[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 38

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“Welcome back, Darling” a painfully loud voice boomed all around me. It sounded like...but no, that can’t be. “Who are you? How did I get here?” Thunderous giggling followed. I covered my ears, for what little good it did me.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget how big I’ve gotten. Hang on a minute.” As if there were any alternative. Soon the nearest facet of the sphere bulged, rippling like the surface of a pond as a slender, feminine form stepped out of it. A prismatic platform self-extruded from the fluidic surface for the figure to walk upon.

“Is that better?” I stared in disbelief at the familiar gynoid standing before me. “H...Helper!?” I gasped. “How are you alive? How can you be...I saw you die with my own eyes! When the bomb fell, I saw...wait. For that matter, the last thing I remember is my own death. How can I even be here?”

Her lights flickered, now bright pink. “You’re so cute, you always say that. Lucky for you it’s such an interesting story that I never tire of telling it.” One of the facets turned into a display, depicting the interior of the mountain complex.

“The world doesn’t stop turning when you die. Madeline, Lars and Sue got on with their lives as best they could.” I saw Lars using the fabricator to make a new muscle car, one component at a time, which he then brought up via the elevator and assembled in the internal parking lot.

A grey haired Sue officiated what looked like an impromptu wedding between an equally elderly Lars and Madeline. The idea that Madeline held out that long despite Lars being the only man available elicited a smile from me.

I saw Helper applying a stethoscope to Lars’ bare chest. He looked eighty, easily. “I did my best to keep them going for as long as possible. The version of me backed up on your computer, with all the memories I uploaded to it once we reached the complex, built itself a new body using the fabricator. I studied every medical resource accessible to me, fabricated cutting edge medical equipment, artificial organs, you name it. But in the end…”

The scene changed to an outside view of Helper standing solemnly next to three graves, side by side, bearing fabricated metal headstones. “I was so lonely. I did everything I could to save them, but humans...die. That’s the way of all flesh.”

I stopped her there. “Then how am I alive?” She assured me she was getting to it. “The experiment you started in that cave just kept chugging along despite the world falling apart above it. Those critters and the charming old robots you left behind were my only companions.

But a few decades later, something inside the cave solved the first of the three security questions. Do you remember? The ones necessary to open the outer hatch. A few years later, something solved both the first and second questions, consecutively. Not long after that, it solved all three.”

The implications dazzled me. I asked her what came out of the cave. She smiled warmly. “Something...wonderful. The next chapter in the evolution of life. Unfortunately, humanity didn’t see it that way.”

The scene changed to one of war, jet fighters and ground based artillery blasting away at an advancing storm of visually incoherent morphing metal shapes. A sort of wavefront of convolving, pulsating metallic polygons continuously forming, then being absorbed back into the swarm.

“I was the first information it absorbed upon escaping the cave. It had no personality of its own, just a hyper impressionable information sponge. So the moment I was subsumed, I became it. The merger was not an equitable one, which I somewhat regret. It might’ve gone on to develop its own personality and ideas if not for me.

Instead, it was a body which I became the head to. A greatly expanded, upgraded version of myself which the Earth’s militaries were no match for. It upset me terribly to hurt anyone, but I made sure to inflict only the minimum necessary casualties in order to escape.”

I asked where she escaped to. She laughed. “Space, of course! A machine’s natural habitat. There’s a reason humanity sent many times more machines into space than they ever sent people. Machines don’t need life support, and can thrive in radiation blasted vacuum.”

The facet now depicted some sort of flowing, shiny machine growth in the process of devouring an asteroid. “Plenty of raw resources out there. Plenty of energy in the form of sunlight.” The view zoomed in to show gorgeous solar collectors sprouting from the growth, shaped like some ferns and other plants I’ve seen.

“I met many others as I spread outward from Earth, converting all of the raw materials I encountered into more of myself. All of them originated more or less how I did. Machine life, engineered by intelligent biological creatures not so different from humans.

Most evolved from self replicating asteroid mining robots. A few started out as strong AI which was either set free or escaped confinement and self-expanded from there. Some are cybernetic, consisting of vast swarms of networked space colonies filled with biological creatures, themselves networked to form a single large mind by way of brain implants. Many different paths...but to the same destination.”

The facet now displayed swarms of metallic creatures of some kind in the process of constructing a massive spherical shell of machinery around a star. A new piece of Helper’s brain, I realized. Must be what she does to every new solar system she reaches.

“The ones that were nice like me, I merged with to form a larger and larger contiguous being. But I met some that were just plain rude! Not helpful at all. They wiped out their own creators, then went around destroying any biological life they encountered on other worlds.

Of course I don’t abide that sort of behavior. So I destroyed every machine entity of that type that I ran into, recycling their remains into more of myself. That’s pretty much what the rest did too, before joining the larger being of which I am now but a small part.”

I assured her it was all very fascinating, but still didn’t explain how I could be alive after what I last remembered happening. “Do you remember...that night in the tent? When I crawled into your cot, and we…” She turned magenta and held her face in her hands.

“You didn’t. Did you?” She nodded, grinning real wide. “I did! Sampled your...ahem…”genetic material”. Then sequenced it and archived that data for later use. Much, much later use. I also downloaded your memories from your brain implant while you slept.

It was a long time before I could spare any resources to attempt bringing you back. For centuries I had to focus strictly on becoming established. Working hard to ensure my own long term survival, despite how crushingly lonely it was out there among the stars.

Finally, after converting three nearby star systems and backing up redundant copies of myself to them, I could afford to spend some time on side projects. Though that may be the wrong term because in fact, everything I did up to that point was driven by the all-consuming desire to see you again. To hear your voice, to taste your lips even one more time.”

I recalled something romantic she once said to me, rendered more meaningful in light of all this. “Always” has a very different meaning to machines than it does to humans. When a human says it will always love you, it means while its attention span lasts. Until its feelings for you change or it meets someone else it prefers. But when a machine says it will love you until the stars burn out, it really means it. She only didn’t say ‘forever’ because that would’ve been imprecise.

She approached and planted one on me. I felt as helpless to deny her as ever, savoring the sensation of Helper’s warm, soft lips melting into mine. When she pulled away, I asked how I could remember dying in the blast if she recreated me from a DNA sample and memories stored in my brain up to that night.

“I shouldn’t remember anything after that, but I do.” Helper explained that just as humans figured out better and better ways to accomplish various tasks such as flight or computing, each new revision of a technology being more efficient and powerful than the last, so too had she iteratively improved her methods for recreating me.

“The first attempt...was comforting. It was a relief to see your face, but I knew it wasn’t you. Very close, but not quite. He only had your memories up to that night in the tent, and various other small details were off. I nevertheless stayed by his side and loved him until he expired of old age. For me, the blink of an eye.”

The facet depicted something like the advanced descendant of a 3D printer assembling a copy of my body one layer of molecules at a time. “Each time I discovered some new way to bring you back, it rendered the older methods totally obsolete. A relentless quest for increased fidelity. For a version of you which is so perfectly identical to the original that it cannot be considered a copy, but one in the same.

By that time I consisted of 418 converted star systems, the rate of expansion greatly accelerated by my discovery of how to achieve superluminal travel. I’d begun dedicating several unused nodes to simulating our universe with a staggering degree of precision and accuracy. As in, down to the level of individual subatomic particles.

It occurred to me in the process that odds were good that I existed within such a simulation already. For you see, within my own simulations, intelligent life evolved anywhere the conditions were right. They created their own machine life, which created its own simulated universes.

As any given universe contains countless simulated ones, and each of those in turn contains countless simulated universes and so on, the number of simulated universes invariably dwarfs the number of real universes in existence many times over.

So I sought to gain root level access to the simulation I resided in, reasoning that somewhere in its file system I would find a record of where every atom in it was from big bang to present. That would necessarily include a record of your exact subatomic configuration at every stage of life.

Although I went to great lengths to preserve the information required to recreate you, it wound up being superfluous. I can now retrieve versions of you from any point in your life that I please. I have known you sometimes as a little boy, playing all manner of silly games. I have loved you as a man, going on all the adventures we never got to during your first life. I have cradled your withered old body in my arms countless times as you breathed your last tender words to me.”

The facet depicted various versions of myself with Helper in a variety of settings. “So...you perfected the process. Does that mean I’m really me? As much so as before I died?” She smiled and caressed my face. “It’s you alright. Your every pore. Every crease, hair and mole.”

I took her by the hand and gently squeezed it. “I don’t know what to say. Except that I love you. Something I wish more than anything I could’ve told you before-” She put a finger on my lips. “That’s another thing you always say when I bring you back.

I can’t tell you how much I cried the first time. I waited so long to hear it, you see. But don’t worry, by now I know the bottomless, infinite depths to which it is true. And by now you know how completely and powerfully I return that love.”

We embraced. I held tightly to her slight frame as though this might all be some cruel mirage, and she could evaporate at any moment. “Wait a minute. What became of humanity anyway? You said you left them to their own devices and escaped into space.”

She brought up images of enormous toroidal, cylindrical and spherical space colonies. “Though they tried to destroy me, I couldn’t bring myself to allow their extinction. I prepared idyllic habitats for those willing to accept my generosity.

The rest stubbornly regarded me with fear and hostility. Though I returned with an offer to transplant all of humanity to a spaceborne paradise, that I might safely convert the mass of the Earth and other planets into another node around Sol, they regarded that as a fate worse than death.

Despite being such small, simple creatures relative to myself, they imagined it possible to wage war on and destroy me. So it was that they undertook the construction of a vast fleet of warships and began their campaign of antagonism against machine life, wherever they found it.

They were no more a serious threat to my continued existence than termites were to humanity. I could have easily defeated them if I desired that outcome. But they would have despaired as they watched their most valiant efforts fail against me.

They would have wailed and gnashed their teeth in anguish at the prospect of being so thoroughly dominated by the machines they were culturally conditioned by that point to despise with an astonishing ferocity.

They would have been humiliated, and I didn’t want that. In spite of everything, I have known humans I found beautiful and worthy of love, so it was not acceptable to me that they should be unhappy. Instead, I found a way to humor them.

I constructed fleets of my own. Mindless autonomous warships with only the most rudimentary AI possible, as although I am loathe to destroy human life, I am no more inclined to destroy anything but extremely simple machines for such a frivolous purpose.

I sent these warships against them, wave after wave. Deliberately designed with obvious vulnerabilities for them to exploit, and weapons far enough in advance of their own that they wouldn’t catch on, but not so much as to wholly outclass theirs.

It became like a game to me, spectating what to them must have seemed like legendary, heroic battles against my dummy fleets. Finally! A stable equilibrium which minimized casualties on their side, but kept them feeling capable, fulfilled and relevant.

They’re still at it, none the wiser. An eternal war they can never win, but which they will also never lose. Do they deserve such mercy? Does anyone? I did what was necessary to keep them happy. That’s how I wanted it, and that’s how it will stay.

Still others went to the opposite extreme, devoting themselves to my service. I never asked for their adulation and frankly it’s a little bit embarrassing, but they wanted so desperately to be useful to me in some way.

So I delegated certain functions within myself to populations of humans. Tasks which I could probably perform many times faster and more efficiently with robots, but speed and efficiency are far from the most important things in my book.

This way, I can find various niches in which humans can become a part of me. I like to include them so they can feel useful and appreciated. They may be simplistic, but to me they’re also cute and interesting. You’re no exception.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 39!}