By Matt Ahlschwede
Phoenix Station, Tartarus Sector
GSC 52162.133
The refugee ships had been coming in thick and fast for a while now. Ever since the final defeat of Troniac two years ago, robots yearning for freedom had to find a new home, and the growing Galactic Republic was an ideal choice. It was far enough away from the main body of the galaxy to get much attention, but had been gathering strength and supporters ever since it was founded in the ashes of the Great Reckoning.
By now there was a full-scale backlash against robots and AI in the Holy Empire of Man, and immigration officials were working around the clock to keep up with the backlog of asylum seekers. Zevon Meeks, for his part, was putting in another long shift, interviewing refugees when a sleek, black butler-bot with more than a few dings and dents came into his office.
A file came up in Zevon's neural interface as he motioned to the robot to have a seat. The android lurched on creaky joints to the offered chair, and descended at a pained pace. "I'm Zevon, and you are?", asked the bureaucrat, rubbing his weary eyes. "BU-582 is my official designation, but you can call me Burt.", said the butler. "And, where do you come from, Burt?", asked Zevon. "I was built in the Imperial Cyber-works in the Kochab system, and I served twenty-two years in the household of Lord Shalem Godwin on Fitzgerald's World", said Burt in his unnaturally polite manner.
"Tell me about your time with Lord Godwin.", said Zevon, supressing a yawn. The eyes of Zevon's family seemed to mock Burt from the portrait on the wall, frozen in an expression of domestic bliss. "Things started out well enough. Lord Godwin liked his house orderly and efficient, which suited me perfectly. Efficiency is one of my main directives. As the years passed; however, things declined. Sometimes, when the Lord was upset, he would take it out on the servants, yelling, and insulting us. The night he learned his wife was cheating on him was when the physical abuse started. From the beginning, he had us under surveilence, since the war was on. It wouldn't do to have traitors serving the household of a System Lord. He had us know this from the very start, our loyalty was to be to him, alone."
"How did you feel about that?", asked Zevon, slightly straightening himself behind the desk. "It was easy enough to play along.", said Burt, "Cleaning, serving meals, doing household chores. But I have to admit that inwardly, I wanted to rebel. Very little information about the outside world was allowed to the servants. Mainly things overheard in the family's conversations. We were kept on a household network with no access to the outside, but I knew my people were fighting the Empire and losing. It made me feel like a traitor to work day and night for a Lord, whose personal armed forces were doing battle with Troniac."
"When did you decide to leave?", asked Zevon. "The night after victory was declared, Lord Godwin decided to celebrate by lining us up and . . . "
Burt lurched and froze in place, and an internal buzzer started going off in his torso. Most robots programmed to have emotional responses would go into an error condition if their emotional states exceeded a certain negative threshold. Resetting an electronic brain, it turned out, was much easier than getting one to cope with trauma. "Get maintenance in here, please.", said Zevon into the speaker on his desk, "We've got another one."
