No one else will know. Grandpa never bring himself again to tell what he tell me. Secret between us. Secret born of sad. Life of others need not change. Go on thinking same. Janglefoot no trouble. No one believe Janglefoot if he talk forever. No one ever know that he tell the truth. Truth is hard to take. No one care except for what we have right now. We go on same.
Except I who know. I never want to know. I never ask to know. I try not to know. But Grandpa won’t shut up. Grandpa have to talk. Time come man will die if he cannot talk. Must make clean breast of it. But why to me? Because he love me most, perhaps. That is prideful thing.
But going down the lawn, I crying deep inside.
(1969)
SECTION FOUR
Changing Places
"Listen, Josef," the author began, "I think I have an idea for a play."
"What kind?" the painter muttered (he really did mutter, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth). The author told him as concisely as he could.
"Then write it," the painter said, without taking the brush from his mouth or stopping to work on the canvas. His indifference was almost insulting.
"But," the author said, "I don’t know what to call those artificial workers. I could call them labouri, but that strikes me as a bit literal."
"Then call them robots," the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and carried on painting.
Writing in the newspaper Lidové noviny on Christmas Eve 1933, R.U.R. playwright Karel Capek credited his brother Josef, an accomplished painter and poet, with coining the word "robot" from the Slavic word robota, meaning "drudgery". More specifically, robota is the unpaid labor a vassal was obliged to perform for his feudal lord.
At its birth, then, the robot was more than just a little bit human. In this section, especially, I’ve played fast and loose with the definition of what a robot is, in order to explore what it might feel like to actually be a robot. (Purists might baulk, but I had to decide: was I trying for an anthology of good robot stories, or a good anthology about robots? I chose the latter path.)
The fear that we are already half-way to robots ourselves powers the powerful strain of uncanny running through robot literature. Chris Beckett’s "The Turing Test" (2002) is a little masterpiece of stillness and focus, while Rich Larson’s seemingly flippant "Masked" shows the same human-robot identity crisis reflected in, and exploited by, social media.
The wonder is not that we can be persuaded into behaving like robots. The wonder is that we don’t behave like robots all the time. Being human is hard work, after all, and it’s only by us constantly reinforcing each other’s humanity that humanity continues to exist at all. (Karel’s brother Josef, the man who coined the word "robot", died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.) This is a big subject indeed for fiction, and lends itself to epic treatment. E. M. Forster’s "The Machine Stops" (1909) only becomes more topical as it ages.
Intimate and funny approaches to the "human robot" idea include Ian McDonald’s "Nanonauts! In Battle With Tiny Death-Subs!" (2014) – as sly a portrait of personal inadequacy as one could wish for, and a delicious takedown of science fiction’s linguistic excesses – while Nicholas Sheppard’s "Satisfaction" (2018) is wry tale of a man’s infatuation with the latest consumer device.
Surrounded by dull, bland, easy-going robot companions, will we come to expect less of other people? Assisted, cared for, and seduced by machines, will we lower our expectations around concepts like "conversation", "care", "companionship" and "love"?
The pioneering psychologist William James argued that what we want from a lover is that they really love us, and not simply behave as if they did. I hope that’s true. If we come to believe that the soul is nothing more than behaviour, then of course a robot will become just as good as a person – a future that Robert Sheckley explores in "The Robot Who Looked Like Me" (1973).
TRANSFORMER
GPT-2
Built by Adam King, Transformer (https://talktotransformer.com) is an online text generator powered by GPT-2, a machine-learning model created by the San Francisco-based non-profit OpenAI. GPT-2 was trained simply to predict the next word in a text, but on the way – and entirely unprompted – it picked up some basic translation skills and learned how to answer queries. Due to their concerns about malicious applications of the technology, OpenAI are not releasing the trained model. The words in bold below are the opening lines of Isaac Asimov’s short story "Liar!". The rest is by Transformer.
Alfred Lanning lit his cigar carefully, but the tips of his fingers were trembling slightly. His gray eyebrows hunched low as he spoke between puffs with his eyes closed, the heat of his cigar rising to a boil. "I don’t think it will get rid of me though, because you aren’t the kind of person who would say such things."
A chill ran down Charles’ spine as he realized that he must have gone too far.
"That’s true," she said simply. "I don’t really need your help right now."
Charles sighed. "I mean I won’t go anywhere for an hour if you don’t want me, but if you don’t do something then I won’t bother you any longer." He turned to shake away the smoke as he turned back to take out his bottle – the smell in his nostrils was the same as ever before.
Sitting down to talk Charles noticed that there were no tears yet on his face. "You seem pretty tired. I do feel better though. Maybe my mind won’t be too exhausted after all." He could still hear her voice through his headphones, albeit muffled – his heart and lungs were beginning to slow down, just like he had the previous day.
Charles glanced quickly at the clock. "I think I feel kind of tired…"
(2019)
THE MAN
Paul McAuley
Paul J. McAuley (born 1955) is a British botanist and science fiction writer. Four Hundred Billion Stars, his first novel, won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988. He’s since written more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. The story here later found its way into the novel Something Coming Through (2015), according to Alastair Reynolds "the freshest take on first contact and interstellar exploration in many years". His latest novel, Austral, set in post-global warming Antarctica, was published in 2017.
He came to Cho Ziyi at night, in the middle of a flux storm.
It was as dark as it ever got in the sunset zone. Low, fast-moving clouds closed off the sky. Howling winds drove waves onshore and blew horizontal streamers of snow into the forest, where the vanes of spin trees madly clattered and coronal discharges jumped and crackled. Ziyi was hunkered down in her cabin, watching an ancient movie about a gangster romance in Hong Kong’s fabled Chungking Mansions. A fire breathed in the stone hearth and her huskies, Jung and Cheung, sprawled in a careless tangle on the borometz-hide rug. The dogs suddenly lifting their heads, the youngest, Cheung, scrambling to his feet and barking, something striking the door. Once, twice.