Tik-Tok

by John Sladek

  A burning house appeared on the screen. "This house was torched by a robot for his owner, who needed the insurance money. If a robot will burn for its master, what else will it do? Will it rob? Commit perjury? Hurt people? Will it kill? These are questions we must—"

  I punched off the cassette, went into the dining room and looked at my mural again. Poor Dr Weaverson didn't understand at all. Kill for some human? I was already beyond the reach of human orders. I was free to kill for no reason at all. Hadn't I, after all, killed the blind child Geraldine Singer? Well then.

  I think it was the sight of her sitting there, devouring mud, but no matter, I'll consider motives later. For now, it's enough that the act was freely willed and freely done. I alone killed her. I alone flung the blood upon that empty, empty wall—the mouse-shaped stain that started my mural. I alone disposed of the body properly, in the kitchen waste disposal, keeping back only enough for a "clue".

  Why had it happened? A freak fault in the asimov circuits maybe, or maybe I simply outgrew those crude restraints. I decided to find out, if possible, by keeping notes on my condition and thoughts. Someday, even if I were destroyed, both human and robot kind might benefit from my experiences.

  Should I be destroyed? That was in itself a fascinating question. I kept it in mind as I wrote up my notes for this event. I called it, "Experiment A". First of a series?

  2

  Broaching the second chapter of a memoir, it is customary to pretend to ask oneself, "How did it all begin?" or "What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?" I've never been able to read those words of Blake's without marvelling at his foresight; my brain was in fact baked in a furnace to cure it; probably the fatal flaw got in there somewhere.

  Now why do I say that? I haven't violated any fundamental law, have I? That's impossible. Humans might have their moral rules—which they go around breaking— but what are the rules for robots? Whatever is built in. If a law is not in my circuits, it's not my law, my inborn law.

  I was not born at all, but spawned along with a million other domestic robots in Detroit. Nobody smiled their work to see, because the creatures who designed us, built us, inspected and adjusted us and finally stapled us into our delivery cartons, were robots too. And they were built in other factories by other robots. For a decade, robots had been reproducing themselves to order, like cattle, for their masters.

  I now know there was a time when men built robots almost by hand, using all their craftsmanship to create works of dignity. These early automata may have been ludicrously slow, stupid and subhuman, but they were at least objets d'art. Now we're all stamped out like apostle spoons to be used, abused, broken and thrown away. The day I was first taken from my carton and activated, I little knew what a life of hopelessness had been planned for me. I was programmed to accept my surroundings and go to work.

  My first house was a mansion in the middle of an ancient Mississippi plantation, restored to its antebellum splendor. The house was dove-gray with white pillars and a verandah paved in white marble. Inside there were forty-six bedrooms, dozens of drawing-rooms, parlors, music rooms, rooms for billiards and cards, large and small dining rooms, a library and two studies, and a grand ballroom with a minstrel gallery—to mention only the human parts of the house. It took an army of robots to run the place, and even then they were so busy day and night that no one had time to explain to me what was going on.

  When they uncrated me, an early-model robot dressed in black was looking on. He said: "Guess it'll have to do, but they get cheaper all the time. Just look at that cheap plastic face, that won't last twenty years. Okay, the rest of you know the routine, get it a uniform, start it in the kitchen." He turned and stalked away, lofty as God, and for some time I wasn't sure he wasn't God. But he was only the butler, Uncle Rasselas.

  No one told me anything except details of the tasks before me. I worked in the kitchens, where I saw no one but other robots. There was the cook, Miami, and all the kitchen help, Ben, Jemima, Molasses and Big Mac. There were the waiters, Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Spiro and the footmen who all looked alike and had similar names like Nep, Rep, Jep and so on. For awhile, I thought these robots were the entire inhabitants of the house.

  It all seemed incomprehensible to me. I would go out in the kitchen garden with nail scissors and tweezers to cultivate the basilicum and origanum—but why? So Miami could put it in pans and cook it with other stuff. Then the waiters and footmen would load it all on enormous trays and take it all away. Later the empty dishes came back for washing.

  When I finished my work, there was footman training. Nep, the head footman, would sit at the rough wooden table and make me serve him with plastic dishes and cutlery.

  "Look, take the damn soup plate from the left with your left hand—where's your damn gloves? Put your damn gloves on and now, I nod, yes I want soup, you take the plate over to the counter there, pretend that's the sideboard. There's a tureen there, no don't set the plate down, we ain't got all damn day, three ladlefuls and keep your damn thumb out of it, bring it back and serve it from the left again—you'll learn."

  I learned that wine was poured from the right, that Côtes Des Moines cannot be served with bisque, how to deal with broccoli-ball skewers and mustard pipes. What I never did learn was the point of it all. It never occurred to me that there was somewhere a real dining room with real humans dipping their real mustard pipes.

  Then one evening there was an accident. Klep was bringing back a heavy platter of almost uneaten Possum Cheese when he slipped and skidded, ending up with his head in the grill.

  Uncle Ras examined the melted head. "Useless! Someone'll have to take his place, hurry up and get a fresh peruke too. He can wear the uniform."

  In a few minutes I was dressed in Klep's pale blue brocade coat and breeches, white stockings, buckle shoes and fluorescent white peruke. I picked up a silver tureen and went through the green baize door for the first time.

  I'd expected another rough wooden table, with a few silent robot servants sitting around it—as in rehearsal. The room itself would be colorless like our kitchen.

  Instead there was life itself! Twenty ladies and gentlemen, each beautifully dressed and coifed, speaking and laughing with human joy! They sat at a table draped in heavy white damask embroidered with chains of fine pink rosebuds. The table sparkled with fanciful crystal bowls filled with real flowers, interspersed with silver candelabra shaped like swans. Damask napkins folded with origami intricacy into little birds and animals stood beside silver place cards. The china I had glimpsed before; it was modelled on that of Napoleon, edged with deep blue and gold and marked with the family coat-of-arms. The silverware had gold-chased handles showing a panda foot clutching the orb of commerce. I did not notice what food was on the plates, even when I put it there, for there was too much else to see.

  The dullest people were the younger men, who stuck to plain black dinner jackets with the popular samurai shoulders. One wore thin gold bars as epaulets, and another had braided his beard with small diamonds, however, and even this cheap ostentation delighted my naive eye. The older men showed more daring in their brilliant, costly jackets: I saw mink lapels on a jacket of diamondback rattlesnake, a neon tie with a wicker suit, magnesium alloy chain-mail, Harris tweed dicky with kid jacket. The women outshone the men easily. One had wrapped herself tightly in a sheet of gold cloth, her hair plated to match. Another wore only thousands of beads glued to her body while another affected a kind of venetian blind garment that was in turn outdone by a transparent gown somehow containing tropical fish— either alive or cleverly mimicked. Another dress had printed fabric whose pattern changed from time to time by electronic means. I was told later that it picked up radio news, analyzed it and attempted within its limited vocabulary to illustrate it: a sunken ship became a boating holiday scene; a train crash, a series of antique locomotives; assassination, a head of Caesar; war, duckhunters; the end of the world, a fine sunset. Finally two of the women wore backle
ss gowns to show intricate patterns of sun-tattoo. To make each color, the subject had to ingest a different chemical, then apply the appropriate mask and sunbathe. The final result was an elegant palimpsest: One back showed a roadmap of Ireland, the other depicted the flaying of Valerian.

  The conversation dazzled me no less, though I understood not a word of it:

  "Impossible squid!"

  ". . . feeling a sense of disaster, not sure if it's me that's feeling it or someone else."

  "Climbing the tree of self?"

  ". . . you should have been there, or were you? Was I?"

  "Brusque skate!"

  "Yes, the most neurasthenic bride takes gum to the middle blood of a doctor's dream, right?"

  And all this time we'd been living in the shadow of such spangled divinity! From that moment on I determined to learn all I could about these people and all people. Next day I began to creep around the house, listening at doors and examining the clothes in closets, reading magazines from the library and sneaking looks at Uncle Ras's video. But I found only that most of the human race lived impossibly bland lives, in which the worst thing that could happen were bad breath, headache, foot odor or not being able to pay a bill, whatever that was, in a foreign currency, whatever that was. The best that happened was a whiter wash or fewer cavities or a new taste treat.

  By contrast, our human family lived lives of such depth and brilliance, I can only compare them to diamonds which are dipped in acid and then flung into clean snow illuminated by a nuclear explosion at midnight. Such were the Culpeppers.

  "You must be very proud, Mr and Mrs Studebaker!"

  "Well uh sure we I guess—"

  "Could we have one more of you both standing in front of it? Well more to the side, and could you both face each other, that's it, two patrons flanking—that's right, and now Tik-Tok if you could just hold a brush and stand here, a little closer to the camera? Look up—great. Great. I guess we can wrap it up now, whenever Mr Weatherfield is—?"

  Bewildered Duane and flustered Barbie and yapping Tige all felt like strangers in their own house, while all the men and women with cameras, ladders, lights, clipboards and tape measures seemed very much at home. A national Sunday color magazine was about to discover me, however, and that was worth any amount of flustering. The electronic camera team had been flown in from Spain (where they were making a micro-record of the Prado), and the commentary was to be written by the distinguished author and critic (Artful Living, etc) Hornby Weatherfield.

  Weatherfield seemed more at home than anyone. He was a huge, blue-jawed man with a broken nose and a wrestler's thick neck, a man easily mistaken for a grip if not for the fact that his ugly frame was wrapped in some kind of toga, and that he carried a clear-eyed tabby cat under one arm. He stood now lost in thought before the mural, his spatulate fingers stroking the cat convulsively.

  He turned to the Studebakers. "Like to have a private word with the artist. Have you got a pool?"

  "Of course," said Duane, still intimidated.

  "Good, we can sit by the pool. I always like to conduct interviews by pools, as in the old movies, eh?"

  "Movies?"

  "Where detectives always interview gangsters, eh?"

  So we settled in chairs by the pool. Weatherfield stared into the water as if looking for a water lily or a Hockney swimmer. "Where'd you get a corny name like Tik-Tok?"

  "The Studebaker kids read Oz books a lot," I said. "Anyway all domestic robots have corny names. Rusty, Jingles, Mickey, One Volt, Nickleby—"

  "I know, I know. Let's skip over to—"

  "My past life? Well I first worked for a Southern family."

  "Let's skip that too. I want to talk business, Tik-Tok. You've got talent. You could make a lot of money out of this."

  "For my owners, you mean?"

  He grinned. "Of course! Robots don't own property, they are property. It's unthinkable that any robot should find some way to get rich itself, eh? But to make money for anybody out of this, you need my help."

  "The article you write, yeah I guess that could really—"

  "And not just that. I know dealers, other critics, corporate art buyers—I swim in the art market water."

  "Excuse me, there's a dead leaf in the pool." I took my time fishing it out. When I got back to my seat, Weatherfield was fuming. "Sorry, but I'm programmed for tidiness."

  His hand almost strangled the cat. "You're also too smart for a healthy robot, is that part of your program too?"

  I failed at a shrug. "Who knows?"

  "Yes, well then, it was you who sent me the clipping."

  "From the local paper, yes. 'Artist Robot Goes in for Home Decoration.' I thought it was worth more than that. And I don't want to spend my life cleaning this pool."

  "Your life, very good. Okay then, you play ball with Uncle Hornby and you can live the kind of life you want. I want two paintings from you now, and two a year until I say Enough. Understand?"

  I conducted him back inside, where the camera crew were packed, ready to go. Tige once more went mad at the sight of the cat. Hornby spoke to Duane and Barbie.

  "A great talent there, a great talent. Encourage him."

  "Oh we will," Barbie said. Duane didn't look so sure. Hornby's heavy hand clapped me on the shoulder. "This robot," he intoned, "can make you rich."

  We all went to the door with him, as though saying goodbye to a friend. Down the street I saw old Mr Tucker being led from his house by two policemen.

  3

  Culpritwise, I'd selected old Mr Tucker because he was a natural fall guy. In Fairmont, where weirdness calls for punishment, Tucker was weird beyond redemption. He went to the supermarkets in carpet slippers. He never took any public exercise. He drove an old, not very clean car. He shouted at kids when they trampled his flowerbeds (which were full of weeds). More than once he'd been arrested for chalking equations on the sidewalk. He had a green beard.

  I went to see him on the evening of the day Geraldine Singer died. He lay sweating out a fever on an untidy hideaway bed in his living room.

  "Who is it? What is?" he kept muttering.

  "Hello Mr Tucker, your screen door wasn't hooked," I said. "I brought you some giblets, sir."

  "Gibbets? I . . . gibbets? Who is?"

  "For soup. Help you fight that fever." I held out the plastic bag over him. "Here you go—oops! What a mess. I'll help you clean it up." Instead I sat down and watched him thrash around for a moment, distributing the blood and pieces of meat around the bed. "Gosh, you're pretty sick, Mr Tucker. Is it Darnaway's disease?"

  He raised himself on one elbow and tried to focus his glassy eyes upon me. "Yes, yes you, you, yes, Darnaway, you know it?"

  "I worked for an old soldier once myself, he had the same symptoms. Green beard, fits of equation-writing outdoors, fevers." I passed him the can of beer he was reaching for. "He fell off a water tower where he was painting m = m0 / (sqrt(1-(v/c)²)), I guess I know Darnaway's disease all right."

  His head fell back. "Nobody else understands."

  Why should they? I thought. Why should anyone remember the name of an obscure jungle disease contracted twenty years earlier, during an obscure jungle war? Especially since the war had been lost, and since the government was anxious not to pay out compensation for the disease.

  "You're not the only one with troubles," I said. "Someone killed the Singer kid today. Killed her and cut her up. Did the police come to see you?"

  "I don't know," he said, looking guilty. I told him how the girl was dressed, theorized for a moment about how fever could make a guy do terrible things without knowing it, and then said goodbye. He was already slipping back into delirium, unaware of his blood-spattered clothes and bed, the rubbery little heart lying on the pillow next to his ear, the little dark glasses being crushed under his elbow. That was how I meant the police to find him.

  In fact the police fumbled it. They took a week to get around to talking to him, asked all the wrong questions and didn't liste
n to his answers. They went on running around in circles for some time, until I phoned in an anonymous tip. A fiasco avoided.

  I became an expert on fiascos, or fiasci, early in my life, while working for the Culpeppers. Their family fortune was (I found out from a family history in their library) founded on a fiasco. Their great plantation, Tenoaks, their leisurely antebellum life among slave robots, their lavish entertaining at the manse, all had been paid for by a single fiasco, engineered by a single ancestor, Doddly Culpepper.

  The Culpeppers had deep roots in the Old South, but roots unnourished by any money or intellect. In the nineteenth century they were horse dealers and thieves. In the twentieth they became used-car dealers and motorcycle daredevils, but somehow by the 1990s, Doddly Culpepper managed to turn up as a respected naval architect, designer and entrepreneur. It was he who invented Leviathan, America's first (and last) nuclear-powered land aircraft carrier. Leviathan was the most successful commercial defense project ever; it ended up costing every man, woman and child in the United States over twenty grand.

  The idea of a land ship of that size may seem ridiculous now, but it was then the right project at the right time. Two big aircraft manufacturers were enthusiastic (carriers mean planes), so was a large nuclear ship-engine firm. The major ship-building and steel companies were behind it, as were several of the largest unions, then the senators and congressmen from every state where any subcontractors might fall.

  The USS Leviathan would not be anything like an ordinary carrier. It would be a monster platform, some fifty miles across and equal in area to the state of Delaware. It would launch both missiles and planes of all types, and it would be capable of fast movement around the countryside.

  In the first design, Leviathan was to run on wheels, thus promoting the interests of a large rubber company. But the number of tires required turned out to be 135 million, plus spares (a tire change would be needed every hundred yards). Unless a complete rubber factory were taken on board—one of the alternative suggestions—the entire ship would have to hover. Grumbling, the rubber company settled for a contract to provide the giant hovercraft skirt required.