Birdbrain, by Brandon Crilly

One thing I learned about Bradley Zhao before he graduated was that sometimes, it was best to let him talk until he ran out of energy.

That was how we spent the walk from the market into the newgrowth near the Ambassador Bridge’s West Fort Street exit. Brad marched two steps ahead, twisting around every few seconds to make sure I was still there and listening. His barreling gait managed to avoid every low tree branch and upturned root, as though he’d memorized each one and could have navigated with his eyes closed if he wanted.

“…when they designed the bots to climb—that’s a Gen Three mod, did you know that? Gen Four lets them fly, but this forest is small enough we don’t need one that can.” Brad abruptly turned, leading me onto another natural path. “Birdbrain is a Gen Two so he can’t climb, but I checked the trees anyway and, uh, whoever stole him didn’t stash him there. Which means—”

“Hold on.” I stopped moving, forcing him to do the same. “What do you mean someone stole…Birdbot?”

“Birdbrain.” Brad grinned from ear to ear. “That’s not his real designation, but that’s what I call him. He likes watching birds.” The grin dropped as quickly as it appeared. “He’s awesome.”

As he started walking again, he let me hurry alongside him. “Why do you think someone stole him?”

“Because he’s gone,” Brad said flatly.

“And he didn’t just wander off.”

“His programming won’t let him.”

“Okay, so who stole him then?”

Brad gave me a dubious look I remembered too well from his days in my tech class. “Come on, Mr. Hak, you’re supposed to be smarter than me.”

He stopped rambling then, which gave me a chance to wrap my head around this. When Brad materialized at Grepp’s Market, I could tell right away he was upset about something. He’d always talked fast, but stumbling over his words meant something else, along with his fingers clenching and unclenching. My mind flashed back to the education plan designed to help this energetic, extroverted kid navigate a school system designed only for the neurotypical. After five years, remembering all the specifics was tough—besides, as an adult he might have been using entirely different strategies that I wouldn’t know.

I wondered what would’ve happened if he hadn’t spotted a friendly face at the market. Would he have just kept walking? Pinged his parents or someone on Discord? The moment he saw me his face had lit up, and the next thing he was saying I needed to come with him, that he wanted to show me the newgrowth where he worked so I could help him with something.

The woods under the West Fort Street exit matched other newgrowths planted across the province. Vacant lots, derelict buildings and unused pockets of land coopted by the government for more and wilder greenspace. A few former students worked as arborists, bioengineers or technicians, though the newgrowths were monitored by the fewest actual people possible to keep them from being disrupted.

“How long have you been a monitor?” I asked Brad.

“Isn’t it an awesome gig?” Brad spread his arms out to encompass the entire woods. “There was a co-op at Waterloo and they wanted people with attention to detail. Plus someone who understands robots, since the robots are the ones who understand the plants. Birdbrain and I keep this place looking sharp.”

He stopped suddenly and turned to stare down at me. This was only the second time he’d made eye contact with me that day. “We need to get him back.”

I had no idea how I was going to help, only a dozen questions I doubted Brad was in the headspace to answer, so I just said, “Okay.”

It didn’t take much longer to reach our destination. Brad beckoned me toward a trio of massive willows. Despite the overpass now directly overhead, the ground squelched from last night’s rain and all I could smell were damp shrubs and displaced pollen. I followed Brad between the willows, sliding across thick roots, until we reached a clearing that backed onto one of the overpass’s massive concrete supports.

Brad’s normal speaking voice echoed over the sound of EV trucks passing overhead. “See, this is from his feet, and this scratch here is probably from one of his arms…”

Birdbrain’s footprints were easily a meter wide and twice that in length. Brad had showed me a still of the robot before we left the market—with his baseball cap and grinning face blocking half the image—so I had a vague sense of its proportions: two legs wide as girders and bent like a rabbit’s, able to angle the boxy central mass up and down. Antennae and a big green eye in the front, but I imagined there were all kinds of retractable arms and sensors tucked into the body. I only understood the broad strokes of these forestry bots, having never worked on them specifically.

What I understood even less, though, was how to investigate a theft—or kidnapping, I guess.

Luckily Brad kept supplying information. “His signal winked out right here—I mean it stopped transmitting. He’s linked to the map overlay on my tablet, see here, but there’s no signal, which means they disabled it.”

As I stepped, he followed on my heels. “So they disabled it first, then took him, because they didn’t want me to know they took him, because if I’d known to expect them I wouldn’t have left him alone…”

“Brad, can you cool it for a second?” I asked without thinking, but he clamped his mouth shut and nodded. My students were used to that phrase, but I’d forgotten it was one of the signals we’d worked out with Brad when he was in the ninth grade. More gently, I added, “I’ll look around on my own, okay? I can’t promise anything, but I might spot a clue.”

He shadowed me while I walked but didn’t interject. Birdbrain’s footsteps were obvious thanks to his mass, entering the clearing through a wider gap toward the west—which Brad hadn’t taken me through, of course—and then seeming to turn in a circle. He must’ve been examining the trees, probably on some preprogrammed course. The steps didn’t lead anywhere else, though, as though Birdbrain had walked a circle or two and then disappeared.

Unless.

“Does Birdbrain always walk the same way?”

The question was too vague, but before I could rephrase Brad’s eyes lit up. “You mean covering his tracks, like the Sand People in Star Wars. Yeah, he does!” Brad had sunk one boot into the center of a footprint and tugged it out so he could point. “He’s programmed to minimize his impact on the forest. But his signal cut out right here.”

“Doesn’t mean this is where he stopped.” I led Brad out of the clearing, through that wider gap where Birdbrain entered and must have exited, plodding over his exact footprints. The natural path we followed was slowly being taken over by lavender and milkweed, but not a single plant had been damaged by the bot’s passage. The same couldn’t be said for a wide-leafed shrub we found a minute later, along a section of path where the tree branches left a significant gap for the sun to peek through. Half the shrub had been crushed by something square that seemed to taper in the center, so not one of Birdbrain’s feet.

“Hey, did you see this, Mr. Hak?” Directly across from the shrub, one of Birdbrain’s footprints was too wide on one side. Either Birdbrain slipped, or the same thing that crushed this shrub was responsible.

I estimated the distance between them, and then marched forward the same amount. Sure enough, I found two more indentations in the dirt, on either side of the path. From something with four legs—or fingers?—covering a wide enough space to encircle a Gen Two forestry bot.

 “They took him,” I said without thinking.

“Knew it! We need to get him back!”

“Wait, Brad—”

Except he was already sprinting away. And I thought I knew what sort of machine would make those four equidistant marks.

The question was how to break the news to Brad that his bot wasn’t coming back.

---

Brad wasn’t in a listening mood as I followed him to a camouflaged shed in the furthest corner of the woods from where we entered. The biocrete was caked in vines on one side but would be solid as iron until a tech decided to break it down or move it. The single front door opened for Brad’s wristband and he barreled inside, leaving me to duck through before the door snapped shut and locked me out.

Inside was a small office and operations center, designed to be functional and comfortable while taking up as little space as possible. A rack near the entrance held clippers and other arborist equipment for human hands, next to replacement bot attachments in both chrome and ceramic. In the alcove across from that, I noticed a thatched couch and a basic kitchenette that hadn’t been used recently.

A bank of metal tables and holographic interfaces dominated the back half of the shed. Brad already leaned over one, hurriedly typing in commands on the virtual keyboard while windows danced across the display. On the others I saw reams of weather and climate data, uplinks to Ministry servers, and views from eight cameras scattered about the woods. None of those showed the area where Birdbrain was taken, of course, which might have avoided this entire mess. The final screen was locked to a status monitor for a Generation Two FH-71 Ecological Monitoring and Maintenance Unit, flashing several error messages including “currently offline.”

More hardcopies than I would’ve expected took up space around the tables. A lot were old technical manuals mixed with DIY magazines for home robotics: things like Gen One lawncare units or racing drones for kids, with printed instruction manuals to appease older millennials like me. I recognized Brad’s blocky handwriting on some of them, comparing Birdbrain’s specs to these other models, and realized he must have been looking for tricks to keep his friend operational.

On one of the displays with a Ministry uplink, I swiped past updates on other newgrowth locations around the province and memos that looked about as riveting as what we received from the school board. The type of messages I would’ve expected Brad to read voraciously from beginning to end, except most of these were unread. The folder marked with direct messages to him showed dozens unread, too, which set off another alarm bell.

I should’ve asked before scrolling, but something caught my eye. Several messages over the past few weeks, marked with subject lines like Update on impending upgrade or Please review new unit manuals. It took a second to scroll to the top, where the most recent were from yesterday, including one that clearly said, Decommission update.

“Mr. Hak.” Suddenly Brad was right beside me, practically shouldering me away from the display without actually touching me. “Do you know anything about satellites? We get reams of data through here, but I’ve never tried to reposition one, you know?”

In seconds, he’d closed the window I was looking at and flooded the display with five other windows, only two of which looked like anything to do with maps or topography.

“I don’t really know much about satellites, Brad,” I said, as casually as I could.

“Okay. No worries. I’m sure you can help with something else.”

He ambled back to where he’d been working before, but I could see his eyes flicking toward me. Something in his nervousness felt different, but I held back from calling him on anything just yet.

“I don’t really know much about what you do here, Brad. Other than what you told me. Let me play some catch-up, all right?”

“Sure thing.”

His eyes didn’t stop flicking toward me. I made a point of walking to a different display, both to put him at ease and put my back between him and the display, hopefully without him realizing. Unlike the school board, the Ministry’s database was pretty well organized. The problem was that I didn’t know exactly which keywords to search, so it took me a minute to find images and technical specs for those flying Gen Four drones Brad mentioned. Sure enough, there were models specifically marked for reclamation, including picking up decommissioned bots. And when they landed, their titanium alloy feet were spaced out exactly as far as those impressions in the forest.

Suddenly I was back in the classroom, trying to decide the best way to broach a touchy subject. Except Brad wasn’t one of my students anymore. Calling a student out on a lie was easier than someone who rightly thought they’d outgrown your supervision.

“You said you don’t know anything about satellites, but we’re networked into the Ministry’s weather monitoring system, and I don’t know if we can use that to track where they took him without them realizing.” Brad’s brow was creased in that serious way that once again reminded me of him at seventeen. “Obviously someone like me isn’t allowed to do more than tap into the feed, but I figure there must be an emergency access or something, since this is obviously an emergency and we need more information—”

“Bradley.”

“This might be an all-night thing, Mr. Hak. I hope you don’t have anywhere you need to be. We can order pizza. My favorite place is actually near the market and they always put extra mushrooms—”

When I reached out to deactivate the screen, he actually slapped my hand away and whirled. “That’s not helping, Mr. Hak! I brought you here to help.”

I held my palms out, placating, and didn’t look away as he glared down at me. “Except you already know Birdbrain isn’t coming back.”

“He is. We can get him back.”

“You know where he went,” I said gently. “Why would you think you can get him back?”

Asking a question like that was a risk back in the day. Sometimes Brad would keep trying to argue his way out of it, which was typically one of the better scenarios; it meant he was at least willing to talk. Less often, he’d acknowledge the thing he was avoiding, letting us progress further. This time, he scowled and turned back to his screen, hands bunched into fists while he held back the temper he apparently still had.

“I’m sorry about Birdbrain. How about you show me some more of the woods while we talk? Maybe we can—”

“Don’t handle me.” His eyes stayed fixed on the screen. “Help me get Birdbrain back from them or leave.”

He went back to entering commands, and I knew I’d lost him again. Not his attention, but his willingness to let me guide him. Which I didn’t have any right to expect; despite my reminders that Brad was a grown man now, as soon as I’d realized the depth of his crisis, I’d started treating him like a kid.

He didn’t respond when I said his name again, so I left him alone. When the shed felt like too little space, I went outside and found a stump to sit on. I didn’t want to leave him like that. At best, he’d send a hundred messages to his supervisors or jump on a call and say something that got him in trouble. At worst, he’d try to chase down Birdbrain and get himself fired or hurt. That decided it, then: I’d be sitting on that stump until he left the shed, and I’d play hardball to keep him from doing something he’d regret. No matter how long I had to wait. Maybe ordering a pizza wasn’t a bad idea.

I didn’t hear the shed door, but I did catch Brad’s heavy footsteps before he plunked onto the dirt beside me.

“Sorry for snapping at you, Mr. Hak.”

All I did was blink at him.

“I can figure out when I need to apologize,” Brad said, like he could read my mind. “Learned it through practice.”

“Oh.” Not sure if I had the right to be proud of him, but I was. “Apology accepted.”

“Also for not telling you those big footprints were Gen Four drones. You know, after you helped me find them. And…”

“I understand.” Which I did, of course. At graduation, Brad had been determined to get a handshake from me, so I risked clapping him on the shoulder.

He let out a breath. “You know what else I learned? Adulting sucks sometimes.”

I coughed out a laugh. “You’re right about that.”

We sat like that for a minute, and I thought about a bunch of questions I could ask or comforting phrases I could try. Brad didn’t say a word, but not because he was stewing. He was thinking, too.

“Do you still want me to leave?” I settled on finally.

“No,” he said, giving me a look that said, Don’t be stupid.

“Do you want to talk, or just sit for a bit?”

Brad thought about that for a second. “The second one. I might change my mind.”

About thirty minutes later, Brad started telling me more about Birdbrain. Technical specs, what its routine was. More personality than that bot could possibly have had. But you never knew sometimes, with machines. He was about to start his third or fourth story when we heard drone engines heading our way. Probably a Gen Four on its way back.

“If you have somewhere else to be, Mr. Hak, that’s okay.” Brad stared at the ground while he said it.

“Nowhere else to be,” I assured him. “Besides, you promised me pizza.”

That only made him smile for a moment, but it was enough to get him on his feet, and we headed off to meet the drone, and whoever it was bringing.

---

Brandon Crilly’s debut fantasy novel Catalyst was published by Atthis Arts, and awarded a Bronze Medal in Fantasy by the 2023 IPPY Awards. You can find his short works in Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Fusion Fragment, Haven Spec, and other markets. He’s also an Aurora Award-winning podcaster, reviewer, conference organizer, and is obsessed with playing D&D with other writers.