The Clockwork Russian and Other Stories

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For twenty years I had no one to talk to except the computer, and the robots, and myself. The computer had no personality, the robots were mindless little drones, and I wasn’t much of a conversationalist.

Then she showed up.

I must have been asleep when it happened — the sky never got lighter or darker here, just the same starlit twilight — so I’d taken to going to bed and waking up when I felt like it.

I didn’t feel like waking up only four hours after telling the computer to darken the windows and dim the lights. I needed a good nine hours of sleep to be functional these days. But I felt her, and she jolted me out of a dream that melted away instantly.

“Computer, interrogative: who’s there?”

The androgynous voice, which had resisted two decades of me trying to reprogram it into something a little more pleasant, said, “there is another human present on the island.”

I practically jumped out of bed and pulled on yesterday’s clothes; they were still in a heap on the floor. The computer lit the way for me as I pelted through the house, snatched up my handheld, and left the small, domed building behind. I turned to the port — the only entrance to the island, so it only made sense that, whoever the human was, she had to be there.

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