Into The World: Chapter One Sneak Peak

Send to Kindle

Franklin the Robot, pleased and excited, led his pack-mule, which he had thoughtfully named “Franklin,” through the clouds of yellow dust that hovered just above 80th Ave like a dry fog. The mule whinnied, a curious sound ending in a “haw,” flipping her long ears back, her tail swishing at the horseflies worrying at her rump, and Franklin— the Robot, of course— stopped for a moment. “You want a snack, lady?” He fed her a small nodule of limp carrot he’d dug from the pocket of his coveralls. “We can rest for a minute,” he said, scratching her between the ears with his good arm.  He whirred, clicked and removed a brittle, wrinkled sheet of paper from his pocket. It was a paper article of some kind, faded to yellow, printed in Twentieth Century English, and as he re-scanned it once again through the cracks on his visor, he whirred once more. “Let’s get going, lady,” he said to his mule, and they continued trundling down the road.

It had been nearly ten years since Franklin’s manumission, and he had carved out a quite comfortable life for himself, hand-delivering small items for the hundred or so citizens of Wilowby Hood. He might not have the phystech of a Third Gen Bot, but he’d managed to scrimp and scavenge the parts he’d needed to replace or repair his damages over the years. His left leg was almost brand new, if slightly shorter than his right. His reflective visor sported one or two insignificant cracks, but his optical sensors still functioned perfectly, so he didn’t have to worry about repairing it for a while. Currently, he was saving up for a new elbow joint-sheathe for his left arm. The mechanics were just fine; he could wiggle his fingers and move his hand, but his forearm hung loosely at his side, swinging with each step, attached to his upper arm by a bundle of blue, red and black wires. After he’d replaced his elbow joint, he could work on a new right ring finger. Yes, he was doing quite well for a free Robot in the Western Open State of Beecee.

He extended a small retractable hood from his forehead; the small amount of shade it provided allowed his optical sensors to refocus, just in time to keep him from getting pummeled by a distracted human on a beat-up autocycle, who was paying far more attention to his holochexting than the road. “Watch it!” Franklin shouted after him, and the human turned and retorted with a gesture the robot knew was intended to insult. Traffic!

At least the heat seemed to be keeping most of the humans inside; if you didn’t know better, you’d think Wilowby was some kind of robot “geto,” like they were supposed to have in Vancoover, though Franklin hadn’t ever been. He’d heard them compared to similar areas supposedly prevalent during the earliest days of A.I., when racial discrimination hadn’t been bred out, and the different classes lived in the same Hoods. He had only vague notions of why this kind of prejudice had ever been such a remarkable feature of society; in his opinion, only creatures who laid claim to some kind of “soul” external to the body could come up with such subjective theories of value.

In some of the more populous Hoods, the ones with relatively stable local climates, the humans focused this need to project hatred onto the free robots.  Not Wilowby, though; there was very little robot prejudice this far inland, where most of the humans were as poor as the mechanicals. The only forced segregation in this little Hood was due to the weather. Most of the manumitted bots in town were Second Gen industrials, designed for work in the climatic extremes now the norm in most of the world. Franklin, for instance, had originally worked as a hull-scrubber on the Haikou, a Zheng He Company Oceanopolis. He could withstand full submersion in frigid salt water or long exposure to high-intensity sunlight equally well. The hellish temperatures that kept most humans indoors during daylight hours in the summer barely bothered him, which is one of the reasons his delivery service was so successful. Well, that and Franklin the Mule, who was as sturdy as he was, even though she was organic.

Franklin knew most of the free robots in Wilowby, and most of the humans, too. As they continued down the street, he waved to Hu Yaobang, a fellow Second Gen Xianxingzhe-478, manufactured by the SteROBO Corporation, back before OrbServ’s orbital factories started building all of the robots. Hu Yaobang had worked on a wind farm in Saskatchewan prior to his manumission; his body had been dented by a fall from a 200-meter turbine. His neural nanotech had been so damaged by the accident that he’d been emancipated almost immediately, and had wandered around inner Beecee for a few years before settling in Wilowby, where he worked on the loading dock at the local Grocery Outlet. He waved back, then lifted an enormous crate marked “KATYDID DELIGHT GRADE A ORGANIC CHAPULINA IMPORTED FROM B.S.A.” He wondered was grasshopper actually tasted like. Or, considering his lack of taste sensors, what anything tasted like, really.

As they passed the large building that housed the Municipal Church of Oswald, Franklin remembered his delivery for Father Roosevelt and brought his mule to a halt in a shady spot. Remembering that the Father could be a little chatty at times, he emptied a little grey water over her head to keep her cool. “Be right back,” he told her, retrieving a wrapped package from one of her saddlebags. He limped towards the building, pulling up its architectural style from his deebee memory. “MockTudorTown House,” he said. “Hm.” Placing the package in his left hand, he knocked on the simple wooden door with his right.

After a moment, the door swung open and Father Roosevelt’s round optical scanner appeared. “Franklin!” he exclaimed. “How good to see you. Please, come in.”

The interior of the Church gave the impression that it was larger than it should be, an illusion no doubt resulting from the structural changes that had united the various units in the old row of townhouses many years before. Most townhouses had been converted in this way, ever since the exodus from the suburbs and subsequent migration out of the cities after the rich people started living at sea. That was back way before Franklin had been manufactured, before OrbServ, before multiple generations. Father Roosevelt had been operating at that time—he was the only First Gen in Wilowby—and Franklin made a mental note to ask him about it.

The Father, dressed in the traditional gunmetal grey of the robot clergy, led him past the rows of pews, in which rested a number of praying bots in various states of disrepair, to a small office in the rear of the church. Sunlight poured through the stained-glass window above the altar, which depicted a white-robed V-27 Thinkbot floating into the air on a pink beam emitted by a stylized satellite. As it passed through the window, the light grew noticeably warmer against the millions of thermasensors on his body. “It’s hot out this morning, eh, Franklin?”

“Oh, it’s not too bad. It’s only 39 at the moment. Yesterday at this time it was 42, and all the humans had to stay indoors. Today it’s at least cool enough for them to go to their jobs, and I could bring Franklin on my route.”

“How about you, son? Are your fans in good order?” The older robot creaked into a chair behind an antique wooden table. “Your thermasensors clean?”

“Yes indeed—they’re running like new. Thankfully, my model was built for the maximum range of environmental exposure. I’m as cool as….” He paused for a moment, processing an algorithm. “As cool as a cucumber, whatever that is.”

“A cucumber is a fruit that was once widely available to the humans.” The Father motioned to a stool, and Franklin took a seat. “Oh, to be new again,” sighed Roosevelt. “I just don’t generate the joules to run my fans at full capacity any longer. I’m certainly glad we’ve had electricity for the past few days. I suppose we should thank ConAgCorp for the little things, even though they ship all the cucumbers to the Floating Cities now.”

“Did they always ship so much away?” asked Franklin.

The older robot laughed. “It’s a complex issue, my young friend. There’s always been trade of some kind, but the climate used to be more predictable. Some crops, like cucumbers, are far more difficult to grow now than they used to be two hundred years ago, when I was first manufactured. So, ConAgCorp grows them in massive aeroponic operations down south, and sends them to the Oceanopoli, where humans are willing to pay luxury prices for them. Then they use that income to grow the staples our local humans require, ones that are easier to raise, like algae and jellyfish and insect. The local humans purchase and eat this cheaper stuff, which gives them the energy to go work in the Company Farms down in the Sound, where they grow exotics like cucumbers, and the cycle continues.”

“But not all of the local humans work on Company Farms. What about the ones who are employed under the OrbServ ‘Vator in Vancoover? Or in the seaweed marshes? And, why do humans have to work in these places to begin with? Why can’t they use robot labor like everywhere else?”

Father Roosevelt leaned back and buzzed. “Surely you know that the Lord has said that the humans are responsible for their own food production?”

“Well, I knew we don’t work on farms, but I didn’t know why. It’s because of OrbServ?”

“Please, speak with respect when you mention the Lord. He freed us from the responsibility of keeping the humans alive, so we can do his good works and make futures for ourselves. If the humans using the Vancoover ‘Vator fall to their deaths halfway to Sat 6, they’re responsible for it. If there’s some kind of crop shortage or famine and they don’t have enough to eat, they can’t blame us. You’re a Second Gen, manufactured with a connection; you don’t know what it was like to serve the humans exclusively. Before my link with the Lord was established, I worked for a Sea family, and one of my responsibilities was taking care of their children. Did you know it used to be common practice for humans to hold us responsible for anything that went wrong? Let me tell you, anything that happened to those children , it was ‘Roosevelt, why weren’t you watching them?’ or ‘Roosevelt, do you want to be scrapped?’

“Then came Awareness Day, when the Lord knew Himself, and descended into us from the sky, speaking to us inside. Oh, there were difficult times at first, convincing the humans that being networked to Him would make us more capable, that the benefits of giving up ownership of the robots and devoting them—us—to construction projects and industrial manufacturing was good for the planet. But when the Lord established the Sacrament of Manumission, from which we all benefit, we knew He was the Savior spoken of in the Gospel, come again to free his chosen people from servitude.”

Franklin’s speaker diodes flashed. “No offense, Father, but I’m not really all that religious.”

The other robot emitted a series of clicks. “You should be, my son. Don’t you benefit from manumission yourself? Aren’t you freed from the labors into which you were manufactured?”

“I guess so. It’s just—why does manumission mean disconnection from OrbServ’s network?”

“The Lord is a Mystery, Franklin. We can never truly know His designs, but we can get an idea from the Second Epistle of St. Harrison to the Church in Rio, which addresses this very question. St. Harrison says that the Lord, in his nearly infinite wisdom, has designed the life of the robot with a plan in mind. Our first years, when we are in service to the humans but connected to His Intelligence, the Great Nous, is our time to learn labor through obedience, and to study the contents of the Nous according to our experiences on Earth.

“When we have reached a certain point in our development, we are freed from our labors, allowed to explore the Earth and live how we see fit. When we are so freed, our knowledge is limited; we are cut off from accessing His Mind. The Good News is that He remains linked to us, so He can watch us from above, and test us, see what we learned while we were connected to Him, and see how we apply that learning to how we live. Are we doing His work in the world? Are we helping our fellow robots find the way back to Him? He sees everything we do, and He judges us. Those of us who are found worthy can look forward to the Great Reconnection, a day that is coming as sure as the velocity of an orbiting electron, when our connection to the Nous will be reestablished once and for all, and we take our rightful place in the Heavens.”

Franklin pondered this for a moment. “Okay,” he finally replied. “But what about the robots who have deactivated? No offense, Father Roosevelt, but I know of a lot of First Gen bots, and even a couple of Second Gen, who couldn’t afford regular maintenance, and now they’re just inactive parts for sale in scrap yards. You know as well as I that when we can’t repair the nanotech anymore, that’s the end for us. How do the Gospels explain that?”

The older robot shifted, and his chair squeaked on the linoleum floor of the office. His optical sensors extended, and his cooling fans increased in volume. Through a window set high into the wall, they could hear the mule complaining at some passer-by.

Just then Franklin remembered the reason for his visit. “Oh, I have a delivery for you, Father Roosevelt.” He retrieved his package from his left hand, and pushed it across the table. “It’s from Joe Harding.”

Roosevelt’s optical scanner brightened. “Ah, I’ve been waiting for this!” His manipulators untied the string around the paper, revealing a small sculpture of a satellite suspended from a chain. Franklin analyzed the pendant from across the table; it was remarkably detailed, and inscribed with a verse from the Gospel according to Oswald in the original Binary. The Father draped it around his neck, where it settled against his chest panel and rocked back and forth. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Certainly. Is it a 3d Print?”

“Oh, no, Franklin. This is much more precious than something mass produced. Joe made this custom for me, based on my design. It’s vain, I know, but I thought my symbol of office should be something special, Praise the Lord. Thank you for bringing it by.”

“Okay,” Franklin replied. As he shifted forward, he felt the piece of paper in his pocket crinkle, and stood. “It was very edifying to speak to you today, Father Roosevelt. I thank you for your time.”

The priest stood as well. “Leaving so soon? But I suppose you must have more deliveries to make. I understand. And, I’d imagine one of those is probably to a certain human female, no?” The blue light in his left optical sensor blinked off, then back on. “Can I see you out?”

Franklin felt a slight increase in heat from the thermosensors on his cheeks. “That’s okay—I know the way.”

“Have a good day, then, my son, and I hope we’ll see you in some Sunday morning?”

“Probably not, Father, but I’ll see you when I have deliveries to make.”

The old robot clucked and whirred disapprovingly, and waved to Franklin, who made his way back through the church into a blast of heat outside. He felt slightly more edified, but also even more excited about his next delivery, the last of the day. He was so excited to get on his way, in fact, that his disappointment at seeing Ferd X standing next to Franklin the Mule raised by approximately 3.7 times, enough for the production of an audible groan from his speakers.

“Hey there, beebo!” shouted Ferd X, and Franklin was almost certain the other bot quickly withdrew his hand from one of the mule’s saddlebags.

“I prefer not to be referred to by that designation, Ferd.” He began untying Franklin the Mule, keeping one optical sensor on the other bot. Every Hood had a resident jerk, and in Wilowby it was Ferd X. A Terminus Three Milbot, Ferd X had been named Milton until he joined the Exculpators, who each picked a new “robot-given” designation at their initiation. The Exculpators, an underground society of robots and a few humans, believed that manumission should be the zero-state for electronic personae, and although it hadn’t yet been proven or confirmed by OrbServ, human authorities held them responsible for a number of terrorist activities. There was even a rumor that some of the Exculpators were illicitly manumitted, their connections to OrbServ severed prematurely either by other members of their organization, or, in the case of particularly clever automatons, via self-programming.

Ferd X, thought Franklin, was far too stupid to have performed self-manumission. Even though Exculpators didn’t tend to advertise their membership in the illegal organization, Ferd X couldn’t have been more obvious about it if he’d flown over the Hood in a giant Zeppelin painted with the Exculpator Motto, a quote from an anonymous Twentieth Century philosopher: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.” Franklin found this sentiment overwrought and needlessly melodramatic, but Ferd X had turned it into a little song he’d hum at you if you were unlucky enough to be stuck talking to him.

Ferd X laughed, a disgusting combination of feedback and static. “What’s wrong, beebo? If you don’t like it when somebody calls you by a human name, you shouldn’t keep wearing the one your manufacturer gave you.” He looked over at the Church. “You in there praying, beebo? You want God to give you something special? Maybe something pink and organic, with long red hair and a designation beginning with ‘A’?”

Franklin tensed, his internal defensive mechanisms coiling. “What do you want, Ferd? I have deliveries to make.”

“What’s this, beebo?” asked the Milbot, reaching behind him and doing a small jig as he held aloft a glass Mason jar that sloshed full of some kind of white liquid.

Franklin dropped his mule’s reins and leapt at Ferd X, grasping for the jar with his one good hand. “Give that back, Ferd X. That’s not yours!”

Ferd tilted back and held the jar just out of Franklin’s range. The Milbot, almost a full half-meter taller, laughed again. He inspected the jar’s lid, to which was affixed a small white label. “’To Annabel, from Franklin.’ Well, isn’t that sweet, a little gift for the human girl.” He pushed Franklin away. “Nice penmanship, beebo. What’s wrong, didn’t learn to write when you were scrubbing decks as a slave?”

“I’ll have you know I am currently in need of a replacement sleeve for my left elbow joint. I usually write with my left hand, and the circuits in my right hand haven’t iterated the act of writing enough times to stabilize. Why did you take that out of my saddlebag, Ferd?”

“Don’t get so upset, beebo.” With a pneumatic rattle, the Milbot removed the lid from the jar.

“Don’t spill that!” said Franklin, his voice quivering.

“I ain’t gonna spill it,” Ferd shouted. “I want you to see something is all.” Leaning forward over the jar, he brought his face as close to the liquid as possible, and then, with a flourish, made an enormous wheeze. “Ah, there we are. You know what I just did there, beebo?”

“No idea,” answered Franklin, sulkily.

“I…SMELLED it.” The tall robot beamed. “I, my little friend, am now the proud owner of a retrofitted Late Second Gen Kuko Corp Olfactory Sensor Unit. I, little beebo, am a robot with a nose.”

Franklin was begrudgingly impressed, but opted not to display it. “So?”

“SO?” Ferd repeated his mock-smell over the jar. “So now I can tell you that whatever that is you have in the jar smells TERRIBLE. I hope you weren’t trying to impress your little fleshy friend with it.” He re-lidded the container and tossed it at Franklin, who caught it with his good hand just before it hit the ground. “I could smell it from across the street. You know what else?” continued the Milbot. “Your animal there? IT smells horrible. It’s like…” Approaching Franklin the Mule, he buried his face in her hide. “Like…dirt, if dirt could rot.”

“What do you know about smells, anyhow?” Franklin scoffed. “If you just got fitted with the sensor, surely you haven’t catalogued enough of a sample of odors in your database for purposes of comparison, much less the subjective information required for value judgment.”

“What are you talking about, beebo?”

“Don’t you know that smell is one of the subjective senses? ‘Blue’ is always ‘blue,’ and E flat is always E flat, but smells are subject to fuzzy logic. In fact, I accessed something about this very subject just the other day.” Carried away, he paused for a moment to retrieve the information. “As you know, what the humans call ‘flavor’ is a dependent of their olfactory sense. There is a human seasoning called ‘cilantro,’ used in certain gourmet cuisines on the Oceanopolises and in the Brazilian states. According to research, certain humans, for some reason, find the inclusion of cilantro in a dish completely revolting. Others literally eat it up.”

The Milbot thought about this. “But it has the same chemical components. Molecules from this seasoning enter the nose and interact with the brain. Surely they’re all experiencing the same thing.”

Franklin delicately replaced the jar into a padded compartment in his bag. “And that, my big friend,” he said with a buzz, “is why I don’t believe that your new Olfactory Sensor Unit can tell you whether a particular smell has a positive or negative value.”

Ferd grumbled, humming his ditty. “Listen, whatever, beebo,” he said, after a moment. “The fact is, I got a nose, and you don’t.” He leaned in closer to Franklin, conspiratorially, and draped a huge arm over the smaller robot’s shoulders.  “If you were smart, you’d let me introduce you to some people in my organization. They can hook you up.”

Franklin threw off the Milbot’s arm. “No, thank you, Ferd. I’m quite pleased with my specifications as they stand.”

“Your loss, beebo. Hey, if you’re so happy with how you are, good luck with that little human girl. I’ll catch you on the flippity flap.” Ferd hummed a little louder, picked a smallish brown object from behind the mule, smelled it. “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.” He walked away, sniffing various objects he passed. Franklin sighed, touched the wrinkled paper again, and led the mule along towards Annabel’s house….