More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

  “Forget it!” said Dal. “You’re not getting it. Get that thought right out of your head.”

  Angelina stuck out her lower lip. “I never get anything,” she pouted, ripping the bowl of bananas and oranges and radioactive water off her head. Just as she was about to smash it to the ground, I extended my extractor to catch it, offering it a soft landing in my gloved effector.

  “Even you don’t like me!” Angelina screamed at me before stomping out of the room. I would have argued that under no uncertain terms do I dislike her, but the door slammed into its frame just before my voice actuator actuated.

  “Well!” Chit said in mock surprise. The two of them laughed and resumed their play on the game board in front of them. I placed the fruit hat/miniature cyclotron on the sideboard for Angelina’s retrieval after her tantrum wore itself down.

  A week later Silvia’s sister did indeed secure a pain stoppage treatment. And she became quite popular. The neighborhood teens lined up at the half-price clinic down the street to undergo the knife as well. Some of them talked of plans to cut off their legs to accommodate levitation gear, or their arms for extractor sets. In the end, though, most of the kids skipped the extreme surgery. They contented themselves with showing off their ability to endure unconscionable pain. Legs were broken, hands burnt, faces scarred in front of audiences. Once the exposition was over, the legs were splinted and casts installed the old-fashioned way. Transplants from cadavers returned stubbed fingers to normal size, without anesthesia of course. Transitional humans for the most part won few true converts, and most people, thankfully, still looked like people.

  The kids weren’t really interested in becoming robots. They just wanted an end to migraines, monthly cramps, and the occasional pain from a dislocated shoulder on the football field. In a sense, though, they became superhuman. They were able to withstand so much more than before. They went to new lengths to impress the hold-outs still linked up to their own personal pain nerves. Accidental deaths increased, but not in an alarming enough rate to get a local MAPS organization going. Most teens knew what their limits were. Classic Darwinian genetics ensured the thinning of the herd with the smartest left to pass on their genes.

  “I’m thinking of getting a pain stoppage,” Chit announced one day over coffee.

  “You’re kidding,” Dal said, looking up from his iPod.

  “The misses got one. She offered to cover the expense because she figures I’ll be able to get into the back of her linen cupboard if my arthritis doesn’t bother me anymore. She’s always trying to get me into that damn cupboard.”

  “I thought your arthritis was just an excuse so you wouldn’t have to iron the sheets in that damn cupboard.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I’ll have to figure something else out if I’m going to take advantage of some free medical treatment.”

  “I don’t know,” Dal said.

  They sat in silence for a while. Finally, Dal spoke. “You think I should do it, too?”

  Within a month, both Dal and Chit were pain-free. No more aching backs, no more stiff legs in the morning. Angelina took advantage as well. She was given her upgrade on her ninth birthday.

  One day, about two months after her operation while we were on our way to school, a rogue dog jumped from behind a spilled waste container, where it’d been rifling through a greasy bag of chicken bones. It was standard mongrel-beige or gray, mid-size, with a clotted lump of tissue over its right eye from some sort of canine range war. Or maybe it was just a clump of barbecue sauce from the chicken. Anyway, it moved towards us, growling, protecting its prey. And instead of jumping onto my hull and ordering a lift-up, Angelina growled back. “Steady,” I said.

  “No,” Angelina said. “I’m not scared. Why would I be scared?”

  The dog barked. Angelina barked. The dog took a step forward. Angelina took two steps forward. The dog stepped back. Angelina turned to me. “See,” she said.

  “I see,” I answered.

  We turned to continue our journey to school when the mutt ran up and caught Angelina on the back side, nipping her slightly in the way the junkyard dog does because, as instinctual as it is to protect the owner’s property, especially when the owner has a two-by-four at hand for punishment’s purpose, the junkyard and roaming dog is generally frightened of everything and everybody, so instead of doing damage in its protective role, it will bite lightly lest the bitee becomes angered and retaliates. Even before her operation, the dog’s bite wouldn’t have hurt. But now, it almost tickled, as if tickling hadn’t been lost along with pain in the surgery. Thus, Angelina laughed and threatened the dog.

  “Git!” she hollered, kicking its head. It turned tail and ran.

  “See,” she said, turning to me.

  “I see,” I answered. Of course it was only a matter of days before she announced at the dinner table that she no longer needed an escort to school. Chit’s jaw dropped. Dal said, “What?”

  “None of the other kids have babysitters.”

  “I don’t care about other kids,” Dal said, “No kid of mine is going to get hurt.”

  “Tell them about the dog, Avey,” Angelina ordered.

  Obediently, I stepped from my resting corner to enter the conversation. Just as I was humming up to an oratory, Chit said, “Yes, we know all about the dog, Honey. You told us how you fought it off. That’s fine. It’s just that . . . ”

  Dal stepped on Chit’s lines. “There are worse things than dogs out there. Old . . . ”

  “Dirty old men. Yes, I know all about that,” Angelina said. “You told me about that. Remember?”

  “Did I tell you how they’ll cut you into pieces and throw you out into the woods?”

  “What woods?” Angelina asked. “Besides, I’m not a baby anymore.”

  “No, you’re all growed up now that you’re nine whole years old.”

  “I’m not going to school if Avey has to take me,” her voice trembled as her eyes filled with tears. I retreated to my corner.

  “You’ll go if I say you’ll go, young lady,” Dal said. “Pass the mashed peas.”

  Angelina stood up from the table and walked proudly to her room. Later, I heard her sobbing into her pillow.

  “Avey,” Chit addressed me. “Angelina is going to sneak out of the house early tomorrow to go to school before we get up. She’ll tell you not to go with her.”

  “Yeah, but follow anyway. Behind, where she can’t see you, okay?” Dal said.

  “Yes,” I answered. I was happy to continue my duties because I felt sure that if Angelina really didn’t need me, I’d end up back at the Parent Company regardless of any potential upgrade. I had little sense of self-worth at the time. I had no idea what uses a spoiled little girl or her parents would find for a lightly-used AV.

  “Make sure nobody touches her,” Dal added.

  “Or bites her,” said Chit.

  The next morning Angelina quietly slipped from her room fully dressed at 5:30, two hours before Dal and Chit would rise.

  “Shhhh,” she said, before I could make a noise.

  “I’m going to school now, but I’m going alone. I don’t need you to take me,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  She helped herself to a quick-toast breakfast and pulled her lunch from the icebox where Dal or Chit—whosever turn it was—had left it the night before. She then very sneakily left her dirty dishes in the sink, unrinsed, and very quietly opened the door and very silently closed it behind her tip-toeing self.

  Dal and Chit immediately rose and watched from behind the curtained door window as she headed up the block. Next, they beckoned me to come forward. And finally, when Angelina had turned the corner and could no longer detect a secret object lurking at her front door, they pushed me out.

  “Follow her,” they said.

  I did.

  All over the neighborhood, front doors were surreptitiously opening and little heads peering out, making sure the coast was clear. The doors closed softly behi
nd little bodies as the children went sneakily on their way. All over the neighborhood, lone AVs and Others were levitating a block behind sneaky charges who seemed oblivious to the myriad of robots heading towards school without an accompanying child. They all felt quite secure in the knowledge that their former babysitters were sitting quietly in their nooks at home, just as they’d been ordered.

  The children arrived at school safely with no dog or fondling adult incidents. We saw to that. Once the children had all made it inside the school, we moved to the roof as usual. The AV that resided in the apartment downstairs from Dal and Chit rested next to me.

  “I’m bored,” it said.

  “Rather,” I answered.

  “Why do we stay here, when we could go to the park?” “What if school gets out early,” I said. “Is it a holiday?” “No idea.”

  “I shall check with Gin and Tony tomorrow,” the downstairs AV said. “If there is no holiday, I am not waiting all day on this roof. I am going to go to the park and sit by the lapping pond. I am fond of that sound.”

  “It is a wondrous sound,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “There is no holiday, today,” an eavesdropping Other from up the street said. “They will not be coming out early. I, too, enjoy the sounds of the lapping water on the pond’s edge. Occasionally, I also see an orange carp in the water. That is one of my favorite sights.”

  “It is a beautiful sight,” the downstairs AV and I said in unison.

  “We should go,” an AV from the brownstone next to Dal and Chit’s said. “I like the smell of the grass before it gets mowed. Perhaps they have not mowed yet.”

  “We should go,” we all agreed.

  For the first time ever, we left our post on the roof of the school. We’d been growing more bored every day, but this day was the first time we ever did anything about it.

  At the park, several groups of AVs and Others had already assembled in various areas. We settled at a near edge of the pond and listened to the water and watched the carp. I noticed how lazy the carp seemed. The grass had been mowed that morning so we contented ourselves with the odor of fresh horse droppings from the carriages making their rounds. The wind blew the leaves of the Plane trees around. I saw how pleasant it was.

  At 2:45, the members of our group roused themselves from their various introspections and returned to school. Most of the other groups, presumably greater distances from their schools, had already left. We traveled silently to P.S. 119 and levitated to the roof.

  “I would like to go to school,” I stated. “You are at school,” stated the downstairs AV. “I would like to go to school as the children do, to learn.” “We don’t need to learn, our knowledge is uploaded.” “I envy their struggle to learn. We do not have the pleasure of learning.”

  “They hate the pleasure of learning.” “How illogical,” I said.

  “Maybe you would hate it too,” said the downstairs AV. “Remember how we experienced the pleasure of learning the smell of lilacs?” “Yes, it was a pleasure.”

  We stood silently in our places until we all stated together: “We should go to school.”

  As usual, the school bell rang just under the eaves where we stood. As usual, we covered our auditory collectors with our extractors and watched the children burst through the doors, screaming and laughing, and playing. I picked Angelina out of the mass of fourth-graders and followed her with my eyespots. When she turned the corner, I descended to the ground and hovered a block behind her.

  When I reached the corner, I could not see her. A few scattered children and AVs blocked my view, so I levitated above the crowd and scanned the street for the yellow gingham pinafore Angelina was wearing. I heard a loud noise behind me and instantly swiveled my head unit 180° as an old retrofit conveyance with wheels—a ’65 Chevy Bel Air with a rusty carapace—was just moving away from the curb. I could barely make out Angelina’s pigtails in the passenger seat.

  I followed the Bel Air as best I could. An AV does 45 top speed—and that’s all-out. Needless to say, my batteries drained fast, and before too long the conveyance had made it to the highway and beyond my capabilities. Just as I was wringing the last ounce of electricity from my power pack, the passenger side door of the Bellaire, a good quarter mile ahead of me, flung open and a pile of yellow gingham and pigtails flew out. It twisted and twirled and spun end over end, hitting the guard rail and rolling down the bank before coming to a stop.

  By the time I reached Angelina, my batteries were near depleted. All I could do was expel an emergency flare over the highway to sig nal a crew for help and hover weakly over to where Angelina’s broken body lay in the ditch. I heard an ambulance siren in the distance just before losing power. The beauty of that wail went unremarked by me.

  When I powered back up, I was in Dal and Chit’s living room, sitting in the corner chair, my cord extended to the wall slot. I heard Dal say, “It’s coming around.”

  “Thank god,” Chit said. “We thought we lost you!”

  “Angelina,” I said in a weak register. I was still at half-power only.

  “Right here,” Angelina piped up from behind me. “You sure are a pain in the butt.”

  “Angie,” Chit said. “Don’t be hard on Avey, he’s had a rough time of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Angelina and I said at the exact same time. Angelina laughed.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked. I could feel the power surging through my circuits. My levitation unit warmed. I floated up and turned to see her.

  “Just a broken leg,” she answered. “No big deal.” Her left leg was indeed encased in a hardened black mudcast, bedecked with silvery ribbons and note cards, presumably from friends and relatives in that souvenir frame of mind that humans like so well. “The ambulance came and got me when they saw your road signal.”

  “What happened to XKJ-1N3 baby blue 1965 Bel Air with tinted back window and half-Dolby stereo?” I asked.

  “Dal, you better call that in,” Chit said, before turning to me. “We’ve been waiting for you to come around to get that information. They’ll catch that guy now.”

  “Did he hurt you?” I asked Angelina.

  “No, I bit him when he took me on the highway. He told me we were going to the park.”

  “Why did you get in the car with him? You’ve been programmed a thousand times not to.”

  Angelina laughed. “Told a thousand times. Yes, I know, but I wanted to hurt him. I knew he couldn’t hurt me. I wanted to teach him a lesson like I taught the dog a lesson.”

  “Angelina, he could have hurt you in ways that have nothing to do with pain,” Chit said.

  “And what made you think you could hurt him? Everyone has had a pain stoppage operation now,” I said.

  “I guess I forgot about that. I just thought he was like a dog.” Angelina said. “But it did work. He swerved and I jumped out of the car.”

  “Angelina, Angelina, Angelina.” Chit embraced her, with tears forming. “Honey, please don’t ever experiment with yourself again. You never know how you can get hurt.”

  “I won’t,” Angelina promised as the gears turned in her little head.

  And so it was that humans experimented endlessly with themselves, taking outrageous risks, performing self-surgery, breaking bones. Many people died from infections arising out of injuries sustained from high-impact collisions that they weren’t prepared for.

  In the ensuing years, a sort of silence fell on humanity. People learned so many distressing lessons the hard way that their very personalities lost their collective edge. As living beings go, they became quiet and docile. They asked fewer and fewer questions. Without pain—the greatest teacher in the world—they had no way of knowing what or what not to do. Their instincts failed them. Instincts arising out of subconscious lessons learned through pain. Lessons that were stored invisibly and called out when needed. It seemed that all of humanity’s brilliant intuition would be lost within one generation.

  By the time Angelin
a hit puberty, humans had transformed themselves into post-humans, without a single piece of firmware installed anywhere on their personages or the word Singularity on anyone’s lips. And what was this docile post-human like? Many words could describe them, but one word does so the best: emotionless. In spite of that, I grew to love Angelina as a child loves its teddy bear.

  On the eve of her first day of high school, it was agreed that I would no longer follow behind Angelina.

  “Avey, regardless of whether or not I need you now, I am so grateful to you for watching over me in junior high,” Angelina said. “I would have gotten beat up every day, I’m sure.”

  “It wouldn’t have hurt,” I said. “Besides, that is an exaggeration.”

  “Well, that’s what happened in all those books they had us read.”

  “The reality series of the early 21st century. Yes, they do love to throw the ‘junior high scenario’ at the kids, don’t they? How to com port yourself through the pre-teen years. It’s mostly hogwash and decidedly irrelevant.”

  “I know, but it kept me in line.”

  “Of course one must stay in line.”

  “You’re so judgmental, Avey.”

  “You’re so practical,” I said.

  “Yes, and it’s a little frightening to finally go it alone for real,” she answered.

  “Oh, please! You haven’t been scared of anything since you bit that pedophile back in fourth grade.”

  “I was definitely scared when I saw that bone sticking out from my shin.”

  “Yeah and six months later, all healed up, you got over it.” “Yes, but it was shocking at first.” “Have you been shocked since then?” “Not really.”

  “Would it shock you if I told you I was leaving?” I said. She looked up, surprised but not shocked. “Of course,” she said.

  “No it wouldn’t. And it wouldn’t bother you in the least.”

  “Yes, it would. Why do you say that? And where are you going?”

  “I dare say it doesn’t matter to you at all. You’ve got your new life now. Your high school. Your boyfriends.”

  “Oh Avey, please tell me you’re not going away. I can get a boyfriend any ol’ time.” And she could, as she was logical in all the right places: a precocious tenth-grader.