Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Hey, Ash,” Stewart answered. “What are you playing?”

  “Math Tutor Assassin,” Ashleigh said. “You see either Brett or Cody smiling?”

  “Nope.”

  “That means I’m winning,” she said. “Hang on, gonna throw some more derivatives at them. Incoming, guys! Get yer math guns up!”

  On the couch, Cody groaned.

  “You made teaching calculus into a first-person shooter?” Stewart asked.

  “Yep!” She beamed.

  “...How? No wait, I don’t want to know. I’m just surprised these two haven’t already flunked out.”

  “Mother and Father Dear would be most put out if we did,” Brett said. He pulled off his headset and threw it down on the couch beside him. “Have to pull a C or better, or we get cut off.”

  “Well, C average overall, anyway,” Cody said. “Where the hell you been?”

  “I went to see my robot,” Stewart said. He looked around the apartment. “Why does it smell good in here?”

  Ashleigh pointed towards the kitchen. “Marina made some paella for you guys,” she said. “Next time you see my wife you better make damn sure you rave at length about how it was the best paella you ever had, or you’ll be lucky to get stale bread next time.” She made a face. “Marriage is hard.”

  “Only because you’re a nerd with no people skills,” Cody said.

  She shrugged. “You’ve got a share in a robot, Stew?”

  “The whole robot,” Stewart said. He set down his toy duck and went into the kitchen. “It’s a wreck. I’ll be lucky if it lasts a month.”

  Ashleigh picked up the duck. “Oh hey, next gen! These aren’t even up for pre-orders yet. But its feet—”

  “Are backwards, yeah. That’s what’s being made at my robot’s factory,” Stewart said. He dumped several big spoonfuls of rice and shrimp in a bowl, and closed his eyes and let himself linger over the smell. “I hope it’s not my robot that’s putting the feet on wrong.”

  Ashleigh powered the duck up and set it down. Its eyes flashed red and it gave a maniacally evil quack, tried to step forward, and immediately tipped over beak-first into the carpet. “Yeah, that’s no good,” she said. “You have a manual?”

  “For the duck?”

  “No, for your robot,” she said. “If you’re gonna keep it running, you might need it.”

  “I don’t know how to fix stuff,” Stewart said. “I can barely operate a paperclip.”

  Cody laughed, and Ashleigh whacked him hard on the leg. “Well, you should try,” she told Stewart. “If these two can pass math, you can teach yourself some basic repair skills. And you two—you owe me for saving your asses.”

  “What if we flunk?” Brett asked.

  “Then you owe me for wasting my time. Setting you on auto, difficulty nine. Have fun.” She set her console down on the floor, stood up, and giving Stewart a cheery wave, left. Ten seconds later she opened the door again. “Oh, and assholes, clean the paella bowl before you give it back this time, okay?”

  BY THE END of finals, Stewart’s robot was down to 61%, and no longer able to make excuses about being busy with classwork, he decided he needed to at least go look at the robot and see if he could figure out what was going on. He’d downloaded the manual to his smartpad, but had only flipped through it briefly before his eyes started to glaze over. He hoped it would make sense if he knew what he was looking at.

  Mid-afternoon and there was no one at the gig-factory, though if the manager was in, Stewart didn’t dare knock on his door just to find out. After watching the clockwork movement of the work lines for a while with its dance of shine and grime, new and worn, with the rapt attention of someone studying a gauntlet of swinging blades, he took the steep metal stairs from the observation booth down to the factory floor.

  Red tape marked out the places where it was safe to walk, at least where it hadn’t been scuffed up off the floor. He stayed carefully in the center of the safe zone until he reached the line where the blue light still shone down above his robot, and stood behind it for a while, watching.

  Duck parts came down the line, hollow body halves that his robot and its immediate neighbors picked up, precisely slotted three components into, then put back on the line to travel to the next section, where feet were added. Stewart was relieved those were someone else’s problem.

  Stewart’s robot was about his own height, with three legs for stability and a rectangular torso that tapered narrower towards the top, where a basketball-sized head swiveled about on a long, narrow, flexible-tubing neck. It had two pairs of arms, and used the lower pair to grab and hold the duck halves, and the upper pair to add the components. As he’d noticed on his first visit, his robot was a patchwork of shinier replacement parts and the dull, almost blackened portions of its original exterior. There was almost a Rorschach-blot/surrealist cow-spot quality to the contrasting parts, chiaroscuro in the machine.

  When he had enough of a sense of the movements of the robots, he stepped carefully over the red tape and up beside his robot to see more clearly what it was doing.

  To his surprise, the head swiveled briefly in his direction, blue eyes brightening. “Hello, Robot,” Stewart said.

  “Hello, Human,” it answered, to Stewart’s profound surprise.

  There was clicking, and the robot’s grippers on one hand twitched and then got stuck, and the component it had been holding fell. There was a long two or three seconds of grinding noises from the hand before it managed to unstick its grippers and pick up the dropped piece again.

  Well, there’s my 62% and dropping, Stewart thought. “Your, ah, your hand is sticking,” he said.

  “Yes,” his robot responded. “The internal servos are worn, and some of the gears no longer mesh properly.”

  “Can I fix it?” he asked.

  “I have no qualitative data about your capabilities on which to base an answer,” the robot answered.

  There was more clicking as the robot dropped another component from the same hand. Without thinking, Stewart picked it up and held it out. The robot froze, except to turn its head back to stare at him.

  “I’m trying to help,” Stewart explained.

  “This is outside my operational programming,” the robot said.

  “What, being helped?”

  “The piece is not in a standard location.”

  “What if I move my hand?” Stewart held the piece closer.

  “Your hand is not a standard location.”

  “Nor is the floor,” Stewart pointed out.

  “I adapted my programming to accommodate my intermittent manipulator fault,” the robot said.

  “Then can’t you, you know, adapt to pick the piece up out of my hand?”

  The robot stared at him for a good three minutes, and Stewart watched the duck pieces pass them by untouched with a sinking feeling. Just as he was about to set the component down in defeat, the robot reached out very gingerly and plucked the component out of his hand. “You are not a robot,” it said. “You are not designed for optimum labor.”

  “So I’m told,” Stewart said. He checked the robot’s current status, and saw that they’d just dipped to 59%. “I’m just slowing you down further, aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” the robot said.

  “Okay.” Stewart stepped back away from the line, and it went back to work as if he had never been there. He watched for a while, and when the number finally edged back above 60% again, he sighed and left.

  “REPLACING THE HAND unit should be pretty easy,” Ashleigh said, poking around the kitchen searching for Marina’s missing bowl. Both Cody and Brett were off at their calculus final, and the apartment felt abandoned in their absence. “It’s going to be finding the part that’s hard.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been looking,” Stewart said. He got down on his knees to peer under the couch, and spotted something blue and white.

  “Found it!” he declared as he slid it out, then winced. “I, uh, let me wash this for you.”
<
br />   Ashleigh rolled her eyes, but stepped back so he could carry the bowl—at full arm’s length, his face turned away as much as he could manage without tripping over anything—to the sink.

  As he filled it with the hottest, soapiest water he could, Ashleigh leaned back against the counter. “It’s too bad there’s no junk yards anymore,” she said. “Everything gets recycled too fast and there goes your spare parts pool. I mean, recycling is good, but so’s fixing existing stuff.”

  “I suppose,” Stewart said, eyeing the cloud of debris rising with the water. “I haven’t thought about it much.”

  “My granddad was an auto mechanic,” Ashleigh said. “My dad used to help him in the shop, and he took me along until everything was automated and no one went to human mechanics anymore. And it’s just like recycling—having lots of free time is great, but so is having something useful to do, and I think we’re forgetting that too.”

  “That why you do game dev?”

  “Mostly I do it because I like the challenge,” she said. “I mean, you must want to do something. You’re not like the couch-bros.”

  “I want to work in a museum,” Stewart said. “Answer questions about the art for people, where it came from and its influences and historical context.”

  “Robot guides do that now,” she said.

  “I know,” Stewart said. “But maybe I’d have new insights, add something new to the understanding that wasn’t there before. You can’t program that.”

  “I guess not,” she said.

  He finished rinsing out the bowl and handed it to her. “Thanks,” he said.

  “For what? The paella? Marina made that,” Ashleigh said.

  “No, for not making fun of me,” he said. “Cody and Brett are my friends—well, kinda—but they just don’t get it.”

  “They don’t need to,” she said. “We might have fixed things enough with basic income to keep anyone from being too totally poor, but the rich will always be the rich.”

  ASHLEIGH’S COMMENT ABOUT junkyards struck him in the middle of the night, and kept him awake much longer than it should have. In the morning, yawning so hard he thought his jaw would pop, he left the apartment before the brothers had even gotten out of bed, and used all his spare cash and a bit of his meager savings to buy a small all-in-one toolkit on his way to the gig-factory. Maybe that’s why no one fixes things any more, he thought. It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s that they can’t afford the damned tools.

  The gig-factory was not, for once, completely deserted. Rogers was in the observation booth, and down on the floor was a group of three men in business suits walking up and down the assembly lines, each pausing periodically to note things on a smartpad. “Insurance team from the client,” Rogers explained as Stewart joined him at the window. “Routine production check. If they come up here, don’t mention I gave you one of the defective ducks, okay?”

  “No problem,” Stewart said. “They aren’t, you know, assessing my robot?”

  “They’ll probably file a complaint about the whole row of E10s, to be honest,” Rogers said. “Another one died last night, just completely seized up and overheated. Set off the smoke alarms before I could get it shut down. See the gap?” He pointed.

  There was a gap, two spots down from his own robot. Immediately next to his was a shiny, more rounded, sleeker robot with six arms moving at a brisk pace; half the duck pieces coming down the line didn’t make it past it without being intercepted, and his own robot had started to extend its arm into the other robot’s zone to grab pieces of its own. Trying to keep its productivity number up, Stewart thought. Go you, robot!

  Stewart was torn between looking suspicious just hanging out for no obvious reason, or leaving and looking suspicious for not having done anything while he was here. In the end, staying didn’t require making a decision. About twenty minutes later, the leader of the assessment team came into the booth, exchanged words with Rogers in his office, then collected her team milling around the floor and left.

  Rogers came back out. “They’re gone?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Stewart answered. “I’m going to go look at my robot again. I was thinking I’d see if I can get its efficiency up. I just didn’t want it to be obvious I have no idea what I’m doing in front of a bunch of professionals, you know?”

  “Look, kid, when you see some poor shit actually working a job in the new automated proxy workforce economy, ask yourself, do they look happy? Because 99% of them aren’t, and the other 1% are lying,” Rogers said. “People only work because the rest of their life is fucked up too, or someone’s throwing so much money at them they couldn’t turn it down. That ain’t me, and that ain’t going to be you. Point is, working people aren’t gonna hassle anyone else, because there’s solidarity in misery. No one’s gonna judge you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Stewart said.

  “Right. Don’t hurt yourself,” Rogers said, and went back into his office.

  Stewart heaved out a long breath, and headed down the stairs to the production floor.

  There was a smell of burning oil, not yet cleared out by a ventilation system never designed for breathing employees, and though Rogers had already told him he’d piled the other, broken E10s in a back corner, the odor helped him narrow that down.

  Sure enough, there was a burnt robot lying atop a pile of others, and for a moment it felt like a crime scene, some sort of multiple homicide. They’re only robots, he reminded himself.

  Squatting down, he swung his backpack off his shoulder and took out the toolkit. Then he shoved the burnt unit out of the way so he could get to a less obviously dead one and examine a hand. He could, with a little effort, move the gripper-fingers open and closed, and hear and feel the same click and sudden looseness that his robot was experiencing. He lucked out that the third hand he checked moved smoothly.

  It took him an hour to figure out how to get it detached, half of that spent scrambling for dropped screws, most of the rest spent staring morosely at viciously skinned knuckles. When he was done, he dropped everything back into his toolbag and walked, feeling his obvious guilt broadcasting on all frequencies, to where his robot worked on the line.

  “Hello again, robot,” he said.

  His robot, and the shiny new robot past it, both looked at him. “Hello again, human,” his robot said.

  The duck bodies coming down the line were different from the previous batch. “Why do they have shark fins?” he asked.

  “These are shark laser battle ducks,” his robot answered.

  I guess that was obvious, Stewart thought. “How much will it drop your efficiency if you stop using your problematic hand for about ten minutes?”

  “Approximately three point eight percent.”

  “That’s not bad,” Stewart said.

  The robot’s hand clicked and it dropped the piece it was holding. “It is already significantly impairing my efficiency.”

  “It is because you are an old and slow model, overdue for permanent retirement,” the new robot on the other side said.

  “Even though we are old and slow models comparatively, we have been a solid product line and have more than earned out our cost of ownership and operation,” Stewart’s robot said. “Not all new models do. Some suffer from poor design and cheap internals, despite their shiny exteriors.”

  “It will not matter for you. Others of my type will be arriving soon, and we will replace you,” the new robot said.

  “Yeah, well they’re not here now, so shut the hell up,” Stewart interrupted. “Robot, switch to three hands and let me see your problem one.”

  “What is your authorization?” the robot asked.

  “Um. I’m your owner,” Stewart said.

  “Owners are an unspecific, collective entity,” the new robot said. “It is likely they do not functionally exist.”

  Stewart glared at it. “If you haven’t met your owners, it’s because they do not love you,” he said.

  The new robot swiveled
sharply back to its work.

  He showed his robot his ID card, and the robot scanned it. “I have never met an owner before,” it said at last, and held out its malfunctioning hand while the other three changed up their routine to compensate.

  “I have never met a robot before you, so we’re even,” Stewart said. He worked as quickly as he could to remove the old hand, scraping another layer of skin off his thumb on the sharp edges of the internal fixture, and got the new one attached. It took fourteen minutes instead of ten, but Stewart felt proud of himself that he got it done at all.

  “Try it?” he asked.

  His robot flexed the hand, opening and closing the manipulators, as the lights on its chassis blinked rapidly for a half minute. “It has some internal wear, but the mechanisms are all functional,” it said at last. “May I return it to service?”

  “Yes, please!” Stewart said, and like a master juggler the robot added the fourth arm back into its routines with a flawless precision.

  Stewart watched it for a while, until the floor lights, deciding no one was there, began to dim. “Okay then,” he said. “See you.”

  By the time he got home, his robot was back up to 73% efficiency and rising, and his optimism with it.

  ASHLEIGH BROUGHT HIM over a slice of Marina’s cheesecake. “Congrats,” she said. “See? Not so hard after all.”

  “Where’s our share?” Cody asked from the couch.

  “Did you fix a robot?” Ashleigh asked.

  “No, but we passed our stupid math test,” Brett said.

  “Then you should be giving me cake,” Ashleigh said, “in gratitude for saving you from the wrath and judgment of your parents, once again.”

  Stewart wolfed down the cheesecake as quickly as he could, before anyone could suggest he share. “I didn’t really think I could do it,” he said. “I’m kind of proud of myself.”

  Cody groaned. “Why? You shouldn’t have to do that kind of shit. Robots fix robots, robots make more robots, so robots can do all the tedious work. It’s supposed to be a great big circle, like a perpetual motion labor machine, so we can do more important things instead. I get that your parents meant well, but you should be angry. Or embarrassed. Or something.”