by Stanley Bing
“Get lost,” said Arthur to the security bot. “We don’t want you around.”
“And yet . . . here I is,” said the bot. They were very good at one-syllable words, although grammar was obviously not this one’s strong suit.
Arthur closed the door to the vehicle behind him and focused his full attention on the bot. Who was following him? He had a pretty good idea, and he would take up this intrusion with them in due time. For now, however, he wanted the thing off his tail. “If you continue to bother me,” he growled, “I’m going to have to disable you. I know how.”
The bot hung in the air, silent. It did droop a little, though, and back up a tad. “Take this reflecting pool,” said Arthur with just the right soupçon of menace. It retreated again perhaps another quarter inch, alarmed.
“Stop that, now,” it said, trembling in the air before Arthur’s face. Then, if a perfectly circular object can be said to turn, it seemed to do so in a direction away from him in preparation for a quick departure. With the swiftness of a cat, Arthur snatched the yellow object out of midair and in one fluid motion tossed it across the fifty yards or so that lay between them and the reflecting pool, where it landed in the water with a resounding smack.
The thing uttered a high-pitched squeal that could be likened only to the sound a pig makes when it attempts to flee the slaughtering blade. It skittered across the surface and out of the pond, and then shot into the air above the plaza, where it zigged and zagged erratically, spinning all the while in an attempt to shake off excess water and dry itself.
“That was not a very nice thing to do,” said a mildly digital voice to Arthur’s rear. He turned to find himself face-to-face with Officer O’Brien, the police bot that was half cyborg, half rolling Segway.
“I agree,” Arthur said brusquely. Without further conversation, he opened the door to the waiting vehicle and hopped inside. “Let’s go,” he said to the interior of the self-driving transport. It dropped a very small set of wheels to ground level and tootled off.
“Unfortunately,” said Officer O’Brien, staring after the departing vehicle and talking to nobody in particular, “it is not yet illegal for assholes like you to be abusive to artificial life forms. Perhaps one day it will be.” He rolled off. The little round tennis ball, after a moment of indecision, floated off in the general direction of where Arthur and Sallie had headed.
Arthur turned and stared out the rearview window. In the distance, he saw the tiny yellow dot meandering far behind them, bobbing up and down in sullen pursuit. Of course it was coming after him. How could it not? Its entire purpose was to be where Arthur was. It had no other agenda, no alternative. What it was meant to do was baked into its hardware. This is what makes all machine intelligence so limited, Arthur thought. In the end, no matter how smart they are, fabricated beings didn’t yet have the power to choose one thing over another. This led to comical problems in some of the more advanced artificials he had developed, when their programmers—who, after all, were only human—forgot to include one preference or another in an otherwise serviceable entity. The creature sat and whirred, fluid leaking out of its nose, unable to even select a movie to download for the evening or a wine to accompany dessert for its master. Pathetic creatures. Not natural beings like he was.
“Can’t this fucking thing go any faster?” Arthur inquired to the interior of the driverless space. He felt very uncomfortable all of a sudden. And the beginnings of a fucking headache, too, on top of that.
“Certainly,” said the car with a hint of pride. “Although it will increase the possibility of an incident by seven percent.”
The vehicle increased in speed, all the way to thirty-five. “That’s it?” said Arthur. “That’s your top speed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fucking sad. When I was a kid, we used to drive down the 405 to Hermosa Beach at one hundred and twenty miles an hour. Three in the morning. Drunk on tequila and cigars. Those were the days, man.”
Sallie sat quietly, looking out the window. These reminiscences bored her tremendously. As powerful and wealthy as Arthur was, as enormous as was the impact he’d had on the world and the corresponding size of his ego, he couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that he was no longer a hipster putting one over on the Man. He was the Man. So these stories of his wild youth at something called Woodstock, the weed he had smoked when it was only five dollars an ounce. Really? So what? She had been born into a world in which everybody was connected wirelessly to the mainframe at birth. This stuff he talked about was ancient history and had nothing to do with whatever was going to happen now.
She wondered about the young man she had met, the original occupant of this fine body. Gene. What had become of him? Seemed wrong somehow, although, no. Not productive to think of that, was it? Done is done. And here was Artie, like she’d never seen him. The thought occurred to her: she had been more than enough for an old man with a cyborg eye and a synthetic dick. But this thing sitting next to her: What was it? Would it still love her? Would she still love it? She realized she was calling it it. That didn’t make her feel very much better.
“That fucking Robocop is still back there somewhere,” said Arthur, peering out the back window with a concentrated frown distorting his new face, rendering it, Sallie realized, creepily Arthurian. She felt a frisson of contempt. A whole new existence lay ahead of this guy, and he was still the same paranoid jerk. Wherever you go, she thought, there you are. Here he was in a brand-new body, a whole different person, and she had never seen his authentic persona more clearly. Sallie blinked twice to get rid of the insight and, as clear insights will, it vanished almost completely. For the time being, he was Artie again. He just looked different.
“How ’bout you kiss me,” he said, leaning into her.
“Okay,” she said. She kissed him the way she always had before: a little carefully, lest he break, you know.
“Come on,” he said, “gimme a little tongue.” And he sucked her face into his in a way he never had before, inhaling it with gluttonous force.
“Artie!”
“What? Come on! We’re alone in here.”
“Not really.”
“Who’s here?”
“You know. The . . .” She lowered her voice discreetly. “The car.”
“The car? You’re worried about the car? It’s not real! It has nothing going on in its head other than to drive us!”
At that point, for some reason, the vehicle’s sound system ignited, spewing a blast of very disagreeable metal from the late twentieth century. “Jesus!” said Arthur. But he let go of Sallie and withdrew to the other side of the moving conversation pit. “I used to like this tune,” he said rather wistfully.
They pulled up to the house a few minutes later.
Arthur burst out of the driverless conveyance and stood, hands on hips, head thrown back, drawing in all the air he could breathe. The sky above was the clearest of blues. “Ah! Christ!” he exclaimed. Then he turned and grabbed Sallie by the hand.
God, she thought. I wonder if he knows that hurts.
“I hate this entire approach to the house,” Arthur grumbled, dragging her to the walkways that led to the front door. All around them, the koi ponds reflected the deep azure of the sky, shot through with bright green skeins of artificial blood that had been shed by the dead creatures who now floated on the surface of the water. The area was now patrolled by the few robot survivors.
“Look at these fucking things. What the fuck are they?”
“You wanted them, Arthur, when genuine koi became extinct.” She couldn’t help but look at him a little askew. It was almost like he was a different person. He was tall and good-looking, with sandy hair ruffled by the wind and a soft, sweet jaw that had yet to know the presence of a jowl. “They were about a billion dollars each.”
He stared down into the viscous water. “I wonder why these particular ones survived,” he said thoughtfully.
“Better programming?” She felt the skin
of his hand under hers. It was smooth and warm, unlike the crackling parchment she had grown used to. She didn’t know what to think of it. It was sort of perfect in its own way. The first time she had seen it on Gene, she had liked it, wanted to touch it a little bit. Now it was Artie.
“I want this entire thing drained tomorrow morning. Put in a lawn or something indigenous.”
“Indigenous?”
“It was a thing. When I was a kid. You put in plants that were natural to the area you lived in. It was, you know, one of those environmental things.” He stared off into the middle distance then, and she knew he was thinking about the old days—the last time, maybe, that he had felt like this. “When we had an environment,” he said.
“Come here, Artie.”
They wrapped their arms around each other, and above them the artificial birds sang in the artificial trees.
11
Afternoon Delight
They almost made it to the bedroom. In the entryway just beyond the door, they stumbled, locked together, and then fell onto a carpet of many colors, huge and intricate, faded now by its almost six hundred years of age, acquired from a wizened little merchant at the end of a twisted, dusty street so remote that it almost did not exist, when the two of them had visited the region that had once been the domain of the Ottoman Empire and was now run by former Google executives. It had set Arthur back more than $70 million at the time, this rug, and was known to be the third most expensive rug in history. During the centuries since it was woven by Persian artisans, it had grown somewhat thinner, but it was more comfortable for the lovers than the hard marble floor beneath. And it was certainly not the first time it had been utilized for such a purpose by one sultan or other.
It was a slightly weird experience for them both. For many years, Arthur had become accustomed to wondering, in the minutes preceding the always hotly anticipated event, whether the entire mechanism was going to work or not. This made the moment of embarkation feel like a courageous plunge into the abyss, like diving into a pool that might not have water in it. No matter how invincible and commanding he might feel when he had his clothes on his back, this was an instant of painful vulnerability when the most important thing in the world could conceivably go wrong, and there was nothing his conscious mind or iron will could do about it.
Yes, he could tell himself that he was well over a full century old and that there were limitations to the science that had maintained his existence, but that didn’t help. Most recently, after the three-dimensional printing tech had attained its current state of the art, certain matters had been improved dramatically—solved, even—but that was still odd and new, too. The experience was not, in some fundamental sense, the real, natural thing that had been the mainstay of his power for his first eighty or ninety years. Now the blood and jism of this newly created human being were coursing through their proper avenues, and the newly minted pecker of his dreams was throbbing between his legs. Sallie was in one of those long, sensuous caftans that both concealed and revealed the splendor of her form in all its fluidity and grace. He didn’t want to tear the garment, because he knew she valued each one of them highly. They had been made specifically for her by an ancient, blind gremlin on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and were unique. They were also quite expensive. So when he seized her by the waist with one strong arm and slipped it off her shoulders with the other, he was perhaps more delicate about it than he felt.
Sallie had been walking ahead of him, leading him to the bedroom by the hand—a hand that was very strange to her, larger than she was used to, with defined muscles and flesh that concealed the bones beneath. Arthur’s former hand had been like the talon of an eagle, a bird that was now as extinct as the koi, hard and cold and a little oily with the medicated moisturizer he had to use to control his eczema, and the skin of it had slid over the bones with no intervening tissue beneath. This—now, this—was a hand. Plump and warm, with a slight throb to it. She heard him say, “Come here, Salamander,” and then his arm was around her waist, and she turned to face him. She said, “Artie, this is so weird,” and plunged her hands into the thick, unruly mop of his new hair.
“Look at all this hair,” she said.
“Take this thing off,” he replied in a voice that was both Artie and not Artie.
Then they were on the floor. Or, more accurately, the new/old rug. Had to be careful with the rug, she thought. Then that’s all she thought for a little while.
“Wow, baby,” said Arthur, when their breathing had normalized a bit. He lay in her arms, and she was toying with his hair again. “I think this whole deal is going to work out fine.”
“I wonder whether you’re like a teenage boy in other ways as well.”
They went into the bedroom, which was not really a room per se but a massive area the size of a squash court with a bed in the center and a freestanding bathtub off to one side. Sallie leapt onto the bed, which rose slightly to meet her. Like Livia’s couch and Bob’s comfy guest chair, it, too, had been designed to skirt the fine line between the organic and inorganic plane. Of course, they had to shoo Lucy the lizard/iguana out of the bedroom and close the door behind her, or she would have burrowed under the covers with them, snuffling and wriggling around, and spoiled the magic of the moment entirely.
The second time was not quite so spectacular. He seemed more calculated to her, working in a clinical way, maybe, to push all the right buttons in himself and in her. Test driving the vehicle, sort of. This New Artie was a dynamo. Crazy with decades of pent-up force. Old Artie was a more controllable, disciplined entity, tender, dynamic as he could be considering the equipment that remained to him and his concern that it not break altogether. Back then (could it be just two days ago?), she had found it wonderful to see the young man emerge from within the old, driven by the strength of his desire. At the same time, she had fully acknowledged her modest expectations. They were liberating, in a way. It meant things were always at least somewhat in her control, capable of management if need be. This new creature, well . . . it was Arthur. She could feel the massive presence of him inside this marvelous shell that had been created to house his being. And yet, not entirely? What else was there? Until today, the man was content paddling around the house, watching the markets go up and down, making them do so, adjusting the pH of his swimming pool, playing with the desert life in his terrarium, a self-created environment that took up half of his study. There he would sit for hours, addressing his global troops at a distance, manipulating his investments, watching his scorpions paralyze and drain a variety of rodents provided for them. Now what? New projects? Travel? To where? Much of the planet was now smoking ash. Giant communities of the disenfranchised and enraged circled the last enclaves of the rich and famous. Guns were everywhere. Where was there to go that was anywhere as nice as what they had right here? Would he want children now? He never had before, and he had been shooting blanks for decades. Of course, that didn’t matter. There were so many other ways. Cloning. Podding. And now, obviously, printing.
“Your mind seems to be elsewhere, babe,” he said, as if from a great distance.
“Maybe,” she said, “but the rest of me is right here.” Before today, she would have flipped his tiny, featherweight body above her, and given him the kind of ride that customarily ended things for at least a day or two. Now he was just too heavy. And so young. So egregiously young. Had she ever had a younger man? Older was, had always been, more her style. Now here he was flipping her over to a place on top. “Go for it, Sal,” he said. Yes, that was Artie. Commanding Artie. Bossy Artie.
“Only because I want to,” she said, leaning down to grab his hair again, as a jockey takes hold of a pommel.
“Excuse me.” It was the lightly strobed voice of Diego, the Roomba manservant. “I hate to disturb you.”
They froze exactly as they were, she on top, he beneath. “Yes, Diego?” said Arthur, only a bit impatiently. He knew that the cyborg intelligence would not have intruded unless he had prog
rammed it to do so.
“I am sorry,” said Diego. “It’s a good thing that as an artificial being I am incapable of shame or embarrassment, or this could be awkward.”
“Yes, Diego,” said Sallie. “Is there something we can do for you?”
Diego hung in midair, regarding them politely with his two blinking LEDs, which had no particular function beyond providing a certain level of anthropomorphism to the machine.
“Mr. Arthur has a visitor in the telepresence room.”
“Well,” said Arthur irritably, “it must be a very fucking important fucking visitor.”
“It’s Jerry,” said Diego, as if no further explanation was needed, as indeed it was not.
“Hop off, honey,” said Arthur. “We’ll pick this up later, okay?”
She gave his face a light slap, and then leaned down and kissed him again. Then Sallie delicately uncoupled herself from the body beneath her, which she found she did not believe was Arthur quite yet, and slid off the bed. It was strange to feel self-conscious in front of the machine that politely hovered in the far doorway. But she did.
“This is fun,” she said, almost to herself, as she disappeared into the depths of the bedroom suite. The door to the adjoining bathroom closed quietly. Arthur rose from the bed, naked, and took in Diego, the room, the entire situation.
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
“If I may say so,” said Diego, “I’m pleased for you, sir.”
“Yeah,” said Arthur. “I’m rather pleased for myself.”
Diego swooped briskly into the nearby walk-in closet and emerged with a gorgeous silk bathrobe on a small arm that had emerged from his apparatus for that purpose. He also had several shelves that could materialize when need be and a hidden Taser capable of incapacitating enemies at a distance of up to twenty feet. Arthur put on the bathrobe. Diego turned and headed for the door with a slight up-and-down bob to his forward carriage.
