ROBOTS

robot (n.)

1923, "mechanical person," also "person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical," from the English translation of the 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots") by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave" (from Old Slavic *orbu-, from PIE *orbh- "pass from one status to another;" see orphan).

 

The Slavic word thus is a cousin to German Arbeit "work" (Old High German arabeit). The play was enthusiastically received in New York from its Theatre Guild performance debut on Oct. 9, 1922. According to Rawson the word was popularized by Karel Capek's play, "but was coined by his brother Josef (the two often collaborated), who used it initially in a short story." 

Hence, "a human-like machine designed to carry out tasks like a human agent."

The Biggest Problem were Quislings. 

Quislings? 

Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies. 

Could you elaborate? 

Well, I’m not a shrink, so I don’t know all the tech terms. 

That’s all right. 

Well, as I understand it, there’s a type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation. 

They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of.

Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, 

join it, try to be like it. 

I guess that happens in kidnap situations, you know, like a Patty Hearst/ Stockholm Syndrome–type, or, like in regular war, when people who are invaded sign up for The Enemy’s Army. 

Collaborators, sometimes even more die-hard than the people they’re trying to mimic, like those French fascists who were some of Hitler’s last troops. 

Maybe that’s why we call them quislings, like it’s a French word or something.

But you couldn’t do it in This War. You couldn’t just throw up your hands and say, “Hey, don’t kill me, I’m on your side.” 

There was no gray area in this fight, no in between. 

I guess some people just couldn’t accept that. It put them right over the edge. 

They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking and trying to eat other people. 

That’s how we found our first one. He was a male adult, midthirties. Dirty, dazed, shuffling down the sidewalk. We thought he was just in Z-shock, until he bit one of our guys in the arm. That was a horrible few seconds. 

I dropped the Q with a head shot then turned to check on my buddy. He was crumpled on the curb, swearing, crying, staring at the gash in his forearm. 

This was a death sentence and he knew it. 

He was ready to do himself until we discovered that the guy I shot had bright red blood pouring from his head. When we checked his flesh we found he was still warm! 

You should have seen our buddy lose it. It’s not every day you get a reprieve from the big governor in the sky. Ironically, he almost died anyway. The bastard had so much bacteria in his mouth that it caused a near fatal staph infection. 

We thought maybe we stumbled onto some new discovery but it turned out it’d been happening for a while.

The CDC was just about to go public. They even sent an expert up from Oakland to brief us on what to do if we encountered more of them. It blew our minds. 

Did you know that quislings were the reason some people used to think they were immune? They were also the reason all those bullshit wonder drugs got so much hype. Think about it. Someone’s on Phalanx, gets bit but survives. What else is he going to think? 

He probably wouldn’t know there was even such a thing as quislings. They’re just as hostile as regular zombies and in some cases even more dangerous. 

How so? 

Well, for one thing, they didn’t freeze. I mean, yeah, they would if they were exposed over time, but in moderate cold, if they’d gone under while wearing warm clothes, they’d be fine. They also got stronger from the people they ate. Not like zombies. They could maintain over time. 

But you could kill them more easily. 

Yes and no. 

You didn’t have to hit them in head; you could take out the lungs, the heart, hit them anywhere, and eventually they’d bleed to death. But if you didn’t stop them with one shot, they’d just keep coming until they died. 

They don’t feel pain? 

Hell no. It’s that whole mind-over-matter thing, being so focused you’re able to suppress relays to the brain and all that. You should really talk to an expert. 

Please continue. 

Okay, well, that’s why we could never talk them down. There was nothing left to talk to. These people were zombies, maybe not physically, but mentally you could not tell the difference. 

Even physically it might be hard, if they were dirty enough, bloody enough, diseased enough. Zombies don’t really smell that bad, not individually and not if they’re fresh. 

How do you tell one of these from a mimic with a whopping dose of gangrene? You couldn’t. It’s not like the military would let us have sniffer dogs or anything. 

You had to use the eye test. Ghouls don’t blink, I don’t know why. Maybe because they use their senses equally, their brains don’t value sight as much. Maybe because they don’t have as much bodily fluid they can’t keep using it to coat the eyes. 

Who knows, but they don’t blink and quislings do. That’s how you spotted them; back up a few paces, and wait a few seconds. 

Darkness was easier, you just shone a beam in their faces. If they didn’t blink, you took them down. 

And if they did? 

Well, our orders were to capture quislings if possible, and use deadly force only in self-defense. It sounded crazy, still does, but we rounded up a few, hog-tied them, turned them over to police or National Guard. I’m not sure what they did with them. 

I’ve heard stories about Walla Walla, you know, the prison where hundreds of them were fed and clothed and even medically cared for. 

[His eyes flick to the ceiling.] 

You don’t agree. 

Hey, I’m not going there. You want to open that can of worms, read the papers. Every year some lawyer or priest or politician tries to stoke that fire for whatever side best suits them. 

Personally, I don’t care. I don’t have any feelings toward them one way or the other. I think the saddest thing about them is that they gave up so much and in the end lost anyway. 

Why is that? 

’Cause even though we can’t tell the difference between them, the real zombies can. 

Remember early in the war, when everybody was trying to work on a way to turn the living dead against one another? There was all this “documented proof ” about infighting—eyewitness accounts and even footage of one zombie attacking another. Stupid. It was zombies attacking quislings, but you never would have known that to look at it. 

Quislings don’t scream. They just lie there, not even trying to fight, writhing in that slow, robotic way, eaten alive by the very creatures they’re trying to be.