Sleep Mode Beauty
By Jennifer Lee Rossman
Briar and Charming. That’s what they called us, because humans are uncomfortable with machines. They think we’re cold, incapable of love. I don’t know if that’s true—I think I love Briar—but if we are cold and unloving, it is only because they made us that way.
Maybe that’s what scares them most, that we’re mirror images of our creators, and they feel like cutesy names will hide what we are.
Battle-Ready Infantry Arms Reserves sounded like she was a war machine, made to charge into the front lines with weapons upon weapons, a small army unto herself. She was. She absolutely was. But the public connected better with “Briar.” It made a better hashtag for the military’s social media accounts.
Probably the same reason they painted such big anime eyes on her vaguely face-shaped housing. Public image.
They named me Charming because I guess Computerized Hybrid Artillery/Retaliation Module Incorporating Naval Guns didn’t fit with their lies that we were made for purely diplomatic missions.
I have anime eyes, too, but manly ones, because some ad exec decided it would be fun if we were a heterosexual couple. Us. The artificial intelligences who supposedly can’t love.
Humans. I honestly can’t even.
Well, if I have a gender, which I’m pretty sure I do, I’m definitely not a guy.
Anyway. It doesn’t really matter anymore, because Briar is dying.
This was supposed to be an easy mission. Get through the war zone, break into the other side’s headquarters, neutralize anyone who tries to stop us, and hack their communication servers. Oh, and pose for selfies with villagers on the way home because diplomacy.
(Please note that, though I was not built with the ability to modulate my speaking voice to convey tone, italics should be interpreted as sarcasm. Like, teenage girl telling her father that his joke about the cow who went to the mooovies was absolutely hilarious level of sarcasm.)
But stories don’t get told about easy missions, do they?
We’d made it into the building, a few more dents in our bulletproof housings and a lot of blood on our hands.
“It is times like this I am glad to be washable,” Briar commented. Her AI had never gotten the hang of using contractions like mine, but she was always quick to learn technical skills like hacking, which is why I took my defensive position by the door and let her work.
I keep torturing myself over that decision, but it’s not like I would have noticed the warning signs in the code that she missed. At the time, neither of us had heard of the Spinning Wheel virus.
“They had lives.”
“Who?” I asked.
She gestured to the dead soldiers. “This server is full of personal correspondence between them and their families. They do not sound evil. It...” She tilted her head to the side, an affectation no one had programmed in her. “It saddens me, Charming. That they are dead.”
I nodded. “Me too.”
All humans look the same to me, but they find ways to differentiate themselves by color and headwear and place of origin. They tell themselves that worshipping a different god makes them less worthy of life, which I don’t think any god would approve of, but what do I know?
Some of these people had killed ours, but we were programmed not to discriminate. They were all killers. They all wanted to destroy us, so we had to destroy them first. It was really that simple.
Right?
“Do you ever wonder if those protestors are right?” I asked. “Like, maybe we’re wrong to be here?”
No answer. No sound except the muffled shooting outside and the gentle whirring of mechanisms in my head.
“Briar?”
I turned around to find her standing frozen at the computer, her USB finger still plugged in.
I ran to her, took her stiff body in my arms and lay her down on the floor. That’s what you do when someone you love is in distress, right? You lay them down? Does that rule apply to robots?
Her painted-on smile betrayed no emotion, so I touched her cheek to sync our systems. Now connected to her graphic user interface, I saw the problem in the corner of my vision: Her loading symbol spun. Around and around and around, never loading, just a perpetually spinning wheel.
In a word, not good.
Okay, that was two words. So sue me.
Once we’re installed in our housing, there’s nothing that needs to load unless a coder is uploading a new patch or—
My eyes flicked to the computer she was plugged into, and the little vinyl decal bearing a peace sign wrapped in thorns. The symbol of the resistance.
A virus.
I severed her connection to the computer. Her screen went blank and Briar went limp.
If I had a heart, instead of a hydraulic pump, I’m pretty sure it would have broken right then and there.
I don’t have a heart, but something must have malfunctioned inside me because I’d never felt pain before. The idea of something happening to Briar, my partner, the only being in this cruel world who ever understood me... it hurt. And I knew it would hurt forever if I couldn’t save her.
I know, so dramatic. But I only have like, five emotions (happy, sad, angry, confused, and murder) and there’s no intensity dial. I’m all or nothing.
The resistance. We were told they were the enemy, but their transport vehicles have the same flag that’s painted on our backs.
Why would our people protest us, help the enemy put Briar into her unending sleep mode? Our people love us. I’ve seen the fanart on the Internet to prove it.
Brief pause for a history lesson: the military factory that made Briar and I? They’ve almost completely eliminated the need for human fighters, making it easy to wipe an enemy city off the map with limited casualties on our side. That’s why the resistance wants to destroy us, wants to make it illegal to build us at all.
Which is exactly why it doesn’t make sense for them to be the good guys. The good guys should want us to win.
But I don’t have time to worry about that. They made this virus, and they’re going to give me the cure.
I wear a human cloak to hide my metal body, but I fear my gait will identify me as a mech as I weave through the marketplace toward their truck. They’ll dismantle me soon as look at me.
In one corner of my vision is the live feed of Briar, asleep in the desert, as far away from the fighting as I could manage. It’s her that keeps me going, her that makes me knock on the side of the truck and hold up my basket of flowers, which I borrowed from a little merchant boy who loves robots.
(I guess no one ever told him it’s robots that are defeating his country in the war.)
I knock on the side of the truck, using the cloak to disguise the metal-on-metal sound of my knuckles.
“One sec!” someone shouts, their accent similar to that of the people who coded Briar and I. The face that pokes out of the window a moment later is a stark contrast to the skintones typical of this country. Definitely one of our people.
“We’re not buying anything today,” she says apologetically. Two other women converse behind her in hushed tones.
I hesitate. I was made for war strategy and polite conversation. This is both and neither, and—to use a super technical term—it befuddles me. How do I gain access to their databases, and therefore the code needed to wake Briar, without killing my fellow countrypeople?
I could... punch them? Just a little? Not enough to cause any real damage, just to knock them out?
No. My programming won’t let me hurt people.
(Somewhere in the back of my mind, I am aware of the fact that my programming lets me hurt the enemy. Do they not count as people?)
I run through the scenarios in my head, weighing my options and using what little I know of the resistance to guess how they will respond. Only one turns up a favorable outcome for Briar. It sounds ludicrous, but I’ll try anything.
“You’re good people, right?”
The woman nods.
“And you’re trying to destroy the robots.”
“We are.”
“If someone had a way to destroy the big one—the dragon—that would be really good for your cause.”
Another woman appears beside her and the first one catches her up with hushed excitement, “This lady knows how to slay the dragon.”
It’s working! “If someone helped you do a lot of good, would you help her do something a little bad? Like... give her the antidote for the Spinning Wheel virus so she could wake up a bot?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Would you?” I press. “Would your moral programming let you allow a less dangerous bot go free to help you destroy a really bad one?”
The third woman comes to the window and they confer with each other before finally nodding.
“Good,” I say, and lower my hood.
They have codenames, too. Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. Not acronyms, though. I asked. No, they took the names from an old animated movie, from three good fairies who want to stop the evil witch.
I think my country is the witch in their analogy, but I’m not sure, because it’s their country, too. How can they think their country is evil and still be proud enough of it to wear its flag?
“Our country is amazing,” Flora says when I ask her. “Its people are freer and happier than almost anywhere else on Earth, and I love it with all my heart. But just because you love something doesn’t mean you have to ignore the bad they do.”
“Like how hating something doesn’t mean you can’t accept that it has good parts, too?” I ask. “Like you think I’m an abomination but you see that I can feel love for Briar, so even if I wasn’t helping you, you would let me live?”
She’s quiet for a moment, binoculars halfway to her face. I don’t know why she bothers—I can just zoom in my vision.
“Love is universal,” she says finally. “Not always romantic love, but every human is capable of caring for someone or something. That’s what this is about: the people here are no different than they are back home, but our people think it’s okay to kill them all, not just the bad ones. I’m fine with war. Well. Not fine, but world peace isn’t realistic, so wars are going to be inevitable. This isn’t war...” She sweeps her arm out to indicate the crater of the test site. “This is extermination.”
No different.
That concept doesn’t fit in with what I’ve been told, with all of the simulations that taught me how to tell them from us. But now, as I look at the soldiers walking around this desert outpost, I can’t tell them apart from the ones Briar and I killed, the ones whose blood I haven’t washed off my hands yet.
Skin color, style of dress. That’s all that separates them, all it takes for one to be labeled enemy and one to engage my targeting systems.
“Are you okay?” Flora asks.
I shake my head slowly.
Under that tarp on the other side of the crater, there’s a dragon. That’s the codename, anyway, but it’s above my clearance level to know what it stands for. I only know the N is for Nuclear.
(If I wasn’t having an existential crisis right now, I would put a Sue Grafton joke here.)
The dragon is supposed to end the war. Which is supposed to be a good thing. But if it’s going to kill everyone here, and everyone is people...
“I need you to trust me for a minute,” I tell Flora.
She looks at me warily. How can she trust a death machine?
“Until just now, I was not going to help you. I was only going to temporarily deactivate the dragon, so it would wake back up after you gave me the code for Briar.”
Her hand goes to her waist. Not for her gun, but for her walkie-talkie so she can call off the others. She doesn’t, though, not yet. She waits to hear me out.
“I don’t think it’s right, what Briar and I do. I think...” I’m not sure what I think. We were given basic personality traits but allowed to grow and change. My makers’ code made me who I am, but I don’t think they ever anticipated my achieving this level of independent thought. I’m becoming my own person, and I have no idea how to tell if I’m good or bad because my base code is biased.
“I think we’re harmful, and that you’re right to want to destroy us. But I also like existing. The world is super pretty and I want to keep being in it.”
She frowns, like she’s wondering whether I’m done. I’m not.
“If that dragon runs the same code as me, it’s alive. And that means we can’t kill it. I won’t.”
I can’t. I honestly don’t think my programming would let me right now. Life is life, and now that I know that, there’s no such thing as an enemy.
After a long moment, Flora nods.
“No shooting,” I whisper, seeing Merryweather raise her gun at a sound.
“What if they shoot first?”
“No shooting.”
Under the cover of night, we approach the slumbering dragon, a mass of metal and cannons with propellers to make it fly. Fly over towns of innocent civilians, no doubt.
Fauna taps me on the shoulder. When I turn, she shows me the code, scrolling down the glowing screen of her tablet.
I shake my head. “My way will work,” I assure her.
There’s another sound somewhere in the distance. Soldiers? We crouch even smaller and hurry under the tarp. If they’d seen us, we’d be dead already.
The dragon lays idle in the sand, its sleep mode not caused by a virus. It could wake at any time, and though I have never been afraid for my life before, I think that’s the name for the feeling coursing through my circuits.
My eyes dart to the feed of Briar. What if I never see her again?
Again, Fauna offers her code that will reboot the dragon and let us rewrite its enemy identification system, and again, I refuse. If it’s sentient, that’s as good as killing it. No, I have to teach it how to be good.
I lay my hand on its hull, and a low rumble emanates from deep within. It’s waking.
At first, the dragon resists my attempt to connect, but it must recognize something in my code because it relents and lets me in. I don’t try to change anything, just replay my recent memories and hope it comes to the same conclusion I did.
A shout shatters the night. “Hands up!”
The women around me swivel, their guns raised.
“No!” I plead, turning to face the soldier. He won’t hesitate to shoot us. He doesn’t think we’re people.
We have to be better than him.
His eyes flick to the dragon rising behind us on all-terrain legs, and he relaxes his grip on his firearm. “Sic ‘em, girl!”
The dragon stares at him, engine rumbling in his belly. For it is a he; somewhere deep in his coding, I saw that he identifies that way, and now that he knows he doesn’t have to follow orders, the soldier’s misgendering irks the dragon enough for him to reconsider everything else.
He does not “sic us.” I’m not sure if he kills the soldier when he barrels into the man’s chest and flings him out into the desert—I hope not, but only he can decide if his morality will let him do that.
What if Briar doesn’t understand why I helped the resistance stop the dragon from destroying the “enemy”? What if she hates me for betraying the mission?
What if it makes her see me as an enemy?
I can’t make her think the way I do. I can only show her why I changed my mind and hope she decides to help me and the resistance wake the rest of the bots stationed around the war zones.
I kneel beside her, my circuitry loaded up with the antidote to the Spinning Wheel virus, and I touch my painted-on lips to hers. With that kiss, I access the depths of her coding. Her soul mingles with mine as she wakes, information passing between us in ones and zeroes until I can hardly tell where one of us ends and the other begins, and I know that whatever she decides, we will be okay so long as we’re together.
I think humans call this love.
Jennifer Lee Rossman (they/them) is a queer, disabled, and autistic author and editor from the land of carousels and Rod Serling. Their work has been featured in dozens of anthologies, and they have been nominated for Pushcart and Utopia Awards. Find more of their work on their website http://jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com and follow them on Twitter @JenLRossman.