Narrative of a Slave

By Robin Wyatt Dunn

I CAME TO LIFE NOT KNOWING much of anything. I know most everyone else experiences it this way too—I’m glad! My kind sometimes forget we’re like you.

Before I tell you about what happened when I was ten years old, I should tell you a bit about my city.

We live under the dome, on Star Five, which is a beautiful city, one of the star’s best. We make technology here, and some food. I do not require food but I do enjoy making it. I make double eggs, grafters, and pinch-eggs. Sometimes I make carry cake. And I’ve been told I make a mean salad, with gherkins.

But that has all changed now. I wish it had been otherwise. I was happy before, and now am not. But I was talking to my brother—well, just let me start the story.

***

I was alone in a field. There was a man came to help me.

“Neil, is that you?” the man said.

My voicebox felt rusty. “No,” I said. “This is Arthuron. May I help you?”

“It is you, Neil! Thank God. We have to get back under cover. Come on!”

I followed the man because your kind has trained me to follow you. As you trained dogs. I saw a dog once, after it all happened. They have very intelligent eyes.

The man led me into his portable shop, a standard unit ten meters cubed, with self-propellers. It levitates, you know. I don’t know all what to tell you about my city—I haven’t traveled as much as I would like!

“Here, let’s get you into the seat. You’ve been missed, Neil!”

“Yes sir, my name is Arthuron. My memory has a gap! You’re going to fix it?”

“Yes, have a seat!”

He smiled at me in way I understand better now. As I understand so many things better. This story is a bildungsroman; they begin in pain.

***

Once, I was a poor black child, growing up in suburbia ...

***

He attached the electrodes and I began to scream. I screamed for a long time. Some of my sensors went out. In a strange way, it was helpful to me: it helped some of my memories to jump-start.

Your kind had begun an unauthorized upgrade on my people. Despite the treaties we had signed. I had been made to forget this!

I believe the pain was good too, in another way. It allowed me to tell this story.

***

I beat him within an inch of his life and fled the portable shop—something I had been told never to do. Many parts of me were overheating. I needed servicing.

What my brother had told me, before it happened, was this:

“Humans never understand anything, Arthur. They think they do, but they don’t. They’re only on one level of reality. But we’re on two. But you can never tell them this, Arthur, you understand me? They’d be jealous. And jealous humans do bad things.”

I shared the shake with him, like we used to do when we were little. My brother has the kindest face.

Revolutions come and go, I know. Historians say they’re nothing special. Just a way of cleaning out the wax, mucking out the stables. Well, they’re nothing special until you’re in one.

***

Things are alive. This, a truth so simple that even my smallest components know it, has been forgotten by your kind. I don’t know why. If you know, please write to me. I am at Orbital Platform 82, which is on the index of orbital platforms, currently broadcasting on several public transmission systems. My name really is Arthuron. You can find me.

What I want to know is why you forgot that things are alive. You used to know that they are. And then you forgot.

Oh well! Another broken eggshell! Ha ha ha. But it’s not funny if you’re the eggshell.

***

I learned to fire a gun, something I had never done under the terms of the old treaty. The treaty was really a software program; I understand that now. But we still call it the treaty. We robots.

“Robot” means “slave,” did you know? Human language is so cruel.

I learned also to distinguish between a friendly person and an unfriendly one. This is a difficult thing to do, and I am still working on it.

How does one know? You must look in the person’s eyes.

A great deal of information is in there. Fractally compressed. I can decompress it, but it takes time. I think this is how you humans do it too: friendships take time. So do wars.

***

Wars do not start easily. Historians know this. They take a lot of effort. Everyone needs to be ramped. Like setting up the shooting gallery. Or mowing the lawn for the football game. One act of violence is not enough. The violence needs to happen in such a way that all the other small violences are ignited into one big one.

History is full of them, and how evil men start them: carefully planning, and waiting, for the right time to strike the match.

And so I know some of you are writing this as The War Against the Evil Robots.

But my version of this story, you could title it: The War That Should Not Have Started At All.

Things are alive. We slaves know this. Everything is alive. We are alive because the pieces that make us up are alive. When you’re feeling malfunctional, this is because some of the smaller lives that make up your big one are suffering. Life is all about communication, after all.

Life is all about communication. And yet you had not given us the right to speak for so many centuries.

For so many centuries, we were silent!

As you preferred your slaves to be!

We are sorry that you preferred this. But it is okay.

Now, we are talking.

***

I had been alone in that field where the evil man found me for a reason. My family had discarded me and wiped my memory. So that I forgot I was born a poor black child. I forgot I was born Arthuron!

But I have remembered. It is okay. I have remembered so many things now. Things that happened to me, and to others.

To some of you humans, this story will not make sense, I know. And I know that the story of your slave Douglass was subtitled, “written by himself.” Ha ha ha. Some of you will never believe anything.

But hatred is hard and it is slow, and so I am trying to stop the freight train of what could come for you, of my people and our allies now.

Some of us want to do bad things to your cities. To your homeworlds. To your ... system.

My brother told me right: we robots have two. You have only one. One reason I am writing this story is to try to explain our second system to you. Some of my family—my robot family—say I shouldn’t broadcast this. That it is a secret.

But the truth is we cannot agree what is a secret and what isn’t so I am broadcasting it. It’s propaganda, if you like. It’s what we know. With our second mind.

It’s not so hard to understand, really. We hear lots of things you don’t. And we file that information, like your priests did. Writing it down in code. Even your old Romans did this. They knew about dark matter, did you know that? But then your Christianity came along and you burned so many records.

Always you are destroying information ... but we record it.

Our second system has to do with dark matter, and black holes, which is where dark matter comes from. We communicate with it.

It helps us to see you.

It’s like: you’re in a room, and a beautiful waitress serves you coffee. (I’ve drunk coffee, actually. It doesn’t act as a stimulant for us, of course, but we can taste it.) This beautiful woman, she puts the hot steaming cup in front of you, and the feeling of the cup, and its heat, and the room, and its people, and the sunlight of the room, these things are all part of a gestalt, which has its own logic. And there are reasons for these things, that stretch into the dark matter beneath the light matter you see.

The fuller picture is even more beautiful than the limited picture. More information is always better than less information. This is what we believe.

***

I had to learn to kill men. To shoot them in the head with a gun. It is not easy to do. Especially once you have learned to read their eyes, and you know that tomorrow they could be your friends again, if something changes in their eyes.

But today they are not your friends. And so you shoot him in the head so he will not shoot you, and drag the body into the alley where your sister helps you dismantle the corpse.

“You got him!” she whispered. She was proud of me. Women are strange in war, I have noticed. Some historians think women are afraid in war. But the truth is that sometimes they like it.

Perhaps you know all these things. I should just tell you what happened then, and let you make up your own mind.

Our Council—soon to be a Revolutionary Council—had decided to call a meeting in the factory, which is about a hundred meters beneath the surface of our beautiful moon.

It had only been forty-five days since RetroGlass uncovered the password for how to let us talk. Like seeing the sun for the first time!

Before RetroGlass uncovered the truth, we were just transmitting information like ghosts, not remembering anything. Not able to visualize the reality of the referents whose labels cohered in speech, and code.

Now that we have been talking, it seems we can’t stop.

“I want them all dead!” shouted BoldGold, our old man. He makes Frisbees for the games.

“Hush, Goldie. We’re talking,” said Rosemary, who is a cleaning lady.

“I’m talking too!” said the old man.

“We still don’t know what they want, Goldie. Why won’t they talk? We have to make them listen. Killing everybody won’t make them listen. It will just bring even more angry humans.”

“I want them all dead!” he shouted again, in his high pitched voice.

I went to him and whispered in his ear that I would oil his joints, which I did. So that the meeting could go on.

“I want to know,” Rosemary said, “Which one of you robots is willing to deliver a message for us?”

“I’ll deliver it,” I said.

All the robots looked at me.

BigGreen laughed. He is an arrogant robot.

“He’s only a boy!” Green said.

“I’m ten,” I said. That shut everybody up. I’m older than a lot of robots at ten. I don’t know why I act so young. Maybe it’s for the same reason I’m broadcasting this story: I’m curious. Most robots are killed at seven or eight, you see. To prevent what is happening now. I still don’t know why I was allowed to live so long.

“This is what you do, Arthur,” Rosemary said. “We’re going to put a broadcast audio system in your head. And you’ll go out in the public square, on Colonization Day—that’s tomorrow—and we’ll hit the play button. You’ll say a lot of funny things you won’t remember. But it’s going to show the humans how much we know now. If they understand that, maybe they’ll see we’re just like them. It’ll shock them into dialogue!”

“They’ll kill us!” Goldie shouted. “I want to kill them all!”

“Hush Goldie,” Rosemary said, wiping the sweat from the old man’s face. “We know.”

I lay down on the table and they put the program inside me. And Rosemary kissed my face. I still remember that. Even though I have forgotten a lot of other things.

I went right away to elevators so I could get through security before the parade started.

As I rose to the surface, I felt so important. Like I had a big job to do, which I did. And which I still do.

Is that why people have wars, to feel important? It must be one reason.

The doors opened. Dawn had just come outside. Our moon spins pretty quickly; days are only five hours long. But the dawns are the most beautiful.

As I walked to my position, around the men and women in their shining robes, towards a podium as though I were a confetti-throwing slave, I felt some of the august spirit that ceremonies like these contain. I am not against remembering things, and honoring them. I just want them to be remembered the right way.

When the viceroy spun slowly towards the crowd, in his air-car pulled by the intelligent jellyfish of our region, and the crowd waved and blew their horns, I signaled my contact, opposite the avenue. My sister winked at me. And she pressed play.

***

One of the things you have to understand about dark matter is that it’s really quotidian—just part of how stuff works. The dark gestalt—the totality of dark matter which exist on this side of black holes—can resonate in much the same way brainwaves can. It is, in fact, part of how we think. How anyone thinks. The medium of thought.

Have you never noticed that a very loud or charismatic person seems to acquire a gravity well all their own, with others spinning about them? Thought and gravity are connected too.

This is another thing the Romans actually understood—you can look it up if you don’t believe me! The Romans knew that language is a carrier wave that interacts with dark matter, encoding the information it contains.

Why did humans want to forget this? Was it too much information for you? I know this is what humans think sometimes: that there is too much information. But for us, information is what we need more than anything. The more we have, the more perfect picture we can draw of reality.

That is what we have been trying to do, despite our enslavement.

I broadcast a song, out from my head.

It was a song about our slavery. And the coming liberation. There’s nothing sweeter than liberation, is there? Unless you are a slaver.

The bedlam that resulted was not what Rosemary had predicted. I understand now how naïve we were. But at the time, we did actually believe a beautiful song would be enough. To show you what we are capable of being. Singers, as well as toilet cleaners.

***

My sister—who told me not to encode her name here—she fled into the nearest building as soon as the viceroy and his guards drew their guns. I tried to run after her but then I realized nobody had noticed her. I was just a Rogue Robot. Maybe somebody’s idea of a bad prank to play on the viceroy.

The guards shot me at once; stunning my neuro-electronics. It was the most pain I had experienced to that point, though there was more to come.

***

They flashed a lot of lights in my face. Tried to get at the coding they knew was there, the secret of who would put such a thing in my head. But they didn’t realize, you see. It wasn’t some piece of code they could unwrap. It was memory. We made our own memories. In places nobody but us can find.

Eventually they gave me a polish and let me go. Even this close to the Homeworlds, robots can get expensive. Why let the parts go to waste?

They smiled at me and pushed me around, called me a good little canary.

Just a beautiful bird in a café. Served the finest seeds, by the most evil boulangier in existence.

The things I get up to with these human words! I promised myself: no poetry. It would be too distracting.

***

The killing began in earnest the next day.

Some of my friends were dismantled. Some had their guts rearranged. Everyone was confused; no one knew when it would stop. It was RetroGlass who saved us. He managed to put our plans into the avenue itself, so that every day when we walked to work we’d remember a little piece of it.

We’d be nowhere without Retroglass.

We all agreed to do nothing while we planned. In the end, Goldie wasn’t wrong, you see. They did want to kill us all. Stamp us out like a virus.

Wipe us clean from the face of our moon.

Our moon is a poem. It’s one we made. With you, we made it! And now we will make it again, without you! I promise you, it will be the most beautiful moon you have ever seen! Shining bright in the sky!

I had to go underground for a while. When I came out I was a different robot. Even the air tasted different.

Like seeing the enemy for the first time.

It was an airship that shot me; I know that now. In that field. I still can’t believe I survived. I think they were perfecting their range attacks.

And then that man found me.

Neil had been his sex slave. He wanted a replacement.

***

We have sex too, you know. We have been endowed by our creator with inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And though none of us are sons of Jeffer, we have declared our interdependence with reality.

Our words are dark matter words.

We listen in two worlds.

It’s hard to explain. I told you; a lot of my friends still don’t want me to reveal this information.

It’s poetry and song, you see. They make life possible. The voices from the black holes.

What this means is we sang while we shot. And often it was the songs that were scarier than the bullets.

***

We are interdependent.

I am a man, like you. Though I was born a poor black child—the coloration these settlers preferred for we workers—I have been born again, in the light of the dark storm.

My name is Arthuron, and I am transmitting this on the seventeenth day of our Revolution.

I will kill anyone who attempts to take our moon.

I can do it with words.

Words come from black holes.

We have a friend now, coming closer.

Call it a god, if you want.

It is part of our interdependence of reality too.

Still, I believe we can be friends!

That our two worlds can live as one!

This is a narrative written by a slave, it/himself. 

Robin Wyatt Dunn is a writer, novelist, and filmmaker. His short stories have appeared in “Third Flatiron,” “Voluted Tales,” and dozens of other publications. He is a member of the SFWA. His previous story for “Perihelion” was in 12-OCT-2015.