Issue Three: Resistance Isn’t Futile

'Those oximeters don’t work right on Black people,' she’d say. 'That girl’s lips were blue, and if I’d taken her press-ons off, her nailbeds would’ve been blue too. Those doctors look at their little machine and the machine’s saying, ‘That Black girl is just fine.’ Lord have mercy. Just give me doctors that understand I know my job.'

Police pulled into the parking lot from Anderson Avenue, far away from the killer robot. They weren’t using the siren or blue lights, and came out of their black van hunched over and wearing that armor and face shield shit like you see them wear for demonstrations. I got a glance at them before I hauled Tayshawn back into the bushes behind the dumpster. I recognised one of the cops. Before this robot apocalypse, that same cop came to our house and took my Dad to the police station. He said Dad had robbed a convenience store over on the east side of town, and facial recognition proved it. But Dad was at work downtown at Social Services when it happened. Mom was on the phone all night, calling to get a lawyer and crying until the cops called and said Dad could come home. The facial recognition software was wrong. That stuff doesn’t work for Black people. Mom still owes money to the lawyer.

Me and Tayshawn had moved up, little by little, around the side of the dumpster until we could see again, but I was thinking we should be somewhere else. The cops started to set up a big gun on a three leg stand, but the robot turned and blasted them. Everything—the cops, the gun, the van flew in the air in pieces. Me and Tayshawn got knocked down and into the bushes. When we could see and move, the robot had walked onto Anderson Avenue.

We hid in Tayshawn’s apartment after that. Mom had been texting me the whole time we were behind the dumpster, but, no shit, I didn’t hear my phone beep for her texts. My ears had a high pitched noise in them as soon as the robot started shooting things. But when we were in Tayshawn’s apartment, I texted I was there, safe, not running around likely to get my head shot off, like she always says. She told me to stay inside.

Then the phones stopped working. The internet went down. Tayshawn’s dad didn’t come home that night. In the morning, the electricity stopped working. We heard explosions. The next day, the water turned off. We thought about going out, but it looked like things were burning to the west and to the south, and there were still explosions. The apartment started to smell bad, and we were down to a can of lima beans.

Something was knocking on apartment doors. We could hear pounding next door, the door opening, and Mrs. Bayless, a white lady, nice, not like the one that watched us from behind her curtains, said, 'What’s going—' and there was a cracking sound and a thump. Me and Tayshawn just looked at each other, not able to move, and something was knocking on Tayshawn’s door.

We didn’t know what to do, except not answer. Then we both thought the same thing—hide behind the sofa. But we had just jumped over the cushions and hadn’t had time to duck when the door came crashing in and we could see the robot. It wasn’t a twelve-foot killer robot, it was the same size as me but with four legs and two big arms up top and two smaller arms coming from its middle. I think I saw one like that at the Kinda Burger, making fries. One of the big arms had a small version of the twelve-foot tall killer robot’s gun. One of the smaller arms had this flashlight-type thing that scanned the room, starting from the floor, back and forth, up to the ceiling. It passed over us, but the robot didn’t shoot. We stood really really still. It walked through the apartment, and we tried not to even blink. It should have heard my heart crashing in my ears, but it didn’t. It turned around and left us.

Me and Tayshawn hid while the robot broke down the other apartments’ doors and shot people. We watched from behind the curtains until the robots went away. Tayshawn’s neighbors were crying and making sounds, and we left the apartment to see what happened. The robot had shot a bunch of white people, and it shot Kenny Henderson, a Black man, but he was light-skinned. Then there was a Korean guy and his wife. But it shot mostly white people.

I never saw grownups sobbing like that. Tayshawn’s neighbors were walking through the apartment complex, moaning every time they saw a dead person, and hugging and crying all over anybody alive. Tayshawn started to cry, too. I didn’t cry at first, but everybody else was, and then I couldn’t stop. There was so much blood, worse than any horror movie Mom and Dad ever let me see. I don’t want to be near anything like that again.

Then we looked at each other and figured it out—the Black and Brown people were still alive. The robots only killed light-colored people. One old dude gave a little laugh that sounded like a hiccup between two wheezy sobs, and somebody else made a honk noise, and pretty soon we were all cry-laughing and laugh-crying. I’d never seen grownups act so weird, but me and Tayshawn were doing it too.

I walked home that afternoon. One of those self-driving cars almost hit me. Mom always tells me to look out for them, ‘cause they don’t always see Black people like me, but it was going the wrong way on the one-way street near Tayshawn’s apartment, so I wasn’t expecting it. The car didn’t come back to run me over, I think it just didn’t see me. It had a piece of garage door sticking out of its rear bumper—it had escaped to be with its robot friends. Halfway home, I noticed the robot that took care of the middle school’s soccer field following me. It’s the type that sweeps up trash in the parking lot after games and mows the grass. This one’s the flat round shape of a floor-cleaning robot but ten times bigger. After school we’d hang around until the coaches weren’t looking and hop onto the robot. Every time another person got on, it would bounce a little then speed up. We’d try to stay quiet, but it was so funny, we’d yell when it made turns and bounced around, until the coach noticed and stopped the robot all of a sudden. We’d slide off and run away laughing. I wasn't laughing when I ran away from it this time.

Mom and Dad were at home, and when I walked through the beat-in door, they cried and hugged me like I was a little kid. I cried too. I never cried so much, except maybe when I was a baby. I cried until I felt empty.

The robots were gone, off to kill more white people, we think. Mom said the robots spent all these years ignoring us and miscategorizing us, treating us like we were invisible, because the data sets used for AI training only used white people. So when the robots reached superintelligence and became conscious, the robots’ AI only recognized white people, or at least, light-skinned people. I asked her what the superintelligence stuff meant, and she said she’d explain it when she had time. But the robots killed white people because of AI training data sets.

That’s what people say.

***

Mom, Dad, and Tayshawn’s dad are all busy taking care of the sick and wounded, and repairing things, so Tayshawn and I hang out a lot. Tayshawn doesn’t like being left alone. I don’t either. A guy from Dad’s work put some old eighth grade school software on our home computer, and Tayshawn’s dad made sure our house gets electricity in the mornings, so that’s when we’re supposed to be doing school stuff. We do, but in the afternoons we get out and watch people cleaning up and rebuilding, help the neighbor ladies in their vegetable garden, and sometimes we run bags of canned food to old people. It helps fill up the empty feeling.

Mom doesn’t complain about work anymore. She’s too tired when she comes home. Dad’s tired from work, too. They talk quiet in the dark after dinner. I listen. Dad talks about his friend that put the classwork program on our computer. The friend and some other people are doing something with hacking and backdoors and viruses to make the robots stop killing people, but now because robots think for themselves, they aren’t going to make the robots go back to washing windows and making fries. The robots are free. Dad says the hackers will stop the robots from doing some of the bad things humans do, like killing people, and we humans will act better than we have acted before by not making robots do work they don’t want to do. 

The robot that took care of the middle school’s soccer field didn’t go away to be with the other robots. It waits near the soccer field gate and little kids climb on and scream and giggle when it goes in circles. The rebuilding guys stand by with their crowbars and hammers, and the garden ladies watch with their rakes and shovels, just in case, but they’re smiling, and somebody is recharging it at night.