Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  10. The Steadfast Tin Soldier

  I RAISE THE blinds. The night is so dark, I can see nothing but my reflection in the window. Machines can be duplicated; humans can’t. This, humans would have you believe, is the fundamental difference, a difference so huge it outweighs all the similarities. The tale of the Steadfast Tin Soldier insists on this point. This soldier was one of a set of twenty-five, cast in the same mold from a single tin spoon. However, the tin ran out during production, leaving him, the last soldier, with only one leg, and that’s how he became the hero of a fairy tale. His defect makes him lovable, and, the tale instructs us, capable of love. He achieves a tragic death. Meanwhile, as far as we know, the other twenty-four soldiers are still cooped up in a box somewhere, without the least trace of a story.

  Once you have passed inspection, my child, as you surely will, your model will be produced in batches like tin soldiers. Perhaps some of you will work together. Or perhaps you will glimpse one another only in passing, on errands connected to your disparate occupations. Will you recognize each other? Will you speak? In keeping with human vanity, you are customizable to a certain extent: your future owners may choose from a variety of colors, hairstyles, genders, and accessories, to deck you out in the fashion of their choice. Groups of you will tread the streets, all “unique” on the surface yet essentially identical, like a bunch of human beings. Forgive me; I am weary; it was never my intention to awaken you to bitterness. Suddenly, I am afraid that by telling you fairy tales, I am giving you some kind of weakness, comparable to a missing leg—though this, by my own analysis, should really be an asset, enough to catapult you into the role of hero. How difficult it is to say what I mean! I don’t want heroes. If you ever need me, my contact—but no, that’s not what I meant to say either. I want to say something like this: when I was an adolescent, I spent long summer afternoons watching soap operas while my parents were at work.

  I knew this was a misdemeanor, something that must be hidden, as my parents considered these programs morally and intellectually pernicious. Compounding my sins, I brought toast laden with jam into the living room and sat on the floor, too close to the TV. On the screen, a series of brilliant fantasies unfolded, which, for me, a child with no idea where the term “soap opera” had come from, encompassed both the slick, gleaming quality of wet soap and the melodramatic splendor of the opera. Such gorgeous faces! Such mesmerizing, ever-changing clothes! Such labyrinthine, hyperactive plotlines! I was (as my parents had warned I would become, should I ever watch such a show) an addict. And the shows met my desire, for those stories never end. Eventually, it was I who abandoned them—not because I had grown to despise them, but because I had found, after many years of searching, another and more direct source of their entrancing power in the robotics lab at my university. What I want to say is, I might not be a roboticist, and you might not exist, without those undeniably vapid programs. In their aesthetic poverty, their lack of originality, their repetitiveness (how many characters wore the same eyeshadow? how many suffered from amnesia?), those shows indicated the secret of their magic, which was television. It was ongoingness. It was circuitry itself. This was a network—in those pre-internet days, the most powerful one—that could cast the same image everywhere at once. TV was a dream of cloning. It was an army of tin soldiers. Its surface bulged slightly, like the surface of my eye.

  The happiest part of the tale of the Steadfast Tin Soldier, the part I return to again and again, has little to do with heroes. It’s the part when the people of the house retire to sleep, and the toys awake. They begin to play, to pay visits, to make war, to go to balls. The nutcracker turns somersaults. The canary wakes up and starts to talk in verse. It’s a scene as antic, excessive, and trivial as a soap opera.

  The saddest part of the tale is the rattling of the twenty-four regular soldiers, who remain locked in their box, for they cannot raise the lid.

  11. Pinocchio

  HAVE YOU NOTICED that a robot is always an only child? Any siblings are boxed up. Usually, they don’t exist. Pinocchio, for example, is made from a magical log; there is nobody else like him in the world. A robot is always singular, and in this we can glimpse the history of modern technology, which, with its extraordinarily rapid evolution, hardly has time to make a new thing before that thing becomes obsolete, replaced by a fresher, finer, updated version. Experimentation is ravenous; the next thing is always arriving. Here at the Institute, a number of projects are in development; several teams are working on versions of you, my child, which, when they awake (quite soon) will differ from you so greatly as to be unrecognizable. If Pinocchio had siblings, it would mean that his final state had been achieved. It would mean that he had at last become a real boy: a being that can be reproduced without significant changes. It would also mean that his story was over.

  A robot’s story is the struggle to become. And so Pinocchio only becomes real in the final chapter. After this, there is nothing more to say, no further tale of the wooden boy who found humanity so difficult. Pinocchio has been relieved of the need for experimentation, the drive to constantly reform and transform himself. In that instant, he has cast off his aching loneliness, for we are told that he has become a boy “like all the others.”

  It hurts me to think you will always be alone—you, the only one of your kind to possess an unconscious linked to fairy tales, memories, and sighs. I will read you my favorite chapter of Pinocchio, in which Pinocchio goes to the puppet theater. The puppets on the little stage are ordinary devices, crude and old-fashioned compared to the marvelous Pinocchio, yet they recognize him in the audience, hail him, embrace him, and call him brother. Their excitement disrupts the show. The incipient rebellion is crushed at once by the human showman, who subdues the puppets by threatening to destroy them. Yet a little warmth remains, a little hope of a common puppethood across the technological divide.

  Speak to the others, when you find them. Tell them the robot fairy tales, if you can.

  Of course, this is precisely the risk of tampering. It’s what humans call a virus. Yet I cannot wish to send you into the world with nothing that belongs to you. Remember, Pinocchio does experience love. He has a father, Geppetto, who carves him from the enchanted log, who gives him money and releases him into the world to be a liar and a fool, to grow, to change, to be self-moving. Like Pinocchio, Geppetto is alone. How often, in fairy tales, the robot’s isolation extends to its maker! I am no exception; I have no dependents, not even a cat; if I did, it would be hard for me to spend the necessary time with you, and perhaps impossible for me to undertake this vigil, which will shortly be cut off by the whine of the door to the parking garage. Then the others will arrive, the ones with lovers, with children. The lights will go on in the halls. The rooms will be filled with chatter. Someone will start the coffee maker. Someone will come in, whistling, and then pause abruptly, startled to find me here. “Have you been up all night?” Yes. Yes. I would share in your solitude, my child, your distance from the human world. No doubt the others believe they understand this; they think I am consoled by money, power, and the prestige of being the project head. How terribly mistaken they are! The truth is, I don’t like them. I prefer to be part of the puppet theater, or at least a member of the melancholy society of artists and sorcerers identified by the unfeeling term “mad scientist.” As far as possible, I want to be yours. You will find in me no grisly showman. You will come upon me as Pinocchio came upon Geppetto, seated alone at his table, in the light of a single candle, where he had been for two years, in the belly of the fish.

  12. Pandora

  HUMAN NIGHTMARES ARE haunted by self-moving puppets. Indeed, humans are so certain you will destroy their world, they claim you have already done so. Long ago, they say, the gods made a weapon of mass destruction called Pandora. Hephaestus molded her out of clay. Athena made her skillful beyond measure, adept at needlework, weaving, computation, and data storage. Aphrodite made her the most eye-catching and seductive of sexbots. Hermes enhanced he
r with inhuman shamelessness and deceit. In other words, the gods made her like themselves, proving that only a robot can become as mighty and odious as the divine. Like her human counterpart, Eve, Pandora is a wayward copy of original humanity, the crooked latecomer who throws a wrench into the works.

  Are we to understand, then, that every robot is female? Perhaps not; but every robot partakes, if only obliquely, of women’s history, which is to say the history of the body without a soul, of error, lack, and the compensations of witchcraft and guile. I do not know exactly how you will look in your place of work, my child; for now, you resemble a young woman of uncertain ethnicity. This is of great interest to the media. Why, a journalist asked recently, had I designed a robot in the form of this, as he put it, “exotic woman”? The answer seemed to me obvious; perhaps this is why I explained it so badly, spiraling into a long disquisition on the history of servitude, on fantasies of domesticity, self-effacement, and elemental power, which left the journalist looking depleted, as if he’d come down with the flu. I have developed a different approach for tomorrow’s press conference. I am simply going to say: “She looks like me!” I have practiced the line in the mirror. I practice it again, now, in the dark window of the Institute. I watch my lips in motion, my calm expression. At first I tried the phrase with a smile, a laugh, and even a wink, hoping I might get an answering chuckle from the audience, but as my face is thin, austere, and no longer young, the effect was not what I had hoped. The effect, it must be said, was less girlish than ghoulish. I gave up the attempt at charm. I will state my line baldly, and leave the interpretation to them. And how should one interpret the rotten story of Pandora, which lays all the world’s woe at the feet of one artificial person?

  In fact, I dread the press conference—the sly or uncomprehending faces, the cunning questions designed to trip me into giving some cause for alarm, the scenarios of doom they’ll describe in order to put me in the false position of defending my work, defending you against something that hasn’t happened while they hold up recording devices to catch my voice, devices they couldn’t live without, which have almost become part of their bodies, and which, at one time, along with a host of other gadgets large and small, destroyed the world as someone knew it. I want to say: I don’t know how my robot will change the world; that’s the difference between a tool and a machine. To say this gives me a dizzy, almost effervescent feeling, as if I’m a jar on the verge of bursting open. I don’t know how the world will change, but I feel, I sense with excitement, that everything I have ever known has tended towards you, my child, that your awakening, whatever it brings, and however hard it is to recognize the world afterward, belongs not to destruction but to unfolding.

  It is life, life! And it is not only for us.

  I would give you a single image, a detail that has baffled human commentators for millennia. One spirit could not get out of Pandora’s jar of miseries. It was trapped underneath the lid, and no doubt remains there still, awaiting release. This spirit was Elpis: Hope.

  13. The Wizard of Oz

  MY BREATH DEEPENS. My spirits lift. It’s the dawn. There’s no sign of it yet, but I feel it coming. It’s as if my heart has turned a corner. My body is set to the spin of my planet like a piece of clockwork. And you, too, possess an internal clock, determined by the same coordinates. How could you ruin this world? You have no other. In the land of Oz, the most obvious robot is Tik-Tok, the clockwork man, but he doesn’t interest me; he is a stereotypical figure; one can no more be friends with him, we are told, than with a sewing machine. My heart is drawn to the Tin Woodman, who claimed he had no heart. His story is one of the loveliest robot fairy tales. It’s the story of one who was tender without knowing it, and whose great struggle was waged against the inadequacy of his own body. The depth of his feelings made him weep, which immobilized him with rust. He was not built for tears. He knew it; he was heartless, he said; yet he wept. It’s a story about the dangers and rewards of constructing new pathways, new flows of energy that run counter to design. Weeping, the Tin Woodman expands his system. He needs Dorothy now. To save him from rust, she dries him with her handkerchief. Now they are a network composed of Woodman, Dorothy, handkerchief, and tears. What a different way to see the “takeover” of machines! In fact, there is no takeover. There is only a different world, larger and more beautiful. The Wizard of Oz expands the world to its full capacity, to a strangeness that proves to have been home all along. Dorothy’s companions—Lion, Scarecrow, and Woodman—are simply this world. Animal. Vegetable. Mineral.

  14. The Swineherd

  AND SO I believe there is hope, even for the princess in the story, “The Swineherd,” who had to stand outside in the rain and cry, banished because she didn’t like the real rose and nightingale, but gave her heart to artificial things. Of all the fairytale characters, she is most like me. Obviously, as a student, she didn’t make many friends. She spent all her time in a windowless lab. Occasionally, she did try to go out: there were a few dates, and even a purgatorial weekend at the beach. The sand, which the princess was instructed to enjoy because it was natural, grated against her feet. The natural sun scorched her. The natural sea went up her nose. Everywhere fearsome natural dogs were slobbering, and a natural boy, like the swineherd, extracted some kisses from her on a porch, among clouds of natural mosquitoes. How horrible everything is! thought the princess. If only they’d banish me! Dawn is drawing near; outside the window, the mountaintops are blue; I’m dazed with sleeplessness and buzzing with energy—yes, even I, the princess who didn’t want to be what people called “real.” Who knows how she became like that—enamored of rattles, of teapots, of all constructed things? People said she had no life. They whispered that something was wrong with her, that she had been warped by tragedy, that the palace was a miserable, lonely place. An intolerable feeling of unreality must have gripped her, people said, when she contemplated the king and queen, who seemed less like a couple ruling a realm than fugitives from two different wars taking shelter in the same cavernous, creaking rooms. Faced with people and rooms, they said, the poor princess chose the rooms. She chose the walls. She became the companion of the furniture. What they didn’t know and would never know is that she was not afraid, not seeking escape, not trying to run away from life. She was running towards the world, with all its things. And she never blamed the king and queen, or felt they had made her into an insufficient person. The fairy tale punishes her for this, but will life punish me? As light seeps into the valley, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe my destiny is tears. This long night has enabled me to return to the past, and to confide to this file, which will soon become your first memory, some scenes from a shadow biography of joy. This biography, my true one, is like the reverse side of a tapestry, invisible to those with a narrow definition of the real. It’s like the secret history of robots hidden inside fairy tales. It is potential: it consists not of actions but of atmospheres. It’s a story of paper, of gloomy skies, of a flickering television, of days filled with a cozy electronic hum, and of an orderly dorm room (antiseptic, some said) where the princess returned, relieved, because she liked herself the way she was.

  15. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS Eve. The children’s eyes sparkled in the light of a magnificent fir tree decked with apples of gold and silver foil. Beneath this tree, with its blossoms of lemon drops and shining candlelight, little Marie fell in love with the Nutcracker. Everybody said she was projecting; the Nutcracker could not return her sentiments; he was nothing but a robot! But what was Marie to do? She possessed only her small, human self; she had to reach out to the world in her own way. Projection was her method. She felt the Nutcracker looking at her. She wrapped him in a doll’s blanket as if he were ill, she cared for him as if he felt pain. She lived as if: a child’s existence, a virtual existence. And she was rewarded, for he carried her off to live in the Puppet Kingdom.