More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

  Yes, Dal and Chit were domestics to the rich, and they got me, the poor man’s domestic, costing about as much as a plasma TV. Very affordable.

  My big gig, the reason they’d petitioned for me at all, was to protect little Angelina when she made the big change. The going off to school. I wasn’t actually going to stay with her all day. My job was to protect her on the way to and from. I’d be levitating up to the roof to wait during my off hours when she and the other little squirts were inside getting their dose of kindergarten.

  I wasn’t needed inside the school building because the police monitors, bomb sniffers, guard dogs, and classroom chaperones would take over from the front door.

  Once a week, Angelina would be spending an hour with a therapist who would monitor her mental health and tip off the authorities if she’d experienced any foul play during school hours. The therapist was a relatively new expense to the local taxpayers, installed as per the Fontaine Act of 2035. The Fontaines sued NYPS 32 because little Johnny Fontaine had sustained sexual abuse at the hands of the

  Big Kids (3rd graders) back in ’34. Ever since then all schools had installed mental health workers to detect any psychological damage sustained by any kid anywhere at anytime. It acted as a deterrent, making sure no harm befell anybody. At least not on school property. What happened outside of that was my responsibility because anything that ever happened anywhere, anytime to little Angelina outside of school would have landed Dal and Chit in a place no parent wants to go: child protection court. Takes a brave soul to have a kid nowadays.

  Angelina grew up fast. At four she’d already pretty much been socialized, having had scheduled play dates with various neighboring kids for a year. She was precocious, naturally bossy, and some would say a bully. She tolerated me, but more often than not, found me a drag, something cramping her style, as if she were already a teenager with boys hanging around.

  On the eve of her graduation into institutionalized life, i.e., kindergarten, she tried to talk Chit into letting her ditch me.

  “Why does Avey have to come with me to school?” she asked.

  “Because otherwise you’ll get picked up by a pedophile, taken into the woods, and cut into a million pieces,” Chit answered.

  “Uh uh!” Angelina went crying out of the room in search of Dal. Chit then instructed me in child protection.

  “Avey, please be aware of conveyances following you slowly along. Do not deposit Angelina until you are at the front door of the school. Did you download directions?”

  “Yes,” I answered, squarely. “They have been retrieved and stored.”

  “You have our pager connections in case of a problem?” “Yes, it is stored in quick memory.”

  “I see that on your readout. The school is aware of your contact coordinates?”

  “Yes, I linked with their mainframe last week. I shared my coordinates, synched to their time unit, and retrieved Angelina’s morning schedule. She will not be late.”

  “Are you caught up on your PMs?”

  “My hydro fluids were changed yesterday. My joints were greased. Hoses and o-rings checked and changed as needed. Solar panels rotated, sockets cleaned, and chips dusted. My emergency flares have been refilled. I’ll recharge my batteries this evening. I replaced the emergency granola bar that Angelina keeps eating.” “She’ll probably eat it on the way to school tomorrow.”

  “I hid it.”

  “Where?”

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “Wow! Good camouflage. Your mag lite is working?”

  I opened the flap in back, extracted the flashlight and switched it on. Once she was satisfied, I returned it to the glove box.

  “If I had to I could change a tire,” I said. You’d think I’d had a sense of humor. Of course I didn’t yet.

  “What’s a tire?” Chit asked.

  “An artifact from when conveyances had tires. It’s those circular objects the retrofit automobiles sit on.” You see how square I actually was.

  “Oh,” Chit said and then gave a quick laugh in the manner that human domestics do when they need to respond in ways that they don’t quite buy into. In other words, it was fake, designed to let me know that she appreciated the joke. As if I had really said something funny.

  So off we went to school the next morning. There were no incidents in spite of the thick crack traffic on most corners of Dal and Chit’s neighborhood. The burnt out buildings with no panes in the windows, some with mattresses hanging half-in, half-out or old water-stained curtains in Jetsons motifs left on a single nail and so flapping in the breeze, housed shops with three balls on the first floor. Tear gas cans rolled in the streets, and rabid dogs came gruffing up out of the roiling sewer streams. The aforementioned pedophiles standing with their hands in their pockets, watched Angelina and the other tykes on their merry way.

  Nothing happened to any of the pink and shiny munchkins levitating to school on the backs of government subsidized AV-1s such as myself, however. The kiddies blithely moved along. Purple packs carrying lunches and Barbie dolls rested stoutly on their little backs. They eyed each other curiously, staring as only children can, as they began negotiating their place in the pecking order. Once out in the neighborhood milieu and despite having been warned about monsters that would cut them into thousands of pieces to be fed to the birds, they had eyes only for their own kind. They worked hard to find friends amongst potential foes.

  When we got to the door, Angelina seemed reluctant to let me go. She clung to my end extender, refusing to let it retract.

  “Come in with me,” she pleaded.

  “I am programmed to deposit you at the 131 Gard Street entrance portal. The locking devices on the school doors prevent unlicensed robots from entering. I am unlicensed. I have been instructed to levitate to the roof and wait there for your exit at 12:15. We shall return to the domicile of your parents at that time.”

  She bawled through my entire speech, uninterested in the particulars and knowing that it only meant one thing: she was on her own in the terrifying first day of school. A human domestic hired for the purpose of easing separation anxiety in the four-year-olds retrieved Angelina. She cooed at the crying child, and despite being kicked and having her hair pulled, she turned to me, smiled, and thanked me. As if that mattered.

  I levitated up to the roof and waited there with the 34 other AV-1s. At 12:15 we floated down. The front school doors flew open, and out ran thirty-five curly-headed, shiny-faced, brown-skinned, pink-garmented, four-year-olds. They screamed, laughed, chased, sang, held hands, ran in circles, spit wads of paper, threw Nerf balls, and avoided their AV-1s like teenagers just discovering cigarettes and needing to hide from Mom.

  One by one, we separated out, nabbed our charges, and headed for our respective homes.

  “Avey, Avey!” Angelina squealed. “You can’t believe how much fun I had. We had cookies and played Numbkers and I hit Brenda and made her cry.” I had been programmed for bully detection and correction. Hitting other children counts as bully behavior, but I didn’t have enough information from that statement to form a proper response. Ascertaining what response to give Angelina took most of the trip home.

  “Why did you hit Brenda?” I asked.

  “Because she lifted her dress at me.”

  “Did that hurt you?”

  Angelina laughed. “No, how could it hurt me?” “Why did you hit her if it did not hurt you?” “Because it was naughty!”

  “Why was it naughty?”

  “She’s not supposed to lift her dress at people.”

  “Did your instructor tell her not to lift her dress at people?”

  “What?”

  “Did your instructor tell her not to lift her dress at people?” “What is ‘urine strucktoar’?” “Your teacher.” “Oh, my teacher?”

  “Did your teacher tell her not to lift her dress at people?” “No, she didn’t see it.”

  “Then how do you know she’s not supposed to lift her dress at peop
le?” “Everyone knows that.” “How do you know that?” “Mommy told me.”

  “I mean, how do you know that everyone knows that?”

  Angelina laughed. She had no idea how everyone knew that.

  “Because,” she said long and drawn out, thinking of an answer. “Because I hit her.”

  So now I knew it was bullying behavior, but I had lost the connection. I couldn’t find the logic and thus didn’t know the correct correcting response. I used default mode as per protocol.

  “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

  It was the best that I could do. Angelina did not notice the deficiency. Ever ready to eat her pudding she had an answer.

  “Well,” she said, drawing it out again. “If the meat is poi, poisdend, you could feed it to the dog and then the dog would eat and, and then the snot would come out of its mouse and then he would die, and, and then you could eat all your pudding because the dog is dead.”

  Thankfully we had made it to Dal and Chit’s apartment building by then, and Angelina raced up the stairs on her own, completely ignoring the drunk in the corner, the broken glass on the landing, the crying baby on floor four—all items that would have taken hours of her attention any other day, but were ignored today so she could fly in to tell Mommy and Daddy of her adventures at morning school.

  Dal and Chit, of course, were off at their day gigs with the uptown rich folks’ and just about to receive Baby Girl’s first report. Meanwhile, Angelina threw down her pack, ran to the wall comm,

  and pressed Mommy’s account. I repeat the conversation here only because I now recognize it as being cute and enjoyable.

  “Mommy, Mommy, we had cookies and made paper mackay, and played nominoes, and I hit Brenda, and Avey’s going to kill the dogs so I can have pudding!” She responded, “Yes,” “no,” “yes” to a few questions from the other end of the line and then handed the ear piece to me. I connected to my audio-in.

  “AV-1 here.”

  “Avey, is everything alright? Were there dogs about?”

  “Not many, four or so, but nothing happened. Angelina is fine and we’re going to eat lunch now.”

  “You’re not giving her pudding if she hasn’t eaten any meat, are you?”

  “No.”

  “What is she talking about then?”

  I reiterated the entire previous conversation. Well, actually just the first few entries. She got the point.

  That was Angelina’s first day at school. I look back at it wistfully now that I can actually be wistful, or tearful, or melancholy, or maudlin, or sentimental. I can be all those things now. Back then I was merely instructional, and so I set about getting the kid’s lunch at that point.

  It took a few years before Angelina’s social skills had elevated to those of a civilized human being. Three years, innumerable timeouts, uncountable notes home to Dal and Chit, endless nights without pudding, and regular good talkings-to that resulted in contrite promises to “never kick Tommy in the head again.”

  By third grade, Angelina’s corners were more rounded out. She fit into her little peg snugly with only a few burrs catching every now and then. She was well on her way to a place in society that Dal and Chit hoped would be more comfortable than the uneasy poverty that characterized her beginning years.

  When they were first starting out, through no fault of their own, Dal and Chit had found themselves migrating from their home in the warm climate of Belize to America. They didn’t have a chance to naturalize into the tight middle class, with its purchased education and dental insurance. Throughout Angelina’s early years, they remained on the fringes with the lower classes, where public education and services were available—but dangerous.

  Angelina was lucky. By third grade it was apparent that her temperament had become manageable enough for her to be taught. Her second grade teacher pronounced it in her final report card: “This one will be going to college.”

  I take pride (now that I have pride) in knowing I helped her there. I protected her from rabies and pedophilia on her way to and from school. I recorded her misdemeanors and regurgitated them when prompted by school officials or Dal and Chit hoping to get to “the bottom of this.” I helped her with her homework when needed.

  The latter was most difficult. Physically hard, in fact. Artificial intelligence, fabulous as it is, is limited. Our processes refuse to jump circuits in order to see things from an illogical angle, which humans can do at the drop of a hat. That, in fact, is their strength. Their flexible logic circuits produce their canny human understanding. Misunderstanding, actually. They don’t see the face value of something because they often see things in an illogical way. There aren’t enough angles a logical powerhouse (like me) can turn a statement to illuminate that face value. Humans are always reading more into it than what is there, so they miss the forest. We miss the trees. Sometimes the answer lies amongst the trees and not in the forest.

  Take for instance the learning of the alphabet. Or the teaching of it, rather. When you want to teach a robot its ABCs, you load in the symbols for the letters and a sound program with that silly song. Escape the “and’s” and the w and tell it to memorize the sequence, matching each bit with its symbol. Each bit being a syllable in this case, assuming that there’s a high enough threshold on the vowels, so that the diphthongs fly under the radar. You add in the w afterward as a special case at position #23 and voilá, your robot can read, write, and sing its ABCs.

  A kid learns the song easily, what with “Jesus Loves Me,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and “Yo Mama Don’t Dance,” imprinted onto his or her brain since the age of two. Explaining that each sound is a letter is not so bad until they get to the elemenopee. Pee is a naughty word to a preschooler so they spend five minutes laughing about that, or lecturing if they are a particularly sanctimonious child. Then there’s the explanation that elemenopee is not a single sound, even though as per the cadence of the song, it certainly is. A lecture on syllables ensues. Finally, after half an hour, they understand. Of course when practicing the next day, they forget that elemenopee is not a single sound and burst into laughter (or lecture) for ten minutes. You explain it all again. Several days later they understand el, em, en, oh, pee as separate letters.

  Diphthongs fly under the radar of most humans, even after they know what the word means and that the letter “I” is not simply pronounced “eye” but “ah-eye,” so you generally don’t have to worry about the diphthongs. Things seem set . . . then you get to w. They understand syllables now and throw a tantrum because “yuu” has already been “yuu-sed.”

  “Not fair!” they scream. It doesn’t make sense, and no amount of mollycoddling and apologizing will get them to accept that dubb-leyuu is in fact a single sound and therefore not dub, bull, and yuu.

  The two of you take a long and arduous trip, perhaps the most difficult in the child’s life, but you do get through. The song has meaning finally. Then the child must learn to write it down.

  It took me three weeks to teach Angelina her ABCs. A robot learns in thirty seconds. And that’s an off-the-shelf mere word processor with arms such as myself. Still, now that I look back wistfully, it was a lovely process.

  Robots never understood human understanding, and how could we? We were designed by humans who have little or no understanding of human understanding. Thousands of years of learning how to learn and, after that, thousands of PhDs working in the area of human learning, and what did they have for us? Not much more than the fact that a child never learns well when beaten. A good lesson, I agree, especially now that I know pain, but not much to go on if you’re a robot. Which I am and was. We simply had no programming on how to teach a child. We had to wing it. A physically difficult process for an object whose processors are loath to jump circuits.

  On Angelina’s eighth birthday, I received the news that changed the world. My world anyway, and perhaps everyone else’s. It wasn’t so much news as it was a product recall. The product in quest
ion being model AV-1 of the Parent Company’s line. Specifically Dal and Chit’s unit of said model AV-1. Me.

  All the AVs and Others like us were being recalled for a safety feature. I received the instructions while doing a routine upload of updated vocal and audio drivers. Dal and Chit received an email stating the same thing. It came in with non-spam, official color-coding blue, so they knew they had to read it.

  “Says there’s an issue with Avey,” Dal called while standing at the message board.

  “You’re kidding,” Chit answered from the bedroom. Chit was changing from work clothes to play clothes as the two of them had just returned for the evening. “We’ve had Avey for what seven years and they’re just now finding a safety violation?”

  “It’s not really a violation,” Dal answered. “Some sort of new shit’s come to light or something. Says here it’s a ‘Singularity Disaster Prevention Measure.’”

  “Singularity Disaster? I thought that was all just hype? Didn’t all that go away when the deficit reached 2 teras?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s got a US DAI stamp at the bottom. I authenticated it with the scanner. It’s a seal; we gotta do it.”

  Chit came out of the bedroom wearing overalls and a bandana. “Do we get our money back? When’s this taking place? School starts up next week. Are they kidding? This is really effed up.”

  “Yeah, well, what you gonna do?” Dal was always pretty passive. Chit, on the other hand, was a bit of a fighter. Bossy in fact.