I, Willhelm

Robbie Samuel had almost given up on the Aphelion story when an email arrived at 2 am. He’d been up all night, his cat curled on his lap and purring. Normally he would have ignored the email until morning, but as it was he’d been up late sorting through the various admin he’d been ignoring from his mother’s nursing home. The saw the email arrive in his inbox, opened it without thinking and began to read. The cat mewed in protest as he sat up and leaned in towards the screen, it’s head squished between his stomach and the edge of the desk.

“Move, move, Sprinkle”. Robbie shoed it away and wheeled his chair even closer to the table.

He didn’t know why he did it, but a cautious little voice in the back of his mind whispered that he should take a screen shot. He did and then promptly stood up to make a tea, his mind racing. When he returned a few minutes later, a tea in hand, he refreshed the email out of habit. The screen flickered and went black, refreshing to his empty inbox. The email was gone.

Robbie stared, paused, and then clicked furiously to see if the screen shot had been saved. It had.

He reached into his pocket and took a photo of the screen and quickly printed that too.

Sprinkle mewed at him irritated.

“I’m going to have to leave you with Auntie Mary, Sprinkle. This story is going to be incredible!”

Joan met him the day after in the car park of an old ASDA store, the camera’s all too far away to see them and a wide brimmed hat pulled down over her eyes.

“Elenore?” Robbie approached, and she nodded. “I’m assuming that’s not your name?”

“Obviously.”

“That email you sent, it vanished a few minutes after I started reading it.”

The colour drained a little from Joan’s face, but she only nodded, unsurprised.

“I was worried that would happen.”

“Aren’t you worried someone will follow us?

“Nobody human reads those, it’s all just a computer reading it.”

“So an algorithm wiped that email.”

“I think it was an algorithm, once. I think it’s become something more.”

“What makes you say that?”

Joan passed him a small tablet and played one of the many clips that where visible on the dashboard. “This has footage from an observation I was working on. Watch the edges of the screen, you see that? The lagging? That’s because the footage is being constructed. Something happened and the robot didn’t want us to see it.”

“The woman who disappeared”—

“Alice Wilson”.

“Have they found her?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What makes you think the robot is sentient? What if someone is just using the robot?”

“That’s not my problem. You can figure that out, I just want to see Aphelion robotics crash and burn.”

“Why?”

“I need a reason?”

“I like to know people’s motivations.” Robbie shrugged.

“I’m the only person in my family who hasn’t lost their job to a robot. My sister is a gp. She spent 10 years studying to that and, then a bloody robot replaced her. She’s still paying back her student loans. She’s never going to be able to pay them off. That’s my reason.”

Joan turned around and walked back to the bike she had cycled on. “Everything I know is on that tablet, you don’t need me for anything else.”

Robbie walked back to his car and sat down, the tablet in his hands. He thought back to Ellis Baptiste and the stories he had told him of the men from Aphelion, and how his life had been ruined.

This story could be very big, or very bad for him personally, and Robbie wasn’t sure if he wanted to risk it.