Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories

by Naomi Kritzer

  It got awkward when Mandy made it clear she wanted Joe to participate in the gaming.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Larry said, bluntly. “These games are supposed to be tests of human skill. If I wanted to play Scrabble with a robot, I could do that, but it’ll win almost every time since it has the dictionary built into its head.”

  “I’ve instructed him not to win anything a disproportionate amount of the time,” Mandy said, defensively.

  “So your robot friend is going to throw games deliberately? No. Just no.”

  “If he can’t play, we’re leaving,” Mandy said.

  There were groans all around, but Shanice suggested, “How about Diplomacy? With the robot, there’s seven of us. And I wouldn’t expect him to have any particular advantage with that game.”

  “Well, other than the fact that if Mandy orders him to ally with her, what else is he going to do?” Larry snapped.

  I pondered this. “We can account for that,” I said, as Mandy said, “I can order him right now to just play the game as it’s supposed to be played—ally with me if it makes sense, betray me if it makes sense.”

  “Can he lie?” Quinn asked. We all stared at Joe, speculatively.

  “Right,” Dawn said. “I’ll get the box.”

  Diplomacy is a seriously old-school game, invented in the mid-20th-century, and everyone pretends to be European powers from around World War I. There’s no random element—no dice rolls or anything like that. You walk around persuading people to ally with you (by assuring them that you’re trustworthy). Then everyone writes down their move secretly and all moves are revealed at one go. There’s no rule that keeps you from lying, from making false promises, or from stabbing people in the back. In fact, in general you want to betray your allies one turn before they were going to turn on you.

  A robot has a clear advantage in any game where a perfect memory or a lightening-fast ability to calculate odds will come in useful—which is to say, most of them. But in a game where you have to make a guess about who’s lying to you, a robot’s going to have a harder time. So we went with it, because by then we were all curious. Mandy reiterated to Joe that he should play the game to win—that he was allowed to lie to people, including her, and betray them, including her, in order to try to win. We had to trust that she wouldn’t rescind that instruction quietly later on, but she probably realized that if he backed her when he should have betrayed her, that would be it. We wouldn’t repeat this experiment.

  During the first diplomatic phase I realized that no one was approaching Joe, probably more because he made them nervous than because they thought he’d sell them out to Mandy. I shrugged and edged over. I was playing Russia and Joe was playing Turkey and I was pretty sure that if we worked together we could squash any chance Mandy (who was playing Austria) had of winning the game by the end of 1903 as long as we could keep the other players from coming to her aid.

  “Want an alliance?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, please,” Joe said, with bright enthusiasm. I wondered whether he would jump up and down and clap his hands if he won.

  You’re probably not a Diplomacy player so the precise ins-and-outs of who allied with whom and who got stabbed in the back when is not going to be particularly interesting to you, so I’ll summarize: Joe was an adequate but not outstanding Diplomacy player because he could analyze the strategic advantage of all the possible actions but he was terrible at reading people and frankly he was pretty gullible. Also, he let the rest of us crush Mandy (I think we were sort of in the mood to do that, anyway) and since everyone figured he probably wasn’t programmed for grudge-holding, I was able to persuade both Dawn and Quinn that I was totally going to double-cross Joe even though I then double-crossed Quinn. (I don’t usually recommend playing Diplomacy with your boyfriend, but it works out for us).

  Nobody won; we got down to me, Joe, Dawn, and Larry and then quit, because actually winning a game of Diplomacy can easily take all night. Joe clearly found that puzzling, but didn’t complain.

  Afterward, we ate pizza and drank beer, except for Joe, who sat quietly and watched us. When it was time to go home, he got Mandy’s coat for her and also slipped on a coat himself, even though surely he wasn’t going to get cold—it was a brusque fall evening but he wasn’t in any danger of freezing solid yet. Everyone shook Joe’s hand and we headed in our separate directions.

  For most of the next year, Joe was Mandy’s boyfriend.

  And, he really was the perfect boyfriend. I mean, I like Quinn a lot. He makes me very happy. But there are areas of life where he is imperfect. For example, when he uses up a roll of toilet paper, he tends to leave the fresh roll on the back of the toilet instead of hanging it up neatly on the hook. Joe doesn’t use the toilet, but if he did, he would always hang up the TP. In fact, if Mandy wanted to never have to hang up the TP, she could instruct Joe to check for un-hung TP every so often and hang it up if it wasn’t in place and he would do it without resentment or reminders.

  Plus, Mandy could change him. I mean, in addition to telling him things like, “always hang up the toilet paper” and “make me my lunch every day,” she could actually take him back in to have his personality altered, and in fact six weeks after she bought Joe she did just that. “He’s so quiet,” she explained. “It’s not that I want him to interrupt, but I want him to initiate conversations, not just answer me when I talk to him. I told him that, and so he tries, but he doesn’t come up with new things to talk about, it’s always, ‘how’s your work, Mandy?’ or ‘how was your day, Mandy?’ I mean, he’s an excellent listener. It’s not that I want to change that. But I want him to have more to say.”

  After the reprogramming, which Quinn called a personality transplant, Joe was chattier. A lot chattier. Dawn found him a lot more irritating because even though he didn’t interrupt, he’d fill in silences and sometimes a silence is okay, you know?

  One week, Dawn turned to him and said, “that story you’re telling me? About the weird guy on the train? You told it last week. I don’t want to hear stories twice. I know you can remember what you’ve told me, so why are you telling it again?”

  Joe continued smiling at her, unflinching. “I’m sorry, Dawn,” he said.

  “No, you’re not. You’re just programmed to apologize when people get annoyed with you.”

  “To be fair,” Shanice said, examining the cards she was holding (we were playing Power Quantum that day), “that’s basically what I do.”

  Everyone laughed and Joe was quiet for a while, before he started in about some article he’d read in the paper. Mandy touched his hand and shot him a look and he stopped talking altogether.

  The “read my look” thing turned out to be part of a new suite of features that included better ability to read body language, although frankly he still wasn’t very good at it. Humans just don’t behave in consistent ways. I mean, imagine trying to program a robot to recognize “angry” in someone’s body language and not get it confused with “thinking really hard” (something we often were doing, playing games). We kept playing Diplomacy with him and he never got much better. The other games, he’d win a precisely proportionate amount of time . . . but not Diplomacy.

  When they’d been seeing each other for about seven months, Mandy and I both decided to participate in an artistic challenge that involved collaborating with someone doing a very different art form. Someone had put up grant money—not a lot, but enough to be a nice supplement to the standard citizen’s stipend. (A stipend is enough to pay for the standard apartment and feed yourself and even buy a housekeeper, but you have to save up for a long time if you want to travel or buy anything fancy. Mandy bought Joe with a pile of money she got for a commissioned painting.) Anyway, we figured, why not, and applied. Our first few meetings, we managed to stay fairly focused, although I have to admit I still didn’t really understand the point of photorealistic art. (If you want something that looks like a photograph, why not take a photograph? Mandy had a long explanat
ion of why photorealism was an interesting artistic movement and after a while I sort of tuned her out.) We decided we’d do a joint exhibit where people were supposed to look at some pictures she’d drawn while listening to musicians play something I’d composed to go with the pictures.

  Mandy’s favorite thing to draw were men. Naked men with nice muscles. She had a dozen pictures of Joe in the mix, a few pictures of her ex, and then various pictures of other artistic models she’d hired. I flipped through the portfolio. “Joe must make a good model,” I said.

  “There’s almost no challenge in it,” she said with a sigh. “He can sit perfectly still for as long as I need him to. If he has to get up for some reason, like if I need him to make dinner, he can always sit back down in the exact same position, not even a hair out of place. It’s too easy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of the whole problem with Joe, honestly. Everything is too easy.”

  Joe was washing dishes over in the kitchen alcove when she said this, and I heard him pause, but he didn’t say anything. A moment later, he went back to scrubbing.

  As a last-ditch effort to keep the romance alive, Mandy took him in for yet another personality transplant that was supposed to make him argue with her. They quarreled once at game night over the game Mandy wanted—Joe insisted it wasn’t her turn to pick and she ought to defer to Shanice—and I heard them fight once when I was at their apartment looking at drawings. Joe complained that Mandy had gotten herself a snack, left a mess, and not soaked the burned pan. “You do realize,” he pointed out, “that it will take me four times as long to scrub this clean than it would have if you’d soaked it. Or told me when you burned the eggs. Or had me make you the snack in the first place.” His tone was mild, cajoling, but with a hint of accusation.

  Mandy shrugged it off. “Like you even care,” she said.

  “I do care,” Joe said.

  Mandy shot a look at me, at my seat on the couch, where I was paging through her portfolio and trying to ignore the argument. It was a look that said, Whatever; I know you’re a robot and you’ve been programmed to say you’re annoyed. “We can talk about this later,” she said. “I’m busy with Izzy.”

  “I want an apology.”

  “Okay, Joe. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. That’s all I wanted: an apology.”

  “Can we drop this now?” Mandy shouted.

  “Of course, darling.”

  She made a face as she stalked back into the living room. “Let’s go out and leave Mr. Personality here.”

  We went for a walk. “You could get it undone,” I suggested. “The personality transplant, I mean. Right? If you’re tired of arguments.”

  “It just feels wrong,” she muttered. “Like taking away his freedom of will.”

  “He’s a robot,” I said. “Everything’s programmed, whether it’s arguing or telling you how pretty you are.”

  “I know. It was satisfying for a while, but now . . .”

  They hung on for another few months, and then Mandy met a guy at the art exhibit. Erik was a music composer who didn’t like my work, and told her she deserved better, and she immediately found him fascinating. He was taller than Joe, with a flabbier body and all the annoying habits Joe lacked, like leaving the toilet seat up and his underwear on the floor. Joe, of course, picked up after them without complaining, since robots don’t get jealous, and from the stories I heard (through friends—Mandy and I had a fight over Erik’s opinion of my work) Erik thought cuckolding a robot was either hot or hilarious.

  Erik was also not into gaming, and when game night rolled around, Mandy blew us off for a night of torrid sex or maybe artistic endeavors? (Probably sex.)

  Joe, however, turned up.

  “I have brought potato chips,” he said, when Larry let him in. That was Mandy’s usual offering, but of course, Joe doesn’t eat. He added the chips to the kitchen counter and then sat down on his usual folding chair and listened to the conversation.

  Of course, we’d been gossiping about Mandy, so the conversation instantly died as we looked at everyone other than Joe and wondered, what exactly is the etiquette here? Finally Shanice turned to Joe and asked, “So, how are things with you, Joe?”

  “Fine,” Joe said.

  “Really?” Shanice said. “No bitter resentment or jealousy over what’s going on with Mandy?”

  “No,” Joe said. “Of course not.”

  “It’s not in your programming, I guess.”

  “It was,” Joe offered. “For about a week. Mandy wanted me to be jealous, so she had that installed. But then she decided it was too much drama, and had it erased.”

  “She made you jealous?” That was precisely the sort of gossip we’d all been after, and I leaned in, wanting more. “What was that like?”

  For a brief moment, I thought I saw a flicker of emotion in Joe’s eyes, and then he said, “Tiring.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “What do you mean, ‘tiring?’” Shanice demanded.

  “I ran down my battery more quickly and had to recharge,” Joe said.

  “Oh,” Shanice said, losing interest.

  “I tell you what,” Larry said. “You can pick the first game tonight, Joe. What’s your pleasure?”

  “Diplomacy,” Joe said. “Only, this time, I want to play all the way to the end.”

  *

  Quinn hadn’t been feeling well that evening, and I’d come on my own. (We hadn’t actually had enough people to play Diplomacy—we’d played a game with a similar mechanic that called for five players instead of seven.) Things ran very late, and Joe offered to walk me home. A street-sweeper came by as we were walking, and Joe turned to watch it go past. I wondered if he felt a sense of kinship for that sort of robot, the non-human-looking ones. Or for the ones who had human faces but not very complex behavior, like the robots staffing the all-night grocery. Or if he felt all alone in the world. If he felt anything at all.

  “I lied,” he said, as the sweeper chugged away up the street.

  “About what?”

  “Mandy didn’t actually have the jealousy module erased,” he said. “She just told me she didn’t want me acting jealous any more. She said she was tired of the drama.”

  I stopped for a moment and looked at Joe’s face. These were all programming modules to affect behavior, I reminded myself, even as part of my tired brain thought, Joe looks so sad. “So she had one set of protocols installed to give you a set of behaviors,” I said, “and then she overrode those instructions?”

  “Basically.”

  “You know? If you were human, we all could have warned you before you got into the relationship that Mandy is a crazy, crazy girlfriend. If it’s any consolation, she’s going to drive that new guy, Erik, up the goddamn tree.”

  “Oh, she is already,” Joe said, and mimicked Mandy softly. “‘Honey, if you would just tell me when you’re going to be home and try to stick to it’ . . . ‘honey, if you would just try to remember to put the milk away’ . . . you get the idea.”

  “Does he promise her he’ll change?”

  “No. He says, ‘If you wanted a robot, you should’ve stuck with your robot.’” He was quiet for a minute. “And then they both laugh.”

  “Is she going to keep you?” I asked.

  “She hasn’t said.” He sighed. “If she sells me, I bet my next owner won’t be into Diplomacy.”

  *

  For the next four weeks, Joe came to game night.

  Every time, he brought a bag of potato chips and a little bit of gossip about Mandy. Erik lasted for just over a month, and we thought perhaps Mandy would go back to Joe, but instead she picked up a new guy who had a beard (that Mandy wanted him to shave off) and a tattoo (that she didn’t like) and who played guitar (but who’d be a lot better if he just applied himself).

  And the week after that, Joe didn’t turn up.

  *

  “Why do you even care?” Mandy said sharply. “First Larry, t
hen Shanice, now you. It’s a robot. I don’t ask you what’s new with your housekeeper.”

  I waited, silently, in her doorway. Behind her, in the apartment, I could see a new housekeeper cleaning the rug—chrome and silver, and shiny and new, but totally basic. Not a human-looking model, or even the cute kind with fake eyes.

  “Jason found him creepy. And I can’t say as I blame him. So I traded him in. Human-looking models are expensive—even used, I got a good enough price to maybe take a trip somewhere. Jason wants to go to the Grand Canyon.”

  I couldn’t look at her anymore; I walked away. And I sent a message to Shanice, Dawn, Larry, and Quinn.

  We met up at the robot dealer in Mandy’s neighborhood, knowing it was probably too late. The store is staffed by robots, of course, human-looking models with the sort of limited range a sales person needs: infinite patience with difficult customers, perfect honesty with a cash box, and a smile that never goes away. This one looked like a girl, with blond hair. “Refurbished male human-looking robots?” she said. “Right this way.”

  There were twelve of Joe, standing in a line, neatly dressed, the same smile.

  “We want a specific one,” Shanice said. “The one that used to belong to our friend, Mandy.”

  “All models are customizable,” said the clerk. “All can be adjusted to whatever skills and personality traits meet your particular needs. Do you all three live together?”

  “You don’t get it,” Dawn said. “We want Joe.”

  I looked at the models on the shelf. “Which one of you is Joe?” None of them replied.

  “You can name your robot however you like,” the clerk said. “Any of them will be happy to answer to Joe.”

  “We want our Joe,” Quinn said. “We want the Joe who remembers us.”

  “To protect your privacy, all the robots have their memories wiped when they’re turned in,” the clerk said. “If you can find out what particular personality modules your friend had downloaded into ‘Joe,’ we can certainly make you a fresh copy. In fact…” She checked her hand-held. “The most recent arrival is the one on the left; that’s probably the specific robot your friend used to own.”