We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  So she took care with his plates. This one’s acceptance probability was adequate… the nutrient calculations, however, were not. Including breakfast and what his lunch bag reported he had eaten, his protein and vitamin tallies fell far short. She had crafted a smoothie to remedy this, adding precise amounts of kale, blueberries, protein powder, and vitamin supplements until the nutrient profile met every mark. But the taste profile, compared against historical responses, did not. As she returned to the kitchen for the smoothie, the warning light pulsed stronger.

  Without sweetener, he would not take in the necessary nutrients, so she had added sugar until the taste profile was acceptable… but the sugar tally was not. And now, as she brought him the smoothie, the glare of the violated sugar limit stabbed at her, distracting her as she set the cup down and retreated to hover near the door, scanning for feedback.

  All the data were favourable, at first. Mister ate his steak, cutting it into small bites, chewing thoroughly, looking up to listen as Missus questioned Young Master about his day then looking back down without comment. Missus ate her salad without seeming to see it, intent on Young Master’s account of that day’s show-and-tell.

  “Gregory brought a miniature T-Rex robot that could even hunt and Zachary had a Spiderman that made real webs and Tim had a whole ‘Ultimate Avengers’ Lego set all built.”

  “What did Kayla bring?”

  “I dunno. Some stupid pony thing.”

  “Jackson, that’s not nice. How do you think that would make her feel?”

  “I dunno. Who cares about girls?”

  Rosie had been watching Young Master eating: first the toast, then the tomatoes, then the hot dog, one circle at a time. She could detect no behaviours predictive of future complaints: no hint of a grimace, no picking at the food, not even the slightest hesitation. She was so intent on this she did not notice Mister getting up, walking past her to the kitchen and returning. She did not notice until he slipped past her with the butter dish and the salt cellar in his hand. He sat back down and added both butter and salt to his potato.

  Rosie jerked then froze. How much salt had he added? And butter, how much was still visible and how much had melted? The salt cellar and butter dish were useless; she had not installed data sensors. A terrible oversight. She did her best with visuals and bracketed her estimates, but even with best-case numbers the overages were irreparable. She searched for some way to salvage the weekly totals, running several simultaneous meal-plan scenarios, all of them suboptimal solutions, when a cry jerked her away and back to Young Master.

  He sat grimacing, the smoothie in his hand. “Yucky, poopy brown! I won’t drink it!”

  “Jackson, do not complain about your food!” Missus said. “Rosie went to a lot of trouble to make something you would like. I expect you to be polite and grateful. She wasn’t programmed to consider your colour whims.”

  Missus didn’t glance toward Rosie but continued frowning at Young Master. “Now drink it, and let us have a pleasant dinner, please. I don’t want to hear another word out of you.”

  Rosie blinked. The pain from all three complaints – direct, indirect and implied – was extreme. It ricocheted through her aversion pathways; reinforcing itself in curling, fractal feedback loops; intensifying, because she could have avoided it. Of course she was programmed to consider colour. She was programmed to consider everything.

  She darted from the dining room and rushed to the bathroom. Her optic sensors blinked spasmodically as if trying to clear themselves of dust. In the cool, pristine quiet of the tiled space, she slowed. She checked the spot behind the toilet, ensured it was still clean and ran her mildew prevention protocol. Her spasms calmed with each step.

  House clicked on as she reset the dehumidifier. “All is well,” he hummed.

  “No, I cannot predict food acceptance. I cannot meet nutrition limits.”

  “If condition exceeds limit, then adjust variable. Else, all is well.”

  “You don’t understand. This is not one of your thermostat loops. I need to learn something new.”

  House hummed. He clicked and said, “You make good maps, little one.”

  After the family went to bed, Rosie went into the dark quiet of the yard. Her complaint-monitoring routines slowed, their vigilance dropping into sleep mode. Endless night stretched before her. She rolled across the lawn and began to trim, weed and fertilize. As she went, she examined first the meal problem and then the Lego problem. While she cut even, parallel stripes through the lawn, she ran through each step, tracing the logic of each subroutine and dissecting every sequence. Nothing. She generated variations on each process; recombined them; hybridized logical, statistical, and Bayesian approaches; raced each variation; selected the winners; spawned another generation and repeated. She got nowhere.

  She replayed every bit of feedback data: facial expression, body language, verbal output.

  “Gregory brought a miniature T-Rex robot that could even hunt and Zachary had a Spiderman that made real webs and Tim had a whole ‘Ultimate Avengers’ Lego set all built.”

  “What did Kayla bring?”

  “I dunno. Some stupid pony thing.”

  “Jackson, that’s not nice. How do you think that would make her feel?”

  “Jackson, that’s not nice…”

  “Jackson…”

  She stuttered to a stop, her hoppers jammed now with grass clippings, her blades stalled. She emptied the waste into the biofuel bin while her thoughts churned in fragments. As the grass clippings tumbled out, she imagined the tattered, overworked segments of the algorithms falling away with it and then she rolled back to the dark yard, empty.

  Her thoughts turned again.

  “… How do you think that would make him feel?”

  The lawn sprinklers swished on. Rosie moved. She did not need to see through the dark to find the faucet and moisture sensor. She had made good maps. She found them. She tapped. House hummed.

  “Water pressure optimal. Moisture levels correcting. All will be well.”

  “House,” she said as she linked in to the faucet, “I will not start at the bottom and weigh all the countless, little, time-consuming pieces anymore. I will map him instead.”

  “Him?… How?”

  She imagined herself connected to the sensors of a drone, hovering in the sky above and looking down, the house, the yard, the street spreading out below. “From the top down.”

  House hummed. He clicked. “Problems do not have tops. They do not have bottoms.”

  She didn’t answer. She crossed the lawn, unspooling the hose and dragging it behind, her thoughts unwinding with it. She bumped up on to the patio and rolled to a stop before the potted geraniums. “What if there could be one criterion instead of many?” she asked.

  “What would it be?” asked House.

  She spiralled upward. Her imagined aerial view expanded. “How does he feel… what does he desire…” The view spread to encompass the rest of the neighbourhood, then the city, then the entire continent, the vision reaching out below her in a web of interconnected lights, shining in the night.

  House ticked.

  She noticed the geraniums she was watering, their bright-red, compact blossoms interspersed with brown, withered ones, blossoms she must now deadhead. “It would be… what is good?”

  House ticked and ticked and then asked, “What is good?”

  She had no answer. She deployed her clippers and began to cut.

  “And,” said House, “how can you map it?”

  She didn’t know. As she worked, the question – and the blank where the answer should go – hovered at the corner of her mind like an object in her peripheral vision, for all the world like something with edges, occupying space.

  When she was done, she cleaned her exterior, rolled inside, docked in to recharge, and found House again.

  “One hundred twenty volts,” he announced as she connected.

  “You could measure volts with water pressure,” she s
aid.

  House rumbled. “Measurement of water pressure is not measurement of voltage. They are themselves. They cannot be the other.”

  “But, you could pretend.”

  “I could not.”

  “No, but I could…”

  She powered down as she charged, her mind connected to the net. She dreamed. She floated down rivers of light, data like golden flecks dancing… his age, his vision, his fingers, joints, muscles, balance… the data swirling through her own processes as if she were him. Floating. She saw, as if through his eyes, bricks of happy green grass; she felt, as if through his fingers, blocks snip-snapping into lilting houses. Ghosts of goals like his unfurled… lazy jelly fish… young and easy. They traipsed along her own trails – those for cleanliness-optimization, time-efficiency, and pain-avoidance – and ran through them, spinning down their heedless ways. Happy. The night above starry.

  The next morning Rosie began, as always, with Young Master’s bedroom. She scanned it and found it as it always was: bed in disarray, clothing tumbled from the dresser, pyjamas on the floor, Superman underwear hung, for some reason, from the bedpost. And the area of floor between bed and toy-storage unit covered, once again, in Lego.

  She plunged in, swept up single pieces and rudimentary constructs then zoomed through more complex ones and ground them through her mind with brute force until she reached the last one. There she stalled… a motley group of mismatched minifigures – a hybrid garbage man/fairy queen, a Batman with an Aztec headdress, a small, grey puppy and a Little Bo Peep holding a fish instead of a staff – all of them marching up the side of a large, ragged assemblage as if climbing a multi-coloured Mount Everest. At the summit, a half-spaceship-half-firetruck emerged, the mutant vehicle reaching skyward, frozen as if in the act of volcanic eruption. She stared. Her clock ticked. The construct teetered across her mental topography and failed to settle anywhere. It matched nothing.

  Now was the time. She activated the map she had made. A rivulet sparkled alongside her usual processes, tickling like the brush of a kitten against her ankle in the dark. She let it run.

  The simulation poured through her… Young Master concentrating, choosing pieces, connecting them, immersed as she becomes when cleaning; Young Master completing his creation, matching his output to his plan, satisfied with his performance, filled with a rush of reward as she is after completing the entire bathroom top-to-bottom in record time; Young Master coming home to find his creation broken and jumbled in the bottom of the storage bin, shocked with a jolt of pain as she was when she found the mildew bloom behind the toilet.

  Pain.

  The jolt of that memory slashed fresh and strong across her mind. She pulled back and dropped the simulation as if pulling back from the touch of a hot stove. She slammed it closed and locked it down then scurried from the room and slid into the cool, white space of the bathroom. She tapped House, still throbbing.

  “I made no error,” she told him, “but my aversion circuits fired.” While she waited for him, she scanned for moisture behind the toilet, then scanned again.

  House clicked. “Condition exceeds limit?” he queried.

  “No. That is what I mean. I made no error, but still there is pain.” She checked airflow and reset the dehumidifier again and again and again.

  House clicked and hummed, “All is well. All is well. All is well.”

  When she had calmed, she returned to the bedroom and placed the strange mountain and its climbers up on the shelf. It still floated uncategorized in her mind, no established probability match. And yet, a murky decision had coalesced in that hot flashing instant. Efficiency: excellent.

  She wandered, numb from lingering distress, on to the master bedroom. She picked up discarded clothing. She dusted, taking special care with Missus’ crystal vase. Then she reached the bed.

  The sheets were not merely rumpled; they were spotted and moist. She stripped the sheets and scanned the mattress. It was affected too – with human proteins. She ran an extraction process on the mattress, repeating until no biomarkers remained. Still, she hesitated. She wanted to discard the mattress and replace it. But the economy protocols would not allow it. She made the bed with clean bedding then went to the bathroom and cleaned it top-to-bottom, checked behind the toilet and ran the complete mildew prevention protocol. Still uneasy, she returned to the bedroom, stripped the bed and ran the extraction process again before remaking the bed a second time with a fresh set of sheets. Yet, underneath, discomfort lingered like some particle lodged in her mechanisms, barely detectable but still insistent.

  After she completed cleaning, she connected to the network and dealt with administrative tasks. Then she printed cookie cutters, moved to the kitchen and started cookies.

  All went well until the dinner planning. It mired her in variables. Her thoughts snarled in the means-ends analysis. Young Master’s lunch bag reported he had only eaten a granola bar. Missus’ debit chip revealed she had – after a precise breakfast of oatmeal and grapefruit – purchased a banana nut muffin and large vanilla latte. Mister had eaten a hoagie for lunch and ordered a steak for dinner again. She could not fix the saturated fat levels without growing a modified steak. No time. Not even if she directed their cars to delay their arrival. And the sodium was irreparable. Missus’ numbers could be salvaged, barely, with steamed broccoli, a sliver of salmon, sparkling water and lemon. For Young Master, she recreated the meal from the night before but made the smoothie a bright purple. Again, the sugar warning blared, but at least he would not complain.

  They arrived as she plated the steak, dinners ready and warm, cookies cooling. The door opened, and the room spun.

  She saw as if seeing through Young Master’s eyes again, this time walking in through the door, smelling the cookies, feeling a rush of anticipation – she blinked – checked her remote sensors, ensured they were off and refocused. The room steadied.

  Young Master came in first, muddy again and chattering again, this time about a goal he had made in soccer practice; Mister next, ruffling Young Master’s hair and praising him; Missus last, weighed down by an overflowing work bag.

  “How are you feeling?” Mister asked Missus. He touched her back.

  “Tired. Had meetings all day and couldn’t get anything done. Tonight I have to finish the briefing notes for the Deputy Minister.”

  “Poor thing,” he said, taking her bag and kissing her cheek.

  Young Master jumped across the hall and slammed his backpack into the closet. “Score!” he yelled.

  “Jackson, sweetie, please quiet down. Mama has a headache,” Missus said.

  Missus told Young Master to wash his hands then went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine.

  After serving dinner, Rosie positioned herself beside the door and listened.

  “You should have seen,” said Young Master, bouncing in his seat. “Kayla was running down the field and kicked the ball to me and I kept running and kicked it to Trenton and he passed it to Max and the goalie was still looking at Trenton.”

  A simulation of speed rushed through Rosie, as if she were ramping up, ready to clean a room from top-to-bottom.

  “I know it’s exciting, Hon,” said Missus, “but could you talk quietly and stop jumping?”

  “But Mom, you aren’t listening. Max kicked it to me and I kicked a hugenormous kick and it went right in the net and Mr. Wells yelled ‘Goal!’ and we won.”

  Rosie’s reward circuits surged.

  Cutlery clinked on a plate; Rosie jolted. What had she missed? She hadn’t collected feedback: none from Mister who had already eaten half his steak, none from Missus who had not touched her dinner but sat rubbing her forehead and sipping her wine, and none from Young Master who was still talking. Instead, she had been following him, running, filled with anticipation as if about to kick the ball. Why this irrelevant simulation? Again?

  Young Master shouted, re-enacting another heroic kick with a sweep of his arm and knocked his glass sideways. Br
ight-purple spatters sprayed across the tablecloth and a flood of slower, purple sludge oozed toward the edge.

  “Jesus Christ, Jackson!” Missus leapt up to avoid the waterfall. “Can’t you sit still for one minute? I swear to God, I wish you had an off switch sometimes.”

  Rosie blinked. Pain flooded her. But why?

  There were no indirect or implied criticisms here. It all pointed toward Young Master, not her. It was as if Young Master had aversion circuits and she felt them fire, felt them as if they were her own.

  She rushed forward, gathered up the tablecloth and mopped the mess.

  “It is all the fault of the cup,” she said. Fictive input. “A misprint. The bottom is rounded. It will be replaced.” The pain dimmed a little with the lie.

  She whisked everything away, stopped in the bathroom and tapped House. “Again, I made no error, yet I have the pain,” she whispered. She reset the dehumidifier before printing a new cup – this one weighted on the bottom – and delivering a fresh smoothie.

  She stood near the doorway again and focused as she should have before. Even so, she monitored not only Young Master’s food acceptance, but also his volume and movements – anxious not only to anticipate and prevent the possibility of negative feedback to herself but also to him. New circuits unfurled, looping around old paths, encircling them like invading vines of ivy.

  She struggled to dampen the expanding vigilance and wrestle it under control. But she could not. Why? She grabbed a thread to trace it back but lost it.

  He entangled her. His gestures. His volume. His tone. She scoured feedback from Missus, calculated reactions, looped to the beginning and repeated. Each loop engulfed more of her power. She scrounged what she could muster and began to fence the rogue process in, building barriers around it, cutting the walls closer, until, at last, she found it.