The Inevitable

INTRODUCTION

BY LIDIA YUKNAVITCH

The first time I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun I bawled my face off. It mattered not that the central character in the story was a humanoid robot. From the get-go, I felt tethered to Klara because she is a servant to the world of humans, created—perhaps monstrously— to serve and to serve up life and the pursuit of happiness to the human community. Her use value is specific and finite. When she has served her purpose—that is, helped raise a human child—she will be discarded. Scrapped.

I always side with the creation. Blame Mary Shelley, who wrote my favorite novel of all time.

Monstrosity I reserve for human brutality.

Daniel Hope serves up a similar creature, a humanoid robot named Tuck, and quite quickly in the story, Tuck began to remind me more of what matters about the human condition than I learn from most of the humans I know. More human than human, comes to mind.¹

Of the many qualities I loved about Tuck immediately and inevitably, were his bones and skin. You heard me. Tuck is made from metal and strips of synthaskin, with polymer muscles underneath. Like my husband, who has high-grade metal in his knees; and like my father, who had a pacemaker and a defibrillator; and like my mother, whose physical disability turned her bones and muscles to rot in her hip and leg, and whose cancer ate her breasts and lungs, a woman who wanted hip replacement surgery for thirty years but was met with indifference from my father; Tuck needs repairs. Tuck needs parts. A body breaking down is a dangerous thing. In The Inevitable, that body is also prized, sought after by salvage hunters.

To be wanted only as scrap metal while you are grieving the loss of your family and searching for meaning in life is to exist inside a class of objects in a world of subjects. Not only is that life unjust, it is lonely.

What is family to a robot? It’s a question I find endlessly intriguing, not just because the biological reproductive element recedes in meaning, but because we all seem to come from fairly fucked-up families in the first place, so who is to say humans got family making right? From where I sit, we need a revolution away from the reproduction-centered, god-fearing, government-serving apparatus. In Ishiguro novels in particular, especially in Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, family as we know it is deformed and reformed around built services. In Never Let Me Go, clones serve as organ donors for sustaining the human population. In Klara and the Sun, the raising of children, especially during the teen years, is farmed out to machines. The thing that makes these two stories so intimate is that they are only very slightly askew from human conditions.

Daniel’s story thus inhabits a very particular wheelhouse of novels that bring sci-fi close in rather than catapulting it far out into space. Tuck travels in space, and intergalactic adventures and mysteries emerge, but the deeper story for me began to be revealed when Tuck adopts an abandoned—or orphaned—AI that he names David, after a boy he was close to on Earth in the past.

Tuck is building a family in the space where his heart doesn’t beat, in a world that does not count him as anything but subservient raw materials.

Early on in the story, Tuck and David are confronted with a death. For a moment, Tuck has no idea what death means. A man he has killed looks a lot like he did when he was alive, and the death moment arrests Tuck. Tuck has questions. David vomits. Suspended between artificial life and real human death, Tuck feels sympathy for David and fascination about the dead guy on the pavement in front of them. His question: How do I return a life I have taken?

On the one hand, the question seems naïve, right? Childlike. Underdeveloped. A machine trying to puzzle out how to take something back. But the question lingers throughout the story in more than one way. The question gets more and more human. If we are always giving and taking from each other, emotionally, financially, and in terms of power hierarchies, if we have been taking our whole lives, which one could argue the human race has been doing to the planet and all life on the planet since the start, how do we learn to give?

To be human, at least in part, is to understand how to give. A particularly human problem is figuring out what giving means, how to give without wanting, and how to determine when you have given away too much self, leaving you a hollowed-out shell only useful to others for your donations. More than the high-risk adventures in space, more than the power wars between billionaires and quasi-corporate conflicts, I was moved by Tuck’s attempts to build relationships, to venture near to that thing we call love, which requires a release we are only barely—if at all—capable of in the face of the inevitable, which is that we die. To give, knowing you will die.

Love stories are not what we’ve been told. A humanoid robot named Tuck reminds us how to build connections and be ever-giving in the face of death and loss.

1 See Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

-- 1 --

Tuck hated that humans could always hear him coming. With every step, his left knee let out a shrill squeak of metal scraping on metal, and his right ankle cracked loud enough to echo down the dirty back alleys. His corroded metal foot clomped down on the metal walkway running alongside one of the many muddy side streets of New San Francisco, the rotting industrial center on the planet Magnus. The other foot, in no better condition, swung unsteadily by to plop down ahead of the first. With every step, what was left of the synthaskin that once sheathed the feet crumbled and flaked off. The pattern of footfalls continued, an inconsistent thump on the rickety walkway creating a syncopated beat with the squeaking and creaking joints connected to the feet.

Lurching along above the feet, on top of a body equally broken and tattered, Tuck’s head remained fixed straight ahead, eyes scanning the surroundings in frequencies throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. His original designation was TUC-67/c, but no one had called him that in over 150 years.

Tuck detected movement ahead of him, where an alley connected with the walkway he was on. Two men in stained and mismatched clothes jumped out, one brandishing a length of metal and the other holding an old pistol in desperate need of repair and, as Tuck’s sensors instantly detected, ammunition.

Hey there, where’re ya headed? one of them said.

Tuck would have given them one of his favorite looks, one he learned from a human friend long ago, but it involved raising one eyebrow. He had lost his right eyebrow several years back to a fungus that eats artificial hair, and the other eyebrow had grown so thin over the years that he feared raising a disdaining brow wouldn’t have much effect. Instead, Tuck settled for another classic human expression. He rolled his eyes.

I don’t have much of value for you, Tuck said. Please, let me pass.

Oh, I don’t think so, the other man said with a gap-toothed smile. You look like you might be worth something down at the salvage yards. You’re comin’ with us, Rusty.

Yeah, the first man said, the drones are gonna have fun figgering out how to tear you apart. C’mon. Both men reached for Tuck.

Wait, Tuck said, I do have something for you.

Before Tuck’s attackers could grab his arms, one was suddenly extended toward them with a BlastLogic 6700 just centimeters from their noses. A slight whine, increasing in pitch, told them this blaster was functional, unlike theirs. Their eyes grew large, and they ducked involuntarily, throwing their hands up as ineffectual shields. Whoa! Hey! What are you doing? Put that away!

I’ve dealt with goons much more menacing than you two, Tuck said, trying to keep the damaged joints in his arm steady. You wouldn’t believe how many people think they can make money off me, but invariably they forget that I can be quite deadly.

Tuck squeezed the trigger and let a bright red bolt fly, deliberately singeing the greasy hair of the man on his right. Both men yelped and scampered back into the alley. Tuck calmly replaced the pistol in a special holster inside his abdomen. People seldom thought Tuck would be carrying weapons inside his body, and this afforded him an element of surprise when he needed it most.

It wasn’t the only surprising thing about him. He was a remnant, a relic of a different time, when synthaskin was as common as human skin in some of the more affluent areas of the galaxy. On some parts of Earth, robotic analogs of humans had been so numerous they outnumbered the very humans they were built to serve. Ever since the Bot Riots, his kind were increasingly scarce, and not just on Magnus. After the riots, bots quickly disappeared from stores, then from homes and businesses, and then finally from the enormous dumps where drones hovered over the massive heaps, quietly and efficiently sorting trash. Now Tuck was the last functioning bot in the galaxy.

People preferred drones because they were more predictable. They weren’t self-aware, they couldn’t alter their own programming, and they didn’t simulate emotions. After the trauma of the riots, humans didn’t want to worry about what their devices were feeling.

Tuck might have worked up a bitter laugh at that thought, but he needed to conserve energy. The regulator junction in his power cell was on the verge of breaking down, and he didn’t want to strain it more than necessary. It was one item on the long list of things to find; many parts of Tuck needed replacing. Entire patches of synthaskin were missing. His left arm was bare, with metal skeleton and Carbora polymer muscles exposed to anyone who cared to look. It needed urgent maintenance, along with a section of his upper spinal column and several parts of his power relay system. One of the highest priorities on the list was a knee joint. His left knee had been damaged in an encounter on Far Haven, coincidentally, the same planet where a pack of morgyt ripped the synthaskin from his left arm, but on a different occasion. Tuck marveled that humans could name such a dangerous planet Far Haven without even acknowledging the contradiction.

Tuck continued down the walkway, accompanied by his symphony of disrepair. People watched him through dirty windows in the tall gray apartment blocks that lined both sides of the street. Some people were curious, some almost fearful. His sensors tracked everything around him. He saw and heard in every direction, and he could even detect the sound of bugs crawling in the mud beneath him. He had to be on constant alert, wary of people who might want to sell him for scrap or even for the occasional collector that wanted to add Tuck to his display of oddities. Obtaining the last bot in the galaxy, no matter what level of disrepair he was in, would make quite an impressive addition to any collection. After being so reviled for decades, he was now highly sought after in certain circles, and he didn’t know which was worse.

As he walked past an alley between two buildings, a drone that had been picking through a pile of garbage swiveled in mid-air to scan Tuck. The drones were trouble, too, but only because they thought he was already scrap.

Without turning his head, Tuck monitored a suspicious character 73 degrees to his right. He listened to the retreating footsteps as the stranger scampered off. He cataloged it as a probable lookout; Tuck’s contact would want to know he was coming.

Tuck approached the end of the walkway that led to one of the many buildings in the area. Several other walkways branched off, but before he could reach them, Tuck would have to cross a heap of slime that had been tossed up by a mud vent nearby. The walkways ran along the sides of streets, off the ground, so people didn’t have to walk through the mud constantly spewed out of the geothermal vents that dotted the town.

Magnus was a temperate world, similar to Earth in many ways. There were forests, plains, mountains, and deserts, but this particular outpost was located in the middle of an enormous swamp that covered nearly half of the smallest of three continents in the southern hemisphere. It was a completely undesirable place to live, but it so happened that the Reinla Swamps, named after the man who first owned the land, sat on some of the most valuable ore deposits on the planet. This outpost turned industrial city, which Reinla named after the city on Earth where he grew up, housed all the miners and associated companies that exploited the deposits. Most people on Magnus lived in nicer, more habitable regions, and many of the people in New San Francisco had grown so rich from ore mining and refining that they might have easily lived elsewhere. But they didn’t; the mines were their livelihood, and they couldn’t leave behind the opportunity for more wealth. Instead, everyone hoarded what they had as the outpost was slowly swallowed by mud.

Tuck hesitated when he reached the edge of the mud. If he stepped in it, it could clog up his foot and ankle joints, which didn’t have enough synthaskin left between them to cover one foot, let alone both. He reluctantly added another item to his list of things to find: boots. He hadn’t bothered with clothing much in the past few years. Even though he was designed to be anatomically human, his designers never gave him the genitalia that humans required to be covered. Even if he had them, they would have fallen off by now with most of his other cosmetic parts, so wearing clothes seemed like unnecessary effort. He was quite a scary sight to behold, ragged scraps of synthaskin clinging to scuffed polymer muscles layered over a pitted metallic skeleton. He was missing all but a few strands of hair and most of one cheek and his nose were gone, showing off his metal skull and abnormally white teeth underneath. He looked like a child’s nightmare, which is why most humans avoided him.

Tuck grabbed the rusted railing of the walkway and tried to hop over the mud using his right leg in an effort to spare his left knee joint as much as possible. He made it most of the way to the other side before his right foot splutched into the sludge. This wasn’t ordinary mud. It was full of decaying biomatter and waste products from mining. It was a sickly yellow-brown and smelled horrific. Fortunately for Tuck, his olfactory sensors didn’t produce involuntary reactions like those of humans. He looked down at his right foot, then quietly lowered his left foot into the muck and trudged the rest of the way through. He made a note to give his feet a thorough cleaning when he got back to his ship.

Tuck approached the coordinates he’d been given and saw only another gray concrete building surrounded by metal walkways and yellow mud. A ragged human sat on a crate near the entrance. As Tuck approached the double doors leading to the dirty apartment complex, the man looked up, then jumped up, startled. Tuck was used to that reaction. He gave a courteous nod as he’d been programmed to do 157 years ago, back on Earth, and reached for the door handle. The filthy, skinny man jumped in front of the doors. I’m sorry, er, sir, but I’ll need your name.

Tuck’s eyes, once brown now faded to orange, sized up the man two and three more times. Tuck looked for signs that the man was a threat but found none.

I beg your pardon? Tuck asked politely. He had been programmed to be polite to humans, and even after 150 years of data decay and algorithmic evolution, old habits died hard.

I need your name, the man replied, voice quivering slightly.

For what?

Well, the man stammered, so I can announce you’re coming.

I don’t want to be announced, Tuck said.

Then I can’t let you in. The man backed closer to the doors. It’s my job.

Tuck scanned the man once again, incredulous. What is your job?

The man stood up a little straighter and stuck out his chin. I’m the doorman, sir.

You don’t have a uniform. You don’t look like any doorman I have ever seen.

Well, looks can be deceiving.

You have no idea, Tuck said, flexing his hand in front of the man’s face; the small squeaking sound it released made his gesture slightly less intimidating.

The doorman winced. Okay, look I was told I could sleep in the lobby at night if I just watched the door and didn’t let strangers in. I’m just doing my job. You know what that’s like, right?

I don’t have a job, Tuck said.

What are you doing here then?

My reluctance to tell you who I am is rivaled only by my unwillingness to tell you why I’m here. Even programmed politeness had its limits.

Oh, I know who you are, though, the doorman said defensively. You’re The Bot. They told me stories about you.

Really? And what did I do in these stories?

Well, as I recall you were angry at someone about … something, so you tracked down every member of his family and killed them all, one by one. Nice and clean.

Tuck had heard that one many times. Some tales had more concrete details, others were just as vague. Some involved him slaying a whole planet’s worth of people, some just a single person. Tuck found it fascinating that people made up false stories about things they didn’t understand. If I am so brutally skilled at killing, why are you bothering to stop me just so you can announce that I am coming? You should be running.

The doorman’s shoulders wilted in onto his chest and his eyelids stretched wide over bulging eyes, but he stood his ground. It’s … it’s my job, he whispered hoarsely.

Tuck reached out with both arms. The doorman scrunched his eyes closed. Tuck grabbed him by the shoulders and, with joints groaning and faded black muscles scraping together as they bunched, hoisted him up and to the side of the doorway. Then do it over here, Tuck said. Tuck tried not to let the man see that one of the muscles in his shoulder had come loose with the strain of lifting. Another thing to add to the list. Another thing that needed replacing.

Once inside, Tuck found himself in a lobby with halls branching off to the left and right and a set of elevators at the back. Realizing he had no idea where to go, he looked back at the door. Tuck sighed. It was another gesture he had picked up from being around humans for so long, even though he didn’t need to breathe. Tuck turned back to ask the doorman if he could show him around.

The doorman was nowhere to be found. A drone floated by, so intent on its destination that it didn’t notice Tuck. Tuck didn’t trust drones enough to bother trying to communicate with it. He went back inside and began doing a passive scan of the building, trying to single out auditory and electromagnetic clues as to where he should go. He was looking for someone specific, but there were several hundred people in the twenty-five-story building.

Just as he began his scan, the sound of someone breathing down a side hall caught his attention. He always thought the breathing humans did was such a liability.

Are you looking for something, or are you just gawking? Tuck asked.

A leathery face peeked out from the entrance to one of the hallways and seemed to stretch in surprise at being addressed. Humans were always surprised that he didn’t need to see them to know they were there.

The man straightened up and stepped out from behind the corner, smoothing wrinkles in a particularly nice jacket. He didn’t look the same as the other humans Tuck had seen in this part of the outpost. This man had finer clothing, his jacket was cut to fit him, and he wasn’t as dirty as most. I was looking for you, he said.

Why?

Because you’re looking for me, the man said. Tuck had already run the man’s face through his database and was confident that this wasn’t his contact.

I think you are mistaken, Tuck said. You are not the person I am seeking.

The stranger smiled, his leathery face stretching around large teeth. Clean teeth. Tuck liked humans with clean teeth. He appreciated personal hygiene, despite his own appearance. Let me be more specific, said the stranger, I’m here to take you to the man you’re looking for.

How do you know who I am looking for?

Because I work for him. Dronic sent me.

Tuck sent out a series of acoustic and electromagnetic pulses, scanning for weapons. A handgun in the man’s jacket and a long knife in a holster strapped to his forearm, neither of which were cause for immediate alarm. Most people were smart enough to carry a weapon in this place.

Where is Dronic?

I’ll show you, if you’ll just follow me, the man said, still smiling.

You still haven’t indicated who you are.

My name is Veld, and I work for Dronic.

Veld, I don’t trust you.

His smile, surprisingly, grew even wider. I don’t expect you to trust me. But if you want to see Dronic, you’ll have to come with me.

In a few milliseconds Tuck had already calculated his options. He didn’t want to trust this man, good dental hygiene or not, but Tuck wanted to get off the planet as soon as possible, and if this man could save him some time, it was worth it. Please, lead the way.

-- 2 --

Amelia sat at a small café inside New San Francisco’s spaceport, shaking her head. She had ordered a drink over ten minutes earlier, and it still hadn’t arrived. She expected quick reactions and loyal service if her money was involved, no matter how small the transaction.

She shifted uncomfortably on the metal chair she sat on, hoping nothing was rubbing off on the skirt of her white suit. New San Francisco wasn’t the type of place she normally liked to visit. She wondered how anyone stayed clean in this place. Gazing around the plaza next to the café, she noticed one of the large glowing billboards on the side of a building was for Galactic Enterprises, and she fought the urge to grit her teeth. At the speed of thought, she used her Link to find the company that owned the billboard. A Link was a special embedded device that delivered information directly to her optical nerve. When in use, it appeared as if an interface floated in front of the user, and they could view and interact with documents, videos, businesses, and just about anything else. Amelia used it to buy out the billboard looming over her and replace Galactic Enterprise’s advertisement with one for a brand of diarrhea medicine.

Satisfied with her purchase, Amelia pulled up some spreadsheets and reports on her Link. There was always something to be done.

A notification pinged her aural nerves, making it seem like a gentle chime went off by her right ear. With a thought, she accessed the notification, and the face of her second-in-command, Maze, appeared before her. Maze was all business, both in looks and demeanor, just as Amelia liked it.

Veld sent us a message. The bot has arrived.

Thank you, Maze.

It’s not too late to contact the bot directly, Maze said. Her voice conveyed her irritation more than her face did. We shouldn’t rely on Dronic’s lackey. We don’t know how trustworthy he is, and we can mitigate the risk by skipping over Dronic entirely.

Don’t worry about Veld, Amelia said softly, overlaying a report on the video feed and scanning it while she spoke. He’ll get exactly what he wants if he does what we want, and he seems quite ambitious. He won’t let us down.

It seems so inefficient.

We’re testing for the results we need without putting ourselves or our assets in danger. I want to see the bot make it through this one on his own. If he doesn’t make it, then he wouldn’t be useful to us anyway. Seems pretty efficient to me.

Dronic will try to take the bot for himself.

Of course he will. But if the bot is as good as everyone says he is, then he’ll be okay.

Okay, perhaps, but likely damaged.

Amelia closed the report and smiled at Maze. Which will make him even more desperate. Just the way we want him. She rose from her chair, brushing at her skirt, and then stood up straight and smoothed her jacket. Keep me apprised of his progress. I’m headed out to the landing field.

Acknowledged.

As Amelia walked out of the café, she noticed the waiter arriving with her drink. With a shake of her head, she used her Link to put the waiter’s name and face in her database, carefully cataloged in a list of people she forbade her associates to hire in the future.

-- 3 --

Veld led him down through a series of tunnels underneath the building. Every ten meters, flickering lights hung from power conduits on the ceiling and thick beams shored up the dirt walls. Tuck noted that whoever maintained them must have had quite an ingenious way to keep the swamp water from seeping in and flooding everything. Tuck asked Veld about it, but Veld knew little of when the tunnels were constructed or who made them. Normally, Dronic requires that we blindfold anyone who comes down here. But we figured that would be useless with you.

Tuck nodded.

And besides, I think Dronic has taken a liking to you.

He hasn’t met me yet.

True, but Dronic likes special things, and you, my friend, are special.

Humans were always assigning value to things, and the more mystery surrounding something the more special they considered it to be. To Tuck, there were very few things of value, and he was one of them.

Veld led Tuck to a short hallway branching off the main tunnel. At the end was a thick metal door. Veld keyed a code into a panel at the side of the door, and then spoke into it, The bot is here to see you, sir.

The door hissed and slid aside, revealing a large room that was sparsely decorated, but what few decorations there were occupied special spots atop stone pedestals. The pedestals held up things like a bottle of aged Arthalian whiskey and a small statuette used by a short-lived but famous fertility cult on Yala. All the semi-luxurious items clashed horribly with the muddy walls and dim lighting. The contrast of dismal cave with impressive antiques was so jarring that it was almost comical. Dronic was obviously trying to convince himself that he wasn’t stuck in the bowels of a sulfurous swamp running a salvage racket.

As he walked past the rows of pedestals, he was surprised to find one holding what appeared to be a first-generation Funbox, a virtual reality gaming system that was extremely popular with a child Tuck had served long ago. The sight called up memories from his storage, causing a wave of nostalgia.

Tuck brought his focus back to the task at hand. It was no time for feelings. He desperately needed a new regulator junction for his power cell; the patch job he had performed would only last a few more weeks. He made a detour in his constant search for body parts because he had found a junk dealer, this Dronic, whose salvage crew had found a nearly new junction.

Dronic sat at the back of the room, at the end of two lines of pedestals, watching Tuck from his makeshift throne, composed of scavenged ship parts that had been gilded with gold. It appeared Dronic hadn’t found enough gold to finish the entire throne, but he sat in it just as straight and haughty as if it were. He wore dozens of necklaces and rings, many of them worthless from what Tuck could see, but all gleaming in the low light.

The metal man! Dronic said. He gave Tuck a lopsided smile, showing dental work as shoddily constructed as his throne. Tuck immediately formed a few opinions about the man.

Dronic waited for Tuck to respond. After an awkward moment, when Tuck made it apparent that he wasn’t going to say anything, Dronic’s smile faltered, and he leaned forward in his seat. Aren’t you gonna say hi? he said in a lilting, clipped accent.

Hello, Dronic, Tuck said. I would like to complete this transaction as quickly as possible. I am sure you feel the same.

Dronic shook his head, and his smile returned. I have a new deal for you.

I won’t renegotiate. We agreed on a price.

I know, I know, Dronic said, waving his hand. I have a better deal now, and I think you’ll like it.

I am only interested in the regulator junction.

You haven’t even heard the offer yet.

You don’t have anything of interest to me.

You don’t like my treasures? Dronic scoffed. I have many nice things. He gestured at the pedestals lining his muddy throne room.

No, you don’t, Tuck said.

Dronic’s eyes scrunched up, and his smile changed to a sneer. Yes, I do, he said.

Tuck remained silent.

Yes, I do! Dronic screamed, then composed himself. All right, let’s talk about that later. First, the deal. I don’t have the regulator junction, but I—

Tuck was already trudging for the door.

I didn’t say you could go, Dronic said. The door Tuck had come through opened to reveal three large men blocking the doorway with a lot of muscle and no fewer than seven guns. Tuck stopped and listened, detecting four other humans entering the room from a back door. The clattering sound of weapons accompanied them. Tuck turned back to see Dronic smiling bigger, exposing pitted teeth and dark gaps where there were no teeth at all.

This isn’t normally how deals are made, Tuck said.

I guess you haven’t been in New San Francisco very long, Dronic said. He spread his hands in half-hearted apology. Okay, let me be honest.

Something you seem to be infrequently, Tuck interjected.

Dronic chuckled. That’s funny. He leaned back in his throne, staring at Tuck. They said you were funny. That you have a quick wit.

Tuck refrained from saying quick wit was an understatement. His processor core did quintillions of calculations per second. If Tuck said everything he was thinking, the monologue would last for years. But Tuck said nothing, because he had the distinct impression that Dronic wanted him to make clever remarks just so he could admire Tuck more. Tuck felt as if he were on top of one of the pedestals, a