The Dragon and the Stars

by Derwin Mak

  “Whatever,” she finally said, walking out of the room. She could win an argument against anybody, but when it came to her mother, it felt as if all the words in the world retreated from her.

  What do I know, right? I only have a PhD in robotic diagnostics.

  “I cannot believe you,” Katie said, as Charles climbed in on the other side of the bed.

  Charles lay down with a sigh and turned to face her. “What was I supposed to do, Katie? It was your mother’s idea to surprise you. You want me to refuse her?”

  “Yes!” Katie exclaimed. “You could have told her that I was really busy and that she should come stay with us some other time.”

  “She’s just staying for the weekend. It won’t be too bad.”

  But Katie’s mind was no longer on her mother. Her thoughts had now jumped to the robot in the other room.

  Carter.

  “Is it just me, or was that a malfunctional robot that my mother brought into our apartment?” she asked Charles. As an operations manager at the same company, Charles worked with the BioCorp scientists on the mechanical functions of the different generations of robots.

  Charles rubbed his eyes and set his glasses down on the nightstand. “Look, Carter is an Aqua Generation robot. He’s a prototype, modeled after the average human being. He’s going to be a little on the sassy side, and not too pleasant either. And even work ethic-wise, he’s not going to be as efficient as, say, Queenie.”

  At the mention of her name, the robot standing at the corner of the room blinked to life. “What can I help you with, Charles?” she asked, the color returning to her flesh.

  “Nothing, Queenie,” Charles said, waving the robot away, and so Queenie retreated to the corner of the room and shut down again.

  “Every generation of robots is different, Katie,” he said. “And the older they are, the more unsophisticated, the more inhuman they are.”

  But that answer failed to satisfy. Even with her eyes closed in the darkness, Katie couldn’t stop thinking about Carter.

  In the silence, she could hear the echoing noise of the second hand in her head, ticking to a new minute, then a new hour.

  Finally, when she could no longer take the curiosity welling up inside her, she slid out of bed and, careful not to disturb the sleeping Charles, tiptoed out the door.

  Darkness pressed on the hallway from all sides, oozing into her senses as she made her way to the study at the end, her footsteps silent.

  With her mother breathing in the same house as Katie’s again, she could feel herself transported back to her teenage years, slipping silently out of the house late on Friday nights, while her friends waited in a car down the street.

  Her mother always said that nothing good happened after midnight.

  Then again, nothing fun happened before.

  Katie rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and set her hand on the doorknob, slowly opened the door and stepped into her study. It was her and Charles’ joint study, but since Charles almost never ventured into the room unless he needed to surf the Internet or answer emails, it was Katie’s diagrams that were plastered over the walls, Katie’s papers that were scattered across the floor.

  She hadn’t logged off work, so the database search engine popped up right away.

  Aqua Generation. She hit the search button. In her five years of working at BioCorp, she had never tested a first-generation robot, possibly because the Cyan Generation had just popped onto the market at the time, making robots like Carter outdated machinery.

  There were only eight reported psychological examinations for Aqua Generation robots, and of the eight, only three had examiner comments. The rest were “Yes” and “No” checkboxes for robotic performance. Almost all examiners checked “No” for “Willingness to Perform Tasks.” Half checked “Yes” for “Ability to Think at Normal Human Speed,” and only one checked “Yes” for “Pleasant Demeanor.”

  The category “Ability to Understand Poetry” was nonexistent.

  Katie ran a hand through her hair as she scanned the rest of the data on the screen. Eight psychological examinations were reported, she thought. The second-generation robots, the Cyan Generation, logged a total of three thousand and sixty-six examinations.

  How can this be? Katie leaned back in her chair, thinking. She remembered the first day she had arrived at the robotics testing office. Outside, there had to have been thousands of deactivated Aqua Generation robots hanging off the trucks.

  “So where did their examination reports go?” she wondered out loud. Could an administrator possibly have erased them?

  If so, it didn’t make sense.

  “Hey,” a voice suddenly said, a few feet away.

  Katie jumped an inch off her seat and turned toward the shadow leaning against the framework of the door, where the light in the study couldn’t reveal him.

  “Who is it?” she said, standing up quickly.

  The person stepped into the study, and relief washed over her.

  “Oh,” Katie said and droppedback into her seat. “Carter. What are you doing, walking around at this hour?”

  Carter shrugged. “Nina is sleeping, but with all the racket you’re making in here . . .”

  Katie frowned as she looked at Carter, at his humanistic face. He couldn’t walk as smoothly as his successors, who moved with flawless step and meticulous swings. Even when Carter talked, his lips couldn’t form perfect Os.

  She shifted her stare from Carter to her computer, where the list of examinations for Aqua Generation robots was still pulled up.

  An idea hit her.

  “Please, sit down,” she said, gesturing to the chair across her desk.

  Carter sat. He didn’t look happy or even pleasant.

  “Have you ever read a poem, Carter?”

  “No,” Carter said. “You see, at slave school, we learned how to cook meals, vacuum, repair leaks ... those kinds of things.”

  Katie couldn’t help but smile. “Is that bitterness I detect?” In the back of her mind, her curiosity was piqued. Robots have never been programmed with an understanding of things like bitterness or sarcasm. Katie had written a paper on the subject in grad school—and if her professor had met Carter, she would have failed the class.

  “Actually, hold on,” Carter said. “When I was examined, way back in the 2050s, the man in the room read me a poem.”

  “Really?” Katie sat up in her seat. Then why were there no records of the poem interpretations? “Which poem did the man read you?”

  Carter shrugged. “Something by Walt Whitman.”

  “Ahh.”

  Carter then proceeded to say, “I don’t remember the title of the poem. But man, it couldn’t have been any more communistic.”

  She hadn’t expected an answer like that. “What did you just say?” Katie said.

  “Transcendentalism is just a mask for communism,” Carter said. “Being one with nature, transcending the physical and empirical . . . Whitman is just a better-groomed Karl Marx.”

  The joke would have been funny if it had come from the mouth of a human. But in Carter’s case . . .

  A shiver traveled down Katie’s spine. Could she really have a human-robot on her hands? A robot with his own thoughts, his own opinions?

  “Well, I’m going to read to you a poem by my favorite poet of all time,” Katie said, grabbing the Chinese version of The Selected Poems of Li Bai out of her drawer.

  A robot, though it was the most complex piece of machinery in the twenty-first century, could not possibly comprehend the deep meanings in human poems. Because to understand poetry, one must identify with the emotions expressed on the page.

  And robots did not have emotions.

  But, looking at Carter, Katie began to doubt.

  She flipped to a page, translated the first few lines of the poem to English in her head, and began. “Blue mountains to the north of the walls, A white river winding about them; It is here that we must separate, And go out through a thousand miles
of dead grass.”

  She stopped and looked at the robot, meanwhile grabbing a pen and a notepad. “These are the four opening lines from Li Bai’s famous poem, ‘Farewell to a Friend.’ Will you give me your interpretation of them?”

  At this question, every robot that Katie had ever examined would pause and start up their internal search engines, combing the Internet and the dictionary for the most accurate answer.

  Carter, on the other hand, immediately said, “Easy. In the first two lines, Li Bai is using the image of mountains surrounded by a river to illustrate the relationship of two friends, as inseparable as Mother Nature’s children. It’s the basic form of love.”

  He just explained to me what love is, Katie thought, her pen shaking as she set the tip down on paper. How in the world does he understand love?

  “As for the last two lines,” Carter continued, “there comes a day that the mountain and the river, the two friends, must separate and go their own ways. Li Bai is saying that, after spending so much time alongside your best friend, traveling the road with no voice to talk to but your own is going to seem scary and dead.”

  Katie dropped the pen. It clattered to a stop on the floor.

  Carter frowned and said, “Hey, butterfingers. Your pen is on the ground.”

  After a pause, Katie scooped up the pen and stood. “Please wait here, Carter,” she said. “I have to go make a phone call.”

  “Hmm. Will it be a quick thirty-second conversation, or will you be confessing your sins to a priest?”

  Katie didn’t answer the question; instead, she tossed her Li Bai book at him. “This might keep you occupied,” she said and left for the second spare bedroom a couple doors down.

  After three rings, her manager picked up.

  “Hey, Dennis, I’ve got something hot on my hands,” Katie said.

  “Well, it better be if you’re calling me this late and on a personal line.”

  Katie took a deep breath and said, “I just did a psychological examination on a robot. He passed the poetry comprehension test.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Dennis?” Katie said. “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Let me connect you to Jeremy Lawrence. He’s the director of robotics distribution at the company. Hold on.”

  The wait was short.

  “Hi. Is this Katie Huang?” a voice came on.

  Katie cleared her throat. “Yes, this is she.” She had never spoken to anyone this high up on the management chain, and the upper levels didn’t speak to her, either—unless something major had happened.

  “Well, Katie, it’s nice to make your acquaintance. My name is—”

  “Dennis told me who you are.”

  “Ahh. Good. Let’s see—first, I want to thank you for making this a priority and contacting us straight away. If this robot indeed qualifies for human status, you will find a generous bonus on your desk soon.”

  “Umm. Thank you, sir.”

  “Of course,” Lawrence said. “Now, tell me: This robot that you just examined, which generation is he?”

  “Aqua,” Katie answered. “He belongs to my mother. He started exhibiting unusual behavior upon arriving at my home. I only examined him when I searched for prior psychological examinations of Aqua Generation robots and found that there was almost nothing in the database. Why is that?”

  “Oh. You saw that, huh?”

  Katie was about to say something, but then thought it would be best to keep quiet. He had obviously heard her.

  After a few seconds, Lawrence said, “Well, it was just a matter of some spring cleaning.” He chuckled. “The Aqua Generation robots are so outdated that I didn’t think anyone would go hunting for their examinations.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t even leave it up there for referencing in the future?” Katie pressed. Lawrence’s answer didn’t make any sense. Database storage was so extensive and cheap. Nobody cleaned anything off systems anymore.

  “Yes, I suppose we could have,” Lawrence said. “But anyway, is it okay if we stop by in the morning and take the robot back to BioCorp, have our scientists run some tests?”

  Katie frowned. “I don’t know if that’s possible,” she said. “You see, the robot isn’t mine. He’s my mother’s.”

  “BioCorp has the right to take away any robot at any time for reasons that will be disclosed to the robot’s owner after the robot has been readmitted to the labs for a period of twenty-four hours,” Lawrence answered. “It’s in the safety clause in the buyer’s contract.”

  “Oh.”

  “So we’ll be by in the morning.”

  But before Lawrence could hang up, Katie asked, “Sir? Umm ... what will happen with Carter the robot if he tests positive for human status?”

  The silence that followed sent chills down her back. Oh, God, Katie thought. And in that instant, everything hit her. The erased information on the database, the urgency in Lawrence’s voice . . .

  They’re trying to erase the existence of all Aqua Generation robots.

  Finally, Lawrence said, “Don’t worry about it,” and hung up.

  Oh, God. Katie leaned against the wall of the room, shaking. What have I done?

  The sound of a scraping chair from the study reminded her that Carter was still waiting for her.

  “How was your call?” Carter asked as Katie stepped into the study.

  Katie took a deep breath. She owed him the truth. “I was just on the phone with the director of robotics distribution. He’s sending some people to come get you tomorrow.”

  “I know,” Carter said. “I heard everything.”

  Katie nodded. She half-expected that he would listen in. “I think that—”

  “They’re going to kill me?” Carter said. A smile played at the corners of his lips.

  “They’re going to deactivate you, yes.” Katie kept her eyes trained on the ground as she spoke, afraid to meet his gaze. “But, Carter, I didn’t know until after I had told him. I mean, when I saw that most of the Aqua Generation information in our database was missing, I was confused, maybe even suspicious, but I was just doing my job. Nothing clicked for me until—”

  “I know,” Carter said again.

  Katie frowned and returned to her seat. “How do you know?”

  “Let’s just say that, after forty years of serving under humans, watching their expressions and listening to their tones of voice, I’ve become skilled at seeing the emotions under the skin.”

  Katie couldn’t believe it. Despite the wires and systems under his synthetic skin, Carter could feel. He couldn’t be anything but human.

  Carter cocked his head to one side and said, “You looked rattled when you came back, whereas before you left, you were full of excitement, like you had just bought a pair of shoes for fifty percent off.”

  Katie chuckled, the noise echoing off the walls of the study. “That would be my mother, not me,” she said. “She’s always going after the bargains.”

  “That she is.”

  Katie nodded. “Well, Carter . . .” She paused as she stared into Carter’s eyes. Were they the windows to an internal computer? Did he even have a soul?

  She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and said, “You should leave. I’ll just tell them that you heard me talking on the phone and decided to escape.”

  Carter frowned. “Escape? Save myself?”

  “That’s right. They’ll be here in the morning. That gives you at least four hours to disappear.”

  A few seconds passed before Carter shook his head and said, “No. I can’t.”

  Katie didn’t understand. “What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can, Carter. It’s a human instinct—it’s called self-preservation. They’re going to demolish you.”

  “I can’t leave,” Carter said. “Don’t bother asking me why. Every part of me is pushing me to run.” He looked down at his lap. “But something inside of me tells me that I can’t.”

  “Oh, my God.” Kati
e took a few steps, jolted by the shock he had delivered to her. “Oh, my God.” The surprises wouldn’t stop coming.

  “What?”

  “You’re so humanistic,in every way,” she said. “But you don’t possess the basic instinct of self-preservation.”

  Carter chuckled nervously and leaned back in his seat. He sounded scared, and with good reason. “Sucks for me.”

  An awkward moment of silence passed.

  “Well, I’m going to go to—” Katie smiled, not knowing what to say. “I have to wake up my mom and tell her—” She stopped. She didn’t know what she was going to tell her mother, though the truth itself would be cumbersome enough to grasp.

  “I’m going to be gone by morning,” Carter said as Katie stood up from her seat.

  Katie paused.

  “Do you think we could chat?” Carter looked up at her with his pleading human eyes. “I know that I haven’t been the nicest little house slave, but—indulge me? Grant a robot’s dying wish.”

  Katie fought back a smile and thought about his request. She had just been responsible for sending an innocent being to his death. The least she could do was sacrifice a few hours of her time.

  “What do you want to chat about?”

  Carter shrugged. “Human things. Human life.”

  “That’s a pretty broad topic.”

  “Then let’s narrow it down.” He gestured at the study door, though his eyes never left Katie’s. “Why are you so wary to see your mother?”

  Katie forced out a laugh and said, “I’m not wary. I’m just—” She stopped herself. Why bother keeping up this pretense? She was talking to something that would be silenced by tomorrow morning. “Yeah, my mother and I, we don’t get along.”

  “And why’s that?”

  Katie sighed. “Different values, I guess. She emigrated from China when I was still in the womb, so that I could be a citizen of this country. And she’s always dangled that ‘sacrifice’ in front of me, pushing me to be the best. No, to be better than the best.”

  Carter smiled and said, “I’ve never had a mother, but I think that all mothers want the best for their daughters. Their worst fear is seeing their daughters follow the same path that they did.”