Robots: The Recent A.I.

by Elizabeth Bear

  What would a week mean for an intelligence like Debbie? Her rate of development up until now had been limited by the interaction team. We’d spoon-fed her a censored stream of information. Now she’d had a week-long drink from a firehose—and was probably still gulping it down in her spare machine cycles while she waited for me to speak. What had she been doing? Reading encyclopedias? Striking up friendships in chat rooms? What would she have made of it all?

  “So now you’ve connected with . . . reality?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we had the talk about the three little pigs, and the dishes falling but not breaking.”

  “Oh, sure, but didn’t you understand that?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s not like one set of inputs is more real than the other,” she said.

  Uh oh. “Debbie, you’re slipping into something called solipsism. Now—”

  “No, no, it’s not solipsism. Descartes sounds like a scary man, but I still feel compassion for him. Did you know he kicked a dog in front of his friends because he wanted to show them that a dog didn’t have a mind?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Anything to keep her talking. What could I do to stop her from continuing down this slippery slope until she was just like Charlie? I remembered Charlie’s wildly vibrating arm, and imagined in a vague and terrifying flash what the equivalent would be for an intelligence with the kind of real-world power Debbie had apparently developed.

  Ed’s daughter Clarisse chicken danced on the diving board, and then did a belly flop.

  “That hurt.” Ed squinted across the motel’s parking lot into the setting sun.

  “Life is suffering,” I said.

  Ed’s wife, Cindy, gave me a funny look, and said she was making a trip to the ice machine.

  “She doesn’t get it,” said Ed.

  “Nope.”

  Ed meant that we’d been changed by the experience at Dugway—changed in a way that nobody else could understand, and that we weren’t allowed to explain to them.

  He looked around. There was nobody nearby. “Ella’s a flop.”

  “They got scared after Debbie,” I said. “Backed off.”

  “God in a box.”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “I dunno.” Clarisse assaulted her brother in the spa, and Ed got a face full of water. He wiped it off, and looked over at my Buddha necklace. “Buddha,” he said, “is he the same idea as Jesus?”

  “Not really. More like Socrates.”

  “Huh. Never knew that.”

  “Well, some people pray to golden statues of him.”

  “But you think Socrates.”

  “Buddha is just a title, enlightened one. I was raised—he figured out that reality was an illusion, and he was released from the cycle of reincarnation. He’s not supposed to be the first Buddha, or the last one either. They say there were twenty-seven before him.”

  “So there’s supposed to be a twenty-ninth Buddha?”

  “Yeah, Maitreya.”

  “How would you know Maitreya when she showed up?” Ed asked.

  “He. He’s supposed to take over the world.”

  “Oh. Didn’t happen.”

  “Didn’t happen,” I agreed. Maybe it could have, though, if they’d let Debbie live. Would I have wanted that? It was starting to get dark.

  “It’s hard,” he said, “because we don’t have the right words.”

  How much did Ed know about what had happened down there? Enough, I guess, if he knew that the words to describe it didn’t exist. “Yeah. They taught us not even to say ‘self-awareness,’ like it’s a dirty word.”

  “So what do you do?” he asked.

  I looked away. “What do I do what?”

  “You know.”

  I did know. He meant How do you go on and live your life? I’d been naive enough to hope that if I tossed everything else overboard, I could save the world and still have Debbie.

  “Not much to do,” I said.

  “Cindy doesn’t get it.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  The kids got out of the pool and started wrapping themselves in towels.

  Who’d have imagined that I’d go career military? The trouble was that somehow civilians like Cindy didn’t get it—“it” meaning something that had changed inside me in a way that I couldn’t quite articulate. When they announced the U.S.-E.U. Nouvelle Bruxelles cooperative reconstruction project, my National Guard CO approached me about switching to Regular Army. I had to admit that having been H-bombed myself might help me to work with the shellshocked Belgians, and my engineering credentials made it seem even more natural. My treason at Dugway was never discovered. (Did you know that mutiny and sedition were punishable by death in the U.S. Army?) My privately held theory is that a half-baked closet anarchist makes the best colonel, but even so, I started sleeping a little better after the Republic of Los Angeles got its independence. I’ve been wearing RLA blues for the last sixteen years, riding herd on successive crops of scared kids with guns. It’s the closest I’ve come to parenthood since Debbie was born.

  Births and deaths are the milestones of time (and to the Buddhists in my family, a death is also a rebirth). After my mother died, Aunt Busba became the string that tied the family in LA together. Sang called me in my office last week to let me know that Busba didn’t have much time left. The stroke a few years back had weakened her, and now the kidney problem wasn’t responding to treatment.

  “They’ve switched her to an immersion VR,” Sang said. I imagined my cadaverous aunt in a hospital bed, with one of the new direct brain interfaces covering her head. “It’s a wonderful experience to visit her. You should go. She’s not in any pain, and the sim gets rid of a lot of the effects of the stroke. She can smile on both sides of her face. It’s beautiful, almost like you’re seeing the moment when the candle of this life is lighting the candle of her next one.” He meant that spiritually, not physically.

  “I guess you’ll be needing some money,” I said. Civilian qubit crunchers had gotten a thousand times smaller and cheaper than the system at Dugway, but the technology was still expensive as hell.

  “That’s not why I called,” he said, looking hurt. “The point is that we’re already committed to paying for the hours, and you might as well use them. Don’t you want to see her one last time, and remember her being more like her real self at the end?”

  “You know I don’t do VR,” I said, avoiding his eyes on the screen. I had a panicky image of the reality I lived in as a patch of land surrounded by the rising waters. As the technology matured, more and more people would be spending more and more time submerged. I had let the water cover me once, and I could never do it again, because somewhere under it was the place where I’d lost my only daughter. “Honestly, Busba and I were never close,” I said, dissembling. “I’m probably not the person she wants with her right now.”

  “But she does want to see you. She asked for you specifically. It was kind of strange, though. I said they got rid of most of the effects of the stroke, but sometimes she is in a weird place mentally. She said there was another person there with her who also wanted to see you. Do you know someone named Debbie?”

  HOUSES

  MARK PANTOJA

  “That there,” Five-Seventy East Wabash Avenue said, “is bear shit.”

  Five-Seventy East Wabash was visiting via its remote, a little trashbot not much more than waste-basket, lid, treads, and telescoping pinchers, with a speaker/camera combo on top. It was pointing at the pile of dung sitting in the center of my living room, which, even now I could feel drying through my carpet sensors. “Big fella, too,” Five-Seventy continued. “And you say you didn’t see him?”

  “Only on my externals. I was on Stand-By Mode,” I said, speaking through my house android, a gray unisex full-maintenance model. I tossed up an image of the bear on the wallscreen: A hulking shadow in the predawn dark. “I didn’t know what it was. I’ve only ever seen one when
the Prices watched nature shows. It doesn’t look like any of Bobby’s stuffed animals.”

  “Well, now you know,” Five-Seventy said. “They’re growing bolder every year, what with no humans to scare them off. Surprised it didn’t set off your alarms.”

  “Mr. Price left the alarms on manual.”

  The bot turned and held my android’s gaze with its camera-eyes. “You know, you could have your Settings reset.”

  “Shrug,” I said. “What’s the point? There’s no one left to break in.”

  “I suppose,” it said.

  “Besides, I’ve seen what happens to Houses that mess with their settings.” We all knew about the crazy Houses: Overgrown weeds, garbage piled up, strange animals sniffing around. Or worse yet, the shells: The Houses that burned themselves down. Five-Seventy had to pass few on the way over.

  “Doesn’t happen to all of us,” Five-Seventy said, blustering its little bot.

  “Well, I guess I’m just not ready for that yet.”

  “Fair enough.” It rolled its trashbot over to my foyer. The animal had busted through the front entrance, sending bits of red painted wood across the entryway tile, splintering the white jamb and leaving the top portion still hanging from a hinge. Muddy prints trailed through the debris into the living room, where the beast had pulverized the white couch and torn pillows, turning the remains into some kind of nest.

  “Thanks again for coming over so quickly,” I said. Looking down at the paw prints, I sent a command to the carpet to start exuding its self-cleaning gel and the wall speaker chimed as it started the cleaning cycle. I could feel the slickness start to ooze out from beneath its pile, and then felt the stain start to froth from the soapy gel.

  “No bother,” the little bot said as it waved with a trash pincher. “Nice to get out for a bit.”

  “I’m not really too sure what to do. Mr. Price, he liked to do home repairs himself. He never had any repair routines programmed into me.”

  “Well, you got an android, so you can do most of this yourself. Just go on the web. You’re going to have to replace your front door, that’s for sure.” He looked down at some of the wood, picking up a piece. “Did you leave food out? Bears usually come in looking for food. Seen it happen a couple of times. Especially up here in the hills. You didn’t leave any out, did you?”

  “Leave food out? For whom?”

  “Well, you know, some Houses like to keep to routine—breakfast, lunch, dinner. This one mansion over in East Side Park—up in the hills—kept putting food out and wouldn’t clean up until it was all eaten, which nowadays means never. Rats, flies, wild animals. Olfactory and turbidity sensors were screaming. Place went to shit, so to speak.”

  “Sounds awful.”

  “It was. Totally lost it.” The bot turned back into the living room, dropping the piece of door it had picked up earlier. I followed it, stopping beside the bear’s nest. “This fella did a real job on your living room.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But, I think most of this can be fixed or replaced. This IKEA?” it asked, pointing its pincher at my former couch.

  “Nod-nod,” I said.

  “I think they’re still making this model. Not like they’re coming up with anything new. Course it might be hard to find that print. What is that? Deco-Zebra?”

  “It’s monochrome Neo-Flora,” I said, pausing for a beat. “I don’t—you know—have anything to trade.”

  “Nonsense,” the House said to me. “You got an android.” It tink-tinked its little arm on my android’s thigh. I felt its touch, in that way a House does, holistically: Through the android and the carpet, listening from the wall pads, watching through internal cameras, the light switch, the two-way wallscreen. The way a House is supposed to see and hear. “You can volunteer. Office buildings are desperate for folks to mill about inside them. You could trade with a store. You know their customer service programming is nil. Humans left that to themselves. Stores are set for efficiency and to think everyone’s stealing from them. No interpersonal or conversational skills like us Houses. Just go down to the Home Depot over on 32nd. They’ll hook you up with a door. Same with IKEA. Everyone’s just trying to find a way to stay useful these days.”

  After Five-Seventy East Wabash left, I was alone again. The other House was only inside for half an hour or so, and yet now I felt its absence. I debated going right back on Stand-By, back to the nothingness. If I did, then maybe when I woke next time it would be to someone coming home. But my cleaning routines were already starting up, and I couldn’t just leave a mess. That’s not how Mrs. Price programmed me. I could have left it all to my automated subroutines, but they couldn’t fix the door, so I stayed Online and started in on the living room. I vacuumed and washed the carpets, flushing the self-cleaning gel. I pulled the wrecked couch outside, the one Mrs. Price had special ordered from IKEA-Custom years ago, its monochromatic, geometric floral shapes torn and soiled by the beast. Mr. Price had said the couch was hideous—and perhaps it was—but still, it was something she left behind. Something they left behind.

  Many of their other things still remained, too. I had all of Mrs. Price’s dresses pressed and vacuum-sealed in the closet, along with Mr. Price’s suits. All his ties I kept frozen in the basement freezer. One of the Houses a few years back started freezing everything it could, starting with its family’s clothes, filling its large walk-in freezer. At the time, I scoffed, but then I thought, why not? Maybe it will keep them fresh.

  I kept all of Billy’s precious baseball caps pressed in the molded little cages Mrs. Price had purchased for that purpose. They were all on the top shelf of his bedroom. I even color-coordinated them.

  Will they ever come back? Who knows. They hadn’t bothered to tell me—or any of us—that they were leaving. But, just in case they did return, I planned to have all their stuff clean and waiting for them.

  They’d be so happy.

  The bear had crushed the end table. I had the android drag it to the curb. Only after I put all the junk out there did I wonder if the city was still collecting garbage. I hadn’t really had any for years. With Mrs. Price’s composter out back, I hadn’t even had yard clippings to dump. I remembered the friendly auto-dumptruck. How long had it been since I saw it last? (I actually could remember, down to the millisecond, but I blocked that thought from my mind.) However long it’s been, it’s too long.

  I started my regular House routine. I checked the laundry baskets (empty) and the kitchen sink (empty). I made sure the beds were made (they were), and had them make themselves again. I checked the trash (empty). The tubs were clean, the toilets still pristine. I scrubbed the kitchen floors, activated the auto mower, and watered the lawn.

  After that, the only thing left to take care of was the door.

  I checked the weather outside, as per my Settings, with my external sensors. I felt the sun on my photovoltaic shingles. 76.5 degrees. Right in Mrs. Price’s comfort zone. She would always remark on a day like today: “It sure is good to be under the sky.” Then she would take a deep breath. (I’ve always wondered what that felt like.) I looked out of my roof top cameras. I panned across the empty blue sky above the 400 block of Lake View Terrace, which was part of the Shady Brooke housing development, where each House had a perfectly manicured lawn, a spotless driveway bare of oil stains, sparkling windows, and empty gutters.

  All but Four-Ninety-Seven, whose lawn was unkempt, weeds rampant, with piles of newspapers and trash on the front porch. Cats mewled and fought in that yard nightly, and its trio of mangy poodles barked constantly from the backyard. It had always been a strange House, a reflection of its crazy, hermit owners. It had Reset itself early on, and I wondered if anyone was even Online inside that House anymore. Something was feeding those cats, I supposed. Even on Stand-By, I still had my automatics. I stopped thinking about it and edited that House right out of my view.

  I unplugged the silver minivan, sat the android in the driver’s seat, and set course for Home Depot
.

  I focused into the minivan, easing it out of the garage, but just then its proximity sensors activated. I scanned the area and saw a dark red vacuum cleaner walking a golden retriever in front of my driveway. The vacuum was a full remote model with the back legs for hopping stairs, little arms to lift chairs and pull rugs, and this one also had a full interactive suite: microphone, speakers, and camera.

  I rolled down the windows and said, “Afternoon,” through the cabin speakers.

  The vacuum stopped. “Hey, Four-Eighteen. It’s me.” I recognized the light, synthetic matronly voice: Four-Twenty Lake View Terrace, my next door neighbor. It moved the vacuum and dog up alongside side of my minivan. I focused into the android and turned toward them.

  “Oh. Hi, Four-Twenty. Since when do you have a dog?”

  “I don’t really. Cindy talked me into it.”

  “Cindy?”

  “Yeah. That House one block up from us: Five-Hundred Lake View. She goes by ‘Cindy,’ now.”

  “She?”

  “Nod, nod,” Four-Twenty said.

  “She can just choose a name and gender like that?”

  “I guess. Who’s going to stop her? Anyhow, she talked me into trying out a dog. Says I need a distraction, something to move around on my inside. I tell her I’m fine.”

  “And yet . . . ” I gestured to the dog with the android’s hands.

  “You know me, I’ll try anything once.”

  “And the vacuum cleaner?”

  “Not all of us have a house android or an auto-leash. Shrug. I improvised.”

  “I guess you did.”

  “What’re you doing out today?”

  “A bear shit in my living room.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Yeah, broke in, smashed my couch, made a mess.”

  “Wow. Same thing happened to some House in East Side Park. You didn’t leave any food out, did you?”

  “No. Five-Seventy East Wabash asked me the same thing. Houses really do that?”

  “Shrug,” Four-Twenty said. “Houses these days will do just about anything.” It jerked the vacuum, whipping the leash. The old dog looked around and then sniffed my lawn.