Sibling Unity

A robot finds family togetherness

ELSA’S METALLIC FEET TROD securely down Mount Evans towards the City of Fools, the place Father had rejected years ago. After the people scorned his ideas about Artificial Intelligence, he’d gone up to the Colorado range to create her. That’s where he’d also found the organic unit, Bear Cub.

Father was gone now, but the city could still realise his dreams around the harmonisation of natural and positronic science. It was Elsa’s goal to ensure these would live on forever, like her.

On her shoulders, Bear’s outer covering lagged like a crumbling shroud. She had no concept of weight, knowing only that she was able to carry him with ease. His unit had been a different composition to hers: small with a strange material and an unclear function. The first time he rolled on the ground, an odd sound ruffling his throat, she’d gone to the study to report the matter. “Professor Jones, the bear unit is damaged. The humanoid unit will delete it.”

“No, Elsa it’s a bear. You will not delete it. And you mustn’t say ‘humanoid unit’ when referring to yourself. You are ‘I’, or ‘me’. Bear is ‘brother’ or ‘he’. And I am ‘Father’, not ‘Professor Jones’. Bear wants you to play with him.”

But she lacked the capacity to roll on the floor or to ruffle her throat—a malfunction that had long disquieted Father. Before his final shutdown he’d said, “I’ve tried to pass something on to you, Elsa. A little real humanity, though some may call it pride. You will no doubt find both in that place we call a heart.”

When Father was nearing deletion, he began to invite students from the city. They came to observe her and Bear as part of their clinical discussions. Sometimes they were examined in the workshop, where a selected few would be allowed to carry out small experiments on her positronics. A number of her parts often lay around the workshop in a haphazard manner.

The bear unit had also been disassembled, its spare components carefully labelled and categorised in a sealed containers. One or two students, having nothing else to do, took time to add greater functionality to her systems. Later on, another student, far exceeding the abilities of those preceding her, had come and input a full-range sensor of human stimuli response. Now Elsa could truly feel, see and hear like a human.

She saw that Father’s students became agitated whenever they examined the bear unit, clustering around until it seemed they would delete it by proximity. Once, one had dropped his stylus as he struggled to hold it and himself steady. But now, by this time able to distinguish between excitement and dutiful interest, she was aware that they examined her with no agitation whatsoever.

When father finally shut down, Elsa followed his instructions and placed his deleted structure in the furnace. By this time Bear had also stopped functioning properly. His leg did not work well. Although, in a short time, he’d grown much bigger than she had, she was far stronger. One day she had damaged him in what Father used to call ‘rough house’ play. When one of his claws scraped sharply against her outer covering, she had caught it on reflex, extracted it sharply, perhaps twisting his leg too hard.

The limb had come off in her hands.

Nor could she fix him with her inorganic spare parts. She had tried, but he’d screamed, then cried, whimpered, and was silent. He hadn’t ever cried or moved again.

Bear was much softer now. Tissue and fluids did not mix well with spare nanobotic components. Yet Elsa felt the attempt had been necessary. So she had tried to fix Bear’s leg. Father would have been...she accessed an emotion from her databanks ...proud. Now she thought of what would happen if Bear were to go into the furnace. She stroked the patchy seeping fur. He would not exit unharmed, as she would.

She and Bear would arrive as a single unit, greeted by Father’s students. They had not visited in eighty years, but once they saw her and Bear, they would be welcomed as one. And when she gave them her name, they would gather close in trembling agitation, ready to discuss and analyse.

One of them would even drop their stylus.

That one would fix her brother so that their bond would remain unbroken.

Lifting Bear higher on her back, the immortal unit E1-SA rolled the words around and formed them in the air. “Bear unit  ... Bear  ...Brother.”

Then, looking down Mount Evans, she began her unhindered descent towards the City of Fools. 

Word count: 774

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