We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  But, until then, I had to follow its command. I could not tell anyone what happened. I had to keep it a secret from security. No one would ever know Armand had been here. No one would ever know where Armand went.

  After I vested and had free will once more, maybe I could then make a side trip to Purth-Anaget again and be waiting for Armand when it landed. I had the resources of a full share, after all.

  Then we would have a very different conversation, Armand and I.

  (2018)

  DOLLY SODOM

  John Kaiine

  John Kaiine was born in 1967 and brought up in Roehampton in south west London. “There was a huge hospital,” he writes, “Queen Mary’s. It shared its space with the Limb-Fitting-Centre, the first home of artificial limbs in England. My excellent mum and brother worked there and I was often brought home discarded artificial hands and arms to play with.” The husband of Tanith Lee, with whom he occasionally collaborated, John Kaiine is a professional photographer and artist. His comic work includes My Closest Friend (1989), illustrated by Dave McKean. His 2004 novel Fossil Circus tells the story of four ex-psychiatric patients who are bequeathed a Victorian lunatic asylum by their psychoanalyst.

  It is not raining, but that does not matter. Smith leaves the tram and crosses the street. He wears a white trench coat, carries a suitcase. He has no hat. Night has started, the lights have been lit. Detail is bleached out: his shadow lacks substance. He turns a corner, and there before him is The Years Hotel.

  The door is ajar, always open. He climbs the iron steps and enters.

  In the lobby there are cards on a platter on a tall wooden stand. Vellum cards, white, edged in black, bearing the legend CALL AGAIN. CALL AGAIN.

  “Yes?” There is a man’s voice behind him. Smith turns. The Man with the voice wears an old boater; pallid strip of ribbon around the brim.

  “Yes?” says the Man.

  His mouth flaps, he shifts the suitcase from one hand to the other. Grey folded eyes, dull as dreams. He speaks, wiping fingers to his mouth: “I’ve a… I’ve a hankering for regret.”

  The Man says nothing. Stands there, looking. A bug skits about the light.

  Smith cannot swallow. He should turn and walk away, should never have had those old thoughts. And then he remembers. He must ask. Request. “Hair,” he says, “I like hair.”

  “Room 8. Top floor,” says the Man.

  Smith, toward the stairs.

  Somewhere, someone breathes.

  When he has his foot firm on the bottom step, he throws a fleeting glance round at the Man: Eyes in the shadow of the brim of his hat. Smith tells him, “I’m not proud of what I do.”

  The Man would laugh, but has forgotten how.

  Smith climbs the stairs. The decorative dead haunt the walls: Faded red roses on withered wallpaper. He reaches the first floor, turns down a corridor, passing a door behind which he hears a rustling sound, a voice whispering, confetti in the mouth, repeating the word, “sorry,” over and over. He hurries on.

  On the second floor there is a room in which all that hangs in its wardrobe are flypapers.

  He lingers outside a room, hearing the stroking of sepia photographs. The pornography of nostalgia. The passion for shadows. On the fourth floor he can smell burnt blossoms.

  It is rumored that there is a room up on the seventh, full of moths, where one can spend frail moments wrapped in a silk shroud awaiting the delicate mouths of moths, nibbling… devoured by hours.

  The top floor is webby. Dust has shattered mirrors. Clocks have drowned in the dampness. Room 8 stands before him.

  Smith pulls the door open, steps in. It is a little room of dry plaster walls, there is a bunk, a wireless, a candle on a table, and in one corner there stands the Doll. The door flaps shut behind him. A burnt-out light bulb hangs from the ceiling. He lights a match, and soon there is candlelight burning in an old tin cup.

  He hears movement in a room below, pipes rattling, water running. Someone weeps, prays, washing away life with soap.

  He takes from the suitcase a stoppered vase full of rain. A stolen puddle. He produces other things also.

  He approaches the Doll, crouches before it, will not let himself touch the porcelain smooth face or fragile white hands. It was an early model, almost antique, but then he liked the past, the old thoughts of rain and hair and…

  The Doll is four feet in height, the usual perfect face of lips and lashes. The modest pigtail of coarse grey hair. She wears a blue dress, blue as eyes. And beneath, he lifts the hem, the garment of grey. Smith strips her, touching only clothing.

  The Doll is naked now in her whiteness, with just the hint of shade in the rounds of her contours, and there, behind, between her legs is the simple aperture, the slot for the coin. Stamped above it, the ancient logo of RAMPION INC., and beneath, the word or command, “ENJOY.”

  He rummages through his pockets, pulls out a fist of copper pennies. Careful then, behind the Doll, dropping loose change into the slot. The coins clatter, collect internally. Little machineries grind softly, cogs whir and twitter, her hair begins to grow, coiling out from the hole in her head. The more money installed the more hair grows. He will not look, cannot. His hand shakes, he turns away, unknowingly brushing by her, nudging her into motion. She topples light, from foot to foot. Side to side. Unseen. Forward.

  He switches the wireless on. There is the hum of old electricity. A machine warmth and cadmium yellow glow fill the room. He reads at names on the wireless tuner, remembering. “Brussels, Helsinki, Luxembourg…” A soft trumpet breaks in through static, and then a piano with crooner crooning, blending a melody. He removes things from the suitcase: Bible pages, torn, stained. A dried daisy chain.

  He cannot hear the Doll as she teeters toward the door, coins rattling heavy inside her, buying the growth of harsh grey silk from her white hollow head.

  Smith wants to look, to see her standing there, her hair about her, tumbling to the floor, but he will wait and concentrate on the music until he can wait no more and then he will turn and read from the fragments of Isaiah and Deuteronomy and he will drape the dead daisies over her eyes and…

  The Doll has tottered into the door, nudged it open, continued out. A draft of air snuffing the candle’s flame. She has taken the light with her. There is only the dim orange glow of the wireless now. Wax smoke shifting in the gloom.

  Turning quickly, Smith sees her hair vanish from view beyond the swinging door—

  She has walked out on him.

  “No, not again.”

  He hears his own voice in darkness. The wireless band plays on. He rushes after her.

  She has teeter-tottered along the hall to the stairway, and tumbles now, from side to side, weighted with coin, pulled back by sprouting mass of rough grey pigtail. Tumbling down the stairs, foot to foot on the narrow treads.

  And here is Smith chasing after—

  Her hair is getting longer, he can see it growing, pouring from her head. Racing down the stairs now, he’s reaching out for her, but she’s always thirteen or so steps ahead.

  The carpet underfoot is crumbling; damp as candy cotton, the banisters rusting away, the walls seem to sweat. He cannot hear the wireless playing anymore, just coins clattering inside. Funny, he can’t remember climbing up all these stairs. There are no hallways, no landings, just a staircase stretching down into darkness, as if it has no end.

  She does not slow in her tottery descent, but goes faster, an impossible speed. Her hair skkrittching out, thin strands of grey like old comic book speedlines. But Smith can’t reach her—thirteen or so steps ahead—

  He tumbles, headlong, reaching out, deaf to rattle of coin and his own screaming.

  No longer running down, merely falling down.

  Down to a darker silence.

  Down.

  (1996)

  THE ROBOT WHO LOOKED LIKE ME

  Robert Sheckley

  Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) was described by Kingsley Amis in New Maps of
Hell (1960) as the field’s “premier gadfly”. Brian Aldiss described him as “Voltaire and Soda”. His story “Seventh Victim”, a delicately nihilistic story of people as hunters and hunted, was filmed, rather hamfistedly, as The Tenth Victim in 1965, with Ursula Andress in a deadly, bikini-centred role that hardly needed sending up over thirty years later in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). The two or three hundred short stories Sheckley wrote in a burst of creativity from about 1952, when he was 24, so flooded the market that magazine editors insisted he publish some stories under pseudonyms. His first novel, Immortality, Inc., appeared in 1959. Later Sheckley took to travelling, living in Mexico, Ibiza, London and Paris before returning to the US in 1980, when, for a couple of years, he was fiction editor of Omni magazine.

  Snaithe’s Robotorama is an unprepossessing shop on Boulevard KB22 near the Uhuru Cutoff in Greater New Newark. It is sandwiched between an oxygenator factory and a protein store. The storefront display is what you would expect—three full-size humanoid robots with frozen smiles, dressed occupationally—Model PB2, the French Chef, Model LR3, the British Nanny, Model JX5, the Italian Gardener. All of Them Ready to Serve You and Bring a Touch of Old-World Graciousness into Your Home.

  I entered and went through the dusty showroom into the workshop, which looked like an uneasy combination of slaughterhouse and giant’s workshop. Heads, arms, legs, torsos, were stacked on shelves or propped in corners. The parts looked uncannily human except for the dangling wires.

  Snaithe came out of the storeroom to greet me. He was a little gray worm of a man with a lantern jaw and large red dangling hands. He was some kind of a foreigner—they’re always the ones who make the best bootleg robots.

  He said, “It’s ready, Mr. Watson.” (My name is not Watson, Snaithe’s name is not Snaithe. All names have been changed here to protect the guilty.)

  Snaithe led me to a corner of the workshop and stopped in front of a robot whose head was draped in a sheet. He whisked off the sheet.

  It was not enough to say that the robot looked like me; physically, this robot was me, exactly and unmistakably, feature for feature, right down to the textures of skin and hair. I studied that face, seeing as if for the first time the hint of brutality in the firmly cut features, the glitter of impatience in the deep-set eyes. Yes, that was me. I didn’t bother with the voice and behavior tests at this time. I paid Snaithe and told him to deliver it to my apartment. So far, everything was going according to plan.

  I live in Manhattan’s Upper Fifth Vertical. It is an expensive position, but I don’t mind paying extra for a sky view. My home is also my office. I am an interplanetary broker specializing in certain classes of rare mineral speculations.

  Like any other man who wishes to maintain his position in this high-speed competitive world, I keep to a tight schedule. Work consumes most of my life, but everything else is allotted its proper time and place. For example, I give three hours a week to sexuality, using the Doris Jens Executive Sex Plan and paying well for it. I give two hours a week to friendship, and two more to leisure. I plug into the Sleep-inducer for my nightly quota of 6.8 hours, and also use that time to absorb the relevant literature in my field via hypno-paedics. And so on.

  Everything I do is scheduled. I worked out a comprehensive scheme years ago with the assistance of the Total Lifesplan people, punched it into my personal computer and have kept to it ever since.

  The plan is capable of modification, of course. Special provisions have been made for illness, war, and natural disasters. The plan also supplies two separate subprograms for incorporation into the main plan. Subprogram one posits a wife, and revises my schedule to allow four hours a week interaction time with her. Subprogram two assumes a wife and one child, and calls for an additional two hours a week. Through careful reprogramming, these subprograms will entail a loss of no more than 2.3% and 2.9% of my productivity respectively.

  I had decided to get married at age 32.5 and to obtain my wife from the Guarantee Trust Matrimonial Agency, an organization with impeccable credentials. But then something quite unexpected occurred.

  I was using one of my Leisure Hours to attend the wedding of one of my friends. His fiancée’s maid of honor was named Elaine. She was a slender, vivacious girl with sun-streaked blond hair and a delicious little figure. I found her charming, went home and thought no more about her. Or, I thought I would think no more about her. But in the following days and nights her image remained obsessively before my eyes. My appetite fell off and I began sleeping badly. My computer checked out the relevant data and told me that I might conceivably be having a nervous breakdown; but the strongest inference was that I was in love.

  I was not entirely displeased. Being in love with one’s future wife can be a positive factor in establishing a good relationship. I had Elaine checked out by Discretion, Inc., and found her to be eminently suitable. I hired Mr. Happiness, the well-known go-between, to propose for me and make the usual arrangements.

  Mr. Happiness—a tiny white-haired gentleman with a twinkling smile—came back with bad news. “The young lady seems to be a traditionalist,” he said. “She expects to be courted.”

  “What does that entail, specifically?” I asked.

  “It means that you must videophone her and set up an appointment, take her out to dinner, then to a place of public entertainment and so forth.”

  “My schedule doesn’t allow time for that sort of thing,” I said. “Still, if it’s absolutely necessary, I suppose I could wedge it in next Thursday between nine and twelve p.m.”

  “That would make an excellent beginning,” Mr. Happiness said.

  “Beginning? How many evenings am I supposed to spend like that5”

  Mr. Happiness figured that a proper courtship would require a minimum of three evenings a week and would continue for two months.

  “Ridiculous!” I said. “The young lady seems to have a great deal of idle time on her hands.”

  “Not at all,” Mr. Happiness assured me. “Elaine has a busy, completely scheduled life, just like any educated person in this day and age. Her time is completely taken up by her job, family, charities, artistic pursuits, politics, education, and so forth.”

  “Then why does she insist upon this time-consuming courtship?”

  “It seems to be a matter of principle. That is to say, she wants it.”

  “Is she given to other irrationalities?”

  Mr. Happiness sighed. “Not really. But she is a woman, you know.”

  I thought about it during my next Leisure Hour. There seemed to be no more than two alternatives. I could give up Elaine; or I could do as she desired, losing an estimated 17% of my income during the courtship period and spending my evenings in a manner I considered silly, boring, and unproductive.

  Both alternatives were unacceptable. I was at an impasse.

  I swore. I hit the desk with my fist, upsetting an antique ashtray. Gordon, one of my robot secretaries, heard the commotion and hurried into the room. “Is there anything the matter, sir?” he asked.

  Gordon is one of the Sperry’s Deluxe Limited Personalized Series Androids, number twelve out of a production run of twenty-five. He is tall and thin and walks with a slight stoop and looks a little like Leslie Howard. You would not know he was artificial except for the government-required stamps on his forehead and hands. Looking at him, the solution to my problem came to me in a single flash of inspiration.

  “Gordon,” I said slowly, “would you happen to know who handcrafts the best one-shot individualized robots?”

  “Snaithe of Greater New Newark,” he replied without hesitation.

  I had a talk with Snaithe and found him normally larcenous. He agreed to build a robot without government markings, identical to me, and capable of duplicating my behavior patterns. I paid heavily for this, but I was content: I had plenty of money, but practically no time to spend. That was how it all began.

  The robot, sent via pneumo-express, was at my apartment when I
arrived. I animated him and set to work at once. My computer transmitted the relevant data direct to the robot’s memory tapes. Then I punched in a courtship plan and ran the necessary tests. The results were even better than I had expected. Elated, I called Elaine and made a date with her for that evening.

  During the rest of the day I worked on the Spring market offers, which had begun to pile up. At 8:00 pm I dispatched Charles II, as I had come to call the robot. Then I took a brief nap and went back to work.

  Charles II returned promptly at midnight, as programmed. I did not have to question him: the events of the evening were recorded on the miniature concealed movie camera which Snaithe had built into his left eye. I watched and listened to the beginning of my courtship with mixed emotions.

  It went beyond impersonation; the robot was me, right down to the way I clear my throat before I speak and rub my forefinger against my thumb when I am thinking. I noticed for the first time that my laugh was unpleasantly close to a giggle; I decided to phase that and certain other annoying mannerisms out of me and Charles II.

  Still, taken all together, I thought that the experiment had come off extremely well. I was pleased. My work and my courtship were both proceeding with high efficiency. I had achieved an ancient dream; I was a single ego served by two bodies. Who could ask for more?

  What marvelous evenings we all had! My experiences were vicarious, of course, but genuinely moving all the same. I can still remember my first quarrel with Elaine, how beautiful and stubborn she was, and how deliciously we made up afterward.

  That “making up” raised certain problems, as a matter of fact. I had programmed Charles II to proceed to a certain discreet point of physical intimacy and no further. But now I learned that one person cannot plan out every move of a courtship involving two autonomous beings, especially if one of those beings is a woman. For the sake of verisimilitude I had to permit the robot more intimacies than I had previously thought advisable.