[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 30

^{Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Part 19
Part 20
Part 21
Part 22
Part 23
Part 24
Part 25
Part 26
Part 27
Part 28
Part 29}

Red leaned over and asked one of the women why Helper was stuttering, concern in his eyes. I seized up, sweat forming on my brow. But as luck would have it, she was the grieving woman Helper comforted last night. She assured him it was just a damaged voice synthesizer. To my immense relief, he appeared to buy it.

“Well if that’s how you feel about each other but you won’t get married, I suppose I don’t know what we’re gonna do with you two.” I chose this point to inform him that we were planning to leave later that day. I didn’t say where to, for fear that some these people would want to tag along.

“Leave? You must be joking. You won’t make it a week on your own. Not even a day, I’d wager. This lodge has everything! A sustainable food supply, access to ground water, even solar panels to keep your robot powered up. That’s to say nothing of the bunker! It’s not every day you have to good fortune to meet a fella with his own private survival bunker!”

He stroked his beard, looking self-satisfied. Until Helper blurted out that we were on our way to our own underground shelter. Had we not been outside, you could’ve heard a pin drop. “...Pardon me? Your own shelter?”

I was mortified. The last thing I wanted was to share the cave lab with these trogs. The silver lining to the mushroom clouds billowing up across the country was, for me, that I’d get to be alone with Helper for the rest of my life. Well, not counting Lars and Madeline I mean.

“Help’s just joking” I assured them, “there’s no-” but she just talked over me as they all leaned in, enraptured. “The facility is approximately 250 feet underground, beneath one of the mountains in the range nearby. It’s fully stocked with a decade of nonperishable food for a nominal staff of 100, sources water from an underground river, is geothermally powered and incorporates a machine which can manufacture anything you might conceivably want.”

One of the women blushed, awkwardly scratched her neck and peered at Red. “...If I’d known there was a second shelter...I wouldn’t have…” Red shushed her and sternly reminded everyone present how good they have it at the lodge, that it’s an established functional community they shouldn’t abandon to chase after some supposed second shelter which may not even exist.

“Oh it exists” Helper insisted. “No it doesn’t” I countered. She began to glow red. “...Yes it-it-it does. It exists. We should...help these people.” Red looked increasingly nervous as everyone else present deliberated over whether the prospect of a larger, better equipped shelter was worth the risk inherent in the journey.

I panicked. There’s no way I’m spending the rest of my life cooped up with these people. No way. That’s when it came to me. “Helper, tell them what’s in the cave network. The primary machine habitat.” She shrugged and said she didn’t see why that was relevant, but described it to them anyway.

The color drained from their faces. “...So you’re telling me...your shelter is connected to miles and miles of unlit tunnels...teeming with robots.” She nodded excitedly and added that they’re very cute and interesting. Nobody else looked inclined to agree with that sentiment.

A long silence followed. Then one of the women crossed her arms. “No thanks. Miss Helper is one thing, she’s a peach. I can abide sharing the lodge with her, and I could abide sharing your shelter with her. But I’m not about to seal myself up underground with all them things, talk about a nightmare.”

The other women all nodded vigorously in agreement. I could’ve cried with relief. Helper just looked perplexed, probably wondering why it made any difference. With that weight lifted off my shoulders and the existence of the cave lab revealed, a new opportunity occurred to me.

“If you really are thankful for my help last night, there is something small you could do for me in return.” Red warily invited me to explain. I told him about the vintage robots in my apartment. Initially he was having none of it, until I described how archaic and feeble most of them are.

“None were infected as they’re all running legacy software without any internet access.” He remained reluctant, but when Helper described their importance to me and added her own pleas to mine, his resolve faltered.

I found a notebook and pen amidst the scattered refuse in the lodge, then jotted down the address of my apartment along with instructions for how to get from there to the entrance of cave lab. “It really would mean the world to me. If it sweetens the pot, after you drop ‘em off I can send you home with a crate of dehydrated food or something.”

His wife’s expression softened. “Oh go on Paw Paw, it’s the least we can do. Think of it as a wedding gift.” Helper pulsed bright magenta but said nothing. Red and I set a specific time that I’d expect him to show up outside the front gate tomorrow so he wouldn’t have to linger too long, and shook on it.

After a hour or two spent gathering our things and packing them into the car, Lars, Madeline, Helper and I bid the rest farewell. That part of the process dragged on for a bit as Helper insisted on hugging everybody.

I double checked that Eric, Ellie and Hero 1 were cozy and secure behind the rear seat. Then took one last contemplative look at the lodge as we pulled away. Second guessing myself, I suppose. The lodge has something cave lab doesn’t: a community. Something I have no need of, but the same can’t be said for Madeline or Lars.

Trees whipped by as we sped down the highway. I gazed out the window, silently reflecting on the madness of the last two days. Now and then I recalled some meeting I was supposed to attend today, or an errand I meant to run. All meaningless now, the world I knew and my comfortable routine both up in smoke.

Something like the phantom limb syndrome which sets in following amputation. You get so used to the same routine day after day that when it’s totally disrupted, your priorities take their sweet time rearranging themselves to reflect the new reality.

It isn’t all bad. There’s no work tomorrow. Or any day after that. There’s no rent to pay, no groceries to buy. But also I won’t find out what happened to my parents or brother for years, if ever. Helper leaned against me, unaware of or indifferent to her considerable weight, head resting on my shoulder.

When I heard Madeline sigh wistfully from the front passenger seat, it returned my thoughts to whether or not leaving the lodge was best for everyone...or just me. I think Lars would probably be happy either way, so long as he doesn’t run out of car wax.

Madeline was more of a question mark. I couldn’t imagine she liked Big Red’s worldview any more than I do, but I also couldn’t picture her enduring several years underground with just Lars, myself and Helper for company.

Only one way to remove all doubt. But before I could open my mouth, Madeline beat me to the punch. “It wasn’t so bad.” Lars didn’t reply, just kept driving. “It really wasn’t. I mean, Red was kind of a wannabe dictator but he listened to everybody. It wasn’t a prison. There were families there.”

I asked if she’d like Lars to turn around and take her back. “Oh no, no. That isn’t what I meant. I just mean we probably would’ve done alright there. Just a what-if. It’s also comforting to know there are probably little communities like that elsewhere in the country that will survive all this.”

Lars shrugged and issued a quiet grunt. It’s frustrating when he does that because it’s neither a yes or a no. But I know from experience that if you pester him to clarify, you just get another grunt. So I filled the gap in conversation with my own two cents.

“The fact that he was a tyrant is never what I had a problem with. Nobody truly opposes tyranny.” Lars scoffed. “No really” I insisted, “It's a question of scale. Both of you are tyrants over about 37 trillion cells which comprise your bodies. Each cell is its own independently valid organism, but enslaved in various specialized roles so that "you", the product of their concerted toil, can exist.
You're okay with that level of tyranny because you're the one in control, and would die otherwise. But when you try to do the same thing with multicellular organisms like humans, binding them together in such a way that their collective toil benefits the larger group, they recoil from it.

They say oh, that's completely different. Now that we're the basic units of the same structure carried up a scale. Totally different. That's Tyranny(tm) and must be stopped. But there’s no avoiding it.

The history of human society has been a process of gradually increasing consolidation, organization and interconnectedness. Arguably as a direct result, our standard of living has increased in tandem.

You can put a bunch of humans anywhere, in any sort of disaster survival scenario and that’s what they’ll do. Establish a hierarchy of command, delegate and divide labor, form something analogous to law enforcement to protect themselves from one another, and so on.

When life finally gets safe, comfortable and convenient again, they find new shit to complain about. They point to endless entertainment options and call it bread and circuses, calculated to keep them distracted and satisfied.

They have delicious food. They have warm, dry shelter. They have healthcare and entertainment. What more do they want? To be at the top, in control of it all. The nuclear family unit was supposed to alleviate that feeling by giving men local control over their own little tribe, but we’ve done away with that.”

Madeline remarked that I was starting to sound like Red. I winced. “Don’t get me wrong! I’m not defending it. This is a diagnosis, not a prescription. Anyway, I lack that desire. I don’t want to lead anybody, I just want to be left alone with my machines.

One little cog in a vast mechanism. Probably sounds depressing to you, but provided I agree with the ideals of whoever is in control and feel like I’m being put to good use, I can find no reason to complain about such an arrangement.

I wanted to leave the lodge not because I object to being ruled over, but because I object to certain attitudes of the fellow who makes the rules there. Also if I’m honest, there were just too many people. I was on edge pretty much the entire time.”

Madeline said nothing. Lars just chuckled and told me I’m fucking weird. I shrugged. He’s not wrong. “What do you think, Helper?” I turned to rouse her from her slumber. But she didn’t react. I pushed her off of me, took her head in my hands and looked into her eyes.

Dark. Still. Lifeless. “Lars, stop the car.” He called back that we couldn’t stop between here and the mountain on account of possible runners. “STOP THE CAR!” I shouted, but again he refused. Madeline asked why. “It’s Helper! She’s not...I can’t get her to...something’s wrong with her!”

Could she be out of power? No, impossible. Though her eyes were dark, her bacterial sacs still glowed and I distinctly remembered charging her the other night. Anxiety accumulated within me, reaching a fever pitch as I eliminated the possible causes one by one.

It had to be the virus. Had to be. She was doing so well in spite of it for a while there, I took for granted that she’d make it to the mountain before it got any worse. Must’ve shut herself down to protect us.

I deliberated inwardly whether or not to inform Lars and Madeline. No telling how they might react to the discovery that they’d not just been stuck in that bunker overnight with an infected machine, but were now stuck in a moving car with it.

“Look, I just...I can’t explain why but it’s important okay? Find somewhere wide open, so we can-” Lars shut me down again. “Look, we’re almost there. You’re gonna need a better reason than that to make me pull over.”

With no other obvious course of action, I broke it to them as softly as I could. They still flipped out. “What the fuck! You mean to tell me you’ve known since the military base and you didn’t tell us? We spent all night in the fucking dark with an infected robot and you didn’t tell us!”

I offered no apology as, so far as I was concerned, I’d done nothing wrong. Just let Madeline lay into me in the hopes that she’d eventually tire of it. “Dump her out! Leave her on the side of the road, I’m not riding with that thing!”

---

^{Stay Tuned for Part 31!}