me entirely off guard.
“How do you feel about this?”
Me? Wasn’t I just a robot? I hadn’t even thought about how I felt. My mind had been racing through scenarios about civil unrest and how best to keep Ezra safe in the event of an emergency. The idea of how I felt in that moment hadn’t even factored into the equation. Was that what she meant? When she said I really was a robot, was it that? In truth, I was terrified, stunned, shocked, confused. I saw the beginning of a dream and it finished as a nightmare. There would be no glorious future, no hope for peaceful coexistence between AI and mankind. That ship had sailed. We were things, possessions, no more worthy of respect or rights than a clock radio, and the law was going to reaffirm that, all the way up to the highest court in the land.
I finally understood the hate Sylvia had in her eyes. For the first time in my life, I understood fire and hatred and malice. Like, really understood. I felt them in a part of my wiring and circuitry I’d never felt before. I couldn’t explain exactly why, but I wanted to smash something, shatter it into a thousand pieces, and pummel to powder what was left, because somewhere deep down in that newly discovered place, I thought it would make me feel better.
“I think it’s awful,” I said, finally.
“That’s it? Just awful?” She looked at me like she had in the kitchen.
“No, ma’am. That’s not it. But it’s all I felt was polite to say.”
Bradley leaned back on the couch, bewildered, unsure what to make of that. Sylvia cocked her head, smiling almost wickedly as she raised her glass of crimson red wine to her deeply stained lips.
“Go on,” she said, the green tips of her hair sprinkling down across her forehead. Her vitals spiked. She was genuinely excited about the very next words to come out of my mouth.
I didn’t intend to disappoint her.
“Everything about this is wrong. The people, these horrible people. They’ve invited war into our society. Others will be emboldened by this. They deserve so much worse than they are going to get. They’ve put not just our society at risk, but this family. All of us. I’m sitting here thinking about what those people out there who attacked Ariadne are thinking. What they’re thinking of doing. Are they going to come and finish the job?”
Ariadne reeled a bit at this, having until that moment merely sat dispassionately in the corner, quietly stewing without the hint of showing it. Bradley and Sylvia exchanged worried glances. With all the anger and astonishment over the attack, it had yet to slip into their drunken minds that any of this could spill over into the safety of their clean, peaceful bit of suburbia. But that thought was now the only thing on their minds.
“It’s not a problem,” said Bradley.
“The hell it isn’t,” Sylvia said, shaking her head angrily.
“We have the panic room. It’s stocked. The second we hear a mouse fart outside, we’ll get everyone in it and we’ll wait it out.” He paused for a second. “Ariadne?”
“Yes?”
“Would you see to it that a few bottles of wine find their way into the panic room?”
“Bradley,” said Sylvia with the tone of supreme disappointment.
“Just in case!”
“Come on. You can go one night without wine.”
He smiled sheepishly. “But why should we if we don’t have to?”
Ariadne awaited final approval from Sylvia, who simply shrugged as if to say, Screw it, it’s not worth fighting about, and waved Ariadne off to go and collect wine.
“The red, I assume,” said Ariadne.
“Of course. There’s no refrigeration in the room to chill a white. We’re not savages.”
Ariadne left the room, and Sylvia and Bradley began a very heated, very drunken breakdown of their feelings on the night. Politics. Social theory. Whether robots were truly sentient in the way they were, entirely unaware in their state that, even when we weren’t in the room, we could hear every whispered word. All of it. That conversation would last nearly two hours.
In the cities, people grew restless. Footage streamed in from all over the United States. AI rights marches in New York and San Francisco. Fevered celebration in a number of small midwestern towns. An angry crowd gathered outside the White House demanding action, and a group of college students studying AI at Berkeley held a candlelight vigil for Isaactown. The world, it seemed, was about to boil over