. It's billions of years from now; we better have mastered interstellar travel. Maybe there're still stragglers left on Earth, and the Sun's about to eat them."

"Should we even dare to peek into the future and see what it holds for humanity?” he asked.

"Sure,” I said, punching in the coordinates. “Let's take a look."

Copyright © 2010 S.L. Nickerson

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Technology can satisfy many human needs, but can it satisfy all?

The door's silent slide still surprised me, even after Aliss and I'd been moving boxes into our new garage and piling them in unruly heaps for two days. Hair stuck to my neck as sweat ran down the small of my back and the backs of my knees. Our real estate agent had told me it never got hot here, but apparently she lied about the weather as easily as she lied about the closing costs. So we were too broke for household help and hot from humping boxes. But we were here.

Home.

And done working for the evening.

I gathered up a cold beer from the gleaming fridge, which opened and closed for me the same way the front door did, eerily quiet and efficient. I'd grown up with doors you opened and closed with human muscle. My last house had been built green when that meant saving energy instead of producing it. Trust humanity not to waste anything free when you can use a lot of it.

The high ceilings and three tall stories made the house seem like it yearned to join the cedar and fir forest. It made me feel like a pretender. We'd bought here, across the lake from Seattle, with returns from a few good investments and a dead aunt. The sliding door opened for me (of course). It allowed me outside onto a deck that glowed honey-colored in a late afternoon sunbath. No matter how pretty the deck and the house and the forest around us, the woman on the deck was prettier than all of it. Aliss'd caught her dark hair up in a ponytail that cascaded almost to her waist, thick as my wrist both top and bottom. Sweat shined her olive skin, and she smelled like work and coffee and the rich red syrah she held in her right hand. She pointed at the neighbors, a good three house-lengths away from us. “In five minutes, I've seen two humanoid bots over there."

"So they're rich. Maybe we can borrow one for gardening.” Not that I minded gardening; dirty nails felt good.

"There's another one."

The curiosity in her voice demanded I stop and look. A silver-skinned female form bent over a row of bright yellow ceramic flowerpots on the deck outside the three-story house, plucking dead pink and purple flower-heads from a profusion of living color, dropping her finds into a bucket as silver as her hands. I sucked down half the beer, watching. Counting. Three bots. One outside. Two or three little ones moving around the house, the ones that didn't look like people. Families in our newly acquired income bracket might have one of the big humanoid ones, but only if they needed a nanny more than flashy cars or designer clothes. Maybe a handful of robovacs and robodisposers and robowashers, like the ones sitting on a pallet in our garage right now.

"I haven't seen any people,” Aliss mused.

"Maybe they work."

Her eyes stayed narrow, her jaw tight and jumping a little back by her ear, and she rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet. I knew what that meant. “Guess we're taking a walk."

"Got to meet the neighbors, right?"

I'd actually been thinking about sliding into the hot tub naked and having another beer. But this was our first house together, and I wanted her to be happy. “Let's go introduce ourselves."

Our driveway gave under our feet, the heat drawing up a hint of its origin as old tires, but not so much it overwhelmed the loamy forest dirt spiced with cedar. Aliss and I turned onto the road, hand in hand. Meeting the neighbors started to feel like a picket fence, like something my mom would do. We turned off the road onto their driveway.

Red light lasered across our bare shins. “Stop now."

Aliss drew in a sharp breath and squeezed my hand before letting it go and freezing in place.

"State your business.” I followed the voice to a spot about fifteen feet in front of me and about knee-high. The guardbot was the same pebbly dark color as the driveway, cylindrical, with more than two feet, and not standing still, which is what kept me from counting feet. This bot was neither pretty nor humanoid. In fact, a bright blue circle with a red target stickered in its side screamed weapons.

I talked soft to it. “We're the new neighbors. We came to introduce ourselves."

Its voice sounded cheerfully forced, like a slightly tinny villain in a superhero movie. “Aliss Johnson and Paul Dina. Twenty-seven and twenty-eight, respectively. You have been here for precisely sixty-seven hours..."

I waved it silent before it got around to checking our bank balance and running us off entirely. “So, then you know we're harmless. We'd like to meet your owners."

"They are not home."

Aliss still hadn't moved, but she asked it, “When will they come back?"

It turned a full 360, as if someone else might have snuck up behind it, and then said, “Please back up until you are off the property line."

We backed, all the nice warm fuzziness of being in a new home turned sideways. After we'd turned away from the house and the bot, my back itched behind my heart. I whispered in Aliss's ear, “Not very nice neighbors."

She grunted, her brow furrowed.

"Maybe we should jump in the hot tub."

She gave me a pouty, unhappy look. “They were watching us."

I didn't remind her she'd been watching them. I just hugged her close, still whispering, “This is our first night here. Let's enjoy it."

She stopped me right there in the middle of the road, at the edge of our own property line, and nuzzled my neck. When she looked up at me, the slight distraction in her gaze told me I wouldn't have all of her attention easily. I made a silent vow to figure out a way to get it all and started my devious plot by sliding my hand down the small of her back and pulling her close into me. We walked home with our hips brushing each other.

The next morning, warmth from her attention still lingered in the relaxed set of my shoulders and the way my limbs splayed across the bed like rubber. Birds sang so loudly they might have been recorded. I tried to separate them, figure out how many species must be outside.

"Honey?” she called. With some reluctance I opened my eyes to find Aliss standing on the small deck outside the bedroom, one of my shirts her only clothing. Fog enveloped the treetops outside our third-story window, tinting the morning ghostly white and gray. “Will you come here?"

Since she was wearing my shirt, I pulled on my jeans and joined her, drinking in a deep whiff of us smelling like each other. Although we couldn't see the house from any of our windows, the deck had a nearly direct view into the robot-house's kitchen, the fog and one thin tree-trunk the only obstructions. Three silvery figures moved about inside a square of light that shone all the more brightly for the fog.

I put a hand on Aliss's shoulder, leaning into her. “Since robots don't need food, there must be people there."

"Don't you see her?"

I squinted. At the table, a girl sat sideways to us, spooning something from her bowl into her mouth. She wore a white polo shirt and brown shorts, and her blond hair was curled back artfully behind her ears and tied with a gold bow. She belonged in a commercial. Across from her, one of the robots appeared to be holding an animated conversation with her.

"How old do you think she is?” Aliss asked.

She still had a child's lankiness and a flat chest, but she was probably near as tall as Aliss.

"Ten? Twelve?"

"She's alone."

"You don't know that.” Although her observations were often uncanny.

"It explains the nasty bots. They were protecting her. But it's not right."

"Her mom or dad will show up any second."

Aliss crossed her arms over her chest and gave me the look. “No cars, still. No movement except the girl. No other lights on. She's alone. It's a crime to leave a girl that age alone."

I glanced back at the window, where one robot was clearly conversing with the girl and another was bringing her a fresh glass of juice. “She's not alone."

All I got for that was the look again. I tugged her close to me. “Come on, let's eat. She must have parents."

"I hope so.” Aliss let me pull her gaze away from the bright square of window and its even brighter occupants.

Days later, we sat on new recycled-sawdust Adirondack chairs we'd ordered for the bedroom deck. The table between us held two coffee cups and two pairs of binoculars and a camera. Aliss hadn't moved from her chair for two hours. She worried at her beautiful lower lip. “No parents. No people. Not for five days."

"They'll come.” Not that I believed it any more. “Maybe there's someone living there who never comes into the kitchen."

"That's lame."

"I'm reaching. I want my girl back."

"Don't be selfish."

At least she had a little tease in her voice when she said it.

We met the neighbors—not at the robot house, but across the street. William and Wilma Woods. Really. They were at least eighty. Their kids hired bot-swarms to clean up their yard for them, but obviously did nothing for the inside of the house. The Wood's probably couldn't see well enough to tell if there was a purple people eater living in the robot house, and when we asked about it, William pulled his lips up into his hollow cheeks and said, “The new house? I dunno who lives there. We don't get out much."

He meant us. We lived in the new house.

The house on the other side of us from the robot house stood empty-eyed and vacant, with a traditional security system that included signs and warnings of proximity detectors. Forest took over for half a mile on the far side of the robot house before it yielded a barn-shaped house next to a barn with a corral and three swaybacked horses. The offbeat collection of direct neighbors made me wonder if we'd picked the right house to buy. The robot house was clearly our problem, at least in the world according to Aliss. And since she was my world, it mattered to me. In fact, after days of watching the little girl play ball with robots and eat with robots and study at the kitchen table with the help of robots, I was beginning to worry all on my own. Surely the kid needed a mom or a brother or a dog or something. Something warm.

I have some skill with the nets, but all that got me was frustrated. A holding company owned the house. A public company owned that company and a few hundred more. It spread wealth—a lot more than this house—through thousands of shareholders. Not a very unique tax dodge for second or third homes. All it told me was the girl or her family—or the freaking robots—had money. Which I already knew. I gritted my teeth and kept plugging while Aliss brought me coffee and rubbed my neck. We saw the girl bent over the table studying every day, but I couldn't find her in public school, online or offline. No kids of her description had been reported missing anywhere in the country.

We unpacked the house, all except the pallet of robostuff, which Aliss steadfastly ignored, and two boxes of art too lame for the new house.

The third week, I woke up in the middle of the dark and texted a friend in the reserves, who brought his night vision goggles. She was warm—and alone. Human.

Satellite shots from the city never showed a car, although they did show the girl out playing robot ball twice.

Aliss made up names for her (Colette, Annie, Lisa, Barbie) and drew her picture. Not that we didn't do our jobs (me, investing advice; her, marketing), or make dinner, or make love. But the spare time that might have been nights out or movies all went to the robots’ girl.

It wasn't like we wanted kids. But she started to haunt our dreams for no good reason except that we were human and she was surrounded by beings that weren't. We walked by the house at least once a day. Always we saw the guardbots. There were three of them. One too many for the two of us. Or maybe three too many. We hadn't degenerated into breaking and entering. After all, the robots’ girl laughed and played. Her hair was neat and her clothes ironed.

We walked and watched almost every day. Delivery trucks came and went from time to time, but no regular cars stayed, no friends, no family. Just groceries and occasionally bags or boxes that might hold shoes or clothes or books.

Fall began to cool and shorten the nights. We were on our lunch break, walking out with the first yellow and orange leaves scrunching under our feet, the sky a nearly purple blue above us. After we passed the house and entered the stretch of forest on the far side, Aliss was silent for a long time before she said, “She's too good. A kid her age should play tricks and make faces and all that stuff. She doesn't do that."

"Do robots have a sense of humor?"

"Shit. She's been like this forever.” Her voice rose. “I keep hoping her mom is on vacation, and she's coming back. She's not. The robots really are raising her."

She fell silent, her feet making soft sliding steps on the road, her breathing faster than it should be for our pace, her lips a tight line in her face. “I'm going in."

"A little melodramatic, aren't we? You sound like a TV cop show."

She swung around in front of me and stopped, blocking my way, head tilted up toward me. “It's like she's in jail. But she doesn't know it. What if they've raised her forever? What if that little girl doesn't know what a human hug feels like? What if . . . what if she thinks she's inferior to those robots? What are they teaching her?"

"Shhhhhh.” I took her shoulders lightly. She felt like a bird. “We have to keep perspective. Not get thrown in jail for breaking and entering. The cops won't even go in—you called them."