Bless Your Mechanical Heart Read online

  BLESS YOUR

  MECHANICAL

  HEART

  Published by Evil Girlfriend Media, P.O. BOX 3856, Federal Way, WA 98063

  Copyright © 2014

  All rights reserved. Any reproduction or distribution of this book, in part or in whole, or transmission in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher or author is theft. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover art by Larry Dixon.

  Cover design by Matt Youngmark.

  “The Apocrypha of Gamma-202” ©2014 by Peter Clines.

  “Seeds of Devotion” ©2014 by Dylan Birtolo.

  “The Imperial Companion” ©2014 by Lillian Cohen-Moore.

  “The Body as a Ship” ©2014 by Mark Andrew Edwards.

  “Ever You” ©2014 by Mae Empson.

  “Just Another Day in the Butterfly War” ©2014 by M. Todd Gallowglas.

  “Rest in Peace” ©2014 by Sarah Hans.

  “Do Robotic Cats Purr In Space?” ©2014 by Kerrie Hughes.

  “In So Many Words” ©2014 by Christopher Kellen.

  “The Lambs” ©2014 by Seanan McGuire.

  “Lost Connections” ©2014 by Jody Lynn Nye.

  “The King’s Own” ©2014 by Fiona Patton.

  “Thirty-Two, Twenty-Three” ©2014 by Jean Rabe.

  “We Eat the Hearts that Come for You” ©2014 by Jason Sanford.

  “The Strange Architecture of the Heart” ©2014 by Lucy A. Snyder.

  “AIDEd” ©2014 by Minerva Zimmerman.

  “Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise” ©2006 by Ken Scholes, previously published in Realms of Fantasy Magazine, August 2006.

  ISBN: 978-1-940154-05-3

  ISBN-10: 1940154057

  To those who need to find

  a little bit of humanity

  in everyday things.

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Lambs, Seanan McGuire

  The King’s Own, Fiona Patton

  The Strange Architecture of the Heart, Lucy A. Snyder

  Thirty-Two, Twenty-Three, Jean Rabe

  Just Another Day in the Butterfly War, M. Todd Gallowglas

  Ever You, Mae Empson

  Rest in Peace, Sarah Hans

  Seeds of Devotion, Dylan Birtolo

  The Imperial Companion, Lillian Cohen-Moore

  In So Many Words, Christopher Kellen

  We Eat the Hearts that Come for You, Jason Sanford

  Do Robotic Cats Purr In Space? Kerrie Hughes

  AIDEd, Minerva Zimmerman

  The Body as a Ship, Mark Andrew Edwards

  Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise, Ken Scholes

  Lost Connections, Jody Lynn Nye

  The Apocrypha of Gamma-202, Peter Clines

  Biographies

  INTRODUCTION

  Bless Your Heart (from the Urban Dictionary) Definition:

  1. This is a term used by the people of the southern United States particularly near the Gulf of Mexico to express to someone that they are an idiot without saying such harsh words.

  2. “You are an idiot but I like you and care about you so I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  I met Katie while I was a guest lecturer at Cascade Writer’s Workshop in 2013. While we were chatting, she let me know she owned Evil Girlfriend Media, a small press I’d been hearing good things about. We talked about anthologies and the various processes we go through to put them together. Then, she said, “I’ve got an anthology idea but I know you wouldn’t work for me.”

  Clearly, Katie didn’t know me that well. I’m all about sharing the love. You don’t have to fail for me to succeed. Very much the opposite. I want you to succeed. I will do a lot to help you succeed. I didn’t say any of this. Instead, I said, “Try me.”

  And she did, making her pitch. She told me all about the phrase “Bless your heart” and the idea of applying it to robots. I loved it, took it, and ran with it.

  Thus, Bless Your Mechanical Heart was born. I adore the idea of it—the poignant, sympathetic robot/cyborg that just doesn’t get it… or does get it and can’t do anything about it. That’s what makes some of these stories a kick in the teeth or encourages the reader to sigh with a knowing smile. We all recognize the humanity in the protagonists, even if they don’t recognize it themselves.

  Many of the stories in this anthology question humanity—why we have the machines we do, why we treat them (and each other) the way we do, what would we use a sentient robot for, and even, what makes us human… and robots who can think and feel for themselves not human. To me, this is the hallmark of good science fiction. When the reader puts down the book, they think more about the world around them.

  I hope these stories touch the readers and make them think of the present as well as the future.

  Jennifer Brozek

  Bothell, Washington

  January 2014

  THE LAMBS

  Seanan McGuire

  The bell rang for first period. I wanted to answer it—my programming told me I should be rushing to my normal seat in the front row, looking eager to fill my head with more rote memorization. Math was one of the classes where I was designed to excel this cycle, as girls who were overly adept at mathematics had been found 16% more likely to be targeted for opportunistic bullying, and 42% more likely to inspire hostility and a lack of generosity in classmates.

  The figures were apparently good, as I was about to be late to class due to being pinned up against my locker by two of the larger members of the football team. One of them had been in my assigned cycle since the second grade; my files contained no flagged recordings of him prior to freshman year, when a growth spurt and the acquisition of several new “friends” had transformed a relatively thoughtful, soft-spoken boy into a trainee terror of the halls. The other was new as of this year, and already had three hours’ worth of data for me to review before graduation. The second boy’s girlfriend stood nearby, averting her eyes. She wasn’t going to help me, but she wasn’t going to participate either.

  It’s funny how some people continue to regard that as somehow “better.”

  “So we’ve been thinking,” said the second boy, stretching his vowels out in a long, lazy drawl. “It’s almost graduation, and that means some of us might find ourselves in a little hot water with our folks, you know what I mean? I moved here in part to avoid that, but things happen.”

  I frowned at him, keeping the right mixture of fear and bewilderment in my expression, even as I raged behind the crafted blue lenses of my eyes. Things happen? As if he had no power over those “things.” As if he had wound up in my files by accident, and through no fault of his own. “I—I don’t know what you mean,” I stammered, and shrank further back against the locker. “Tom? I don’t know what you and your friend want, but I’m going to be late to math—”

  “Just shake the geek down for what she knows,” said the girlfriend, glancing back over her shoulder at us. Her eyes raked over me in the silently assessing way that had long since been perfected by popular girls the world over. We all shared that look back and forth across the network at night, trying to find a way to put it into words, to add it to the report. No one had found one yet. It wouldn’t matter how advanced our reporting systems became; there would always be horrible things that humans could do to each other that we
wouldn’t be able to explain.

  “I’m on it, Patty,” said the second boy, with a sneer that implied Patty—in all her manicured, perfectly coiffed glory—was only a little better than I was. He turned his attention back to me. I was glad. That was our purpose, after all: we deflected. We kept them from each other’s throats by focusing them on ours.

  Sometimes I just wished it wasn’t so hard.

  “We’ve been thinking,” he said again, this time accompanying his words with a little shove to my shoulders. Not much, but it was enough to slam me back against the lockers in a way that would have hurt, if I’d been wired for pain. I whimpered. Even though he didn’t smile, I could see his eyes light up at the sound. “You’re a nerd. Everybody knows that, just like everybody knows you’re in line to be valedictorian. That means you can’t be our snitch—no honors for the fake kids—but you’re smart. I bet you know who it is. So tell us, and you’ll have our protection for the rest of the school year. Scouts’ honor.”

  The offer was tempting, in a perverse way. It could get exhausting, dealing with the things they did to each other—the things they did to us, believing that we were like them—for class after class. But I knew what happened to “snitches” who got caught by their year group before the end of the term. We all knew. There was no one I could point the finger at, and my year group hadn’t been equipped with a second Lamb.

  “I don’t know,” I whimpered, before continuing, speaking ever faster: “I’ve been trying to figure it out all year it’s a really great problem and I was sort of a mean girl in second grade, I’m terrified of my parents hearing the things I used to say on the playground, but I haven’t been able to even guess, they say it could be anybody, it could even be one of you trying to trick me into disrupting the system—” I was crying by the end of the sentence. It was one of my better performances, if I did say so myself.

  “I told you the nerd wouldn’t rat on the robot,” snapped the second boy, giving me another, harder shove. This time my head bounced off the locker with a hollow bonging sound. I whimpered, letting my knees buckle. He didn’t hold me up.

  His name was Ryan. I pulled his file from the network and began annotating, words and sound files flashing behind my eyes.

  “Ryan, come on, let’s go,” said Tom. He glanced down at me, looking pained. The boy I used to play with during recess was still in there, it seemed, buried under a layer of social expectations and poor decisions. I was almost sorry to see that. It hurt more when they endured. His hand on Ryan’s elbow, he tugged, pulling the other boy away before things could escalate further. “We’re going to be late.”

  “Whatever.” Ryan shook him off, and the three walked away down the hall as the final bell rang. None of them offered to help me up.

  I collected myself, smoothed my shirt back into place, and scuttled down the hall toward my math class. I would get a reprimand for being late. That was all right. What mattered was that I was the one who’d been slung against the locker, and not anyone else. That’s what I was here for: to take the abuse the other students shouldn’t have to bear.

  Mr. Groblek was well into his lecture on the importance of Calculus in our future endeavors when I slipped into the room, trying to make myself look small. He paused, taking in my disheveled appearance and the fact that my backpack was only halfway zipped. Something that looked very much like pity flashed across his face, and he nodded his chin toward an open seat at the back of the room, indicating that I should go sit down. My cheeks reddened with simulated relief—no reprimand for me today, not from a teacher who’d been doing this for long enough to recognize the signs of a hallway altercation—and I scuttled to the waiting chair. Snickers and soft jeers of “Teacher’s pet,” rose around me as I sat and unpacked my math book. A few of the students kept their eyes fixed straight ahead, neither adding to my presumed embarrassment nor trying to make me feel any better. Only two of my classmates cast sympathetic looks in my direction, and they were both in the afterschool Math Club with me. They understood what it was like to be the one up against the locker.

  Not as well as they would have twenty years ago. The Lambs had begun rolling out at the middle school level twenty-one years before Mr. Groblek’s class bell. We’d been early models then, easily detected novelties that didn’t have the support or elaborate backstories we would eventually accumulate. My first host family had lost a daughter to suicide after an ex-boyfriend had distributed shirtless pictures of her to most of their mutual classmates. Her name had been Beven. She had been beautiful.

  She still was. The artificial skin that covered my chassis got more detailed with every cultured generation, and I was now the absolute picture of the girl Beven would have been at seventeen, if she’d been allowed to live that long. Her mother sent me Christmas cards, and asked for copies of my school pictures every year. It was technically a breach of operational security to send them, but I did it anyway. It was the only human thing to do.

  “Miss Carter?” From the annoyed edge in Mr. Groblek’s voice, he had already said my name at least once, and probably more; he was definitely regretting allowing me to take my seat without a reprimand. I jerked my eyes away from my math book, cheeks burning again, this time with more genuine embarrassment. He looked slightly mollified when he saw my face. “Did you have the answer to problem five?”

  This was familiar ground. I cleared my throat like I was nervous about my results, and said, “I think so…” From there, it was just a matter of reciting figures with careless ease, gaining glares from my less-able classmates and admiring looks from my fellow Math Club members. It was a foolish thing for me to do—it could have blown my cover—but I didn’t care, really. It was the last semester of senior year. I was going to be relocated and reskinned in a matter of months, placed with a new host family and prepared to enter first grade. Let me have my fun. I’d earned it.

  The Lamb program came about at the end of the twenty-teens, when two things happened in unfortunately rapid succession: a man named Benjamin Wallace developed the first fully human-seeming robot in his Seattle lab, and his thirteen year old daughter committed suicide as a direct result of online harassment by a group of her more popular classmates. The classmates were tried for harassment under Washington’s Cyber-Bullying laws, and while they were found guilty, they served no jail time and were able to go on to their college careers unhaunted by what they had done. Dr. Wallace couldn’t reconcile the loss of his daughter with the seeming unconcern of her classmates—or worse, their parents, who continued to insist all the way through the trial that their children were innocent.

  The first Lamb was enrolled in the local high school at the beginning of the following school year. He was just a prototype, found out quickly and unmasked by the student body, but not before he had managed to record five hours of tape, all of which was played back for the parents of the kids who had bullied him. They could deny a lot. They couldn’t deny the voices of their own children saying terrible things to someone who they had believed to be another student, less than a year after one of their classmates took her own life.

  There were lawsuits, early in; there were arguments about morality and the Heisenberg Principle, and whether we were doing any good by forcing the bullying to become less overt. But the voices of bullies played back through artificial mouths that couldn’t lie, and the schools that hosted our pilot program showed a measurable decrease in the suicide rate. The Lamb program worked. The lawsuits didn’t.

  The program went national three years after the first prototype attended his first homeroom. Realistic robots in schools across the country, always hidden in plain sight, always listening, always watching, always recording. Some of us were found out, but with every generation and every update to the backstories and design schematics, more of us were making it to graduation, fulfilling our purpose in the most important way possible. We were making sure people remembered how much words could hurt, even when they thought those words had been thrown aside or forgotten. We
were accountability writ large, and all I had to do now was make it to graduation.

  The bell rang for the end of Mr. Groblek’s class. I stood with the others, ignoring the poisonous glares from certain corners of the room, and the ever more pervasive sneers of “Geek” that often accompanied those looks. I lingered at the back while the popular kids filed out, letting them have their space. It’s dangerous to challenge lions on the veldt, and while that might seem like a primitive way to describe the high school ecosystem, it was surprisingly apt.

  The first Lambs got caught because they were too aggressive with their lions, needlessly challenging them to be cruel, making themselves into such perfect targets that they couldn’t possibly be real. Our programming has evolved since then.

  “Beven? A word, if you don’t mind?”

  I turned obediently to the sound of my math teacher’s voice, walking to the front of the room with an earnest, eager-student smile on my face. Sometimes Lambs caught teachers who did inappropriate things with their underage students. It wasn’t our primary purpose, and it wasn’t something I enjoyed, but we were reminded never to pass up an opportunity to spend time with our instructors, or to form the social bonds that might expose deviant behavior.

  Mr. Groblek didn’t look like he was planning anything deviant. He was in his eighties, a man on the verge of retirement, who had seen his entire profession reinvented around him easily a dozen or more times since he taught his first class. He was looking at me solemnly, with something like concern in his rheumy blue eyes. “Beven, I was speaking to your guidance counselor yesterday, and she said something that worried me. Is it true that you haven’t completed any college applications?”

  Only the speed of my central processor prevented me from wincing. Lambs weren’t allowed to apply for college admission. It was illegal for us to disclose our non-human status on our applications, and we might prevent some worthy human student from getting a slot, at least until the school year ended and we inevitably outed ourselves. There was some discussion of allowing Lambs to apply, just to close one more loophole that could lead to identification. By the next time my picture in the yearbook appeared with a senior class, this might not be an issue.