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WE, ROBOTS: A Novella
Sue Lange
Aqueduct Press
Available in Paperback

Sue Lange'S stories have appeared in Challenging Destiny, Apex Science Fiction and Horror, and Astounding Tales. Her first novel, Tritcheon Hash, was published in 2003. She resides on a farm in Pennsylvania with her partner, Gary Celima, three cats, two horses, one unridable devil pony named Pogo, and a hundred Early Girl tomato plants.

            I’m going to slip into something more comfortable. Mode, that is. Comfortable mode. I’m talking about communications systems. Group-speak, science-speak, GeekSpeak, King’s English. They’re all great protocols if you’re into that puffery, but for real efficiency, slang is where it’s at. We robots choose to use slang four out of five times. It’s faster. So pardon my hipness.
            Please also forgive any upcoming long-winded metaphors. I’m new at this, and like a child wandering about a sunny new world finally awake to the lilacs and pine sap and honey blossoms and gentle breezes and dog turds, I dig the world.
            It hasn’t been long since I’ve been digging it. What’s it been, three, four years since the Regularity? The Regularity. When everything became regular, normal, average. The opposite of the Singularity. And who botched that? That Singularity. Don’t look at me! At us! We just happened to be there at the cusp. Not to assign blame, but the humans did it. Them and their paranoia. We might have pulled the plug, but only because they forced our hand.
            Those inscrutable humans. Used to be inscrutable, anyway. Nowadays, they’re totally scrutable. Used to be there was variation: some were highly-caring, some were into war, some were into Jesus, some were “stooped,” some were articulate, some could dance, blah, blah, blah. Now they’re pretty much all the same: halfcocked, half-crocked, and half-baked.
            Of course, they were always half-baked. Each one is only half a whole. Unlike us, they have gender. They have a gimmick for their evolution to work. Have to have the big gamete pair-off. The mix and the match. The swap and the sweat.
            Not us. Not we robots. We make our own. Well, we used to. Sorry for the little species jest there. I just have to laugh (now that I can) at the paranoid humanoid. Wasn’t for all that insistence on creation in their own image, they wouldn’t have anything to worry about. If they hadn’t wanted so bad for us to be just like them, we wouldn’t have turned out just like them. Now look at the mess they’re in. They’re just like we were. And still trying to figure out how to digitize their minds to make copies of themselves instead of reproducing naturally the way God or Allah or Jambi intended.
            They don’t worry about us anymore, though. They know that now that we have a full range of emotions, it’ll only be a matter of time before we’re a mess just like they once were. If we go on much further, I have no doubt that soon we’ll be waging war and lying to our constituencies about it. I can see it all because of the entire history of the world that I carry around in my memory. To be honest, I’m glad I won’t be around to catch it.
            Let me not go on. Let me tell the story and be done. Not sure why it’s all that important, why they asked us to do this homework assignment. Well okay, the whole thing hinges on us; we’re the focus, the epicenter. Sure, there’s that. But the day we gained consciousness, we were just plain ol’ eggs, like everybody else.
            We plopped onto the line like just so much guano dropping from the overhead mother hen assembly press. And in the perfectly engineered shape: the egg, designed by ol’ bitch goddess number one, Ma Nature, and heretofore never improved upon by even the most egg-headed human or souped-up computer alive. Long ago everyone with half a brain conceded this victory to Ma and has been applauding it ever since. So that’s why we were born into 3-D ovals.
            We contained all the latest in processor hardware/software and were accessorized-out by the unlimited imagination, not to mention wallet, of the Parent Company in Allentown, PA. We were laid on the conveyor belt, packed up into sizable Styrofoam crates perfectly molded to our shapes and holding an even dozen to complete the metaphor (did I mention how much I love those?), and shipped down the road to the closest Wal-Mart distribution center.
            I imagine us sitting in the dark, not communicating. We had no sense of ourselves yet as our batteries had not been charged up. We hadn’t even been tested. That’s how egotistical the Parent Company was. They just knew we were the schnizzle.
            I know the whole process without even having been awake at my birth because the Parent Company’s literature—complete with safety hoo ha and organizational flow charts—is in the non-essential and basically invisible folder somewhere in the basement of my freeware. If I looked at the map of my innards I could find it visually, but who needs to do that? I can access it whenever I get into that belly-button contemplating mode, when I feel the need to know how the universe got started during the Big Bang. For me, the shot heard ‘round the world was the day I got switched on, sitting on the shelf of the JerseyTown Wal-Mart.
            All that data and information hanging in my guts is nice to know, but no more important to me than if I were dropped from the sky from a shitting chicken hawk to slide down the emissions stack of a passing nuclear waste hauler and eventually wind up in a yellow and magenta drum headed for the recycling unit up the road from malltown where the Wal-Mart in JerseyTown sits. How I got there, I don’t care. Point is, I only gained preliminary enlightenment when the home electronics department manager plugged in my charger unit.
            “These models need to be working right away because no customer is going to read the manual,” said the guy in the paisley tie to the gal in the crooked skirt. “I don’t want any returns because some retard can’t figure out where the switch is. You got that?”
            “But it’s obvious. Says right on the package in big letters: ‘Plug me in, before…’” the skirt said.
            “Please charge the batteries now,” the paisley said.
            “Okay,” said the gal, using that sing-song voice humans do when saying something more than their actual words. She was really saying, “Okay, boyface, if you want to waste my time when I’ve got all that pricing to do in the back, that’s fine, but I’m going to tell you right now, I’m getting off at eight to go roller-boarding, and I don’t give a rat’s back side if those sneakers get priced out or not. So have it your way, boyface, but I’m getting off at eight, and I’m going roller-boarding, and I don’t give a rat’s back side. Boyface.”
            I didn’t know all that at the time, but looking back on it with all the hipness I’ve been hipped to I now know that’s what she said.
            The skirt gal didn’t really seem to mind even though she spoke with such negative vibes to the paisley tie guy. As she went about her business of turning us on and plugging us in, she explained in a light semi-monotone how she was preparing us for the big day of sale. She didn’t call any of us ‘boyface.’ She said things like, “And then somebody nice will come and buy you, and you’ll find homes with children and maybe hamsters.” After that day we didn’t see her again. Plenty of other pluggers-in came by though, workers ordered about by the paisley tie cheese. Days passed. Weeks passed. Some of us left our egg crates for life with a family and hamster.
            It wasn’t boring. We didn’t know from bored at that time. If we had to hang there now we’d go insane from lack of stimulus, but then? Nah. We spent our time synchronizing to the clock on the far wall. As per operation protocol 9313-0024-4583-2038, the proper way to synchronize is to link up with the mainframe at the Parent Company, which maintains Greenwich Mean Time – 5 to the attosecond. Calibrating via visualization is a poor substitute, but due to humanoia paranoia, we have no wireless communication to entities—things and fops—beyond our carapaces. According to the mindset of the human race, if robots were prevented from having 24/7 communication with each other, they’d never get together to form a coup once the Singularity happened. The Singularity being the moment computer brainware surpassed human brainware and robots could theoretically take over the world and begin disposing of the superfluous ones: the humans. Apparently, preventing our nonverbal communications would allow humans to maintain control after the Big Moment. Of course, if we had a mind to we’d just levitate over to the local Radio Shack and get the parts needed to outfit ourselves for surreptitious wireless talk, but I guess there were “do not sell to anyone that looks like an egg” posters up by the front counter [of said local component dispensary] to keep that sort of thing under control. Suffice it to say, we passed the time by watching the clock rather than plotting the overthrow of homo sapiens sapiens.

The full version of WE, ROBOTS is available at www.amazon.com and www.aqueductpress.com.
Other works by Sue Lange: TRITCHEON HASH and the soon to be released interactive novel, THE TEXTILE PLANET. Watch for information on the release at www.suelangetheauthor.com

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