The Stories of Ibis

by Hiroshi Yamamoto

  Like I thought, Shion’s responses were accurate but not interesting. It did not make for conversation. I listened nervously, but soon Sumiyoshi lost interest and closed her eyes.

  For a few minutes she relaxed in the water, and then she said, as if remembering, “You know, in my day, they had this device that let you bathe in a wheelchair.”

  She always talked about the old days when she was bathing. So much of our work had not changed in the last thirty years, and a lot of what she said sounded very familiar.

  “I’ve seen that. The side of the bath opens like a door, right?”

  “Yes. You pushed the wheelchair in, closed the door, and then you started the water. But the lock didn’t always latch properly, so water would come spilling out of the crack in the door. Such a mess.” Sumiyoshi laughed, and I smiled, imagining the puddle.

  “But the worst was how it shook them.”

  “Shook them?”

  “Yes, if you pushed a button, air jets would churn the water. A lot of people liked the feel of it and requested it. But the skinnier seniors would be knocked all over the place. And the water was up to their shoulders, so if they lost their balance, they’d start to drown. Only way to stop it was to have someone with their arm around the senior’s shoulders, keeping them in place the whole time. We had to sit perched on the edge of this really tall bath, leaning out—it really messed up our backs.”

  “That sounds tough,” I said. Unnatural poses like that could really do a number on you. The bathing equipment we used now was designed to let us work in a much more comfortable position. We didn’t have to bend over or stretch ourselves at all.

  “I imagine the people that made the thing tested it thoroughly. They put themselves inside it and decided it was perfect and that it would make our jobs so much easier. But there are always things you don’t know till you use it in the workplace.”

  Suddenly I got it.

  Sumiyoshi was speaking indirectly about Shion. She had already realized that for all the marvelous technology that went into her, Shion was lacking something that was vital to any caregiver.

  I glanced at Shion, but her face was frozen in that same old smile. She appeared completely oblivious to any irony.

  The flaw was not just with Shion; the power loader was the same. It looked great when I first saw it on TV, but it just took too much time to put on. When a senior asked to get up, nobody wanted to head back to the nurses’ station and put on a suit of armor. It was far faster to just use your arms. We hardly used the loader at all.

  There were many things you couldn’t know unless you put them to work. A caregiver’s job was far more than just technique. Takami had made Shion’s body and brain, but he had forgotten to give her a heart. And that was not easy to install after the fact.

  Five fifteen PM. At last the day’s work was done. Evening care was handled by those on the late and night shifts.

  Shion had been given a seat of her own in the corner of the nurses’ station, next to the methanol tank. She would wait there until morning.

  Her uniform had been custom made so it could be opened on the left side. She opened it herself and pulled the compress off her side, exposing the connector underneath. Then she extended a tube from the tank, connected it to the socket on the end of the connector, and refilled her fuel tank.

  When her tank was full, she closed her uniform up again and sat down on the chair.

  “Am I finished for the day?”

  I hesitated but saw Takami nodding. “Yes,” I said.

  “Shutting down,” she said. For a few seconds she stared into space, but then her eyes slowly closed, and she stopped moving. It looked like she had fallen asleep.

  “That’s basically how she’ll end every day,” Takami said. “There’s an activation switch on the back of her neck, but don’t touch that except when you turn her on. Much like a computer, if you don’t shut her down properly, it could cause problems. And if you need to perform an emergency shutdown—”

  “Klaatu?”

  “Yes. And if people start getting creeped out by her at night, cover her with a cloth like this.” Takami calmly draped a white sheet over Shion’s head. Now she looked like a ghost. Even creepier.

  “I think I’ll let the night shift staff decide.”

  “Were there any other problems?” Takami asked, clearly expecting there not to be any. But I was not that nice. Nothing mattered to me except the safety and comfort of our residents. He was getting my honest opinion.

  “When you practiced changing diapers, did you use real poop?”

  Takami’s smile froze. We’d drawn the curtains while changing diapers, and he hadn’t seen her at work.

  “Um… no, no, I think we used miso.”

  “I thought so. The way she wiped the senior’s bottoms was a little unusual.”

  “Uh… well, I’m sure she’ll get used to that soon enough, right?”

  “But the biggest problem is definitely going to be communication.” This had been bothering me all day. “I honestly didn’t think this was going to be that hard a job,” I said. And not just because I was worn out. “I just thought I’d have to tell the robot what to do. Nobody said anything about teaching it how to have a heart.”

  “I do apologize. We should have said,” Takami said, bowing his head. “But… humans are the same, aren’t they? We all learn to communicate by being with other humans. Shion’s just left the lab, so how is she supposed to know any of this stuff? I promise you, she has the capacity to learn it.”

  “Then why didn’t you teach it at the lab?”

  “Um, well…” he stammered. “I’m not…”

  “Not what?”

  “I’m not that good at talking to people myself. I didn’t… know what to teach her.”

  I gaped at him.

  “And not just me. All the lab’s staff are total engineering nerds. It’s like a high school science club in there. We’re all pretty good at dating simulation games, but none of us could ever talk to a real woman. If she grew up surrounded by people like us, she’d be at even more of a disadvantage than she is now. Honestly, there were people who tried to mold her into their favorite personality type…

  “But that’s not what Shion was invented for. We couldn’t let her have a personality marketed toward a particular otaku subculture. We wanted her to be an android that everyone could love. And I thought the best way to do that was to have her meet a lot of people out in the real world.”

  “So you dumped her in our laps?”

  “I hate to put it that way, but I suppose you’re right.” He bowed his head. “Please. Look after Shion. I know she’s flawed, but in the long run—”

  “I’m starting to hate you.”

  “Eh?”

  “I really hate people who get all self-deprecatory. You aren’t that good at talking to people? That’s something you should be ashamed of, not something you should ever admit to. If you know you’re crap at something, then make an effort to get better.”

  Boy, I must have built up a lot of bile that day to be so harsh with him. Takami looked rather flabbergasted. I’d surely destroyed his fantasies about nurses. But I was no angel. Just about every woman who became a nurse despised the myth of the “angel in white.” We weren’t angels. Just human beings.

  “Anyway, I understand very well that I can’t count on any help from you. I will take care of Shion—don’t you worry. She’s in my care now. If I don’t make her into the best damn caregiver around, it’s the seniors who will suffer.”

  I left him standing there stunned and stalked off to the changing room. Tomorrow would be the start of a whole new battle.

  3

  To my surprise, there were no real problems over the next couple of months.

  I wouldn’t say everything went smoothly. Shion’s communication abilities remained at a very low level. At first the residents tried to talk to her, but they soon saw how unfriendly she was and developed a low opinion of her.

 
But none of them went so far as to avoid her. Indeed, there were a number of people who preferred having her help them to the bathroom or change their diapers. It was embarrassing to have a nurse or a caregiver take care of such unclean functions at their age. But they didn’t need to worry about grossing out a robot. It was easier for them to use Shion as equipment.

  Every few days we’d take her out on our day resident pickups. We had a microvan with a wheelchair lift, and we’d take it around to each home, loading the seniors onto it. We couldn’t fit them all at once—depending on the day, we’d make as many as three trips. Not all homes were constructed with wheelchairs in mind, and sometimes it was a real struggle just getting the wheelchair out of the house. Shion’s strength really came in handy.

  Shion was still unable to work without my supervision. The thing she had the most trouble with was hearing and understanding what the seniors said to her. Many seniors had conditions that left them muttering, unable to enunciate clearly, and even humans would struggle with comprehension. Seniors with dementia often babbled incoherently. A robot could never hope to understand them. I had to stay with her and interpret.

  But she was making great strides with the work itself. Anything requiring physical strength quickly became Shion’s job, and the toll on my own body was greatly reduced. I could see clear improvements in the way she performed her duties. At first, I had to be really specific with her: “Put _____ in a wheelchair and push him over to the elevator. When you’re done, come back here.” But now I didn’t have to say anything at all. She knew what orders I was going to give her. And since I had learned what she could do and what she could not do, I knew exactly what to have her do.

  She made a number of little mistakes. Misunderstanding what the seniors said to her, believing things they said to her in their dementia—“The man in the other bed stole my money!” or “I haven’t eaten lunch yet”—but all of these were things a human might carelessly do and didn’t rise to the level of problems. And she was learning from each of her mistakes.

  Shion’s most surprising ability was singing. Though perhaps we should not have been surprised; she was a robot, and her voice would never go off-key or crack on a high note. We had a karaoke party once a month, and the residents had talked her into singing a few numbers. The machine was filled with old stuff like Seiko Matsuda, Miyuki Nakajima, and Kyoko Koizumi, but Takami must have taught her all their big hits. She had no trouble reproducing them.

  But… while this might just be my own bias talking, her singing was rather soulless, with no emotion behind it. Someone asked her if she liked a song, and she answered, honestly, “Not especially.” She might be singing love songs, but she did not know what they meant.

  TV crews came three times. For the first few weeks we weren’t sure what mistakes she might make, so Geodyne was reluctant to publicize Shion, but as things began to go more smoothly, they gained confidence. Geodyne must have thought the market for android caregivers would expand if Shion received positive media attention.

  The resulting programs were pretty much what you’d expect. When the reporters pointed their microphones at Shion, she simply repeated the phrases she’d been told to say. “I enjoy working to help people,” etc. Did anyone watching believe her? Most people knew androids weren’t capable of “enjoying” anything.

  She also had a new hobby. While I was eating lunch, she would read. I thought we might as well use the time to help teach her a little more common sense, so I suggested she read some of the used books we kept in the lounge or download material from the Internet. She read newspapers, modern literature, history books, mysteries, nonfiction, manga, anything she could get her hands on. At first, when I asked what she thought, she always said, “I don’t know.” I wasn’t sure she really understood what she was reading.

  Then one day she suddenly said, “This is interesting.” At first, I was happy that she had advanced enough to say something like that, but then I read the preface and table of contents of the book she was reading—Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. It was a nineteenth century book detailing financial bubbles, duels, the occult, witch hunts, alchemists, and the Crusades.

  As her experience increased, Shion’s manner of speaking gradually improved. She was still rather curt, but as she talked with me she seemed to be picking up on a few things. She occasionally surprised us by saying things that sounded like jokes. Still, I couldn’t quite work out if she was actually learning, or if I just wanted her to be.

  At first Takami came every day, but soon he started only coming on Fridays. He would watch Shion work, talk to me and the other staff, and ask Shion a few questions. At the end of the day he would create a backup of her memories. If anything strange happened with Shion, we could return her to an earlier state.

  Strange to think that thousands of hours’ worth of Shion’s experiences could download in a few dozen minutes and fit into a single high-capacity holographic card. Takami explained that Shion wasn’t recording everything she saw and heard like a video camera but was selectively focusing on what seemed important to create a bank of abstract memories. That was why there wasn’t as much data to download as one might think.

  “Human memories work the same way. They are abstracted and compressed, with only the most important aspects remembered clearly, thus reducing the actual amount of data that is stored. If you were to write out every detail you remember about your own life, it would only fill about ten megabytes. If we included a lot of illustrations, it still wouldn’t be more than a gig. Honestly, Shion is remembering a good deal more than humans do.”

  At first, I would report what had happened, and he would offer explanations. Very businesslike. Given the way I’d spoken to him the first day, he was understandably reserved, and I was a little ashamed of having been so unpleasant, so there was a sort of wall between us. It took several weeks for that wall to crumble and for us to be comfortable enough to engage in any kind of small talk.

  “Everyone at my company is a massive nerd,” he said at lunch one day. “Even our president—born the year Gundam first aired, obsessed with dating sims since his first computer as a teenager—is the archetype of the otaku generation. He founded this company because he wanted to make robots like the ones in anime. You know why we’re named Geodyne? Because it sounds like the name of an evil army.”

  “Then Shion’s development?”

  “The president’s idea. He popped into the labs one day and gave a speech about how making beautiful androids was the dream of all mankind.”

  “Not mankind so much as otaku men, surely?”

  “You could say that. But he meant every word. He was very insistent that we name her… something beginning with M. We had to explain copyright infringement to him then.”

  He laughed a lot at that. I liked anime, but I wasn’t that deep into it and had trouble following some of his jokes.

  “But sometimes he’s right. ‘Nothing happens if you just dream,’ he said. ‘You need the motivation to make your dreams reality.’ Isn’t that how the space program got started? Mankind dreamed of going to space, but all we did was send twelve people to the moon, and we’ve not been back for the last fifty years. Dreaming alone isn’t enough. When you get down to it, if you don’t have money and desire, society never changes.

  “Androids are the same. You can’t make them just because you think it’d be neat. Dreams don’t get you funding. That’s when we hit on the idea of a caregiver android. The need existed. If we got it right, we could sell them all over the world, not just Japan. There are many developing nations out there with aging populations. And the government was happy to help fund it…”

  Then the elderly were just a tool to help achieve their dream? I stopped myself from asking. It would just make things awkward between us again.

  But the more I talked to Takami, the more the differences between us became clear. On the surface, we were both working to educate Shion, but our ulterior motives we
re unrelated. He was trying to make Shion into the perfect android and didn’t really give a damn about the seniors.

  And that was wrong. Shion needed to be a skilled caregiver before she could be an otaku’s dream come true.

  In those two months, there had been changes in the residents as well.

  Early in August, Sumiyoshi had been hospitalized. A summer cold had given way to pneumonia. She was back a couple of weeks later, but it had really taken its toll on her. She’d lost a lot of weight—when we lifted her onto the stretcher to help her bathe, she was shockingly light. Her muscle strength had deteriorated, and we had to start her rehabilitation program over from scratch. She spoke less and rarely reminisced in the bath.

  She no longer had the energy to talk, but more importantly, being sick had left her depressed. Where once she and Kasukabe had got on so well it was like watching a stand-up comedy duo in action, now she just smiled faintly at Kasukabe’s jokes and did not respond. And we could all tell she was forcing the smile.

  While not as bad as Isezaki, Toki was also causing us problems. He didn’t seem to understand that this wasn’t a retirement center, but a nursing facility focused on rehabilitation. His right hand and leg were partially paralyzed, but when it came time for his rehabilitation exercises, he would scoff, “Do I look like I’m in kindergarten? Spare me your games.” Certainly opening and closing your fists and raising and lowering your arms in time with the Train Song was pretty childish, but this was how we’d done rehabilitation for decades now. Explaining this did not deter him from his boycott. Shion once tried to force him into his wheelchair and bring him along, but he threw such a fit we had to give up.

  “Toki needs some motivation,” Shion said. I knew that. Rehabilitation was hard work, and you needed a real desire to get better if it was ever going to work. Figuring out how to get unmotivated residents to comply was a perennial problem.

  Isezaki’s selfishness was escalating. His blood sugar was always high, but he’d demand we bring him cake or let him drink—requests he knew we’d never give in to. When we refused, he’d accuse us of incompetence or poor service. He was starting to be rude to other residents as well. His roommate Komori was a very patient man and rarely answered back, but even he was starting to ask—quietly, so Isezaki couldn’t hear—to be moved to another room.