Table of Contents
Title Page
Book Details
Dedication
The CyberneticTea Shop
About the Author
The
Cybernetic
Tea Shop
MEREDITH KATZ
Clara Gutierrez is a highly-skilled technician specializing in the popular 'Raise' AI companions. Her childhood in a migrant worker family has left her uncomfortable with lingering in any one place, so she sticks around just long enough to replenish her funds before she moves on, her only constant companion Joanie, a fierce, energetic Raise hummingbird.
Sal is a fully autonomous robot, the creation of which was declared illegal ages earlier due to ethical concerns. She is older than the law, however, at best out of place in society and at worst hated. Her old master is long dead, but she continues to run the tea shop her master had owned, lost in memories of the past, slowly breaking down, and aiming to fulfill her master's dream for the shop.
When Clara stops by Sal's shop for lunch, she doesn't expect to find a real robot there, let alone one who might need her help. But as they begin to spend time together and learn more about each other, they both start to wrestle with the concept of moving on...
Book Details
The Cybernetic Tea Shop
By Meredith Katz
Published by Less Than Three Press LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.
Edited by Keith Kaczmarek
Cover designed by Aisha Akeju
This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.
First Edition March 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Meredith Katz
Printed in the United States of America
Digital ISBN 9781620047378
To Samantha King, without whom this wouldn't be half the story it is and I wouldn't be half as happy as I am.
The Cybernetic
Tea Shop
Clara woke to the rapid puffs of air and noisy chatter that meant that she'd slept in. She'd ignored Joanie's first few complaints, which meant that the hummingbird had gone from dutifully waking her to chiding and flapping around her face.
"Honestly! You tell me to get you up at seven-thirty, but you don't even start to open your eyes until eight? Don't pretend to sleep now! I saw you shifting! I saw you turn your face away!" Joanie was huffing wildly, her throat puffed out in offense, wings a blur through Clara's slitted eyes. Clara tried to turn her head away as Joanie jabbed her tiny beak against her nose. "I can't believe you make me do this. If you wanted a Raise that could wake you up every morning, you... you should have gotten a woodpecker!"
It was Joanie's usual type of complaint. Clara let out a sleepy, fond laugh, finally opening her eyes all the way and reaching up to try to catch her. Joanie dodged as usual, a rapid batting of her thin wings brushing the edge of Clara's hand. "I don't want a woodpecker," Clara said, indulgent.
"Hmph." Joanie hovered overhead, all buzzing wings and glittering synthetic feathers and disapproving judgment. "Well, you're awake now, anyway."
"I'm awake," Clara agreed. Joking about wanting to go back to bed would probably make Joanie screech at her—not bad when she needed that level of morning alarm, but not really necessary now. She shook her head to herself as she forced herself upright and swung her legs out of bed. It wasn't like it was the weekend; delaying too long would make her late for work.
As soon as her legs were out from the covers, the cold air seemed to rush over her. She shivered, letting out a loud whine of complaint through gritted teeth. "I'm awake, I'm awake," she muttered again, the chill having more or less guaranteed she wasn't going back to sleep even if she'd wanted to. "Jeez..."
"Quit complaining," Joanie said, high-pitched voice firm. "Go make breakfast, or you'll go to work hungry."
"I'm on it," Clara said, beginning to sort through her clothes on the floor. She'd worn her jeans and bra four times that week already, but they could probably go another day as long as her underwear and shirt were clean. Her shirt—not so much. A sniff test had her tossing it in the laundry bin, and she rooted around in her apartment's dresser for a new shirt. They all looked pretty much the same, colors aside; long-sleeved coarse shirts, protective and seamless. They were practical and kept sparks and scrapes from reaching her skin, but somehow always picked up oil stains despite her best efforts.
She grabbed her hairbrush and pulled the tie off the handle onto her wrist as she headed into the kitchenette of her studio apartment, dragging the brush through her thick black hair. "Get the toast on, Joanie?"
"Sure, give me the easy job," Joanie said, exasperated, and wrestled with the plastic bread packaging. As usual, Clara had forgotten to set things up the night before, or she would have had breakfast with the push of a button.
Clara finished braiding her hair back neatly and cracked an egg into the pan. Behind her, Joanie somehow managed to get the bread into the grill slot of the oven. She was always pleased when Joanie agreed to do things like that despite them being monumental tasks for a bird, artificial or not. Joanie was a Raise; it stood in for the rather unwieldy term, 'Robotic Artificially Intelligent Synthetic Entity'. Ultimately, it had become more or less the generic term for mechanical personal assistants so people could reserve 'robot' for those human-shaped automatons that had been the object of so much ethical debate. Robots had wills of their own, after all. In order to avoid similar debates, Raises were given emotional types and personalities to interact with, but but had no developmental AI built in, no real will. Without it, they didn't grow or change or become more 'human' over time. As such, they were considered sentient, but not sapient, not like some of the older robots were.
But that was the reason that Raises were still being produced and robots weren't.
In Clara's opinion, Joanie showed more than enough personality even without the ability to gain true emotional understanding. Although there was no changing Joanie's base programming, Clara had tinkered a little inside Joanie's systems and broken her emotional lock. In order to mass-produce Raises efficiently, they all had the same AIs, but their coding just commented out whatever sections weren't to be used for that personality profile. A 'put-upon' hummingbird like Joanie, when purchased, still had all the code for helpful, affectionate and so on inside, just flagged as inaccessible.
Clara had removed those flags and added lines to call to reactions in various situations, and it resulted in a Raise with a lot more emotional range and a greater ability to make its own decisions than most of them had. Joanie still wasn't a person, of course, and that was probably for the best—there were absolutely huge ethical issues with creating actual sapient people who were registered internally as belonging to others. But Joanie was considerably more enjoyable a personality to hang around with than most Raises, and was able to refuse requests, disagree, and give her own opinions—although she lacked impulse, which a true developmental AI would have.
And she was more than opinionated enough as a result.
"Hey, are you cooking that egg or watching it?" Joanie complained, landing on her braid and nesting where it began at the base of Clara's skull. "Your toast's gonna pop out any minute."
"I've got it," Clara huffed back. "Jeez."
She ate breakfast quickly, running just far enough behind schedule that she couldn't afford to dawdle. Finally ready, she pulled her coat and hat on, dislodging Joanie, who had settled in firmly. With fond admonitions, Joanie took to the air, joining Clara for her walk to
work.
When she stepped outside, she stiffened against the rush of cold air. It had a different feeling than it had the day before: Biting, sharp. It almost smelled cold, and when she exhaled, a cloud of steam rose up in front of her, dragon-like.
"Hey, Joanie. What's the weather supposed to be like tonight?" she asked, sticking her hands in her pockets.
"Cold. Obviously," Joanie said. "It's forty-five degrees right now. Going to warm up in the afternoon, but drop toward evening tonight. Small chance of snow."
"Snow, huh..." Clara looked upward at the sky. It was clear so far, but that didn't mean much this early in the day other than to make the cold air feel colder. She heard her voice come out wistful. "Have we been here a whole year?"
Joanie flitted around her head, darting forward and then back. "A little more than," she said. "Thinking of moving on?"
Clara exhaled steam again, watching it puff up and vanish as she walked forward into it. "Yeah, probably," she said, distracted by the thought. "I don't really feel like seeing winter in the same city two years in a row."
It was their usual pattern. There was no meaning behind it; she'd just picked it up as a child from her parents. They'd been migrant workers, stopping when an employer had their signs out, living in the ramshackle housing that was offered, moving on when the season was done. It was awful work in awful conditions, and she'd never made many friends, going to a different school every few months, smelling like whatever they were working with at the time. Her back and hips still hurt off and on. Her aptitude with machinery and mind for programming had nearly been wasted; she'd gotten lucky more than anything else. One of the schools happened to offer a program, and she happened to be selected, and having been selected, she happened to be sponsored.
She hadn't even expected to go to high school.
But once she was done with that, the ability to move ended up being the inverse of what it had been before. Rather than going wherever there were jobs, there were jobs wherever she wanted to go. The tech field was always hiring; she could go to any city, rent a fully-furnished apartment, and get work pretty much immediately. It paid well, and she didn't live extravagantly.
Clara arrived at her current workplace—a small repair shop called Raise the Roof—with only minutes to spare, and clattered in waving her hands. "I'm here, I'm here," she called out, noticing that Terry, the owner, was in the back.
"Morning, Clara," Terry called. He came out a moment later, wiping his hands off on a cloth. "Joanie too, good morning."
"Yeah, morning!" Joanie chirped, and fluttered over to her usual perch near Clara's station.
His expansive forehead was creased, bushy white brows drawn down with some kind of anxiety and wrinkles around his eyes standing out sharply. "I'm so glad you're here," he said, fretful. "I thought you might end up calling in or something—we've got this Pomeranian in for errors he's been tossing out, and he's such a sweet little thing. You know how I am with programming. I didn't want to end up poring over books and maybe mucking him up."
"Rush order?" Clara asked, stripping her jacket off and hanging it up by the door.
"Well, no," Terry sighed. "But I didn't want to leave the poor thing waiting..."
There he went, treating it like a pet store rather than a repair shop again. He always put it down to a sense of wonder over the existence of Raises, just old enough to remember when they really started kicking off to replace the previous robotic assistants. Despite his worries, he could program if he needed to, but much more slowly than Clara and with a lot more screens pulled up to help.
He was probably going to make it hard to say goodbye to him, Clara thought a little sadly. After a year together, it would probably come as a shock. She'd miss him, but not enough to stay, and from experience, she expected they'd lose contact after she left.
Better to tell him when it was time to go home; give him the night to deal with it instead of listening to whatever feelings he had on it throughout the day. Clara settled into her station, sorting through the jobs in front of her. Mostly viruses, some cases of a low-quality brand throwing up errors due to bloatware they'd put in out-of-the-box, and a couple of broken parts that needed looking at.
"Hey, Clara, I'm going to sleep," Joanie said. "Wake me if you need anything."
"Uh-huh. I'll flick my fingers in your face and yell at you. That's how you like it, judging from how you woke me up."
"Jerk," Joanie said affectionately, and shut down.
The work day went by fairly quickly; she hooked up her headphones and just tinkered away to upbeat, energetic music, mostly noticing time passing by the growing ache in her wrists. She tended to put the mechanical issues first; the mechanical was less interesting, and she was always slow to wake up fully. That she could do without having to have her brain on point.
At lunch, she went to a nearby cafe to eat and to catch up on her personal messages. One had come in from her parents, as she'd expected; it was around that time, after all.
Little Clara, it said, thank you as always for the help. As good as the money is to have, it is mostly reassuring that you are doing well enough for yourself to be able to spare a thought or two for your parents. We are going on a trip soon to visit your aunties further south, but we miss you dearly. When are you going to visit?
Love always, Mama and Papa
She wrinkled her nose and fired off a quick response: Mama and Papa, I'll visit you when you're not going to be out of town! Say hello to the others for me, of course. When will you be back? I'll hold onto next month's money if it will be a while. Love always!
Clara never really sent longer messages than that—which her Mama chided her for plenty, not that they ever wrote longer ones themselves. She thought privately that the money should at least stand in for half the filial duty that long letters would otherwise provide, but she knew that ultimately what they wanted was to see her home with them, as weird as it was to think of anywhere as 'home.' It wasn't her home, but her parents'; once she started sending money, they went back to New Mexico to live among their extended family. She couldn't personally imagine wanting to settle down, but that was the difference between them. Even if she'd had to work as a child, they'd been the ones to manage the necessity of it. She'd just moved when they did and did what she had to. The ability to stop moving, to have a community and a home, was a privilege to them.
Her lunch break halfway over, she got up to stretch her legs for a walk around the area, knowing she'd go right back to hunching over and squinting at her work once she was back at Raise the Roof. Doing so drove home how long she'd been here—the shops were so familiar she couldn't pay attention to any of them, nothing like the new and exciting explorations when she'd first arrived here. Joanie's chatter distracted her, but that, as much as the chill, made her make up her mind definitively.
It was time to move on.
When she got back, she got out the little Pomeranian that Terry had become so fond of already and pulled up her music and its BIOS at the same time. The number of system errors there decided her on a video game soundtrack—games designed their music to let people settle in for the long haul, to focus on the technical without getting distracted but still push them forward. She'd played a lot of games when she'd attended tech school, stuck in one place but able to explore rolling vistas, cliff faces, rivers and oceans and ice fields. She could spend hours ignoring the plot to walk through whatever locations had just unlocked for her on her digital travels.
Easy to get lost again in that, feeling like she was getting somewhere again while she waded through registry problems.
Clara worked a little overtime to make sure the Pom was dealt with properly, then carefully detached her cords from the side panel. She looked up finally, sliding her headphones off to see Terry closing up shop.
"You done?" he called. "I'll set the alarm if you're heading out."
"Yep, done!" She pet the sleeping dog briefly, sliding fingers through its soft fur almost in apology for the work she'd
had to do in its code, then gently placed it to the side to test the next day. "You in a hurry? There's something I want to talk about."
Terry chuckled. "Always have time for my girl Clara," he said, and she sighed, smiling. "What is it?"
"Mm." Hard not to feel bad after a comment like that, but she had experience in leaving all kinds of jobs by now. She nudged Joanie to wake her up. "I've had a really great time working here, Terry. I want you to know that."
The smile slid off Terry's face, his brows furrowing. "Well, I've had a good time working with you, but what's that supposed to mean? You leaving?"
"Yeah, consider this my two weeks," she said, not unapologetic. "The work's been great, but I'm afraid I'll be leaving the city soon."
"Leaving? Why? Where to?"
She'd had enough practice with this to know better than to act like it was for no reason—even if it was. Her wanderlust was hard to explain to anyone who didn't feel likewise. Too many people were rooted to a concept of home, wanted to have the same place to return to every day, to walk the same paths between home and work and back, to see the same faces every day. Nobody would just nod to the idea that she could decide to leave before she'd picked somewhere to go. "Ah, West Coast," she said. Then, jokingly, "It's a bit far to commute."
"Just a bit," he said, brows furrowed. "Did another place give you a better offer? I can up your pay, if that's the problem—"
Clara waved a hand as if trying to physically push that idea away. "No, no. Actually, I don't have a job lined up out there yet. If you're willing to be my reference, I'd be grateful."
Terry sighed, ducking his head and running a hand over thinning hair. "Well, if you have to go, of course I'll be your reference," he said. "But what's pulling you out there, if not work? A boy?"
"Never that," she said, a little dryly.
"A girl, then?"
She laughed, giving him a friendly jab to the shoulder as she passed. "Do you honestly think I'm the sort to let anyone, guy or girl, seduce me away from work?"
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