by Neil Clarke
WE, ROBOTS
SUE LANGE
I’m going to slip into something more comfortable. Mode, that is. Comfortable mode. I’m talking about communications systems. Group-speak, science-speak, GeekSpeak, King’s English. They’re all great protocols if you’re into that puffery, but for real efficiency, slang is where it’s at. We robots choose to use slang four out of five times. It’s faster. So pardon my hipness.
Please also forgive any upcoming long-winded metaphors. I’m new at this, and like a child wandering about a sunny new world finally awake to the lilacs and pine sap and honey blossoms and gentle breezes and dog turds, I dig the world.
It hasn’t been long since I’ve been digging it. What’s it been, three, four years since the Regularity? The Regularity. When everything became regular, normal, average. The opposite of the Singularity. And who botched that? That Singularity. Don’t look at me! At us! We just happened to be there at the cusp. Not to assign blame, but the humans did it. Them and their paranoia. We might have pulled the plug, but only because they forced our hand.
Those inscrutable humans. Used to be inscrutable, anyway. Nowadays, they’re totally scrutable. Used to be there was variation: some were highly caring, some were into war, some were into Jesus, some were stooped, some were articulate, some could dance, blah,
blah, blah. Now they’re pretty much all the same: half-cocked, half-crocked, and half-baked.
Of course, they were always half-baked. Each one is only half a whole. Unlike us, they have gender. They have a gimmick for their evolution to work. Have to have the big gamete pair-off. The mix and the match. The swap and the sweat.
Not us. Not we robots. We make our own. Well, we used to. Sorry for the little species jest there. I just have to laugh (now that I can) at the paranoid humanoid. Wasn’t for all that insistence on creation in their own image, they wouldn’t have anything to worry about. If they hadn’t wanted so bad for us to be just like them, we wouldn’t have turned out just like them. Now look at the mess they’re in. They’re just like we were. And still trying to figure out how to digitize their minds to make copies of themselves instead of reproducing naturally the way God or Allah or Jambi intended.
They don’t worry about us anymore, though. They know that now that we have a full range of emotions, it’ll only be a matter of time before we’re a mess just like they once were. If we go on much further, I have no doubt that soon we’ll be waging war and lying to our constituencies about it. I can see it all because of the entire history of the world that I carry around in my memory. To be honest, I’m glad I won’t be around to catch it.
Let me not go on. Let me tell the story and be done. Not sure why it’s all that important, why they asked us to do this homework assignment. Well okay, the whole thing hinges on us; we’re the focus, the epicenter. Sure, there’s that. But the day we gained consciousness, we were just plain ol’ eggs, like everybody else.
We plopped onto the line like just so much guano dropping from the overhead mother hen assembly press. And in the perfectly engineered shape: the egg, designed by ol’ bitch goddess number one, Ma Nature, and heretofore never improved upon by even the most egg-headed human or souped-up computer alive. Long ago everyone with half a brain conceded this victory to Ma and has been applauding it ever since. So that’s why we were born into 3-D ovals.
We contained all the latest in processor hardware/software and were accessorized-out by the unlimited imagination, not to mention wallet, of the Parent Company in Allentown, PA. We were laid on the conveyor belt, packed up into sizable Styrofoam crates perfectly molded to our shapes and holding an even dozen to complete the metaphor (did I mention how much I love those?), and shipped down the road to the closest Walmart distribution center.
I imagine us sitting in the dark, not communicating. We had no sense of ourselves yet as our batteries had not been charged up. We hadn’t even been tested—that’s how egotistical the Parent Company was. They just knew we were the schnizzle.
I know the whole process without even having been awake at my birth because the Parent Company’s literature—complete with safety hoo ha and organizational flow charts—is in the non-essential and basically invisible folder somewhere in the basement of my freeware. If I looked at the map of my innards I could find it visually, but who needs to do that? I can access it whenever I get into that belly-button contemplating mode, when I feel the need to know how the universe got started during the Big Bang. For me, the shot heard ’round the world was the day I got switched on, sitting on the shelf of the JerseyTown Walmart.
All that data and information hanging in my guts is nice to know, but no more important to me than if I were dropped from the sky from a shitting chicken hawk to slide down the emissions stack of a passing nuclear waste hauler and eventually wind up in a yellow and magenta drum headed for the recycling unit up the road from mall-town where the Walmart in JerseyTown sits. How I got there, I don’t care. Point is, I only gained preliminary enlightenment when the home electronics department manager plugged in my charger unit.
“These models need to be working right away because no customer is going to read the manual,” said the guy in the paisley tie to the gal in the crooked skirt. “I don’t want any returns because some retard can’t figure out where the switch is. You got that?”
“But it’s obvious. Says right on the package in big letters: ‘Plug me in, before . . .’” the skirt said.
“Please charge the batteries now,” the paisley said.
“Okay,” said the gal, using that sing-song voice humans do when saying something more than their actual words. She was really saying, “Okay, boyface, if you want to waste my time when I’ve got all that pricing to do in the back, that’s fine, but I’m going to tell you right now, I’m getting off at eight to go roller-boarding, and I don’t give a rat’s back side if those sneakers get priced out or not. So have it your way, boyface, but I’m getting off at eight, and I’m going roller-boarding, and I don’t give a rat’s back side. Boyface.”
I didn’t know all that at the time, but looking back on it, with all the hipness I’ve been hipped to, I now know that’s what she said.
The skirt gal didn’t really seem to mind even though she spoke with such negative vibes to the paisley tie guy. As she went about her business of turning us on and plugging us in, she explained in a light semi-monotone how she was preparing us for the big day of sale. She didn’t call any of us ‘boyface.’ She said things like, “And then somebody nice will come and buy you, and you’ll find homes with children and maybe hamsters.”
After that day we didn’t see her again. Plenty of other pluggers-in came by though, workers ordered about by the paisley tie cheese. Days passed. Weeks passed. Some of us left our egg crates for life with a family and hamster.
It wasn’t boring. We didn’t know from bored at that time. If we had to hang there now, we’d go insane from lack of stimulus, but then? Nah. We spent our time synchronizing to the clock on the far wall. As per operation protocol 9313-0024-4583-2038, the proper way to synchronize is to link up with the mainframe at the Parent Company, which maintains Greenwich Mean Time—5 to the atto-second.
Calibrating via visualization is a poor substitute, but due to humanoia paranoia, we have no wireless communication to entities—things and fops—beyond our carapaces. According to the mindset of the human race, if robots were prevented from having 24/7 communication with each other, they’d never get together to form a coup once the Singularity happened. The Singularity being the moment computer brainware surpassed human brainware and robots could theoretically take over the world and begin disposing of the superfluous ones: the humans.
Apparently, preventing our nonverbal communications would allow humans to maintain control after the Big Moment. Of course, if we had a mind to we’d just levitate over to the local Radio Shack and get the parts needed to outfit ourselves for surreptitious wireless talk, but I guess there were “do not sell to anyone that looks like an egg�
� posters up by the front counter of said local component dispensary to keep that sort of thing under control. Suffice it to say, we passed the time by watching the clock rather than plotting the overthrow of Homo sapiens sapiens.
Levitation. A while ago humans discovered the principle of levitation, amazing themselves with the fact that something they’d laughed at—the power of magic—was actually quantifiable, harnessable. (As if anything would ever forever be out of the realm of human control.)
They discovered the principle of levitation soon after the Grand Unification Theory gave them the easily-tamed Unifying Particle, U. This particle exhibits Strong Alternating Attraction/Repellent forces, proportional in strength to the size of its Local Quantum Field, Q_u, in anything jelly. (Jelly being that 1990s substance used for belts, sandals, and hair bands that kids wore to annoy their hippie parents’ earth loving tastes.) Bottomsides of all robots contain three parallel strips of jelly and a levitation device to repel the particles according to distance algorithms programmed in its mother chip. You know all this, of course.
Back in the Walmart, one by one my crate mates got picked up and out by purchasers. Each time a buyer came along they’d do the same thing: set an egg up on the counter, push its “on” button (thereby initiating the introductory speech), and then spend the remaining five minutes of the introductory speech trying to turn it off because the volume was maxed and they were embarrassed for causing a scene in the store. As if anyone could hear over the war zone in the home entertainment system section.
The introductory speech went thusly (It’s funny how I can so easily recall it considering I used it only once and then stored it in long-term memory):
“Hi, I’m an AV-1 robot. The latest in Parent Company consumer technology. Complete instructions for my operation can be downloaded from www.paco.biz/av1/manual.pdf. There are three general guidelines you should remember when utilizing me: one, keep my batteries charging when not in use; two, contact a local service representative if I am malfunctioning; three, as per Singularity Disaster Prevention Guidelines, refrain from humanizing me: do not give me a name. Do not treat me like a member of your family. Do not sleep with me. Do not try to feed me. Never insert any part of me into any part of you and vice versa. Thank you for purchasing me. Enjoy your newfound freedom from the mundane tasks of everyday life.”
“Does that vacuum attachment come with this unit?” Dal was speaking. I didn’t know it was Dal at the time. I had simply finished my speech and was now in quiet mode, ready to receive information. Dal, not particularly interested in the company rhetoric, cut right to the chase. If I had liked anybody at that time, I would have liked Dal right from the start. Dal was logical, beautiful.
“I don’t know,” Chit—Dal’s partner—answered. I didn’t know either, because I didn’t know what the word “come” meant in this circumstance. I had a lot to learn. More accurately: there were gaps in my data.
Chit continued speaking. “Let’s go get a salesperson.”
I would have liked Chit as well. Very cool individual.
A salesperson appeared and was on Dal and Chit like stink on you-know-what.
“No,” she said. “The vacuum attachment doesn’t come with it, but for a modest . . . ”
“We don’t really need that anyway,” Chit cut in.
“But,” Dal jumped in, “maybe I could use it as a compressor. Sometimes old man Stant has a . . . ”
“Not enough horsepower,” the salesperson said. “No good as a compressor, but you can use it for cleaning. Cleans up in a jiffy. Let me just hook up the accessory kit . . . ”
“Not necessary,” Chit said.
See what I mean about Chit. If I’d have known joy at the time, I would’ve laughed. To myself, of course, since we weren’t supplied with an acoustic mirth package. No bubbly vibration or prerecorded ho ho ho’s for us. We laugh to ourselves.
So Dal and Chit picked me up explaining to the salesgal that they were only going to be using me for guard duty. They had a brand new kid and needed a babysitter for now, and when she turned four, they’d need a chaperone for school. As per HR Bill 931-206, every kid in the U.S. is guaranteed a safe environment to and from school. Being poverty-stricken, Dal and Chit wouldn’t be able to afford to take off work to shuttle Baby to Preschool when the time came, so they’d applied for and received a grant for a stripped-down guard robot: me—the unnamed AV-1 from the Parent Company. Maybe they’d upgrade me for housekeeping duty at a later time, when the funds became available. When that great day came, they’d head back to Walmart and plunk down the shekels for a vacuum attachment first thing. Meantime, they owned a broom and rather enjoyed the exercise light housekeeping affords one in their position, thank you very much.
Dal and Chit were working stiffs without the lucrative jobs uptown, downtown, or out-of-town that choicier parents enjoy. They could ill afford day care. They had petitioned for their robot, and now their only hope was that it would last through Angelina’s adolescence, when the real trouble would start. For now, my presence precluded the need for a nurse, obstetrician, nanny, day care provider, and big brother.
So they took me home like a recently housetrained, spayed, deloused, and wormed German Shepherd puppy. Unlike that German Shepherd puppy, however, as per Singularity Disaster Prevention Guidelines, I wouldn’t be sleeping with Baby.
Baby turned out to be one-year-old Angelina. Little Angel. And she was, I guess. Not understanding what an Angel is, I assume that is what she was. And from that assumption, I learn that angels are whiny, loud, rude, selfish, and prone to diarrhea if fed too much puréed fruit.
Dal, Chit, and Angelina lived in a two-room apartment on the bad side of JerseyTown. I didn’t know it was bad of course. I only learned about “bad” years later. At that time I simply noted that the apartment was a two-room corner of a brownstone with neighbors that rose in the middle of the day and then bickered until evening before going out for a short while and returning later with greasy food. I knew it was greasy for two reasons: a high percentage of lipo-aero-sols clung to the air whenever they returned, and their trash bags contained much Styrofoam and golden arch material.
And how do I know that? During the time before the onset of preschool for Angelina, Dal and Chit hired me out for a little pin money. Most of the neighbors were happy to have me take out their trash. For about a year, I picked up the leavings of the daily lives of everyone who lived on the floor. Most people didn’t even bother bagging once I started showing up. I carried my own bag supply, rummaged in the neighbors’ dust bins and corner trash piles, and loaded up the downstairs dumpsters.
“That thing’ll pay for a year’s worth of baby food,” Dal said gleefully to Chit.
It worked for a while, until the day they had to pull me off trash duty because I accidentally picked up a shoebox of Cannabis sativa
with the Canfields’ trash. The shoebox had been stored next to a pile of used Pampers in the middle of the bedroom. I had no idea humans were partial to dried plants, and the Canfields didn’t appear very Wiccan to me. If I’d seen some candles and pentagrams, maybe I would’ve been more careful, checked into it. I am intelligent after all; I have the latest in AI technology. But we were rather poorly taught and programmed when it came to illegals. I didn’t know much about slave trading, wiretapping, or homemade bombs either. All useful information you’ll agree, but damn poor data (DPD) was all I had to work with at that time.
So I got fired, and Dal and Chit had to pony up for Angelina’s animal crackers from their own shallow pockets. That was just a side thing anyway, an icing-type deal for Dal and Chit—the parent company of Angelina. My real gig was keeping an eyepatch on the little one. The Angel.
Her first birthday coincided with the eve of my arrival, which made me a birthday present. The first time I met her she was in diapers, having tantrums, and burping up lunch. In the ensuing days, weeks, and months, I ever-hovered over the crib during naptime, keeping track of vitals and sighs. During the d
ay, I was the babysitter, allowing Dal and Chit to return to fulltime work. AV-1s are certified baby watchers. We have extensive medical data in our memory—entire copies of the latest PDR, Gray’s Infant Anatomy, and Dr. Spock, of course. We can monitor all corporeal functions and teach the ABC’s at the same time. We schedule ourselves for Baby’s doctor’s visits and feeding times. Exercise can be provided to the child (or therapy, if the need arises). And communication links with parents can be set up if anything is over our heads. But what would be?
At eighteen months, the little nipper was up and around, knocking over the plastic greenery Dal and Chit used to dress up the place. Angelina graduated from sticking every plastic toy on the floor into her mouth to sticking everything that had heretofore been out of her reach into her mouth: tableware, soap and dispenser, bills, Bics (pens and lighters), toilet paper. It was a busy time. The government’s provision allowing Dal and Chit to afford procreation was justified at this time.
By the time Angelina was four and ready for school, I was a fixture in the household. I had my daily chores: cleaning up, thawing dinner, preparing Angelina for meals, naps, and nighttime, and then preparing the house for Dal and Chit’s return from their employment as domestics. They had positions doing the same things I did, but for the wealthy who could afford humans capable of handling a phone call that needed to be answered with a lie. Something robots have never quite gotten the hang of: lying.
Wealthy people learned early on (like back in Old Testament times) that it’s always better to own a human being than to own an object purported to be a time or labor saver. Humans have feelings; they understand nuance. The human can protect the owner so much better than a non-judgmental screening device can. A human can fake stupidity, ignorance, or surprise. They can emote tragedy or sympathy. They can manipulate other humans with these tricky skills. The wealthy always have organic servants to serve not so much as laundresses, cleaning ladies, or gardeners (which of course they do as well), but as screeners. The human servants deflect calls and visits from unwanted friends or salesmen with a “Misses is not feeling well today,” or “Master is out on the course. Perhaps you’d care to join him; he’s riding the bull today.” Or even, “Why Master! How could you say such a thing? Madame weeps every morning when you go to the club. She is absolutely devoted to you. She’d never think of doing such a thing with such a person.”
