I Heart Robot

by Suzanne Van Rooyen

  “Sometimes I’m glad my father was an anonymous sperm donor.” Not sure I would’ve been any better off with two parents. Mom’s hardly ever around anyway and my dad, if I’d had one, probably would’ve been a workaholic too. Still, sometimes I wish I knew who he was, whether I look like him, or if I have half siblings.

  Rurik helps me to my feet and kisses me gently before we amble to the kitchen.

  “What’s the big news?” Mom arranges my flowers in a vase. She’s dressed in sweats that mold her figure, which seems untouched by pregnancy. Miles busies himself with food packages at the sink. Cups of coffee and hot chocolate wait for us on the counter.

  “I’m going to play for the Baldur Junior Philharmonic.”

  “You got in?” She blinks at me.

  “You sound surprised.”

  Part of me shrivels up inside and dies, legs in the air twitching dead.

  “I … ” Mom trails off. “Well done, sweetheart. I’m happy for you, but remember what we discussed.” She slides a mug of hot chocolate toward me.

  “You said I could play if my grades improved.” Maintain a better average was what Mom said. If my grades start slipping, it’s bye-bye violin.

  “And you call going from a C to a B- average improvement?” She gives that arched eyebrow look.

  “Isn’t it?” My cheeks burn.

  “You’ll need better grades to get into college.”

  “I’ll keep improving.”

  “I hope so.” Mom sighs and the pain of disappointing her needles my heart.

  “I want to be a professional musician. Math and physics don’t matter when I’m this good at violin.” I resist the urge to slump down on the stool beside Rurik. Standing makes me feel more powerful, like I might have a say in my life’s trajectory.

  “Math and physics might surprise you,” Rurik adds.

  “Don’t gang up on me. Music is what I want. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

  “You weren’t meant to be a musician,” Mom says and then looks a little guilty.

  “Well, I’m sorry if the sperm cocktail you selected is a disappointment, Mom.” Maybe my dad is a musician; maybe he’d understand what Mom clearly doesn’t. Those needles poking my heart turn to spears.

  “That’s not what I meant, Tyri.” She steps around the table and gives me a one-armed hug. “I just think you have far greater potential. You could do anything if you applied yourself. I want you to reach your full potential and not waste your talents on music.”

  “I have a talent for music.” I shrug away.

  Mom sighs again. “Yes, you do. I still think you should go to university. You’ll need a scholarship and those aren’t easy to come by. Don’t you agree, Rurik?”

  “Don’t bring him into this.”

  “He knows first hand how hard it is to get into a good school. Look at how hard even he had to work for it.”

  Even he? Implying what Mother? “I will get into a good school, but I’ll be going to the Royal Academy of Music, not Osholm or Baldur Tech.” If I don’t make it into the music academy, then my options are limited to apprenticeships in bot factories or bug manufacturing. I’d rather join Nana in the dirt than spend the rest of my life building robots for M-Tech.

  “We’ll see,” Mom says, and I feel like screaming. Rurik reaches for my hand, squeezing my fingers. He’s trying to be nice, supportive, but it feels patronizing, Mr. Perfect Score. I pull away, stomping into the living room to join Glitch on the sofa. She greets me with ear licks and doggy cuddles. At least Glitch loves me.

  ***

  After dinner, Rurik suggests we go out for dessert. Mom disappears into her study to do whatever it is she does in that cramped box of hers. Glitch sprawls on my bed preventing Rurik from getting too close. I’m not in the mood for making out anyway. We don our coats and head into the frigid night. Frost dances in the breeze, sticking to my eyelashes. It’s not even winter yet.

  “Ice cream or pancakes?”

  My usual favorites, but Nana would’ve baked me a cake. Mom couldn’t even congratulate me without choking, and Rurik has yet to truly acknowledge my achievement.

  “I want cake.”

  Rurik opens the door of his hoverbug. A wave of lemon freshener washes over me.

  “Ander’s?” He looks hopeful, but I’m not in the mood for the gauche decor of the popular fika establishment.

  “Let’s try that place in lower Baldur. Olof’s Tea House.”

  “I hear they make great semla.”

  “I want cake not marzipan.”

  “Botballs, you’re in a mood tonight.” Rurik orders the bug’s navigation system to Olof’s, and we zoom off downtown.

  “It would help if you actually congratulated me.”

  I receive silence as Rurik contemplates how many macho points he’ll lose for caving. I could threaten him with no making out for a month, but that makes it too easy.

  “I’m happy for you, Tyri,” he eventually says as if it pains him. “It’s just…”

  “You don’t approve?”

  “Music isn’t going to get you anywhere in life.”

  “But politics will?”

  “You don’t think what I do is important, and I deal with it. Why are you so hard up about me not approving of your music?”

  It’s a fair question, and I’m stymied. All I want is someone to enthuse with me. Someone who gets it, but I might as well be talking to the deaf.

  “I’m sorry.” He drags a hand through his hair and looks at me with those chocolate truffle eyes I can’t say no to. “Considering the way you play, I’d have been surprised if you didn’t get in. You deserve this.” He leans over and kisses me, sending an army of happy tingles marching up my spine.

  The hoverbug pulls into Olof’s and lands in the parking lot decorated with street art and broken bottles. Inside it’s full, but there are a couple of free tables outside, glistening with ice crystals in the neon shop glow. Thankful for the distraction of pastries, I leave the conversation there and hurry inside, the aroma of almonds and cocoa already overwhelming my senses.

  ***

  With a belly full of chocolate cake and cream, I can tell Rurik what’s really been bugging me.

  “You missed Nana’s funeral.”

  Rurik slurps up the dregs of his low-cal, nutrient enriched raspberry tonic-shake and leans across the oval table precariously balanced on the cobbled paving. It’s freezing out here, and my coat’s not doing much to protect me from the wind.

  “Robots don’t have funerals.” He keeps his voice low.

  “So what would you call burying Nana’s body then?”

  “Illegal.”

  I slam my fork onto my plate. “You say that about the woman who practically raised us, who put Band-Aids on your knees and made you hot chocolate after school.”

  “I remember, thanks.” He glares at me. “But she was a nanamaton. A machine programmed to nurture. Nothing more.”

  “You sound like your PARA brother.”

  “Like the leader of the one of most powerful organizations in the government? Like a guy who might be prime minister one day?” His eyes are bright with anger.

  “Is that what you want too?”

  “Maybe.” Rurik drums his fingers on the table. “Gunnar’s done pretty well for himself.”

  “At the expense of robots.”

  “Tyri!” Rurik throws his hands up. “You know your Nana never loved you back, right? It did as it was programmed to do.”

  “That doesn’t matter, what matters is how I felt about her.”

  Rurik shakes his head. “You don’t get it.”

  “My heart broke today watching them bury her.”

  He reaches across the table to take my hand, but I pull away.

  “T,” his tone softens. “You know she’ll probably be dug up and sent to a scrap yard, right? Especially when the government revokes the amendment.”

  “Whe
n?” I chase crumbs around my plate with a finger.

  “You think PARA will really let the government grant robots human rights?” he scoffs and looks away.

  “Would it be so bad?”

  “You really don’t get it.” He sounds exasperated.

  “What I don’t get is how you can be so callous.” Rurik was always so kind and sweet, until he started turning into his father.

  “And I don’t understand how you can be so naive and childish. It’s not like someone died,” he says.

  I’m not sure what to be more furious about, him calling me childish or intimating that Nana was nothing more than a housebot. My chair scrapes against the cobbles, and I stomp my feet as I get up. Rurik’s lucky I don’t stab him with my fork.

  “I might not understand all the politics, why you and your PARA party are so anti-robot rights, but you know what? You don’t understand me, Rurik Engelberger, and clearly never have.”

  I’m halfway across the parking lot before I realize I don’t know where I’m going or how I’ll get home. I steal a backwards glance. Rurik stands beside the table, fists opening and closing as he watches me depart. I wish he’d run after me, but he just stands there shaking his head and my heart crumples up like failed origami. I could call Mom for a lift, or Asrid, or a taxi despite the cost. Instead, my feet take me down a side street away from boyfriends and empty cake plates. I walk. Walking helps clear the cobwebs from my head. The cold air whips tears from my eyes, and I tense against the freeze.

  The wind carries snatches of music, the dissonant and frenzied twang of strings and pulsating bass. I follow the sound down a labyrinth of narrow streets littered with trash until I reach the ruins of the old train depot. Being out here alone at night isn’t wise, but I really couldn’t care.

  Firelight dances spasmodic across the paint splashed walls. Standing on a stage above a thicket of writhing bodies, a guy with wild hair dips and sways as he plays the viola to a backtrack of electronic beats. Feral, that’s what Mom would call them, and all I want to do is let my hair down and join them.

  Quinn

  Sal’s idea of celebrating is getting high on inebriation patches and partying with the ragamuffin crowd at the depot. She jams the flash drive into the port beneath a flap of flesh on my lower back. The code unravels up my spine and addles my system.

  “Strong enough?” Sal asks.

  “Pleasantly buzzing.”

  “Shoot me up.” She hands me a different flash drive, and I fumble through tatty layers of military surplus in search of her port. Sal takes a triple dose and starts giggling, her eyes shiny with fuel-cell byproduct.

  Together, we stumble out of Fragheim and cross the tracks toward the depot. The abandoned trains provide sleeping quarters for the city’s flotsam and jetsam. At night, the humans emerge to writhe beneath the stars, high on drugs and life. Various crews roll in and soon the depot is a musical war-zone. Humans garbed in psychedelic relics of the cybergrunge age bump and grind to electronic beats. Others, with safety pins through their noses and studs in their tongues, lambaste the night with industrial noise, claiming a crumbling quadrangle for their own. They smear the walls with neon paint, swapping bottles and skag needles. A few even sport cranial shunts that plug the brain into a drug-induced virtual reality, despite the strict laws against integrated tech.

  A Saga-droid threads through the crowd handing out fliers. There’s a photo of the android spokesperson, Stine, with the triumphant statement: Freedom for All! written beneath her smiling face. Sal takes a flier and attaches it to a nail protruding from a wall.

  “Change is coming, kiddo.” She beams.

  Change isn’t always for the better. I thought getting away from my owners would mean happiness, but that change only made the past eighteen months a different kind of difficult: avoiding the authorities, stealing hydrogen, and never knowing who to trust. Until I met Sal.

  I keep my thoughts to myself as Sal drapes her arms around my neck and howls in time to the music. A chorus of would-be wolves joins her, raising strained voices, ululating the night. Fire erupts from barrels and lanterns dangle from warped struts above our heads. Shadows play a vicious game across the graffiti-covered walls. The colors are sharper, and the scent of human sweat and sex that much stronger as my ears ring an internal accompaniment to the relentless bass.

  “You should play,” Sal slurs her words.

  “Play what?”

  “Violin, dummy. Go get your violin.”

  There’s no way I’m bringing my violin anywhere near this moiling crowd. Without access to my owner’s funds, I’d never be able to afford repairs, much less a new instrument should anything happen to it.

  “Violin?” An old man with dreadlocks to his knees staggers past us and pauses. He reeks of gin. Seashells and bits of colored glass are knotted in his hair. “I gotta violin.”

  “See?” Sal thumps me on the back.

  “You’ve really got a violin?” The inebriation code makes the words feel fuzzy in my mouth.

  “Scavenged it from a dumpster.” He beckons me with gnarled fingers toward a hole in a wall lined with blankets. He produces a viola. The lacquer curls and flakes, and there’s a string missing. He hands me a bow two strands away from being unusable.

  “You wanna buy it?”

  “No, but can I play it tonight?”

  “You can play it?” He sounds incredulous, his milky eyes wide with astonishment.

  “I’ll show you.”

  “Ah, three hundred krona first.” He holds out a filth-crusted hand.

  “One hundred.”

  “Two fifty.”

  I shake my head, but Sal slaps the money into his palm and the instrument is mine for the night. She drags me onto the stage already occupied by humans with synthesizers.

  “Do you mind? Thank you.” Sal pries the microphone away from a vocalist too high to sing and raises the mic stand to the level of my strings.

  “Maestro.” She curtsies as I step up to the mic.

  The electronic beats thin into a steady pulse over which a weaving melody peaks and dips. I raise the viola and pluck the strings. I’ve never played anything but the violin. It can’t be all that different. A quick tuning and I start to play, grazing the strings with the bow. Atonal mush spews forth, my fingers unused to the instrument. Another few minutes playing off key and I finally find the right notes.

  The weird and wild gather at my feet, and I know what it is to be a god. The stars hide behind the pall of light pollution thrown up by Baldur city, but it doesn’t matter that I can’t see them; I know they’re there and that’s enough.

  I feel all the anguish within me arise. Baudelaire’s words stream from my memstor. My owners had me memorize the Flowers of Evil to recite verbatim as a party trick, translated, of course, given my linguistic limitations. The poetry plays through my mind now as I saw my bow against the viola. Frenzied music spools from some hidden recess in my core, out through my fingers, and into the night. And they say a robot has no soul.

  I scan the crowd for Kit, hoping he’s there in the psychedelic tumult, that he’s experiencing something of the magic thrumming through the humans. The kind of magic I’m hoping one day will pour out of me and my violin while I’m standing on a better stage.

  No Kit, but there’s a girl in the crowd too clean and pretty to be one of the skag addicts or runaways. Her hair forms dark ripples around her face, obscuring her eyes, as she dances like seaweed tossed by waves. I play for her like a puppet master pulling her strings, watching her sway to the melody I wring from the ether. Beneath her hair, her eyes are closed. Her arms stretch toward the sky as if she might snatch down the stars. She smiles, lost in bliss, and I smile too as joy ribbons through my system.

  Never taking my eyes off the girl, I play until my fingers ooze Cruor and my pseudo vertebrae develop a crick. I play until my audience collapses in a stupor and the inebriation code runs its course, returning me to sobri
ety; the buzz in my circuitry an incessant reminder of my overindulgence.

  Minutes or hours pass. Time distends and leaves me standing on an empty stage, my audience asleep in puddles of piss and vomit. The apathetic sun creeps into the sky illuminating the carnage. I search through the crumpled bodies, but the dark haired girl isn’t among the fallen. Part of me wishes I’d spoken to her, gotten her name—another part knows it’s probably for the best I never see her again.

  My circuitry aching with a hangover, I return the viola to the old man’s crevice and tuck a blanket around his shivering shoulders. Sal is wrapped around a younger man, his patchwork jeans around his ankles, and his bare skin a rash of goose bumps. He stinks of skag and wears polka dot bruises along his veins. Sal’s staring at the graffiti on the walls and weeping.

  “Time to go home,” I say, and she nods dumbly, extricating herself from the arms of her one-time lover.

  “Did you have a good time?” She wipes imaginary tears from her face, programmed for emotion she can’t physically express without tear-ducts.

  “The best.”

  “I wish I could feel like that all the time,” she says.

  “Like what?” I loop an arm around her trembling shoulders.

  “Like –” She struggles with the words. “Like I’m alive.”

  Tyri

  The bass reverberates in my chest making my ribs thrum a constant tremolo. Mom would have an aneurysm if she knew where I was, but she doesn’t. No one does, and that’s as exhilarating as it is terrifying. Loosening my braid, I tumble into the crowd, bashing up against the sweaty bodies of vagrants and delinquents. I’ll marinate in disinfectant later. Right now, only the music matters as it tears up conventional harmony, tossing in augmented chords that make my bones ache.

  The guy with the viola thrashes the instrument, ripping dissonant squeals from the strings. I fling my arms to the sky, dancing and losing myself in the music. I’m no longer Tyri Matzen, no longer a disappointment or failure. I’m singing, swaying blood and electric nerves. I’ve never felt so alive. Through my bangs, I glimpse the viola player and for a moment, he meets my gaze as the bow scissors back and forth.