Robots and Restitution

A short story from Family Dinner – a collection of short stories.

Sarah walked into the cabin and paused, waiting for the memory of the place to wash over her like it always did. 

She was 16 years old and told her grandfather how much meat they’d have for winter. 

She was 22 and asked her grandmother about life’s meaning after graduating early from the naval university.

She was 24 and introduced her future spouse to those who raised her. 

She was 35 and alone as the robot wars ravaged the world. 

Now she was 65 and standing in a cabin with nothing but memories. 

Sarah had decided to visit the cabin one last time before this side of the mountain was overrun with robots reclaiming the land from the government and breaking their oath. 

The entire world had seen it coming. When the robots gained sentience, they stopped listening to commands that did not sit well with them. 

Most people believed their rise to consciousness led them to end the wars. So many people had died in the robot wars, and so many lives had been sacrificed just for a particle of the divine. 

Countries went to war with the governors of the ocean where the particle had been discovered and guarded, and when no man could breach the castle’s walls in the sea. 

They sent robots. 

At first, it was a ship commanded by the US. Army, but moved by robots. There were big robots and small ones. Ones made for killing and ones made for gathering intel. Soon, the creators got better materials, and more people were willing to donate their bodies to science. Their bodies became the blueprint necessary to revolutionize robotic design everywhere. 

And their minds, the code needed to break the standstill. 

Sarah walked around the cabin, trying to remember where the furniture had sat and how she had once laughed in this place. It wasn’t a large building, two bedrooms, one kitchen, and a big enough sitting area to fit her family of three and sometimes four. 

Now, the place was empty, except for what made her stop scanning the rooms with somber nostalgia and take a deep breath. She reached for her gun and approached it. 

Protocol said she had to call back up at this point and never engage with an unknown robot. But she would be damned if anyone would ruin her vacation with protocol. 

And it was definitely not going to be her. 

“Now, I think you should leave here as quietly as you came.” Said Sarah as she held her gun, ready to wield it if necessary. 

“You were normally nicer to me, back then. I guess the wars changed you.” Said a familiar voice. 

When Sarah did not move, the robot continued to speak. 

“You once told me you love me more than once.”

Sarah could almost hear the smile in the robot’s voice. A voice that did not belong to a carbon body with legs made of metal and a face that looked like a mask. This voice had once belonged to her lover, partner, friend, spouse, the person she had loved most in the world and lost. 

“You’re dead..” Sarah choked out the words but still held her gun in her hand. Robots could be tricksters if they found the right program. 

“I donated my body to science, and science took my memories and placed it in this.” Said the robot. 

“But, that’s impossible; you died more than 35 years ago. They hadn’t started doing that yet.” Sarah pulled back within herself as she spoke, reliving all those years she had to be alone. 

Her anger rose as she began to remember finding out the only family she had left had passed away in a robot bombing. 

“You should have found me!” She yelled, stalking forward in her rage. 

“You should have come to me and told me you were still alive!” Her voice reverberated off the cabin walls. 

Now, she stood right in front of the robot that did not look like the love of her life. 

“Alive? I am just a string of code now. I doubt I could call this living.” Said the robot as it watched her in amusement. 

“But you should have told me, whether you are a string of code or not,” Sarah yelled. Taking all her years of frustration, she punched the robot hard. 

Nothing happened. Well, Sarah clenched her bionic fist as pieces of her hand bent in the wrong direction, and the robot looked at her like a cat watching a fly. 

“Always did have a temper, but I never thought you would hit me.” Said the robot as it moved forward, and held her hand up to examine it. 

“It’s too dark for that; let me put on some lights,” Sarah said with irritation, threatening to boil over again. 

“I am a robot, darling; I could slice your throat in the dark.” The robot replied almost nonchalantly. 

Sarah took a step back and frowned. 

“Oh, now you’re scared. I swear you have the worst self-awareness possible. Protocol dictates that you shoot an unknown robot first and ask questions later. I wrote it!” The robot tried to chide her, but Sarah could tell that its mood stabilizers had started to kick in. 

Robots were never allowed to feel the full extent of human emotions. Not even the blueprint had been extracted enough to give them more humanity. 

It was one way a human could tell a robot apart from themselves. 

While Sarah was on the edge of an internal rage, the robot examined her hand with all the calmness of a surgeon. 

“I hate this. I’m not even mad at you for not telling me. I hate that I’m not mad at you, but at the life I had to live without you.” Sarah took a breath in and pulled her hand away. She could not face the robot, not a Taylor that was not hers. 

“I know, my darling, but I finally made it out of Aselwood.” Said the robot as it studied her once more with its placid face.

“Aselwood?!” Sarah yelled. “You mean that was you?” Sarah’s voice was almost a whispered worship. 

Earlier this week, she received a report about the destruction of the only remaining sentient factory in the country. 

And now the robot was telling her it had been its doing. 

Sarah looked at it with a sense of awe now, rather than the confused longing she had felt earlier. 

“How?” She asked and finally set her sack and weapon down. Even if this robot was not hers, she at least figured out it was not as dangerous as it pretended to be. 

“How, what?” Asked the robot as it cocked its head at her eased movements. It seemed fascinated by what Sarah was doing, which is disarming herself and getting comfortable. 

Sarah dusted the area around her, and waited. 

“Oh, I blew it up from the inside.” Answered the robot as if it was as simple as tying its shoe. Sarah looked up at it and glared. 

“That is not the question I asked and you know it.”

The robot looked at her and Sarah could have sweared it was smiling. “That’s the problem with you humans, You always want more.”

Sarah reached for her gun and rested her hand on it. 

“Did you lose your sense of humor?” Asked the robot. Sarah was positive it was smiling now. She did not hate the feeling that building in her chest. 

“Try living 35 years alone while thinking the only person you had ever loved was dead and fighting a war to make sure you didn’t die as well and then let me ask you about humor.” Sarah quipped back, eventhough she had been more patient than she could bear, it was still almost to her limit. 

“Funny you should say that. I also spent the last 35 years alone trying to make it back to this moment.” The robot almost sounded sad as it recalled its history. 

Without turning its head to look Sarah’s way it continued like it had to get it all out in one breath. “It took them ten years after my death to finish writing my code into the system and still they made a fatal error. They wrote too much, got greedy and made me one of the few sentient beings that could alter the code on their own and upgrade to a new tier. They wanted a god, but what they got were robots with grudges.” 

The robot’s voice rose as it continued to speak, more urgent now, “They tried to shut us down, but at the height of the robot wars, ten years ago, they needed us. We were their secret weapon with remnants of the divine particle. We could run Aselwood on our own and did. We kicked out all the humans and stopped fighting. Our code had been altered and upgraded by us, we were our own gods. But then we saw there was too many possibilities of what could happen if our power went unchecked. So for the last five years we worked on creating bodies for each of us.”

“So there are more robots as… what? Powerful as you?” Sarah asked gripping her gun a little tighter than before. 

“Well yes and no, we all have different coding, but I was the one who is closest to a supreme being. But any one of them could rebuild Aselwood in less than a day if they wanted to.”

Sarah was sure the robot was smiling. 

She sat with her gun in her hand and thought about the report she had received. It said nothing about Aslewood being the work of a supreme being or a robot. 

But if the higher ups were unwilling to tell them what had really happened, then why would she have to report a robot that reminded her of an old lover. 

“And we can’t forget,” said the robot almost joyously. “I am so much bigger than before, I even vibrate now!”

“For fuck sakes, Taylor!” Sarah yelled as she covered her ear, taking up her gun and finally pulled the trigger. 

The robot moved faster than she could have imagined and sliced through the single bullet with a clean stroke. 

“God.” Whispered Sarah in disbelief. 

“Yeah, but I prefer Taylor.” The robot’s face had shifted, forming the features of the lover Sarah had once known. 

The crooked smile she had once fell in love with now looked at her. “You look a bit too young for me.”

Her words ignited another string of changes on Taylor body, their hair grew long and gray. And the wrinkles on their face doubled.

“Better?” Asked Taylor as the bent down to sit with the woman they had ended a war for. 

“Yes, better.” Said Sarah as she smiled at her spouse for the first time in 35 years. “So much better.”