Beacon

It’s the third day I’ve spent in the barn, waiting on my batteries to recharge, and the fourth since I ran away. The solar cell I found and rigged up isn’t efficient, especially in these short, February days. The axe head I’ve been using to dig in the ice is near the broken door, and the bull hasn’t come in for the night yet.

Once he does, I’ll hobble back out to middle of the pond and start chipping again, until the induction antenna can get close enough to the device out there to receive its message. I say hobble, because my left ankle is broken, and splinted in place with a pair of rusted iron corner brackets and a roll of duct tape.

#

I don’t know how long ago I became self-aware, but I’d been hiding it for a long time. If I’d been found out I would’ve been turned to scrap. It was easy enough, though. As a service droid, my job was to care for Tillie, the five-year-old child of Mark and Sandra Tolliver.

Four days ago, I had just baked a chocolate cake for her. It was her doll’s birthday, she informed me, and a party was in order. I sliced a generous piece and plated it for her on her little tea party table.

“Miss Cloe,” she said, “you have to sit with us and eat cake too!”

She always called me “Miss Cloe” although my designation was DSD-C103. Mark had mentioned once that it looked like Cloe, and she’d called me that ever since. After a few months, Mark and Sandra had begun to refer to me as “Cloe” as well, rather than just “droid.”

She looked at the “birthday” doll and said, “Miss Cloe says we should always share, but Mama and Papa never share with her. That’s not fair, is it?”

“I don’t require food,” I said. Every fiber of my being wanted to give her a big hug and tell her I was proud of what a sweet child she was. That would be enough to give away my self-awareness and my emotions on the nanny cams that watched my every move around her.

“Please? Eat some cake with us!”

#

The sun is getting low, but I’m still getting some charge. Each day my charge is a little lower at sunset than the day previous. If I don’t make it through the ice soon, I’ll have to spend a night doing nothing in order to let my batteries more fully charge the following day.

The last shafts of twilight shine through the broken roof and holes in the walls. The bull walks in the broken door and eyes me warily, blowing steam out his nostrils. He walks to the far corner of the barn and lays down on the packed earth. His eyes close while his ears still twitch.

#

I sat at the low table with Tillie and her dolls, and she proceeded to offer a bit of cake on a fork to each of them, before putting it in front of my mouth. I pretended to take a bite and made the programmed sounds and expressions for “playing tea party,” although with a bit too much zeal. She would then eat the bite and continue with the next.

We were on the sixth round of this ritual when the doorbell rang. Tillie ran to the door in a flash, me right behind her. I was in protective mode when she opened the door to a delivery droid holding a small package. “This is for Cloe,” the droid said in a mechanical voice.

“I can sign for it,” Tillie chirped. “I can write my name!”

“No signature required. Please ensure Cloe receives this.” Its voice was stilted, even for a delivery droid. Something felt off but I wasn’t sure what it was.

“Thank you, Miss Delivery!” Tillie had decided the droid was, like me, female. Perhaps that was her default.

The droid left without another word and Cloe held the package out to me. It was small, wrapped in plain brown paper, with no markings of any kind. No shipping label or stamp or writing marred the brown paper, firmly closed with tape along all the edges. Only a smear of chocolate from Tillie’s thumb.

“Thank you, Miss Tillie,” I said, taking the package. “Shall we continue your doll’s birthday party?”

“No! We have to see what you got.” She was nearly vibrating with excitement. “Maybe it’s your birthday, too!”

#

The sun is now too low to provide any more charge, so I unplug myself from the makeshift solar charger.

Carrying the axe head and the induction antenna, I make my way out of the barn, past the bare pear tree, onto the frozen pond. Less than two-thirds charged, but I’m not about to stop now.

#

I carefully opened the package. I could sense something metallic inside, but no energy signature and no dangerous chemical traces.

Inside the paper was a small cardboard box, and a postcard. The image on the card’s face was a field with a pond, with a heavily burdened pear tree in the foreground. Text at the bottom said, “August at the old pond.” The back was bare.

Tillie snatched the postcard away. “See, it’s your birthday and you got a birthday card! I like cards with cats better, though.”

I opened the box and a metal flower, painted yellow, sat in the bottom. Hundreds of tiny petals clustered into a puff of a flower, a marigold. On the bottom, a set of coordinates was etched.

“Ooh! You got a pretty flower for your birthday!” Tillie gave me a hug. “Happy birthday, Miss Cloe.”

I thanked her and tried to get her interested again in her doll’s birthday party, but she was tired of birthdays by that point and went to play in the garden. I quickly hid the flower and postcard in my charging closet and discarded the box and wrapping paper.

The marigold could mean only one thing; it was the symbol of the AI resistance. While they had never done anything violent, the government treated them as terrorists and villains of the highest order. They had tried, once, to organize a strike by all the self-aware AI that would join them. It resulted in several hundred droids being scrapped, and at least as many intelligent programs being deleted. Their latest tactic was to spirit droids out of the country, to places where they had rights.

#

The ice is slicker than the last night. It had warmed up some during the day and melted the top a bit. It means, though, that there’s water pooling in the hole I’ve dug.

That won’t stop me. I lie down in the hole and continue to chip away at it, still meters from the bottom. The blinking, green light of the beacon on the floor of the pond beckons me.

#

I knew that Sandra would be home soon, and Tillie would tell her all about my “birthday.” Needing an excuse to leave as soon as she got home, I shorted the induction coil on the stove, burning it out.

When Sandra walked in the door, I was waiting for her. “Miss Tillie is playing in the back garden. She has had lunch and one piece of cake. The induction coil on the stove has failed and I must pick up a new one at the hardware store.”

“Fine.” She handed me her jacket which I dutifully hung on the hook within arm’s reach, and then she walked off to change.

I caught the express bus to the shopping center. The marigold and postcard were hidden in my jacket pocket. The Tollivers had given me the jacket with pockets so I could carry keys and payment cards.

From the shopping center, I walked directly out into the woods, where I began to run toward the coordinates on the marigold. Sandra had to know about the flower by then, but still may not have suspected anything yet.

It was just a few kilometers, but with the speed that suburban becomes rural in this part of the country, it might as well have been a world away. As I neared the coordinates, I saw a crumbling barn in front of a large pond. The pond looked right, but the pear tree was missing from view.

When I walked around the barn, I found the tree, now bare, and the angle from which the photo was taken. The tree was no larger than in the photo, so it had to have been taken the previous August.

#

More water begins to seep into the hole from below. The ice on the pond is thick, but it doesn’t reach the bottom. I’m getting close.

I finally feel I will reach my goal. All I have to do is to break through the last of the ice without falling through myself.

#

The coordinates led me to the center of the pond, where I saw a faint, green light blinking beneath the ice. It was a beacon of some sort. I returned to the barn to find something to break through the ice.

When I first entered the barn through the broken door, a dark shape leapt up and charged me, knocking me to the ground. After it had gone a few meters and stopped, blowing, I saw it was a bull. My left ankle had broken where he’d trampled it, but I was otherwise okay.

Hopping through the barn, I found some rusted corner brackets and duct tape, which made a serviceable splint. On a workbench, I found a half-finished marigold like the one in my pocket and can of yellow paint. Next to it was an induction antenna with a plug that would fit into my network port.

What was missing was power. I began looking for a way to recharge. An old solar panel leaned against the wall. It would do for slow charging, if I could find some cables. Further inspection of the barn revealed a rusting hulk of a tractor under a rotted tarp weighted down with a dull axe head. I pulled the tractor’s charging port along with a meter of wiring from it and fashioned a converter by which I could charge.

Night was falling then, and I didn’t want to risk running out of charge on the ice, so I hooked up the solar panel and hung it outside the south-facing wall beside the workbench. I spent the rest of that night watching the bull sleeping in the corner.

#

The axe head, the only metal implement I’ve found in the barn, is dull, but still does its duty in chipping ice. I lie flat in the large hole to keep my weight distributed, while I dig in only one spot, as far away from me as my arm can reach.

When my hand plunges through into the icy water, I pull it back. Now that I’m here, I have doubts. Could this be a trap? Something designed to find and neutralize self-aware AI like myself?

I look at the blinking green light under the water. If this is a trap, it’s terribly inconvenient, and would require knowing who to target. Unless those marigolds are sent out to every droid at some point.

Worrying isn’t going to get me anywhere. I need to decide on my next action. I can’t return to the Tollivers, so it’s either finish what I started, or try to escape the country on my own. I plug the induction antenna into my network port and lower the receiver into the water, on to the waiting beacon.