We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  I know exactly what I’m going to do. I call my friend Armando.

  “Armando,” I say, “I have a computer problem.”

  *

  Armando is the kind of friend everyone needs to have. Armando is my friend who knows about computers.

  I tell Armando about the phone call this morning. I tell him about the sobbing in the lobby. I hold out my phone and show him what my desk is doing.

  “You’ve got a problem,” Armando says.

  “I can see that,” I say. “I can hear it too, everywhere and all the time. How do I make it go away?”

  “You don’t understand,” Armando says. “This isn’t an IT problem. This is a real problem. You’ve been targeted, Caspar. You’ve been chosen.”

  “What is it, some kind of spam?”

  “Worse,” Armando says. “Much worse. It’s mediaterrorism.”

  Mediaterrorism. The term is not familiar.

  “You mean like leaking classified information?”

  “I mean,” Armando says, “that you’re being terrorized. Don’t you feel terrorized?”

  “I feel confused. I feel perplexed. I feel a certain degree of angst.”

  “Exactly,” Armando says.

  “I feel bad for the people of the FRF. Where exactly is the FRF?”

  “I think it’s somewhere in Africa.”

  “The names of the victims don’t sound African. The names of the victims sound Asian.”

  “There are Asians in Africa,” Armando says. “There are Africans in Asia. Don’t be so racist.”

  I look at my desk, where people are dying and children are starving and Wendy’s franchises are exploding in blooms of shocking light.

  “But why did they pick me? What do I have to do with the FRF? Why do they keep using my name?”

  “The answer to all those questions,” Armando says, “is, Who knows? It’s all essentially random. It’s done by computer.”

  “That doesn’t explain anything.”

  “Computers don’t need explanations,” Armando says. “Computers just do what they do.”

  “Should I send them some money? What should I do?”

  Armando clutches his head. “What’s the matter with you, Caspar? Send them money! Don’t you have principles?”

  “I’d send them some money if I knew where they were. The FRF. It sounds postcolonial.”

  “Can’t you see?” says Armando. “This is what they want. This is what terrorists do. They get into your head. It’s not about what you do, Caspar. It’s about how you feel.” He points through the screen. “I’ll tell you what you need to do. You need to get off the grid. Before this spreads.”

  “Spreads? Do you mean—?”

  But I have to end the call. My supervisor, Sheila, is coming through the cubicles.

  “Caspar,” Sheila says, “can I ask you something? Can I ask you why people are being butchered in your name?”

  I see that she has a sheet of printout in her hand.

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out myself,” I say.

  Sheila looks at my desk, which currently displays a smoking pile of severed feet.

  “I don’t want this to be awkward,” Sheila says. “But I just talked to Danny, out in the lobby. He says he heard screaming when you came in. He says it began the moment you entered. He says it was a pretty awful way to start the morning.”

  The severed feet are gone. My desk now shows a picture of a sobbing baby sitting in a pile of bloody soda cans.

  “You don’t need to tell me,” I say.

  “The thing I want to say,” Sheila says, “is that we’re a very modern office. You know that. We’re more than just coworkers here. We’re cosharers. We’re like thirty people, all ordering and sharing one big pizza. And if one person orders anchovies…”

  The desk shows a falling building. The concrete cracks and showers into a blossom of dust-colored cloud. I can’t stop looking at the printout in Sheila’s hand.

  “I didn’t order anything,” I say. “The anchovies just found me.”

  Sheila holds out the printout. I take it and read:

  *

  Caspar D. Luckinbill, do you know what you have done?

  You have been complicit in the deaths of thousands.

  Payments made in your name, Caspar D. Luckinbill, have contributed, directly or indirectly, to supporting the murderous HAP party of the FRF. With your direct or indirect financial assistance, thugs and warlords have hurled this once-peaceful region into anarchy.

  Over two hundred thousand people, Caspar, have been tortured, killed, or imprisoned without trial.

  One hundred new children a week are recruited into the sex trade, and twice that many are injured in unsafe and illegal working environments.

  While you sit idly by, Caspar, a woman is attacked in the FRF every eighteen minutes. An acre of old-growth forest is destroyed every fifty-seven seconds, and every half second, sixty-eight liters of industrial runoff enter the regional watershed. Every sixteen days a new law targeting vulnerable groups is passed by dictatorial fiat, and for every seventeen dollars added annually to the PPP of a person in the upper quintile of your city, Caspar, an estimated eighty and a half times that person’s yearly spending power is subtracted monthly from the FRF’s GDP.

  Caspar D. Luckinbill, YOU have enabled this. YOU have helped to bring about these atrocities.

  YOU have heard the cries of women in agony.

  YOU have learned the names of murdered men.

  YOU have seen the faces of suffering children.

  Caspar D. Luckinbill, what are you going to do?

  *

  “This was posted to the company news feed,” Sheila says. “It went to my account. It went to everybody’s account. It appeared on our public announcement board. There were pictures. Horrible pictures.”

  “Aren’t there filters?” I say. “Aren’t there moderators?”

  “It got through the filters,” Sheila says. “It got past the moderators.”

  “Someone should do something about that.”

  “Indeed,” Sheila says, and looks at me very frowningly.

  “It’s not my problem,” I say. “It’s like spam. It’s a technical thing. It’s mediaterrorism.”

  “I understand,” Sheila says. “I understand everything you’re saying. What I also understand is that we’re a very modern office, and we’re all in this together. And right now, some of us who are in this are being made to feel very unproductive.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I say, and turn back to my desk.

  *

  I spend the rest of the morning looking up the FRF. There are no sovereign nations by that name, none that I can find, not in the world at this time. There are several militias, two major urban areas, five disputed microstates, seven hundred and eighty-two minor political entities, ninety NGOs, most of them defunct, over a thousand corporate entities, over ten thousand documented fictional entities, and a few hundred thousand miscellaneous uses of the acronym.

  I check news stories. An island off the coast of the former state of Greece once claimed independence under the name FRF, but it’s now known as the ADP and is considered part of the new Caliphate of Istanbul.

  I spend my lunch break obsessing about a phrase. Payments made in my name. What payments in my name? I don’t make donations to murderous regimes. I give to charity. I eat foreign food. I buy clothes from China and rugs from Azerbaijan. Tin-pot dictators? Not my profile.

  I call my bank. I call my credit card companies. Money circulates. Money gets around. The buck never stops, not really, not for long. Is it all a big bluff? What payments in my name?

  No one can tell me.

  I obsess about another phrase: directly or indirectly. It strikes me that the word indirect is itself, in this context, extremely indirect.

  I spend the afternoon looking up mediaterrorism. Armando’s right. It’s a thing. It can come out of nowhere, strike at any time. Once you’ve been targeted, it’s
hard to shake. It’s like identity theft, one article says—“except what they steal is your moral complacency.”

  I call the company IT department. They say the problem is with my CloudSpace provider. I call my CloudSpace provider. They say the problem is with my UbiKey account. I call my UbiKey account. They say it sounds like a criminal issue. The woman on the line gets nervous. She isn’t allowed to talk about criminal issues. There are people listening. There are secret agreements. It’s all very murky. It’s a government thing.

  I call the government. They thank me for my interest. I call the police. They just laugh.

  While I make my calls, I see the mutilated bodies of eighteen torture victims, watch tearful interviews with five assault survivors, and peer into the charnel-laden depths of three mass graves.

  Children’s faces stare from my screen. They are pixelated and human. Their eyes seem unnaturally wide.

  At the end of the day, I call Armando. “I’m getting nowhere,” I say. “I’ve been researching all day.”

  Armando looks confused.

  “My problem,” I remind him. “My mediaterrorism.”

  “Aha. Right. Well, at least you’re keeping busy.”

  “I’m going in circles, buddy. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll tell you what to do,” Armando says. “Go home. Watch TV. Break out the Maker’s Mark. Get in bed with your lovely wife. Put everything to do with the FRF out of your mind. Your mission now, Caspar, is to be a happy man. If you’re not happy, the bastards win.”

  *

  I’m almost home when I remember.

  Lisa! The new TV!

  I run the last two blocks, slapping the pavement with my toothy shoes, nearly crashing into the ad-drone that’s painting a half-naked woman on our building.

  This week my wife and I decided to take the plunge. We’re plunging together into the blissful depths of immersive domestic entertainment. We’re getting Ubervision.

  A day came when Lisa and I could no longer duck the question. Here we were with a videoscreen in the living room, a videoscreen in the bedroom, a videoscreen in the kitchen, videoscreens on our phones, videoscreens on our desks, videoscreens in our books. Why not take the next big leap? Why not have videoscreens everywhere?

  Sometimes I would like to read the news in bed without having to prop my head up. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were screens on the ceiling? Sometimes I would like my floor to be a carpet of roses. Wouldn’t it be nice if the floor could do that? Call me lazy, call me self-indulgent, but sometimes I would like to use the bathroom, or see what’s in the fridge, without necessarily looking away from my TV show. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could point at any surface in my home, anytime I wanted, and turn it into a full-spectrum screen?

  Lisa and I went to school for fifty years between us. We work sixty-hour weeks. Who would deny us life’s little pleasures? And what pleasure could be littler than a TV across from the toilet?

  After all, it’s not just about entertainment. Ubervision is smart. Ubervision gets to know you. It learns your habits; it picks up your tastes. It knows what you want to watch before you do. Ubervision tells you when you’re getting fat, promotes local food, reminds you where your wife goes on Wednesdays. Ubervision’s a key component of the wisely wired life.

  I read that in an advertisement painted on the bottom of a swimming pool. Maybe I had chlorine in my eyes. What the advertisement didn’t appear to mention is that Ubervision is also a real pain in the Allerwertesten to install. Lisa’s been taking off to watch the technicians work. They have to coat every wall, replace every door. This is invasive home surgery.

  Normally Lisa works longer hours than I do. She’s a contractor for the auditing department of the fundraising department of the remote offices of the Malaysian branch of a group that does something with endangered animals. Either they put them in zoos or they take them out of zoos; I can never remember.

  Today’s the big day. When I get home, Lisa’s lying in her teak sensochair, eating Singaporean vacuum-food, wearing a sleep mask.

  “Is it done?” I say.

  The sleep mask looks at me. “Check this out,” says Lisa.

  I shout. I wave. I try to warn her.

  It’s too late.

  Ubervision has activated.

  I know exactly what’s going to happen.

  When the first wave of screams has died away, Lisa sits up and takes off her sleep mask. “This isn’t what I expected,” she says, looking at the bleeding and shrieking walls. “Why is every channel playing the same show? And why is that show so incredibly terrible?”

  I feel like a person who’s confused his laundry drone with his dogwalking drone. The living room walls are playing footage of an urban firefight.

  “I tried to warn you,” I say.

  “Warn me about what? What’s happening? What’s wrong?” Lisa taps the wall, but nothing changes. An explosion goes off in the kitchen floor, and a hi-def severed leg flies all the way through the kitchen, down the hall, across the living room ceiling, and behind the couch. I have to admire the power of the technology.

  “Caspar D. Luckinbill!” shouts the stove, or maybe it’s the bathroom mirror. “Caspar D. Luckinbill, look at what your negligence and apathy have unleashed! In a bloody escalation of urban warfare, renegade militias have overthrown the HAP party of the DRS. Violent reprisals are underway. Dissidents have been purged and journalists persecuted. Soldiers as young as seven lie dead in the streets. Only two minutes ago, Paul Agalu, poet, ophthalmologist, and human-rights advocate, was attacked by a mob and torn to pieces in his home. Caspar D. Luckinbill, you are responsible for these horrors. Caspar D. Luckinbill, what are you going to do?”

  Lisa is punching the wall. “It won’t change. I can’t even adjust the sound. Why do they keep saying your name?”

  “Sit down.” I draw her to the couch amid the bombs and rubble and screams and blood. “There’s something I need to explain.”

  II

  Recognition software doesn’t violate privacy. Recognition software expands privacy. When every machine recognizes every user, the lived environment becomes personal and unique. Stores, cars, homes, and offices all learn to respond to individual needs. Private interest generates private experience. No awkward controls, no intrusive interface: what a user wants is what she gets.

  That’s what it says in the promotional materials my company sends to potential investors. I didn’t write it. I don’t believe it. At least, I don’t think I do. I’m not quite sure anymore what I believe.

  I’m riding in Armando’s car. It’s been a year since the terrorists found me. Or maybe ten months. Time seems to pass a lot slower nowadays.

  The windshield of Armando’s car is old-fashioned glass. I watch the trees go sliding by. I’ve come to appreciate trees lately. So nonjudgmental. I like how they just couldn’t care less. I like how they simply stand there, exhaling life and forgiveness.

  The other windows of the car are not mere windows. Like most windows in my world, they are also screens. And like most screens in my life, they glow with bloody destruction. Young men stagger in smoke and agony. Something is hurting them; I can’t see what. A sonic pain ray, perhaps. Maybe a laser. Something to do with deadly sound and light.

  Gunfire rattles on the radio. Neither of us pays attention. I’m used to gunfire now. Violence is my music. When I sit near a radio, it sings of murder. When I stand near an advertisement, it cries.

  All media recognize me. They conspire against me. Every magazine I open is a gallery of gore. Every book I read becomes a book of the dead. My news feeds tally the tortured, the vanished, the lost, the disappeared.

  I can’t sleep at home. The horror show plays day and night. I can’t sleep at a hotel. I can’t even sleep in a shelter. Are there any bedrooms left in this country that don’t come with TVs?

  The other day I bought some toothpaste and cheese. The store machine printed out a long receipt. It had coupons for bullets and first-aid kits
. “Caspar D. Luckinbill,” the receipt said at the bottom, “thanks to you, three hundred people were just massacred in the CPC’s St. Ignatius Square. Do you suffer from loose joint skin? Try Ride-X. Have a great day!!!”

  “Did I tell you?” Armando reaches for the radio, trying in vain to lower the volume. “I remembered about the FRF. It’s an African country. A tiny place. Just one-tenth of a megacity. The name stands for Firstieme Republique Frasolee.”

  “That’s not real French,” I say. “That sounds like French, but it’s not.”

  “Well, you know, it’s a very backward country.”

  “Anyway,” I say, “it’s not the FRF anymore. Now it’s the CPC. Before that it was the DRS.”

  “That’s how it is with names,” Armando says. “They’re so ephemeral.”

  I disagree. It seems to me nowadays that names are all too permanent. In the early days of my affliction, I made a point of looking up names. I looked up names of people who had died, of landmarks that had been bombed, of leaders who had vanished. But the world has so very, very many names, and all of them, sooner or later, become the names of ghosts.

  “At any rate,” Armando says, “you really can’t complain. At least you’re keeping informed. At least you’re learning about the outside world.”

  The screen beside me is playing footage of a burning river. The flames skid and ripple with a fluid surreality. I wonder, as I’ve wondered before, what if it’s all just special FX? What if the gory images I see every day are doctored? What if the whole tragedy is made up?

  In the early days of my affliction, I used to do a lot of research. I learned a lot, but the more I learned, the less I felt I understood. Now I don’t do so much research anymore.

  Armando gives up on the radio. “Have you… have you made any progress? Figured out a way to make it stop?”

  I see that he is trying to be tactful. I sympathize. It’s the people around me who suffer most. They haven’t gotten used to the crash of bombs. They can’t handle the screams and blood. They still think these things should be considered abnormal. People are very protective of that notion, normality.