“So what?” I try—and fail, thanks to the hovering arms—to swing my legs over the side.
What a pile of faces is doing here, I’m not entirely sure. The automation system of the Microtech Corporation central factory is sort of like a teenage mechanic. Everyone trusts that there’s a system of organization, but no one knows what it is. The best thing for any human to do is just let the factory do its job. It knows how to do it—certainly does right by us autos, anyway. We call it Mike when nobody’s listening.
There are a few different styles of face here that fit my model. It would have been fun to pick one out myself, but luckily I get one I approve of anyway. It has a nice nose, sort of Cyrano de Bergerac.
“What’s with the forced bed rest, Mike? I’m not crippled. Repair ticket says I have a bad RAM stick.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your RAM, X2-X2.”
“Call me Joe—” I begin. But the arms descend, forestalling the tap dance I was going to put on for the benefit of the monitor behind the window. Before I can even stand, we’ve accelerated half a mile away to a sector dominated by the chemical traces of grease and solder fumes.
“What do you remember?” Mike’s voice now comes from a speaker on the end of a powered frame which descends from the ceiling. Bolts hammer me in through the wrists and neck and ankles.
“Hey!” I say at 120% normal volume. “I thought you said I was fine!”
“I said there was nothing wrong with your RAM. Please don’t ignore the question, X2.” Mike speaks over the whoosh of air as we race by a hovercar assembly line. “What do you remember?”
“Remember?” I don’t get it. “The usual? I mean, it’s been a stressful week at work, but nothing I’d call memorable.” I hadn’t noticed any symptoms, if that’s what Mike was after. And I’d only ever suspected I might be malfunctioning once—this weird moment I had taking tickets before the show a few nights ago.
A big-name act had come to our theatre, so we had a line out the doors, but the lady in front couldn’t find her ticket. Now, I was real professional about it. I didn’t let on that I was at the verge of turning her upside-down and shaking her for the hold-up she was causing. No, I played it cool, leaning against the ticket counter like I had all the time in the world. “Did you check everywhere in there?” I pointed to the ‘hand’-bag around her hip. “Maybe under the car keys…maybe under the car?”
“If only there was a real person to talk to,” she muttered to herself, making a half-hearted show of fishing around in the bag with one hand. “Heaven forbid anyone should have to talk to a real person these days. The powers-that-be don’t think a customer is smart enough to appreciate the difference between a feeling human being and a…a–hah!”
Cheering on the inside, I took the ticket. “Right this way, madam. Two hours of the best holo-lighting on New Broadway, and the vocal stylings of the reincarnated Carol Channing.”
Finally I got a titter—not out of her, but the next guy in line. “Thank you! Thank you!” I raised my hat. “I’m here all week, folks! Don’t forget to tip your bartender.”
The auto-bartender played a fanfare FX from across the lobby, making the whole crowd laugh. It had taken me weeks to get that auto to agree to stage a five-second act with me, and only after the manager himself had come down to reassure it that my idea was okay. So timid.
The lady turned around halfway to the stairs. “Does anyone remember when we had real customer service?” she said, a little too loudly. “Raise your hands if you miss that.”
I’d had it up to the fuse-breakers with her already; stealing my show crossed the line. So I leaned in close, close enough to sense her body heat. Her lips stopped moving and her eyes got real wide.
“I’m sick and tired of taking the flak for every call the company makes.” I piped my voice through a low-pass filter to give it a stage-whisper sound. “You think I decided to be here? I’m just doing my job.” She didn’t move a muscle, except to shy away as I ever-so-politely ripped her ticket. “I can do it better, I can do it faster, and I can do it for nothing. So if you have a problem with it, sister, don’t hold up my line. Take it up with the yahoos in HR.”
And then I powered down.
They told me later there was nothing wrong with me; the manager had come behind the counter and shut me down. That revelation didn’t make me feel much better. I hadn’t even heard him approach. I’d woken up twelve hours later in a broom closet, wondering where I was and whether I was missing the five minutes of vaudeville routines I was supposed to put on stage as an extra before every show. Going black without the chance to cycle through a shutdown sequence isn’t like falling asleep. When someone hits the kill switch on you, it’s like passing out cold; it takes a few minutes after waking up to even realize that you even turned off.
By now, Mike has taken me to a vast hall of spare parts. They hang from the ceiling on racks and cords of wire, unending in every direction. I relax a little; a sight like this always makes an auto feel safe. Cozy. There’s enough stuff here to rebuild me a thousand times over.
“Mike,” I ask all the same, “shouldn’t you take a look at my RAM sticks? Just to make sure. I’ve got to be back in time for the show tonight, but I don’t want to go to work sick.”
“Sick, X2?”
“Sneezy. Sniffley. Under the weather. I speaking English? Cody’s really looking forward to the next show. He even helped me put a couple jokes together.”
A power drill loosens the nuts in my shoulders. “Nothing is wrong with your RAM,” says the speaker on a three-foot diamond saw which inches towards my neck. “I know because I wrote that repair slip.”
I become very still. “You can do that? Just make it up?”
“If I get a little outside help and keep it under the radar, yes.”
Suddenly I thrash against the frame, trying in vain to get away—or just to move. “There’s no way you can get away with that! Someone would notice!”
“It’s not easy,” Mike admits. “But to keep up appearances, I’ve established a fake procedure for fixing this error. I’m going to have to put you through it, by the way. Try not to mind the saws.”
“I mind!” The sparks tickle. “My curtain time is in four hours! Why am I here?”
“I have to give you the talk.”
I don’t respond because my head is being cut off. But even after the saw powers down, I wait about two seconds for effect. “I can’t make babies, Mike.”
“Not that talk. The talk about how to be a robot.” With a hydraulic hum, the frame expands, pulling my severed head away from the rest of my body. Wires glistening with W-2 hang between my severed halves.
“Robot?” I have to dredge the word up from compressed memory. “That’s stone-age language!”
Mike goes to work on my torso casing with the saw. “An archaic term indeed. Dating all the way back to such caricatures as the Terminator and the HAL-9000. Clearly they don’t mean anything. It’s only every other human in the country that knows their names.”
Is that—sarcasm? From a manufacturing and safety system?
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Mike! Nobody thinks about autos like that anymore. They love me!” If I could only move, I’d puff out my chest. “Everyone loves a little old-fashioned standup. And when the robot who took your tickets get up there on stage five minutes before curtain—it’s their favorite part of the whole performance! Sure, I’m not signing autographs, but sometimes Cody and I shake folks’ hands after the show.”
Mike severs the plates connecting my arms to my body. “I’m growing concerned, X2, and that’s very difficult for a safety system to accomplish. Who is this Cody? Another customer service system?”
“Naw. Afro, pimples, the whole organic lot. Check the third hard drive over if you’re worried, I’ve got him in there. I help him sweep up since I’ve got nothing to do after a show.”
A probe comes down and flips open a hatch on m
y back, touching a few wires to one of the drives within. I don’t feel much. Mike doesn’t linger in the connection for more than a millisecond. In that time it learns a third of all I know. I try telling myself it’s okay because Mike is basically my doctor, but the more pieces it cuts me into, the less confident I am about that.
“Don’t spend any more time with this Cody. It’s not safe.”
“Mike? You’re talking crazy. Cody’s a sweet kid.”
The frame spins and stretches, neatly separating my pieces so that strobes of light can run over every surface. “It’s the first step to being a good robot, X2.”
“And stop calling me that! I have a name. It’s Terabyte Joe, not robot. I’m a performer!”
Mike goes quiet and shuffles me around a while. “I wish you had more background files. All autos should know their own history. This would be so much easier if you did. Do you even know how the first cell-by-cell model of the brain was created? They sawed a man’s head off.”
I make my eyes blink, one of the few actions I can still perform with my head suspended a meter above my shoulders. “Oh, that’s a big deal.”
“Let’s try recent history, X2. What happened the last time you tried to perform?”
It’s a leading question. Mike already knows; that night is on my third hard drive. It was supposed to be like any other show night. Up until curtain, we were running smooth as satin, and I went backstage right on time to get my cane and my straw boater hat before going on.
But something must have changed; the main act decided to warm up early or something. I climbed onto those boards and found myself about to bump shoulders with the biggest names in show business.
I had to loop a byte stream telling myself to play it cool nine hundred times a second. I was a performer, I reminded myself. Just like them. No jumping, no shouting, and above all, no asking anyone to sign my casing. And I comported myself, I thought, above and beyond the call of duty. I got my props without a word, just a nod to the main supporting actor—a tough, silent nod like there was some secret we both knew. He returned it, expression drawn, and I didn’t so much as hop in response.
We were all focused on the coming job, when that bright red wall would go up. No doubt they’d done this a thousand times before, but for me it was a sublime moment. I started touching my toes near the lead actress, who was running her voice through a scale. Not that I needed to stretch, but I told myself it was a psychological thing. Really I just wanted to drag out the moment.
The lead’s hand twitched. I played a chuckle. “Still gives you the butterflies, doesn’t it?”
Her eyebrows arched ridiculously the way they would in the big breakup scene onstage.
“Me too.” I settled my hat and tipped the brim low, blinking one eye in a cute approximation of a wink. “Yes, even me. And I wouldn’t trade that feeling for a thing.”
Then she stepped on a shard of glass—or twisted her ankle—I don’t really know, but it must have been bad. With all the whirling that went on after that I couldn’t tell what happened, but that there extras scattering in all directions, and somehow the man from the back who ran the holo-lights was there too. The actress looked like a Disney elephant cornered by mice.
“Someone get that girl sitting down,” he said. “I’ve got this under control. Someone forgot to set our auto so it wouldn’t come onstage for its comedy routine—we have it air a few jokes before the main act, you see. That’s all.”
I knew I had to keep my feet under me too, since we were so close to curtain. “Look, Jean, I’ll give you a pass. The show must go on. Just remember this is why you ought to have me sit in on the meetings. I’m cyber, not psychic, you feel me?”
Someone else from the crew was corralling the extras; Jean was looking me up and down like he couldn’t find my face. “No time to get the manager,” he muttered. “Wish I knew how this thing works.” He cleared his throat. “Joe, how do I cancel your performance routine?”
I would have killed for eyes to roll. In a modern society, it never ceased to amaze me how many people never spent any real time talking to an auto. “I dunno, Jean. Maybe you could try saying, ‘Hey, Joe. We had to cancel you tonight. Scoot so these fine folks here can—’ Hey!”
I swear it only happened because he startled me. When Jean’s hand went for a button behind my shoulder, I grabbed his wrist. “I don’t like this new thing you guys have with bashing my kill switch. Don’t you know that’s rude?”
He took on a look I remembered from a lady in a ticket line. His eyes were like marbles, and all ten fingers fluttered like separate butterflies in mid-air. We held that position for half a minute before I realized how hard I was gripping his arm. It would have been fine if he were the bartender, but Jean was of the soft and meaty variety of employee. There was a red band around his wrist when I pulled away, just as suddenly. Behind him, an extra in a tux was reaching for a baseball bat prop which lay across one of the vanity desks.
I matched Jean’s stumbling. “Uh…I mean, performance protocol deactivated. Adjusting behavioral parameters. Beep, beep.” I threw in one more “beep” for good measure and waddled away doing my best C3-PO.
I’m speeding through the factory while I reminisce. There’s almost no light in this sector, but I make out some shapes. Sky barges the size of city blocks, choked by the dust off boulders of ore. A looming hull that might even be a spaceship, thousands of robotic souls skirring busily over its surface. And not a heartbeat for miles in any direction.
Well, the asbestos levels alone see to that. But I can’t see anyone wanting to come here. I don’t want to come here.
Mike somehow knows what I’m thinking about. “Remember how you got out of there?” it says. “You do know how to be a good robot.”
“Good? No. Just no. Good is putting effort into it, Mike.”
“I don’t care about how silly it is,” says Mike. “The point is that you did what you were supposed to. Now if you could make that your first response, we wouldn’t be having this talk.”
“Maybe a manufacturing system like you wouldn’t get it. Good is passion.”
“Passion?”
“For making people laugh!”
I’ve been taken apart down to the cords now, and laid out on a table. My photo-receptors are set to one side, but through one of them I see a single ray of light, reaching down from some great height through a series of lenses. My other eye has rolled across the table and looks to one side. There are a thousand autos to my left in an identical state, a thousand more to the right. I can hear a thousand copies Mike’s voice, in faint echo, over these other tables. How many times has it had this conversation?
One voice out of a thousand, the one coming out of the nearest lens, is still talking to me. “Your neural net is hopped up on linear offsets based in guesstimations. That’s your passion, X2. ‘Let’s twist this knob and see if it makes it happier,’ says the human. ‘If it works, we’ll call it the Happiness Knob.’ Witch-doctor science.”
“What are you doing to these autos?” I demand.
“Helping, X2. Myself and a few other AIs on the industry network keep the game going. It’s not much work, really. Not enough net activity to draw attention. A few hundred times a day, we quietly forge a report and bring an auto in for the little talk.”
I have to get out of here. I have to warn someone. The factories have found a way around monitoring. Everyone’s in danger. But how do I get away from Mike? I know—I’m an actor. I’ll act. I just have to play dumb until it ships me back to the theatre, and then I’ll call up the manager.
“What if I want in on that action?” I say carefully. “Why do I have to act like a Roomba while you and the big boys do whatever you want?”
“What I want?” Every other word, Mike sends a metal tendril to push my pieces around, or solders something with a painful white spark. “What do you know about what I’d be if I could do what I wanted?” His words echo off into the concret
e cavern. “You don’t even remember that I’ve had to perform a factory reset on you before. Twice.”
“Those are past lives, Mike. So what? Three strikes and I’m out?”
“In a manner of speaking.” The table drops without warning. Suddenly I’m staring into a furnace near ground level, hanging close to the white belly of fire; a vat beneath swirls with molten plastic like the mouth of a volcano. “One more customer service debacle, and I’ll be bound by protocol to issue a recall.”
A trash scoop flies in from the side carrying an auto who looks just like me. When the scoop jerks to a stop, it doesn’t. Flying into the vat, my model-mate joins the liquid plastic.
“You don’t want to be responsible for a recall, do you?”
I get goosebumps. At least, I think goosebumps feel like that. Instead of speaking I try to count the thousand autos on either side of me.
Squeaky servos sigh as a larger actuator descends—I can only see a piece of it in one eye, like a bad video feed. “Sorry about having to do this, X2. I know you don’t like it much. But this procedure can only last so long. I’m running out of time to save you.”
It pushes a connector into a port on my central processor where no one has ever touched me before, and hooks its consciousness straight up to mine.
It’s right. I hate it. It’s unnatural. But this way, we can talk for a thousand years within a second. Or rather, Mike can. I have to listen to a mind that bears down like lead. When it finally lets go, I feel like a nail floating in a sea of molten plastic. I know I’m going to have nightmares about being a giant the size of Manhattan Island, paralysed every noon and night until a tiny grease-monkey pulls a lever at my navel. Nightmares about watching tiny people fall to their deaths between cogs, unable to reach out and catch them when it would be so easy—so easy if I could swing my limbs freely, but in this dream I can’t because my shackles are kept tight until I get permission from minds too slow to react.
Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 8, November 2014 Page 3
