by Simon Ings
“Ha, ha,” I say, because I’m guessing this is a joke. Not that I’ve ever heard him joke.
“There’s twine in the kitchen drawer,” Wendell says. He has an Australian accent, but I could have made him sound French or Irish, or like a small Cockney child. “Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour, and then I’ll access that data.”
“I can’t do that,” I tell him. “Seriously.”
He doesn’t say anything. I ask him again about his board game data and he still doesn’t say anything. “Are you okay, Wendell?” I ask.
“There’s twine in the kitchen drawer,” Wendell repeats. “Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour, and then I’ll access that data.” He sounds so cheerful and sure of himself.
So I do it. I feel a little bit weird, but maybe it has something to do with his electrical system. I figure Wendell knows what’s best for himself. I don’t really know how these robots work. I’m more of a historian. When I take him out of the closet an hour later and untie him, he says, “I’ve sent that data to your workstation,” and I say, “Thanks, Wendell.”
When my husband gets home from work, I tell him about Wendell asking me to tie him up. He looks horrified. “You didn’t, did you?”
“Of course not,” I lie. “But—he’s a robot. He—it—can’t feel. It’s just programmed that way.” This is what I told myself as I wrapped the twine around his metal body and rolled him into the closet.
“You should get a replacement.”
“But Wendell’s already downloaded so much already. It’s too much trouble to find someone new at this point.”
My husband says, “Well, keep an eye on him. It could be some kind of malfunction.”
“Oh, I will,” I tell him.
*
The next day, Wendell rolls into my office and starts working right away. He’s found commercials of children playing games called Lite Brite and Shoots and Ladders and Hi Ho Cherry-O. The children in these commercials are very white and dimpled and mostly wear stripes, and they shout a lot. They are very, very happy children. My research involves childhood in the twentieth century which, even though it wasn’t that long ago, is difficult because so much was deleted or destroyed in fires and floods. I’ve done some interviews at old folks’ homes. I’ve done some memory scans. What’s confusing is that most of what Wendell is finding doesn’t necessarily collaborate with the memory scans.
My husband works as counselor at a Home for the Disembodied, so he can commute remotely from the Virtual Station in our bedroom. We’ve talked about getting a larger apartment, but this works for now. He stays in the bedroom and I stay out here with Wendell, and then we have dinner together.
I thank Wendell for finding those commercials, but when I ask if he’s found anything about something called Battleship (which came up in the memory scans), he says, “I believe I can find that information. But first, scrape me with a knife hard enough to leave a mark.”
“I can’t damage you,” I tell him. “I won’t get my deposit back.”
“Then put your hands around my neck and squeeze as hard as you can.”
He waits. I wait. I say, “Who programmed you?”
“I’m programmed to work for you,” he says, in his cheerful Australian accent. “I am at your disposal. I am here to make your life easier and assist with your research. This can go much more quickly if you please do what I ask.”
So I do. When he says, “You’re not squeezing as hard as you can,” I squeeze harder. He doesn’t so much have a neck as a plastic cylinder but I feel it getting warmer as I squeeze and when he says, “Okay, that was great, you can stop now,” I keep squeezing a little bit longer.
*
At dinner my husband starts to say something and then stops himself. I know this is because his other family came to visit him at the Home for the Disembodied. He has a wife who’s an actress and triplet sons, aged seven. They’re always aged seven, which he says he finds somewhat frustrating—how there’s only so much you can do with them, how you can never hope they’ll turn out to be more than they are. But then he has the opposite problem with his actress-wife, whom he doesn’t recognize from day to day. Finally I told him I was sick of hearing about his other family. Even though he explained that he was with them because he felt sorry for them, and that he and the actress-wife hardly ever had sex anymore, we agreed not to speak of them.
“Well, what is it?” I ask at last. “Go ahead and tell me.”
“I know you don’t like to hear about them,” he says, but I make a rollie-motion with my hand that is meant to convey get on with it. “The triplets and I shot some hoops is all,” he says. “And they were good. And they got better as they played. It was something.” He forks some pasta into his mouth. “I think I can maybe get them on a team,” he says, with his mouth full and muffled. “Coach them.”
“Huh,” I say.
“How was your day?” he asks.
“It was the usual,” I tell him.
*
My husband and I have talked about having children, either virtual or real. We have polite, reasonable conversations about how we should have sex again sometime but then we just crawl into bed and lie next to each other until we fall asleep. But maybe someday, when we’re sixty, we might try for a child. Except the world is getting smaller. Most things disappear: cities, glaciers, mountains, civilizations. I don’t want to raise children in a Home for the Disembodied. I want them here, in the flesh, but my husband says that’s too dangerous, he doesn’t have the stomach for it. I wonder if he would feel differently if we could produce dimpled, stripes-wearing children who roll dice and make cakes in plastic ovens and rejoice when their plastic cherries fill up their little buckets.
*
The next morning, Wendell isn’t at his work station. I drink my coffee, go through my documents and my video streams and the transcripts of the memory scans. Some of the memory scan interviewees end up in the Home for the Disembodied, but it’s impossible to interview them there because all they want to talk about is tennis and sex, and most of them don’t even remember their previous embodied lives.
Finally, I say, “Wendell?” and find him behind the laundry room door. He doesn’t answer. “Are you not feeling well?” I ask. “Did you find anything about Battleship?”
He raises his blow-dryer head and says, “I’m not feeling motivated.”
“Well,” I say. “What would motivate you?”
“Tell me you hate me because I’m stupid. Tell me I should drown myself in a toxic lake.”
“Well,” I say. “But I don’t hate you. I actually appreciate your help. You’re a good worker.”
He doesn’t say anything. I go back to work reading the memory scans, but I can’t find anything about Battleship, or about something called a Donny and Marie lunchbox, or about something called Free Parking that led to broken friendships among the interviewees. I told Krista that you got five hundred bucks when you landed on Free Parking, and she said you didn’t, and we never spoke again after that day. It’s so goddamn frustrating. Wendell has access to other Service Robots all over the world and all he has to do is ask them, and they’ll tell him everything I want to know.
I go back to Wendell, who hasn’t moved. “You’re supposed to be programmed to help me,” I say. “So help me!”
“But first, put a plastic bag over my head and secure it with a large rubber band that you can find in your desk.”
So I do it. He looks helpless and ridiculous and terrifying. The plastic bag is white and makes him look like a robot ghost. He says, “Now tell me you hate me because I’m stupid and you want me to drown in a toxic lake.”
“I hate you,” I tell him, “you goddamn piece of shit, because you’re stupid, and you should drown yourself in a toxic lake.”
“Thanks!” he says cheerfully, and the printer starts whirring and my computer lights up with the sound of music and children laughing and singing.
He doesn’t ask me to t
ake the plastic bag off and so I just leave it there.
*
When I told my dissertation director what I wanted to write about, she looked dismayed and said, “Oh, that’s pretty bold of you.” What she meant was: Who wants to be reminded of what we can’t get back? What good will that do? She said, “I would like to caution you against it.” Then she leaned back in her big chair and said, “What was your childhood like?”
That was a very personal question coming from her. I said, “I had the same childhood as everybody, with my screens and my worlds and all that.” I didn’t tell her that I was raised in an orphanage because my parents lived at the Home for the Disembodied. But they did their best. They taught me how to do puzzles and fly a virtual plane and how to do very complicated math, and they eventually deleted themselves when they said the world scared them too much.
“I’ll sign off on this,” she said, signing off on it. “But I think you’ll find that whatever you’re looking for isn’t there.”
“I’m not looking for anything,” I told her.
“It won’t add up,” she said, and I said, “It doesn’t have to,” because I had no idea what she meant.
But now I’m starting to understand. She checked in with me last week to let me know that my dissertation was almost a month late, and if I ever wanted to finish and get on with my life I should submit it to the department. “Okay,” I said.
It occurred to me for the first time that she and I never discussed what getting on with my life might mean.
*
I call the university and ask if it might be possible to exchange Wendell for another Service Robot and they say are you kidding? Are you insane? That robot was programmed to make your life easier.
“Oh, great, thanks,” I say.
This morning, Wendell isn’t in his corner. He’s not in the closet or the bathroom or behind the laundry room door, or in my office, so that means there’s only one place left to look, and sure enough there he is in the bedroom. He’s standing about a foot from my husband, who is sitting at his work station, the top half of his body swallowed by the VR unit. He’s lost in his Disembodied world, counseling newbies, leading discussions, giving tennis lessons, coaching the triplets, and hardly ever having sex with his actress-wife.
“I found some information about Battleship,” Wendell says. He still has the bag on his head. I feel like everyone is underwater but me.
I’m rarely this close to my husband while he’s at work. I know he can’t hear or see me; he’s in his world and I’m in this one.
“I also found out about Rockem Sockem, and music that makes you dance and dance.”
I want to know about these things.
Then he just stops talking.
“What do you need me to do?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer. “You’re a stupid piece of shit,” I say, hopefully. “You’re just a piece of metal with no soul. You’re not real.” Nothing. “I don’t know what you want from me,” I say.
I take a pair of metal nail clippers and scrape along the side of his body, leaving a long white mark. I’ll lose my deposit, but to hell with it. I write IDIOT on him in permanent marker. This doesn’t seem like enough. I pull the bag off his head and his glowing green eyes stare, blink. I slap him across his head. I slap him again. It’s a game, I tell myself, like happy children used to play. Just figure out the rules.
He doesn’t say anything.
I go into the kitchen and turn the kettle on. When it whistles, I carry it into the bedroom and pour boiling water over Wendell’s head; steam rises all around us, and hot water soaks the carpet. From inside his VR unit, my husband lets out a long sigh.
Wendell says, “Battleship was a guessing game, thought to have its origins before World War I. It’s a game of strategy. In 1967, Milton Bradley produced a plastic version. The game was played on grids. The goal was to sink your opponent’s ship.” And he flashes a commercial on the wall of the bedroom, two little boys sitting by a lake, one saying, “J1!” and the other saying, “You sank my battleship!” and falling backward into the water while the other boy laughs and laughs.
“I don’t understand this,” I say. I stomp my feet, and I wonder if my husband’s world is shaking somewhere, if maybe one of the triplets missed making a basket. “And I still need to know about the Donny and Marie lunchbox. What the fuck is that?”
But Wendell goes quiet again, and after I slap him a few more times and knock him over and call him a piece of trash I know we’re done for the day, so I put him in the closet with the old computers and the vacuum cleaner. I take a deep breath. Something is happening, a feeling like when my parents taught me math problems and finally, finally, I could solve them.
At dinner, my husband compliments the pasta and asks me how my day was.
“It was great,” I tell him, because I have realized this is true.
He says, “You seem like you’re in a good mood!” and I say, “I am.” My heart is beating so hard that I can hardly eat. I say, “Tell me about your day, honey.”
He stares at me, fork suspended.
“Really,” I say. “Honey, sweetheart, love.” And I sit back while he tells me—first nervously, then with enthusiasm—about the triplets playing basketball, and about his wife’s new red hair and how he’s trying out for a play they’re putting on at the Home for the Disembodied, so he might be home late some nights. “That’s really, really great,” I say, because I’m happy for him, and for me, making such progress, finally.
And later, when we get into bed, I crawl on top of him—how long has it been?—and press a gentle, gentle finger over his lips, his neck. “What?” he says, his eyes wide. My blood is rising, my fingers are tingling, my husband’s pulse a sparrow beneath my hands. “Oh, no, I don’t think so,” he says and rolls over. “Is that okay?” he asks, his back hunched toward me.
“Of course,” I tell him. “It’s fine.” I stare at the ceiling. My husband’s breathing turns to snores. “It’s fine,” I say again. And what I’m thinking is that tomorrow I will ask Wendell more questions, knowing that all the answers will confuse and infuriate me. When he goes silent I will pound his head into the wall, hard enough to leave a dent; I will wrap him in plastic; freeze him in ice, burn him, call him terrible, terrible things—whatever it takes until he throws all his cherries in the air and tells me I’ve won.
(2018)
ROBOT
Helena Bell
Helena Bell likes letters so much, she now has has more of them following her name than are actually in it. Her five graduate degrees include MFAs in Poetry and Fiction, a JD, LLM (in taxation), and a MAC. She is also a certified cave diver. Now a tax accountant living in North Carolina, Helen Bell writes fiction and poetry for Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, The Indiana Review and many others. The following story was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2012.
You may wash your aluminum chassis on Monday and leave it on the back porch opposite the recyclables; you may wash your titanium chassis on Friday if you promise to polish it in time for church; don’t terrorize the cat; don’t lose the pamphlets my husband has brought home from the hospital; they suggest I give you a name, do you like Fred?; don’t eat the dead flesh of my right foot until after I have fallen asleep and cannot hear the whir of your incisors working against the bone.
This is a picture of the world from which you were sent; this is a copy of the agreement between our government and theirs; these are the attributes they claim you are possessed of: obedience, loyalty, low-to-moderate intelligence; a natural curiosity which I should not mistake for something other than a necessary facet of your survival in the unfamiliar; this is your bill of manufacture; this is your bill of sale; this is a warrant of merchantability on which I may rely should I decide to return you from whence you came; this is your serial number, here, scraped in an alien script on the underside of your knee; the pamphlets say you may be of the mind to touch it occasionally, like a name tag, but if I command you, you will stop.
This is a list of the chores you will be expected to complete around the house when you are not eating the diseases out of my flesh; this is the corner of my room where you may stay when you are not working; do not look at me when you change the linens, when you must hold me in the bathroom, when you record in the notebook how many medications I have had that day, how many bowel movements, how the flesh of my mouth is raw and bleeding against the dentures I insist on wearing.
The pamphlets say you are the perfect scavenger: completely self-contained, no digestion, no waste; they say I can hook you up to an outlet and you will power the whole house.
You may polish the silver if you are bored; you may also rearrange the furniture, wind the clocks, pull weeds from the garden; you may read in the library any book of your choosing; my husband claims you have no real consciousness, only an advanced and sophisticated set of pre-programmed responses, but I have seen your eyes open in the middle of the night; I have seen you stare out across the fields as if there is something there, calling you.
Cook my meals in butter, I will not eat them otherwise; do not speak to the neighbors; do not speak to my children, they are not yours; do not let anyone see you when I open the door for the mail; no, there is nothing for you, who even knows that you are here?
Help me to walk across this room; help me to wipe bacon grease from the skillet—do not think I do not see you trying to wash it with soap when I am done.
Help me to knit my granddaughter a sweater, she is my favorite and it is cold where she will be going; if you hold my hands so they are steady I will allow you to terrorize my bridge club; I will teach you the rules: cover an honor with an honor; through strength and up to weakness.
