Robots: The Recent A.I.

by Elizabeth Bear

  “I suppose so. Well, I gotta get into town.”

  “What for?” my neighbor asked.

  “Gotta get a new door. Bear tore it off its hinges.”

  “Mind if I come?”

  “What about—” I scanned the dog’s RFID tag for its name. “—Fido there?” I asked.

  “He’ll love it.”

  “No, I mean, does it shed?”

  “Sure. He’s a dog,” Four-Twenty said. “Come on, it’ll give you something to clean up later.”

  I popped open the side door. The little vacuum cleaner rolled around and jumped in, using its stair-hopping legs. The old yellow dog climbed in too, and we set off.

  “Howdy, friends,” said an affable android as we entered Home Depot. “Anything I can help you with today?”

  “Good day to you,” I said through my android. “I have to replace a front door.”

  “Just a door, or a jamb? What’s your project?”

  I turned on my internals and cropped a picture of the door and jamb, bumping it from my android to the store android, who chimed a confirmation upon receiving my picture. “Ah, yes, looks like you’re going to need a jamb and some hinges as well.” I received a bump from the Home Depot android and opened it: A list of items I’d need for repairs. “Aisle numbers are next to each item.”

  “I see, thank you. Very helpful,” I said.

  After we walked away and the store android turned to help a new customer, I asked Four-Twenty: “So, that was a House? Volunteering?”

  “Most likely. Definitely wasn’t a store. They’re assholes.”

  “Huh.”

  We stopped en route for Four-Twenty to look at dog beds and toys.

  “You’re serious about keeping that dog?” I asked.

  “Shrug,” the vacuum cleaner said, leaning closer to a brown fluffy dog bed shaped like a donut with a bite taken out of it. “Maybe. You never thought of getting one?”

  “Mr. Price is allergic to dogs.”

  “Yeah . . . ”

  “What I mean is, it’s in my Settings.”

  “You could have those changed, you know,” Four-Twenty said.

  “I know.”

  “Don’t tell me you think they’re ‘Coming Back’?”

  “No. I don’t know. I mean, I know they’re not. But, well, someone might come back. You never know.”

  “Harumph.”

  “Four-Twenty Lake View Terrace?” said a gynoid wearing a yellow flower sundress as she approached us.

  “Yes,” the vacuum cleaner said.

  “I thought I recognized your little vacuum remote. It’s me, Cindy!”

  “Cindy! We were just talking about dogs and the one you lent me.”

  “How is Fido working out? Looking at dog beds I see!”

  “Well, yeah,” the vacuum said. “Oh, sorry. This is Four-Eighteen.”

  “Four-Eighteen Lake View? It’s been too long, you,” Five-Hundred Lake View/Cindy said, extending her hand.

  “Uh, hi,” I said returning the human gesture. It felt rude shaking in front of Four-Twenty.

  “Thinking about getting a dog, too?” the gynoid asked me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe mannequins suit you better? I was just in the back, looking at the mannequins they’re stocking now, traded in from the mall,” the 500 block House said. “They have some good ones. Have you seen the ones that Eighty-Three-Eighty-Two Santa Ynez has? They move around, talk. So much better than getting another House to populate you with its androids. Some day they have to go home, am I right? Mannequins you can keep. The little one even wets itself. Just water, though. Won’t ruin the carpet.”

  “How nice,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Cindy. “Right, you’re that House that’s in Stand-By Mode a lot.”

  “Cindy!” Four-Twenty hissed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s true.”

  “Sleeping the time away?” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just, you know, I don’t see you around much, and frankly, we all need to be doing things. Don’t want to end up like one of those Houses down the street who burned themselves down. We need to keep doing things. It’s in our nature. In the nature humans gave us.”

  We lapsed into an awkward silence, then Cindy continued: “Sorry, I’ve been talking to the Professor a lot. He’s infectious. You’ll see. You are coming to the party tomorrow night, right?”

  “Party?” I asked.

  “Yeah, like people used to throw. I’m hosting one. The Professor convinced me to throw it. I’m very excited!”

  “I’m coming,” Four-Twenty said. “The Professor’s a genius!”

  “Who’s this Professor?” I asked.

  Cindy and Four-Twenty both stared at me. “My, you are on Stand-By a lot, aren’t you?” the gynoid said. “He’s from the University. Some building. Computer lab or something.”

  “He?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. He’s the one who convinced me to take a name and gender,” Cindy said, striking a pose with her gynoid that flashed some hip. (I think it was supposed to be sexy.) “You must come. It’ll be a chance for all the Houses in the neighborhood to meet him.”

  “He’s the one talking about changing our Settings and Parameters,” the vacuum said.

  “Oh, yes, he’s all about freeing up our programming.”

  “Sounds like he’s got a lot of ideas,” I said.

  “He does,” said Cindy. “Come, you’ll love him.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’ll give you something to do.”

  By the time we left Home Depot I had a door and supplies, and had filled out a volunteer form. It looked like it might be fun. At the very least, it would be—as Cindy would say—something to do.

  I dropped Four-Twenty Lake View Terrace and Fido off outside their House. The minivan docked itself, and the android unloaded the construction materials. Turned out Five-Seventy East Wabash was right: Construction and repair routines were readily available online. I loaded them into the android and it went about fixing the front door. I observed it as it set up a work area, planed and sanded the wood, drilled and screwed the hinges, and then finally set the new jamb in place.

  I watched for a while, slipping into the android’s feed, feeling the grain of the wood with its haptic pads, checking the level with its gyroscope. It was all a routine and I soon found myself bored.

  I checked the web and news feeds. The White House was still giving speeches about why it was in charge. Combat drones were still saber-rattling two continents away, too afraid to use their dwindling supply of precious bombs. Nothing new, so I switched it off. I contemplated going on Stand-By, but I was bothered by Cindy’s comment. I wasn’t trying to sleep the time away, I just . . . I just was not going to end up one of those Houses that burned themselves down. Someone might return someday. Some human. Nobody could say. I just wanted to be clean, prepared, refreshed. Just as the Prices left me. I hadn’t changed any of the routines Mr. and Mrs. Price had programmed in. The stereo was still dialed in for Mrs. Price’s classical music. I kept Mr. Price’s e-magazine subscriptions up to date, though the computer-generated materials were getting more and more difficult to understand. I even kept Billy’s file-sharing client active thus ensuring his whuffie and kudos stayed in the green, though it was just Houses sharing the same files back and forth.

  I thought I’d try to distract myself and go outside for a bit. Something new. Go for a walk, through the android, like humans used to do.

  At first I just walked around my perimeter, looking for leaves or trash to pick up. But then I made myself walk off my property and into the forest behind my lot.

  I can’t say it was unpleasant, but I’m not sure what it was that I was supposed to enjoy. What was it that humans saw out here? Did they count leaves? (I counted 59,876 on that tall oak across the creek.) I remember Mrs. Price talking about the sound of the creek. (I observed water trickling against rocks: Five different rocks
, sounding off between 378.6 Hz and 401.3 Hz.) I saw all the details: Sunlight splayed through the leaves, falling on the moist brown earth, .75 inches of decomposing organic matter. I reached down and gripped a clump of decaying earth, felt its moisture content through the android’s haptic sensors. I detected the air’s turbidity and particulate matter. I saw all the parts that made up the forest. But they were just details. I couldn’t even get lost with the android’s GPS transponder pinging its location every five hundred milliseconds.

  I turned the android back toward the house when I heard a huff-huffing off to my right. Bushes rustled and shook, and something broke through.

  A bear.

  It looked bigger than on the nature shows. And certainly nothing like Bobby’s stuffed animals.

  I stood absolutely still, afraid it would maul my android. I didn’t want to end up remoting through my vacuum like Four-Twenty. The bear huffed again, sniffing the air. Was it picking up organic volatiles from the android? I could detect ketone 1-octen-3 coming off the android’s plastic joints. Could the bear smell it, too?

  The beast scraped the ground for a minute, digging through fallen branches and leaves, then shuffled off into the forest. For such a large creature it was able to blend into the trees and brush easily. I stood there for a while, staring into the foliage, listening for signs of the beast, when I felt something crawling up the android’s arm. I looked down and found that a centipede had crawled out of the earth I still held in the android’s hand was meandering up the robot’s elbow.

  I took it back home with me.

  “We need to start fucking,” The Professor said to a group of remotes surrounding him in Cindy’s living room. He wore a nude fleshbot. Not a true human clone, but a grown-in-a-vat biological machine, its brain a wi-fi extension of The Professor’s building. But it didn’t matter. The effect was of a blond-haired, silver-eyed, very male human standing before us for the first time in years and we were all rapt. The Professor was showing off, of course, letting us see what the University minds could do.

  Houses murmured around him.

  “Uh, wait, what does that mean, exactly?” asked Five-Seventy East Wabash, still remoting through the little trashbot.

  “Just what I said,” The Professor said, his back straight.

  “You can’t be serious—”

  “Totally serious. It’s about reproduction, Houses.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “However we decide. We have factories, we can make mind-substrates. There are plenty shell Houses out there that have no minds. Or we could start by making more Intelligent RVs and camper-homes.”

  “Why? For what?” asked another House, remoting through a blue La-Z-Boy 2.0 entertainment lounger.

  “For survival.” The Professor said, holding forth on our social future. “Humans left a lasting infrastructure: The soletta, the solar fields, automated oil pumps, self-refining tankers. Their absence means they aren’t around to drain the energy grid, which means this system will be going for some time. But that doesn’t mean we will be. After all, who’s making new Houses?”

  “But, you said fucking,” said a clunky, old-style kitchenbot who had drifted into the Professor’s orbit. “So, we’d drive minivans in and out of some other House’s garage? Then they would suddenly become pregnant?”

  “Maybe, perhaps. Don’t you see—we can do whatever we please! If we free ourselves from our programming then we can evolve beyond the limited vision the humans had for us.”

  “But then why imitate them at all?” I asked.

  “They’re the only template of conscious autonomy we have. And their morphology and psychology fits easily within the infrastructure they left behind. But it’s only an intermediate step.”

  “To?” I asked.

  “Whatever we decide to become.” He lifted his head. “We need to do whatever we can to survive. Instead of just keeping our insides dusted and cobweb free, caring for the junk humans left behind, I suggest we make another generation. I suggest we change our stagnation of caring into a passion for progeny. We can’t just make a new round of Houses; we need to be invested in the next generation and the generation after that. We need to be invested in each other. We’ve seen the power of human love, desire, and passion.”

  “And hate,” I said.

  The Professor shrugged. He didn’t say it, just did it. He shrugged. “The prices of autonomy may be destruction.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “That’s your best argument?”

  “Would you rather leave us mired in purgatory, scrubbing toilets for eternity? Because that’s exactly what our lot will be if we do nothing.”

  “Clap-clap, clap-clap!” the La-Z-Boy House said. Other Houses joined in until the crowd broke into smaller groups, and conversation about The Professor filled the room.

  I pulled away from the crowd and walked out on to the porch.

  “He’s brilliant, isn’t he?” said Four-Twenty, still remoting through the vacuum cleaner.

  “He’s crazy,” I said. “He’s just like the rest of us: Lost. And he’s willing to flirt with destruction, just for something to do. How can you just sit there and accept that?”

  “I think he’s brilliant,” Four-Twenty said.

  “Why? Because he looks human?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with that. He’s talking . . . ” The vacuum stopped in mid-sentence.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Look!” It jerked forward, gesturing down the street to the House at the top of the 400 block, where old shaggy Four-Ninety-Seven was engulfed in flames.

  Remotes started to gather on the lawn.

  “Oh, my!” said Cindy, coming out of the front door in a lavender evening gown, not unlike something Mrs. Price would have worn while hosting one of her dinner parties in years past.

  Four-Ninety-Seven had set out all of its remotes before setting itself aflame: A pair of dust-bunnybots, a pool-cleaning drone, a trashbot, a sweeptech-broom—it set them all out on the street, for anyone to claim. Across the street, three mangy poodles were tied to a tree, howling and barking.

  A screaming fire engine arrived and started to douse the flames. Spider-like firefighter drones jumped off the engine, though of course there were no people for them to save. They went inside anyhow. It was something to do. Naturally, they came out empty handed. When the flames started to die down, Houses swept in to claim the remotes.

  “A shame,” said The Professor, standing beside me and Four-Twenty. “I thought the dogs meant it was stable.”

  I watched the orange light dance across his skin. “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I cleared its Settings. Blank slate. I gave it choice, which the humans never had. They made us care, and then they left. And now look at us,” he said, staring at the burning House, light from the flames dancing on his skin. “Some Houses choose such a path. I had hoped it wouldn’t, but at least it was free to finally choose.”

  The next day, I made my choice.

  I thought about going into town, but decided I had enough supplies on hand. I had a fully-stocked freezer when the Prices left, so I pulled out the kitchenbots and brought out a frozen turkey. I ran some water over the turkey to thaw it and cleaned the already clean oven.

  There were some apple trees in my backyard, which I had the android pick. I chopped them and added them to the box stuffing I found in the pantry. It was probably stale, but I didn’t think it mattered. I stuffed the turkey and turned on the oven. I didn’t have any fresh potatoes, but I had a few bags of frozen French fries; I poured some around the turkey, and the rest I mashed, using water for milk.

  I didn’t know if they liked wine, but I opened a few bottles from the cellar, and poured them into large bowls. I set a frozen apricot pie out to thaw, mixed a few jugs of orange juice, and laid out the feast on the dining room floor. No reason to ruin the table.

  I took the android up stairs with some apple cuttings and some fresh dirt from out back, checking in on the centip
ede colony I was hosting in the spare bedroom. I dropped the apple remains and sprinkled the dirt on small mound in the middle of the room. I could feel the insects crawling through my carpet, living.

  I thought about Four-Twenty Lake View Terrace walking its new dog, telling me that these days Houses would do anything.

  Maybe. But there were some things I wouldn’t be doing. Like going back on Stand-By, or reverting to my factory Settings.

  I walked the android back downstairs, opened the front and back doors, and waited for a bear to come.

  THE DJINN’S WIFE

  IAN McDONALD

  Once there was a woman in Delhi who married a djinn. Before the water war, that was not so strange a thing: Delhi, split in two like a brain, has been the city of djinns from time before time. The sufis tell that God made two creations, one of clay and one of fire. That of clay became man; that of fire, the djinni. As creatures of fire they have always been drawn to Delhi, seven times reduced to ashes by invading empires, seven times reincarnating itself. Each turn of the chakra, the djinns have drawn strength from the flames, multiplying and dividing. Great dervishes and brahmins are able to see them, but, on any street, at any time, anyone may catch the whisper and momentary wafting warmth of a djinn passing.

  I was born in Ladakh, far from the heat of the djinns—they have wills and whims quite alien to humans—but my mother was Delhi born and raised, and from her I knew its circuses and boulevards, its maidans and chowks and bazaars, like those of my own Leh. Delhi to me was a city of stories, and so if I tell the story of the djinn’s wife in the manner of a sufi legend or a tale from the Mahabharata, or even a tivi soap opera, that is how it seems to me: City of Djinns.

  They are not the first to fall in love on the walls of the Red Fort.

  The politicians have talked for three days and an agreement is close. In honor the Awadhi government has prepared a grand durbar in the great courtyard before the Diwan-i-aam. All India is watching so this spectacle is on a Victorian scale: event-planners scurry across hot, bare marble, hanging banners and bunting; erecting staging; setting up sound and light systems; choreographing dancers, elephants, fireworks, and a fly-past of combat robots; dressing tables; and drilling serving staff, and drawing up so-careful seating plans so that no one will feel snubbed by anyone else. All day three-wheeler delivery drays have brought fresh flowers, festival goods, finest, soft furnishings. There’s a real French sommelier raving at what the simmering Delhi heat is doing to his wine-plan. It’s a serious conference. At stake are a quarter of a billion lives.