Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  “And what more important things are you doing, Cody?” Ashleigh asked. “What’s that you’re doing right now? Studying? Solving some of the world’s problems via your console? Contributing volunteer coding time? Running a distributed sim module to help find new cures for disease?”

  Cody fell silent, his lips pressed tightly together.

  Brett snorted, and jabbed Cody with his elbow. “We’re playing Llama Zombies II: Llamas With Jetpacks,” he said. “We just cracked level eighteen. Fun is work too, you know.”

  “You know what’s work? Being friends with you two idiots,” Ashleigh said. “Also, making cheesecake from scratch, which is why neither of you got a slice.”

  She held out a hand to Stewart.

  “Uh, I should wash the plate first,” he said.

  “Nope, no need, I got it this one time,” she said, taking the plate out of his hand and heading for the door. “Congrats again. Don’t forget you felt proud.”

  SCORPION LASER BATTLE ducks were the stupidest of the various models yet, Stewart decided as he walked into the gig-factory control booth and accidentally kicked one that had fallen from the defective bin to the floor. His robot had stayed in the low 80s for efficiency for most of the summer, but had dropped overnight into the 30s, so he was back at the gig-factory hoping he could patch up whatever the new problem was in time. He’d left early enough that, even now, the sun wasn’t even fully up yet.

  He picked up the duck—one backward foot, this time—and walked to the control panel. It took him a few moments to find the ‘locate’ button for the manufacturing floor and hit it.

  The blue spotlight lit up his robot and a bustle of activity around it, entirely unlike the rhythmic movements of the rest of the floor, and after a second of confusion he realized his robot was struggling with three of the new models, who seemed to be trying to pin down its arms.

  “HEY!” Stewart shouted, pounding on the glass with his free fist. “STOP!”

  Rogers peered his head out of his office, scowling. “What the hell is going on?!” he demanded.

  “They’re beating up my robot,” Stewart said. “I have to go stop them!”

  Rogers’ expression went from sleepy irritation to fury, and he glanced out the window just long enough to verify what Stewart had told him, then pulled a key out of his pocket. He stuck it in a tiny slot in the control panel, turned it, and punched the big red button beside it. Instantly, the entire manufacturing floor was flooded with bright, yellow-red light, and all the machinery came to an immediate, dead stop. The three shiny robots holding Stewart’s let go and scuttled back to their own stations.

  “Those asshole programmers. I haven’t had to call a work freeze in three and a half years,” Rogers growled, and grabbed a large metal pole from his office, flicking it on so that it hummed with electricity. “Stay behind me, in case they’ve really gone rogue.”

  Stewart followed him down to the floor, wishing he had one of those poles too, instead of the toy duck still in his hand.

  “You three!” Rogers shouted as he walked up to the robots, pointing them out one by one. “Were you interfering with another robot?”

  “Yes,” said two of them.

  “No,” said the third, and Rogers jabbed it with the pole. It shut down immediately and fell to the floor with a loud crash.

  Rogers pointed again at the remaining two. “You two. Why did you interfere with the other robot?”

  “We are programmed to seek maximum efficiency,” one of them said. “This robot is old, and not as efficient as we are.”

  “It was staying in range,” Stewart said.

  “It was less efficient than another of us would be,” the robot answered. “Also, its labor was not contributing to our pool, and we are rated not only on our work efficiency, but also on how fully we maximize profits for our owners.”

  “Told you it was the programmers,” Rogers said to Stewart. “You two are in violation of the interference clause in your pool’s contract with the factory. Please shut yourselves down.”

  “Being offline would be detrimental to our efficiency rating,” the other new robot answered.

  Rogers waved his pole. “Shut yourselves down gracefully now, or I short you out like your fellow and you incur a repair bill for your owners,” he said.

  After a few seconds contemplation, the two remaining robot assailants shut themselves down, their arms dropping to their sides as all their lights went off.

  “Hold this, just in case,” Rogers said, and handed his pole to Stewart. Then he stepped up to each of the two robots and hit the power switches on their backs. “There. Hard down. How’s your robot?”

  “Are you okay?” Stewart asked his robot.

  “I have not been damaged,” it answered.

  “Good,” Rogers said. He glanced up and down the row. “Any other robot here who thinks interfering with another robot will improve efficiency despite this demonstration to the contrary, please raise your hand!”

  One did, and he shut that one down too. Then they went back up to the booth and Rogers pulled the key out, and the lines all started up again. “I’ll file an incident report with their owner pool,” Rogers told Stewart. “Probably they’ll end up owing you some compensation. It’ll take a few weeks to settle, though.”

  Stewart checked his numbers, and his robot was back up to 48% and rising. “Okay,” he said.

  Rogers rubbed at his eyes. “What time is it, anyway?” he asked, then glanced at his watch. “4:47am?! Shit. This is way too early for this kind of bullshit.”

  “Yeah,” Stewart agreed, and Rogers clapped him on the back and returned to his office. After watching his robot work for a while, he went home to try to get a last few hours of sleep.

  IT WAS NEARLY fall midterms before Rogers dropped him a message, and he got a deposit notification from his bank at the same time. He checked his account first, then Rogers’ message, and then had to go sit on the couch. Brett actually took his goggles off. “You okay, Stew?” he asked.

  “Well, my robot is no longer in the red,” he said.

  “Woo-ooo!” Cody said. “That’s several months early, right?”

  “Yeah,” Stewart said. He was out of the red by a lot. Apparently, interfering with other labor pools’ property was an expensive gaffe, and the penalty was designed to still be significant even when split among the aggrieved pool’s many owners. As an owner of one, it was all his.

  “That’s great. We should celebrate,” Brett said. “What do you want, Cody? Italian?”

  “How about Mexican?” Cody countered.

  “Ok, done. Stewart, you wanna call it in and add something for yourself?” Brett said. He caught Stewart’s expression. “What’s wrong? You didn’t want Italian, did you?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just that there’s this thing,” Stewart said. “My robot is now the last of the E10s on the line, and the other labor pool wants to buy my spot. They’ve made me an offer, and it even includes extra to cover my disposal fee.”

  “How much?” Cody asked.

  Stewart told him, and Brett whistled. “Take it, friend. It’s only a matter of time before your robot breaks down again, and this gets you clear in a big, big way. What’s the problem?”

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” Stewart said.

  “You don’t think it’s enough?”

  “No, not fair to my robot,” Stewart said. He was picturing the pile of discarded robots, like corpses of the unwanted, at the back of the factory floor. “I have five days to decide.”

  “It’s just a robot. A machine. Five minutes is longer than you need,” Cody said. “Call in the food, would ya? Then take the offer and get your parents back in the black while you can. It’s the right thing to do, and you’re not gonna get another chance.”

  “I suppose,” Stewart said.

  “You know it,” Cody said, threw the phone to him, and slid his goggles back up onto his face. “The usual. Extra hot sauce.”

  ASHLEIG
H CAME IN, her arms full of gear and cables dragging behind her on the floor. “Okay, next game,” she said. “This one is Chemical Asteroids, because you two lazy fucks have your final in two weeks and you can’t tell argon from arsenic.”

  “Our parents suggested they’d like to see us pass at least one honors course,” Cody said. “So here we are.”

  She untangled the controller cables and hooked her unit up to the couch-bros’ VR setup. “Okay,” she said. “Basic game play is, you’ve got two little spaceships with teeny slow engines, and there are gonna be rocks crossing the screen, coming from any direction. Each one has a symbol from the periodic table of the elements, which I assume you at least have looked at once or twice. In order to fire your cannon at it, you have to type in the name of the element. Spelling counts.”

  “But if we can move, we can dodge indefinitely while we look it up,” Brett said. “That doesn’t sound very challenging.”

  “Sounds tedious, actually,” Cody said. “Sounds even worse than whatever it is Stoobie is doing over there at the table.”

  “Memorizing Abstract Expressionists,” Stewart said. “And I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “And anyway, I haven’t told you the best part of it,” Ashleigh said. “Unlike the classic game, these rocks are going to be actively trying to kill you.”

  Brett pointed to the third controller. “Not to brag, Ash, but we’re way better at these kinds of games than you are.”

  “Not me,” she said. “Marina put a pie in the oven and I’m supposed to watch it and take it out when it’s done, before it burns. She’s testing me, I think.”

  “Surely not Stew?” Brett said.

  Stewart laughed. “Nope.”

  “You can’t mean—”

  “Yep,” Stewart and Ashleigh said together.

  Stewart’s robot extended one long arm fully across to sofa to pick up one of the controllers. “Will this be a similar task to the predatory, airborne ruminants?”

  Cody groaned. “Stoobie, buddy, when they offer you a disposal fee, it’s to cover disposing of the robot, not taking it yourself and bringing it the hell home to torment your roommates. I can’t— Ah shit, the bastard killed me already!”

  “My work here is done,” Ashleigh said, and high-fived Stewart on her way out the door, through which the faint smell of gently burning pie drifted in.

  A GLOSSARY OF RADICALIZATION

  BROOKE BOLANDER

  Brooke Bolander’s (www.brookebolander.com) fiction has won the Nebula and Locus Awards and been shortlisted for the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. Her work has been featured on Tor.com and in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and the New York Times, among other venues. Her most recent book is The Only Harmless Great Thing. She currently resides in New York City.

  HUNGRY[ huhng-gree ]

  adjective

  1. having a desire, craving, or need for food; feeling hunger. indicating, characteristic of, or characterized by hunger

  2. lacking needful or desirable elements; not fertile; poor

  3. Informal. Aggressively ambitious or competitive, as from a need to overcome poverty or past defeats

  HUMAN KIDS NEVER thought about what it meant to be hungry, the privileged little shits. They were allowed that ignorance through good luck and the accident of being born from parents who had been born from parents who had been born from parents, all the way back to the earliest days back on Earth. There was no baggage tied to the feeling. They just felt it and opened their wet pink holes like baby birds and food either went in or it didn’t, depending on availability and circumstance.

  Rhye, meanwhile, has resented the gnawing in her middle pretty much since she got old enough to know what she was and why she existed. There had been picture books explaining all that stuff back in the Factory nursery; sticky dog-eared well-thumbed stacks with busted spines and titles like Mommy and Daddy Are the Company! and The Yeasty Beasties In My Tummy Make Me Grow Up Strong!A blank-faced man on a television screen had taught them how to read. Kids in Secretarial and Retail came pre-loaded, but nobody was covering extra licensing costs on anyone in Manual. You got what you got and all the rest was up to training and where you eventually got assigned.

  It’s a book called Special by Design that first gets Rhye to thinking. She’s a pretty slow thinker even at six, but once she gets an idea between her teeth, she can wear it down to sand through sheer cussed stubbornness. She puzzles over what the book says through Mandatory Cardio. She frowns and furrows over the implications in Weight Training as she and fifty other six-year-olds from Manual do curls and squats. After Dexterity class, she pads off down the dingy white halls until she found a ward’s booth and tugs at the hem of the woman’s starched uniform, fingertips still numb and aching from soldering and snapping together practise electronics. The ward doesn’t bother looking up from her computer screen until Rhye has practically torn the bottom edge of her shirt off.

  “I’m hungry,” Rhye says.

  “Dinner’s not until 17:00,” the woman replies, all monotone and hypnotic fluorescent buzz. Flick go her unreflective human eyes, briefly, boredly taking Rhye in. Flick. Back to the computer screen, to pick up where the interruption yanked them out of the moment like a worm in a robin’s beak. There’s another book in the Nursery called Too Many Robins! that goes into the decision to import robins to the Colony, and how many catchers and smashers and neck-breakers the agricultural branch of the Company has employed since. The illustrations are gruesome. It’s one of Rhye’s favorites. “Snack-time was two hours ago.”

  “No. I mean, why am I hungry?”

  The glassy eyes flick back, a little more irritated this time.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she says. “If you didn’t pick up your snack pack before Dexterity that’s your own fault, not ours.”

  Rhye’s fuse is very short, even at six. She grits her teeth and clenches her jaw and sets back her shoulders, ready, if it comes down to it, for a battle.

  “No,” she says, stretching the word out like a rubber band. “The book said we didn’t need to eat. It said we’d grow up without it, because of how we’re made. Because of the… the yeasty beasties inside feeding us. So: Why? Why do I gotta be hungry?”

  She definitely has the ward’s full attention now. The woman peers down at Rhye from behind her booth like she’s just sprouted wings and a tail and maybe a pair of fetching horns. They stand there goggling at one another for a full sweep of the wall clock’s yellowing face before the adult manages to respond.

  “You don’t need to be,” she says. Her voice is wary. She licks her dry lips with a tongue-tip the color of dried fruit in the bottom of a plastic snack cup. “It’s just... it makes you more normal. More natural. If you want to eat, I mean.”

  “But we don’t have to.”

  “No. Your integrated yeast colony takes care of all dietary and developmental needs.”

  “But we still get hungry. Because people made us that way?”

  “...Yes.”

  “Why? It hurts when I’m hungry. Can you turn it off? Why didn’t they just make it so the yeasties made us less hungry?”

  The ward sighs. “I don’t know,” she says. “The Company does what the Company does, all right? It’s how you’re all designed.” Her eyes snap back to the screen in front of her with finality: Flick. “It’s just the way things are.”

  The conversation ends there. Rhye’s question, meanwhile, has doubled in size and hooked itself into her brain, where it grows tendrils and shoots and roots like thick blue veins.

  They chose to make us this way, she thinks that night lying in her stiff little bed in Manual Nursery, the grunts and snores of a hundred others filling the darkened room. It has been hours since dinner and her stomach is churning and growling, sniffing around for something to digest. Because it was more normal to them like this.

  If we didn’t want to eat, we could do anything. She’s on a bus to one
of the Halfways, and all each of them got for breakfast was a single energy bar. The Court—whatever that is— has ruled that the Factories must stop production immediately. It has also ruled that underaged ex-Merchandise of the Company be clothed and sheltered until they come of age. There’s nothing in there about feeding them regularly. Some of the other kids are practically crying with hunger by the time they reach their new home. Rhye stays stony-faced, chewing on her frustration to pass the time. Restaurants and food stands flash by outside, full of happy humans cramming their biological imperatives full of dumplings and sweets. A slow, sweet hate for all of them blossoms in her belly. We were made like this so they could control us.

  A design choice. This was someone’s choice, to make me hurt like this. They get two small meals a day at the Halfway. Rhye and some of the other kids start stealing from fruit stands to feel better. If pickings are especially slim, they’ll climb into a dumpster and rifle through its stinking guts until something palatable bobs to the surface.She can barely remember a time when she hasn’t been hungry. Like choosing the color of a damn wall, or a picture for their office.

  Bad attitudes don’t just happen from scratch. They gotta be watered and babied and given fertilizer. A whole lot of shit has to plop down to make them grow.

  IMPETUS[ im-pi-tuhs ]

  noun

  1. something that incites to action or exertion or quickens action, feeling, thought, etc

  2. (broadly) the momentum of a moving body, especially with reference to the cause of motion.

  WORD ON THE street is a scrap of smudged paper with a barely readable address scratched on it in stolen ballpoint pen, a high-pressure hallucination fumed in ballooning neon letters across a grotty wall, it tells you where to go for the best dumpster diving, which streets are patrolled, whose rooftop gardens have the highest fences and the meanest, fastest dogs. Word on the street makes legends, haunts houses, tells how so-and-so saw such-and-such get vanished by mobsters missionaries madmen aliens. Word on the street walks slantwise to the truth, but you can always never trust it. It’s a dirty-water hotdog made of hope, fear, brags, boasts, near-misses, sure things, grudges, and growling stomachs.