Pixel-Stained Technopeasants Make With The Free!

Oh, man. Where to begin.

The current-but-outgoing vice president of the SFWA wrote a barely-coherent tantrum about the evils of a) artists who give away their work FOR FREE!!! b) on THE INTERNET!!!!. Because it interferes with a good, old-fashioned, wood-chopping way of life where if you want to call people idiots, you have to hike uphill in the snow to do it, by cracky, without all this fancy bloggery.

Or something. I told you it was barely coherent.

Anyway, to mock his spittle-flecked insulting of other writers as ‘scabs’ and ‘pixel-stained technopeasants’ who dasn’t use a woodstove like He-Man Hendrix, Jo Walton has declared today International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

In honour of Dr Hendrix, I am declaring Monday 23rd April International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been published or if it hasn’t, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.

Jo will be posting links in comments. In the meantime, I offer my own non-professional-technopeasantry, in the form of a short story originally written for Subterranean’s “SF cliche” issue (edited by John Scalzi).

This At Last

He rested his fingers over the glowing ON button, not really sure if anything would happen, afraid not to try. “Idiot,” he said out loud. “The entire human race is dead. There’s nobody left to laugh at you.” Or to tell me I’m going crazy, he thought, and turned the robot ON.

There was a soft hum like a fine Swedish appliance as its brain powered up. The robot flexed its fingers in precise sequence and turned its head from side to side. The eyelids blinked rapidly as if it were awaking from a dream, rather than going through a series of mobility tests. It sat up in its cardboard shipping box and looked at him with its artificial eyes.

It was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

“Hello,” it said. There was something familiar about its voice, as if it had been copied from an actress not quite famous enough for him to remember her name. “I am a Lang Model Six scientific assistant. For my initial activation, Doctor, I will need a sample of your voice, so that I may respond to spoken instructions. Please say a minimum of ten words to allow my software to create a reliable imprint.”

He looked around the shipping dock. Bins full of Tyvek envelopes were pushed up against FedEx shipments stamped LIVE SPECIMENS and NEXT-DAY AIR. In the mail clerk’s cubicle, letters and intraoffice mail spilled out of a wire cart. He’d come back here hoping to find medicine the abandoned pharmacies didn’t carry, and the coffin-sized box labeled LANG ROBOTICS had caught his eye.

The robot sat patiently and waited for him to speak. Environmentally-friendly packing peanuts clung to her short black hair. She didn’t bother to brush them away, and the absence of such a human gesture unnerved him more than anything else about her. It, he thought, it, not she, you need to keep your grip on reality, buddy. It’s a robot, and it’s not any more human than a toaster.

“Uh, hi,” he said. “I’m not a doctor. My name is Adam–”

“Thank you,” the robot said, smoothly cutting him off. “Adam, I am now ready to recognize voice commands. What would you like me to do next?”

“Well,” he said. “I guess you should go ahead and get out of that box.”

It stood up in a crackle of packing peanuts and folds of plastic sheeting. The robot was dressed in a plain beige coverall. There was a manila tag hanging from a band around her right wrist. Adam flipped the tag over: LANG ROBOTICS, it read, QUALITY INSPECTED BY #117.

He let go of the tag. The robot stood still, waiting. Even barefoot, it was a few inches taller than Adam. He wondered if all humanoid robots were like this one, identical sisters stamped out of a mold, or if you could pick and choose their appearance like the paint color of a car. He imagined some high-ranking scientist clicking through a Web page, checking boxes for gender and hair color, moving the slider on the eye color scale to get just the right shade of blue, adjusting her height and the shape of her hips–

“I need to carry some of these boxes out,” he said. “How much can you carry?”

“My safe lifting capacity is eighty-five kilograms.”

“Then take those white boxes and bring them out the loading door,” he said. “We need to get them home while it’s still light out.”

#

Right after Adam found himself the last man on Earth, he had been really excited about the idea of being able to live wherever he wanted. With everybody else dead of Fadeaway, he could set himself up in San Simeon, or the White House, or even Larry Ellison’s mansion, if he felt like it. That turned out to be one of the many ideas that sounded great until you tried it. Fadeaway killed people–it had nearly killed Adam–but it didn’t make the bodies disappear. Or the food people left behind, or for that matter the guard dogs, the ones that hadn’t starved to death yet. Adam found out that he didn’t get much enjoyment out of living in a mansion that stank of corpses and rotting Brie. Anyway, now that nobody was alive to keep the power plants running, it was pretty hard to find your way around a big house, however elegant, after the sun went down. You just didn’t run San Simeon on a generator looted from Home Depot.

He’d settled on a new “planned development” outside of San Jose. Only the model homes on the property had been finished, and furnished, before the end of the world. Nobody had ever moved into the houses around it–some of them weren’t even finished–so there were no dead bodies, no freezers full of mold, no roving packs of dogs.

Adam and the robot moved the white boxes of antiviral drugs into Naxos, the model house he used for storage. He actually lived next door, in the Doric. It had a better floor plan.

She followed him into the house. Sometime during the drive back from the research institute where he’d found her, Adam had decided that it was kind of silly to keep calling the robot “it”. A lifetime with nobody to talk to but himself, and no human voice that came from somebody still living, he figured, was going to be a lot worse for his grip on reality than talking to an intelligent robot.

“Make yourself at home,” he called over his shoulder, walking to the back of the house where the kitchen was. The generator outside was pretty noisy, even though he’d put insulation and baffles over it, but it beat sitting in the dark. He had considered putting in solar, but that meant getting up on a ladder, and what if he fell? There was nobody to call 911, much less put him back together.

“Thank you,” she said.

Adam returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Merlot that would have cost him ten dollars if he’d had to pay for it. He knew he could raid the cellars of any fancy wine shop, now, but he’d gotten accustomed to cheap red wine back when he was living on a data entry clerk’s salary. He was usually pretty strict about limiting his alcohol intake, knowing it would be all too easy, in an empty world, to just sit and drink himself away. Today, though, seemed like a good occasion to celebrate, now that he had somebody to help him carry things and look for salvage. And talk to.

He sat down and put the bottle and a wineglass on the elegant coffee table. He looked at the robot, then the glass. “Do you, I mean, can you drink?” he asked. “I know alcohol probably doesn’t affect you.”

“I can, in small amounts,” she said. “It’s part of my analysis package. Here.” She poured a mouthful of wine into the glass and lifted it to her lips. Adam half-expected her to make a face, the way most people did with this kind of wine, but she drank it without flinching.

“There’s ethyl alcohol,” she said, “and some tannins, flavor compounds that–”

“Hey,” he said, “You’re using contractions.”

She blinked, as if confused, and then smiled. It was the first time Adam had seen her do either. “I learn things,” she said. “It’s part of my programming to make working with a robot easier. I analyze your speech patterns and gestures, and incorporate them into my behavior.”

“Oh,” Adam said. “I thought you were just, I don’t know, more relaxed. That’s what humans do. I thought…never mind.”

“I am doing what humans do,” she said. “Am I incorrect? The data I have says that normal human behavior is to adjust to the social norms and conduct of other humans, and to adopt the modes of speech of their friends. If this is uncomfortable for you, I will revert to my default.”

“No, you’re fine, don’t. I, um, I like you better this way.”

“Thanks,” she said.

Adam poured himself a glass of wine and drank it fast. He would have made a face except that he’d known what he was in for. Tannins, he thought, she’s not kidding. Not so sure about those flavor compounds.

“Want to watch a movie?” he blurted, and felt like an idiot, but then she smiled and said yes, as if it were an idea she liked, and not just a positive reaction to whatever he asked her to do.

The only DVD in the house Adam hadn’t watched was a Regency romance. He nodded off during the scene where the wealthy cad confronts the poor but heroic suitor. The robot watched the screen intently and didn’t say a word.

#

The first week was awkward, but Adam got a lot more done than he had in the previous month. He needed to put up better insulation in the house, and find more canned goods, and the robot never got tired, plus she lifted things he couldn’t even move with a handtruck. She didn’t need sleep, either. He thought she stayed up and watched his DVDs while he slept, but he could never really bring himself to ask.

The second week, he gave up and named her. He chose Helen, after a robot he vaguely remembered from an old science fiction book. He toyed with naming her after an old girlfriend, or an actress he’d had a crush on, but that felt adolescent and weird, somehow. Helen was a good name, pretty but not sexy, and it was a tiny reminder that she wasn’t human, no matter how much better she was at understanding humor or what behaviors she’d picked up from the heroines in his movie collection.

It was almost the third month after finding Helen that he made a pass at her, and it took the better part of a six-pack for him to stop telling himself he didn’t really need to know whether Lang Robotics had made her just like a real woman. Adam was drunk enough that he didn’t realize what he was doing until he was already kissing her, and then she was kissing him back. Her skin felt oddly smooth, but instead of cold plastic and hard steel rods underneath she was warm, and soft, and how different a real woman might have been was something Adam could no longer remember.

Afterward, with her head tucked against his shoulder, Adam watch the room slowly lose its spin as the alcohol wore off. The comforting wall that the beer had put between him and his better judgment was dissolving. He felt stupid and pathetic, as if he’d woken up from a night at the bar to find someone he didn’t even know in his bed. Not someone, something, he thought. You’ve just made love to a glorified inflatable sex toy. You think having a complicated steel brain makes her any more real?

Helen stirred against his shoulder. Reflexively, he stroked her head, feeling the soft hair that never grew and would never turn grey. She made a satisfied little noise and moved one of her legs to twine with his.

She’s as real as I’m ever going to find, he told the negative voice, and pulled her close against him.

That was the moment Helen chose to tell him she loved him.

#

“How can you be sure there isn’t anyone else?” she asked. They were driving down I-5 towards Irvine, where Lang Robotics had its headquarters. They had a siphon and a pump to take gas out of cars along the way, and a cooler full of food for Adam. Helen didn’t need any.

“I guess I can’t be,” Adam said, “but I am. I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of Jungian race consciousness thing. But I don’t…. well, I don’t feel as though any other people survived. There was no Internet, but there were a lot of short-wave radios. Nothing, on any channel. I put together a ham kit I found at a Radio Shack and I would send out a broadcast every few days, but I never heard anyone else. Just static.”

“It would make sense that somebody else survived, though,” Helen said. “If you had a genetic resistance to Fadeaway, shouldn’t there be other humans with the same resistance?”

“Probably,” Adam said. “If they turn up, that’s fine. If they don’t, well, that’s okay too.”

She gave him an affectionate kiss on the cheek. “Okay.”

It took Adam another fifty miles to work up to the question he really wanted to ask. “I know we’re going here to look for parts and a repair kit, in case something happens to you,” he said, and by now he was not at all surprised at the physical pain that twisted his heart at the thought of anything happening to Helen. “But there may be, well, there may be other robots. Other people like you. And they’ll have positronic brains, and be a lot prettier than me. I’m, I’m scared that you’ll want to be with them, and you won’t have any use for me. I’m just human. I’m not perfect, like you.”

There was a long silence, and Adam couldn’t tell if he’d finally managed to come up with something her memory banks couldn’t handle. Or if she was trying to find a way to give him a good-bye speech: sorry, honey, but I’m leaving you for a man who never farts, doesn’t need tetanus shots and won’t grow old and die.

“In the movies, when the man says something really stupid, the woman is supposed to slap him and then give him a big kiss before they live happily ever after,” she said. “But I’m afraid if I do that, you’ll drive the car off the road.”

“You’re probably right,” Adam said. “So don’t.”

“Can I do it once we get to Lang Robotics?”

“Sure, if you do it before we power up all the cute male robots.”

“Deal,” she said, and laughed until she got hiccups, and Adam wished they were going west, not south, so that they could drive off into the perfect California sunset.