We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  He has nothing to say about gomi. It’s his medium, the air he breathes, something he’s swum in all his life. He cruises Greater Van in a spavined truck-thing chopped down from an ancient Mercedes airporter, its roof lost under a wallowing rubber bag half-filled with natural gas. He looks for things that fit some strange design scrawled on the inside of his forehead by whatever serves him as Muse. He brings home more gomi. Some of it still operative. Some of it, like Lise, human.

  I met Lise at one of Rubin’s parties. Rubin had a lot of parties. He never seemed particularly to enjoy them, himself, but they were excellent parties. I lost track, that fall, of the number of times I woke on a slab of foam to the roar of Rubin’s antique espresso machine, a tarnished behemoth topped with a big chrome eagle, the sound outrageous off the corrugated steel walls of the place, but massively comforting, too: There was coffee. Life would go on.

  First time I saw her: in the Kitchen Zone. You wouldn’t call it a kitchen, exactly, just three fridges and a hot plate and a broken convection oven that had come in with the gomi. First time I saw her: She had the all-beer fridge open, light spilling out, and I caught the cheekbones and the determined set of that mouth, but I also caught the black glint of polycarbon at her wrist, and the bright slick sore the exoskeleton had rubbed there. Too drunk to process, to know what it was, but I did know it wasn’t party time. So I did what people usually did, to Lise, and clicked myself into a different movie. Went for the wine instead, on the counter beside the convection oven. Never looked back.

  But she found me again. Came after me two hours later, weaving through the bodies and junk with that terrible grace programmed into the exoskeleton. I knew what it was, then, as I watched her homing in, too embarrassed now to duck it, to run, to mumble some excuse and get out. Pinned there, my arm around the waist of a girl I didn’t know, while Lise advanced—was advanced, with that mocking grace—straight at me now, her eyes burning with wizz, and the girl had wriggled out and away in a quiet social panic, was gone, and Lise stood there in front of me, propped up in her pencil-thin polycarbon prosthetic. Looked into those eyes and it was like you could hear her synapses whining, some impossibly high-pitched scream as the wizz opened every circuit in her brain.

  “Take me home,” she said, and the words hit me like a whip. I think I shook my head. “Take me home.” There were levels of pain there, and subtlety, and an amazing cruelty. And I knew then that I’d never been hated, ever, as deeply or thoroughly as this wasted little girl hated me now, hated me for the way I’d looked, then looked away, beside Rubin’s all-beer refrigerator.

  So if that’s the word I did one of those things you do and never find out why, even though something in you knows you could never have done anything else.

  I took her home.

  *

  I have two rooms in an old condo rack at the corner of Fourth and MacDonald, tenth floor. The elevators usually work, and if you sit on the balcony railing and lean out backward, holding on to the corner of the building next door, you can see a little upright slit of sea and mountain.

  She hadn’t said a word, all the way back from Rubin’s, and I was getting sober enough to feel very uneasy as I unlocked the door and let her in.

  The first thing she saw was the portable fast-wipe I’d brought home from the Pilot the night before. The exoskeleton carried her across the dusty broadloom with that same walk, like a model down a runway. Away from the crash of the party, I could hear it click softly as it moved her. She stood there, looking down at the fast-wipe. I could see the thing’s ribs when she stood like that, make them out across her back through the scuffed black leather of her jacket. One of those diseases. Either one of the old ones they’ve never quite figured out or one of the new ones—the all too obviously environmental kind that they’ve barely even named yet. She couldn’t move, not without that extra skeleton, and it was jacked straight into her brain, myoclectric interface. The fragile-looking polycarbon braces moved her arms and legs, but a more subtle system handled her thin hands, galvanic inlays. I thought of frog legs twitching in a high-school lab tape, then hated myself for it.

  “This is a fast-wipe module,” she said, in a voice I hadn’t heard before, distant, and I thought then that the wizz might be wearing off. “What’s it doing here?”

  “I edit,” I said, closing the door behind me.

  “Well, now,” and she laughed. “You do. Where?”

  “On the Island. Place called the Autonomic Pilot.”

  She turned; then, hand on thrust hip, she swung—it swung her—and the wizz and the hate and some terrible parody of lust stabbed out at me from those washed-out gray eyes. “You wanna make it, editor?”

  And I felt the whip come down again, but I wasn’t going to take it, not again. So I cold-eyed her from somewhere down in the beer-numb core of my walking, talking, live-limbed, and entirely ordinary body and the words came out of me like spit: “Could you feel it, if I did?”

  Beat. Maybe she blinked, but her face never registered. “No,” she said, “but sometimes I like to watch.”

  *

  Rubin stands at the window, two days after her death in Los Angeles, watching snow fall into False Creek. “So you never went to bed with her?”

  One of his push-me-pull-you’s, little roller-bearing Escher lizards, scoots across the table in front of me, in curl-up mode.

  “No.” I say, and it’s true. Then I laugh. “But we jacked straight across. That first night.”

  “You were crazy,” he said, a certain approval in his voice. “It might have killed you. Your heart might have stopped, you might have stopped breathing….” He turns back to the window. “Has she called you yet?”

  *

  We jacked, straight across.

  I’d never done it before. If you’d asked me why, I would have told you that I was an editor and that it wasn’t professional.

  The truth would be something more like this.

  In the trade, the legitimate trade—I’ve never done porno—we call the raw product dry dreams. Dry dreams are neural output from levels of consciousness that most people can only access in sleep. But artists, the kind I work with at the Autonomic Pilot, are able to break the surface tension, dive down deep, down and out, out into Jung’s sea, and bring back—well, dreams. Keep it simple. I guess some artists have always done that, in whatever medium, but neuroelectronics lets us access the experience, and the net gets it all out on the wire, so we can package it, sell it, watch how it moves in the market. Well, the more things change… That’s something my father liked to say.

  Ordinarily I get the raw material in a studio situation, filtered through several million dollars’ worth of baffles, and I don’t even have to see the artist. The stuff we get out to the consumer, you see, has been structured, balanced, turned into art. There are still people naive enough to assume that they’ll actually enjoy jacking straight across with someone they love. I think most teenagers try it, once. Certainly it’s easy enough to do; Radio Shack will sell you the box and the trodes and the cables. But me, I’d never done it. And now that I think about it, I’m not so sure I can explain why. Or that I even want to try.

  I do know why I did it with Lise, sat down beside her on my Mexican futon and snapped the optic lead into the socket on the spine, the smooth dorsal ridge, of the exoskeleton. It was high up, at the base of her neck, hidden by her dark hair.

  Because she claimed she was an artist, and because I knew that we were engaged, somehow, in total combat, and I was not going to lose. That may not make sense to you, but then you never knew her, or know her through Kings of Sleep, which isn’t the same at all. You never felt that hunger she had, which was pared down to a dry need, hideous in its singleness of purpose. People who know exactly what they want have always frightened me, and Lise had known what she wanted for a long time, and wanted nothing else at all. And I was scared, then, of admitting to myself that I was scared, and I’d seen enough strangers’ dreams, in the mixing room at the Au
tonomic Pilot, to know that most people’s inner monsters are foolish things, ludicrous in the calm light of one’s own consciousness. And I was still drunk.

  I put the trodes on and reached for the stud on the fast-wipe. I’d shut down its studio functions, temporarily converting eighty thousand dollars’ worth of Japanese electronics to the equivalent of one of those little Radio Shack boxes. “Hit it,” I said, and touched the switch.

  Words. Words cannot. Or, maybe, just barely, if I even knew how to begin to describe it, what came up out of her, what she did…

  There’s a segment on Kings of Sleep; it’s like you’re on a motorcycle at midnight, no lights but somehow you don’t need them, blasting out along a cliff-high stretch of coast highway, so fast that you hang there in a cone of silence, the bike’s thunder lost behind you. Everything, lost behind you… It’s just a blink, on Kings, but it’s one of the thousand things you remember, go back to, incorporate into your own vocabulary of feelings. Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor’s edge, forever.

  What I got was the big-daddy version of that, raw rush, the king hell killer uncut real thing, exploding eight ways from Sunday into a void that stank of poverty and lovelessness and obscurity.

  And that was Lise’s ambition, that rush, seen from the inside.

  It probably took all of four seconds.

  And, course, she’d won.

  I took the trodes off and stared at the wall, eyes wet, the framed posters swimming.

  I couldn’t look at her. I heard her disconnect the optic lead. I heard the exoskeleton creak as it hoisted her up from the futon. Heard it tick demurely as it hauled her into the kitchen for a glass of water.

  Then I started to cry.

  *

  Rubin inserts a skinny probe in the roller-bearing belly of a sluggish push-me-pull-you and peers at the circuitry through magnifying glasses with miniature headlights mounted at the temples.

  “So? You got hooked.” He shrugs, looks up. It’s dark now and the twin tensor beams stab at my face, chill damp in his steel barn and the lonesome hoot of a foghorn from somewhere across the water. “So?”

  My turn to shrug. “I just did… There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.”

  The beams duck back to the silicon heart of his defective toy. “Then you’re okay. It was a true choice. What I mean is, she was set to be what she is. You had about as much to do with where she’s at today as that fast-wipe module did. She’d have found somebody else if she hadn’t found you….”

  *

  I made a deal with Barry, the senior editor, got twenty minutes at five on a cold September morning. Lise came in and hit me with that same shot, but this time I was ready, with my baffles and brain maps, and I didn’t have to feel it. It took me two weeks, piecing out the minutes in the editing room, to cut what she’d done down into something I could play for Max Bell, who owns the Pilot.

  Bell hadn’t been happy, not happy at all, as I explained what I’d done. Maverick editors can be a problem, and eventually most editors decide that they’ve found someone who’ll be it, the next monster, and then they start wasting time and money. He’d nodded when I’d finished my pitch, then scratched his nose with the cap of his red feltpen. “Uh-huh. Got it. Hottest thing since fish grew legs, right?”

  But he’d jacked it, the demo soft I’d put together, and when it clicked out of its slot in his Braun desk unit, he was staring at the wall, his face blank.

  “Max?”

  “Huh?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Think? I… What did you say her name was?” He blinked. “Lisa? Who you say she’s signed with?”

  “Lise. Nobody, Max. She hasn’t signed with anybody yet.”

  “Jesus Christ.” He still looked blank.

  *

  “You know how I found her?” Rubin asks, wading through ragged cardboard boxes to find the light switch. The boxes are filled with carefully sorted gomi: lithium batteries, tantalum capacitors, RF connectors, breadboards, barrier strips, ferroresonant transformers, spools of bus bar wire… One box is filled with the severed heads of hundreds of Barbie dolls, another with armored industrial safety gauntlets that look like spacesuit gloves. Light floods the room and a sort of Kandinski mantis in snipped and painted tin swings its golfball-size head toward the bright bulb. “I was down Granville on a gomi run, back in an alley, and I found her just sitting there. Caught the skeleton and she didn’t look so good, so I asked her if she was okay. Nothin’. Just closed her eyes. Not my lookout, I think. But I happen back by there about four hours later and she hasn’t moved. ‘Look, honey,’ I tell her, ‘maybe your hardware’s buggered up. I can help you, okay?’ Nothin’. ‘How long you been back here?’ Nothin’. So I take off.” He crosses to his workbench and strokes the thin metal limbs of the mantis thing with a pale forefinger. Behind the bench, hung on damp-swollen sheets of ancient pegboard, are pliers, screwdrivers, tie-wrap guns, a rusted Daisy BB rifle, coax strippers, crimpers, logic probes, heat guns, a pocket oscilloscope, seemingly every tool in human history, with no attempt ever made to order them at all, though I’ve yet to see Rubin’s hand hesitate.

  “So I went back,” he says. “Gave it an hour. She was out by then, unconscious, so I brought her back here and ran a check on the exoskeleton. Batteries were dead. She’d crawled back there when the juice ran out and settled down to starve to death, I guess.”

  “When was that?”

  “About a week before you took her home.”

  “But what if she’d died? If you hadn’t found her?”

  “Somebody was going to find her. She couldn’t ask for anything, you know? Just take. Couldn’t stand a favor.”

  *

  Max found the agents for her, and a trio of awesomely slick junior partners Leared into YVR a day later. Lise wouldn’t come down to the Pilot to meet them, insisted we bring them up to Rubin’s, where she still slept.

  “Welcome to Couverville,” Rubin said as they edged in the door. His long face was smeared with grease, the fly of his ragged fatigue pants held more or less shut with a twisted paper clip. The boys grinned automatically, but there was something marginally more authentic about the girl’s smile. “Mr. Stark,” she said, “I was in London last week. I saw your installation at the Tate.”

  “Marcello’s Battery Factory,” Rubin said. “They say it’s scatological, the Brits…” He shrugged. “Brits. I mean, who knows?”

  “They’re right. It’s also very funny.”

  The boys were beaming like tabled-tanned lighthouses, standing there in their suits. The demo had reached Los Angeles. They knew.

  “And you’re Lise,” she said, negotiating the path between Rubin’s heaped gomi. “You’re going to be a very famous person soon, Lise. We have a lot to discuss.

  And Lise just stood there, propped in polycarbon, and the look on her face was the one I’d seen that first night, in my condo, when she’d asked me if I wanted to go to bed. But if the junior agent lady saw it, she didn’t show it. She was a pro.

  I told myself that I was a pro, too.

  I told myself to relax.

  *

  Trash fires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whipping their dark coats. Up in Fairview’s arty slum-tumble, someone’s laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheet standing out against the background dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist’s eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates.

  Rubin clumps along in paint-spattered L. L. Bean gumshoes, his big head pulled down into an oversize fatigue jacket. Sometimes one of the hunched teens will point him out as we pass, the guy who builds all the crazy stuff, the robots and shit.

  “You know what your trouble is?” he says when we’re under the bridge, headed up to Fourth. “You’re the kind who al
ways reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. Like Lise.”

  “She wasn’t the first.” Traffic drums past overhead.

  “No, but she’s sure as hell the first person you ever met who went and translated themself into a hardwired program. You lose any sleep when whatsisname did it, three-four years ago, the French kid, the writer?”

  “I didn’t really think about it, much. A gimmick. PR…”

  “He’s still writing. The weird thing is, he’s going to be writing, unless somebody blows up his mainframe…”

  I wince, shake my head. “But it’s not him, is it? It’s just a program.”

  “Interesting point. Hard to say. With Lise, though, we find out. She’s not a writer.”

  *

  She had it all in there, Kings, locked up in her head the way her body was locked in that exoskeleton.

  The agents signed her with a label and brought in a production team from Tokyo. She told them she wanted me to edit. I said no; Max dragged me into his office and threatened to fire me on the spot. If I wasn’t involved, there was no reason to do the studio work at the Pilot. Vancouver was hardly the center of the world, and the agents wanted her in Los Angeles. It meant a lot of money to him, and it might put the Autonomic Pilot on the map. I couldn’t explain to him why I’d refused. It was too crazy, too personal; she was getting a final dig in. Or that’s what I thought then. But Max was serious. He really didn’t give me any choice. We both knew another job wasn’t going to crawl into my hand. I went back out with him and we told the agents that we’d worked it out: I was on.