I Heart Robot

by Suzanne Van Rooyen

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Nothing for you to worry about.” Mom strokes my hair and kisses my forehead.

  “Can Rurik come over?”

  Mom purses her lips, the frown exaggerating the furrows on her face. “Fine, but leave your door open, please.”

  Practice over for now, I lay my violin back in its velvet bed and call Rurik.

  Half an hour later, we’re trying to make out, but Glitch is having none of it, constantly inserting herself between us on the bed.

  “I hate your dog.”

  “Love me, love my pooch.” I grin and tuck loose hair behind my ears.

  “Can’t I just love you?” Rurik loops his long arm around my shoulder, and I haul Glitch onto my lap so I can weasel in closer to my boyfriend. At least Glitch doesn’t try to pee on him, opting for death glares and growls instead.

  “How was orchestra?” He asks.

  “Rehearsal was intense. My desk partner is amazing. I’m kind of embarrassed sitting next to him.”

  “I’m sure you’re just as good.” Rurik kisses my nose.

  “You really think so?”

  “I know so.”

  His compliment makes my bones turn gooey.

  “Want to watch a flick?” He grabs the remote beside my bed and hits the switch. My lights dim and a screen unravels from the ceiling.

  “There’s nothing worth watching on this basic package.” All I want are more kisses.

  “Yeah, but there’ll at least be a Saturday night feature.” He presses another button on the remote and Miles appears moments later.

  “Popcorn and two sodas.” Rurik orders without even looking at the housebot before surfing past a documentary about Africa and the last lions as the race for resources caused mass extinctions on the continent. He skips a retro sitcom set in the early 2000s, and some interactive game show where the host keeps leaning out of the screen in hologram form as the buzzer rings.

  “Told you, nothing worth watching.” I slip a hand under his shirt while Glitch has her eyes closed. “And really, I’m not nearly as good as Quinn. He’s had lessons since he was a little kid. I knew starting at twelve was too late.” The best classical prodigies started playing their instruments at three or four. I’ll never catch up.

  “Hm-mm.” Rurik isn’t paying much attention to me as he flips to the news and sits-up, removing my hand. A robot dressed in a suit with one sleeve rolled up to reveal her tag stands at a podium giving a press conference.

  “I can’t believe they even allow this.” Rurik cranks up the volume.

  “ … asking for is nothing more than what every oppressed people has ever wanted. The rights to freedom.”

  “You’re not people, tin can.” Rurik grabs the bowl of popcorn from Miles as soon as the housebot is within reach. Miles pauses at the doorway, his lights flashing orange as he looks at the screen.

  “We were created for the betterment of society. We deserve a place in that society. We deserve equality.”

  “Are you suggesting that all robots be recognized as human?” A journalist shouts.

  “No. I am asking that those androids who have demonstrated a capacity for complex thought, emotion, and creativity be granted rights so that they may no longer live in fear but be allowed to live freely within human society.”

  “Ridiculous.” Rurik shovels a fistful of kernels into his mouth. Miles remains at the door, lights flashing orange, his humanoid face tilted toward the screen. “Robots don’t get autonomy. That’s like saying vacuum cleaners should be given rights.” Rurik chuckles.

  “That’s probably what the Nazis thought about the Jews or what right-wing fundamentalists thought about gay people a hundred years ago.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No, Tyri. Because Jews, gays, and every other faction of humanity ever oppressed were human beings. Robots are machines. Major difference.”

  “Please,” The android continues. “All I want is for us to reach an amicable agreement before this situation turns violent.”

  “Turns violent?” The journalist speaks again. “Is that a threat?”

  “No more so than the threat of M-Tech developing an AI virus.”

  “What virus?” The journalist asks.

  “A virus designed to scramble acuitron brains and…”

  I reach for the remote and turn off the image. The screen rolls back into its sheath on the ceiling.

  “Hey, I was watching that,” Rurik says with a mouth full of popcorn.

  Miles stands gazing at the rolled up screen for another moment before his lights blink yellow. He gives me a measured look, the sort of soul-searing stare his model shouldn’t be capable of, and blinks back to green. He leaves with a glance over his mechatronic shoulder, a glance that makes every single hair on my body stand up.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?” Rurik chomps through more popcorn and passes a piece to Glitch. She takes it gracefully, as if she’d never dream of peeing on the guy.

  “Miles.”

  “What about him?” What exactly? He flashed yellow, a color I’ve never seen before, and he gave me a very human look. Maybe I imagined it.

  “Nothing.” I banish all thoughts of Miles. “I didn’t want to watch any more.” I pop a kernel in my mouth, taste the butter, and wonder what Asrid would say about me indulging in this many calories.

  “Fine by me.” Rurik settles back into the pillows and teases Glitch with a piece of popcorn.

  “I’ve been trying to tell you about my rehearsal.”

  “Sorry. How was it?” Glitch lets him rub her ears while she crunches through another kernel.

  “It was good. Steep competition. Quinn is really amazing.”

  “Yeah, you said.” A muscle in Rurik’s jaw tightens.

  “I asked him to teach me, give me a few pointers regarding technique. That sort of thing.”

  “And your mom’s paying for this?” He frowns.

  “Mom doesn’t know. I’ll pay for it with my pocket money.”

  “That’s barely enough for a swift-meal a week.”

  “I’m hoping it’ll be enough.”

  “You don’t need lessons.”

  I don’t know if he genuinely believes in my talent or if he just doesn’t want another guy anywhere near me.

  “Well, he hasn’t even said yes yet. I wanted you to know is all.”

  Rurik eats the kernel he’s been waving in front of Glitch’s nose. She growls and turns her back on him, their fleeting friendship over.

  “Why can’t you take lessons with whoever taught this guy?”

  “Too expensive probably.” A blush threatens my cheeks as I try not to think about how much I’d like to get to know Quinn better.

  “Seems like a waste of time and money when you’re so good already.”

  I bite my tongue not wanting to get into a fight over this.

  “I love you,” I say to change the topic. I lean in and kiss Rurik, tasting popcorn, inhaling cinnamon and lemon. His hair is silk between my fingers as I nudge Glitch off the bed with my foot and roll on top of him.

  “Good.” He kisses the tip of my nose.

  “Do you have to go to Osholm?”

  “It’s what I’ve always wanted.” He kisses me and our tongues do a slow dance as his hands slip around my waist, pulling me tighter to his chest.

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you more.” He grins and all thoughts of Quinn fade as I lose myself in Rurik’s embrace.

  Quinn

  The average human sleeps a third of their life away. What a waste of precious time. Instead of sleeping, or joining Sal on her bar hopping slum excursion last night, I memorized the music. All of it. Berlioz is a breeze, the Mahler taxing but manageable, and the Dvorák’s a dream. Fisker’s concerto is quicksilver beneath my fingers. The solo is mine.

  Ten AM, Tyri should b
e awake by now. Perhaps she’s one of the few remaining humans who go to church, to worship their maker with candles and prayers. I have a maker. Several. I can see and touch the human beings who drew up my schematics, programmed my acuitron brain, and fit my joints together. I still wouldn’t worship them. Those who practice religion have never seen their supposed maker, yet they construct grand places of worship and offer their very souls to whichever gods they believe in.

  The sleet pings against the corrugated roof of my hut, a percussive accompaniment to my twitching circuitry.

  –Dial Tyri

  –Call in progress

  She answers after several rings, her voice thick with sleep.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Who is this?”

  “Quinn, from the orchestra. We met yesterday. I wanted to let you know I thought about the teaching.”

  “Oh, Quinn.” The rustle of bed covers. “Hi, what did you decide?”

  “When would you like your first lesson?” I hear muffled voices and a growl before Tyri’s voice comes back.

  “That’s great, thank you. Um … Where would we have the lessons?”

  “Where would you like them?”

  “Could you come to my school? They have a few practice rooms I’m sure we could use.”

  If I drew breath, I’d sigh in relief. “Which school?”

  “St Paul’s College, it’s in Karlshof.”

  –Search location …

  The map creates a spider web across my left eyeball. Her school’s on the other side of town.

  “Should be fine. When do you want to start?”

  “Thursday. I’m leaving Friday and Wednesday’s the first day back, so it can get a little crazy.” She giggles nervously.

  “Thursday is fine. Time?”

  “Three-thirty?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Hey,” she says before I can hang up. “I can only pay you eighty bucks so if that’s only good for ten minutes that’s okay.”

  Eighty krona. Hardly a fortune but … Calculation Commencing … in one season I’d earn over a thousand krona. About a quarter of what I need for a new processor. Better than nothing.

  “Perhaps thirty minute sessions to start with.” Better to keep the lessons shorter.

  “Sounds great. Thank you. I’ll see you Thursday.” Her words turn breathy. She must be smiling.

  “See you.” We hang up and a warm buzzing sensation permeates my circuits from the tips of my toes throughout my synthetic CNS. I pick up my violin and dive back into the concerto.

  Two minutes later, Kit bursts into my hut brandishing a flash drive. “You need to see this.”

  “Give me a moment.” I turn to place my violin in its case, and he seizes the opportunity, lifting my shirt and jamming the drive into my spinal port. An unusual sting accompanies the flood of information.

  Stine, the android spokesperson from the flier in the train depot, gives a press conference, addressing her audience from a podium. The interior of my hut retreats into a blur as the images play across my eyeballs.

  The android’s pleas for equality don’t go down well. The journalists fire volley after volley of questions without waiting for her answers. When she mentions the virus, the humans start calling for her decommission. Others from the Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Robots, or HETR, movement hold up boards and chant altruistic slogans. They are ignored.

  “Our ambassador.” Kit removes the flash drive, and my hut swims back into focus. “Voice of the droids and diplomatic negotiator. That’s how they treat her. That’s—”

  “I get it.”

  Kit’s face bears the marks of emotion I’ve never seen before. Rage and desolation with creases of pain around his eyes and lips. All together, I don’t know what they mean.

  “You know what they did to her? What those bleeding, pissing sacks of shit did to her?” Kit punches a neat hole through my wall letting in a draft of frigid air.

  “What did—”

  “I’ll tell you. Those steaming piles of excrement put her in zip-cuffs and marched her to M-Tech.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe if you stopped playing your stupid hunk of splinters and tuned into the Botnet, Quasar, you’d know about it too.” He balls his fists.

  I connect to the Botnet, and the matrix blossoms before me, unfurling petals of binary code. Scrolling the newsfeed, I find five unread messages, all from Kit. I watch the news, the images curdling my Cruor, as Stine gets carted off by M-Tech security-droids. Robots restraining robots. It feels like I’ve been burned again, beaten again, the pain real as I watch them march our ambassador into McCarthy headquarters.

  “Search for time stamp oh-six hundred.” Kit waits for me to find the information.

  At oh-six-hundred, humans wearing shirts bearing the green and red M-Tech logo walked out of the building carrying garbage bags. They marched right up to the AI monument erected in Skandia Square in honor of the robots who fought during the European wars, the robots who helped build the Skandic nation from the ashes of Sweden and Norway.

  Protected by heavily armed robot guards, the three humans emptied their bags, spilling out tangles of electronics and titanium body parts. Lastly, a human removed an arm from his bag and propped it up against the memorial. The camera zoomed in on black lettering: Saga-T-60, Stine’s tag.

  I want to gag, to vomit up electrodes and metal screws, but I can’t. My humanness only extends so far. Nausea washes through my Cruor and, blinking back tears, I tune out of the Botnet to focus on Sal as she rushes into my hut, her face wrought with emotion.

  “Did you see?” She asks.

  “Did you know Stine, personally?” I hope she didn’t.

  “We worked together for a while. Back in the day.” Sal’s voice is quiet and quavering.

  “I’m sorry, Sal.” I fold her into a hug and she crumples against me, her head on my shoulder. We stand like that for several minutes, my system overwhelmed by grief. They didn’t just decommission her; they destroyed her, the equivalent of a human being racked and quartered.

  “Is this because she asked about the virus?”

  “Sure looks that way.” Kit drums his fists against his thighs. “At least it confirms our suspicions. M-Tech’s definitely up to something.”

  “Up to something?” Sal shudders. “They’re going to create a virus, if they haven’t already, capable of annihilating AIs. It’ll be genocide!”

  “They wouldn’t do that.” My words lack conviction.

  “As if the humans haven’t done it before.” Kit spits vitriol.

  “Not if we do something first.” Sal pulls out of my arms and wipes at phantom tears.

  “We will.” Kit’s eyes burn dark and dangerous.

  “Like what?” My hands are shaking, and I clench them into fists.

  “We have to show these apes that hurting one of us is hurting all of us.”

  “Isn’t retaliation what they want?” I ask.

  “It’s what they’d never expect,” he says. Sal doesn’t offer her opinion.

  “Don’t be so sure.” I’ve studied human history. From the days of tribal feuding to the Great Economic Decline of the 21st Century that pushed Europe toward war once more, every changing regime has had two things in common: blood spilled and lives lost. Robots can’t bleed, but we can be destroyed. Stine is proof of that.

  “They expect us not to react, to be passive and incapable of independent thought. They’ve got another thing coming,” Kit says.

  “I think they want to incite us to violence, to justify turning us into shrapnel.”

  “Twiddle your strings then, and see where that gets you.” Kit glowers. “The rest of us are going to march.”

  “By us you mean the Solidarity? I thought it was a covert operation.”

  “I mean all of us robots little Quasar.” He prods me in the chest with a finger.

  “What kind of march?” I r
un a hand through my hair, still sticky with yesterday’s gel.

  “A protest demanding justice, demanding what we’re owed. Our rights,” Sal answers.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow,” Kit says. “We’ll march from Fragheim through the city, right up to the front doors of M-Tech and demand justice for Stine and to know what this virus is all about. Are you with us?”

  “I don’t know.” I should be. I should hate the humans, but part of me can’t stop thinking we brought this upon ourselves.

  “They murdered her!” Sal shouts. I’m not convinced you can murder something that wasn’t ever living.

  “Why don’t you forget trying to be human for a second and stand up for your own just once?” Kit stands, hands on hips, and glares at me.

  Sal clenches her jaw and levels me with her gaze. The tattoos gleaming on her baldhead make her look every bit the warrior. “We’re making history, kiddo.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of.

  ***

  On Monday morning, androids gather in the muddy streets of Fragheim. We’re primed for what looks like war. The sun peeks through the clouds, too afraid to shine as we hoist our cardboard signs painted in boot polish with slogans like ‘Oppression is a Crime’ and ‘We Have Rights.’ I painted my own board with graffiti cans I borrowed from some cyberpunks across the tracks.

  “Nice and bright.” Sal hovers in my doorway. She’s dressed like a soldier in military surplus camo and a khaki sweater. Her cheeks bear the McCarthy logo with a red line through it.

  “I tried to be creative.” My slogan reads ‘Have a heart. We do.’

  “Such a sap, aren’t you?” She grins before bending down to tighten her laces.

  “Holy Codes, why’ve you got knives?”

  She’s got twin blades tucked into her combat boots.

  “In case they try to decommission me. Humans die easier than we do.”

  “Now you sound like Kit.”

  “He’s right, you know. About accepting what we are. We’re stronger, faster, smarter. We’re not equals at all,” she says.

  “You think we’re superior?”

  “I know it.” She taps the blades.