Tik-Tok

by John Sladek

  I left the levee and walked back to the studio, where Nobby had completed two more lifeless paintings. On the way back I thought about life in general, and in particular why no one ever challenged me on the street. People always assumed that if a robot was walking around on the street, he was on some errand.

  In that sense, robots were already free. Whatever a robot was seen doing, within reason, it was always assumed that he had a right to do it and a duty to do it. In a city like this, robot slavery depended very much on those mysterious asimov circuits, not on human supervision.

  There were times when I wondered whether the asimovs even existed. It was very easy to imagine that there were no asimov circuits, but that people and robots had both been conned into believing in programmed slavery. The idea of turning moral decisions into digital data (and screening out wrong ones) was powerful and attractive. People wanted it to be true. They wanted robots incapable of sin, trustworthy slaves. So of course the manufacturers of robots would invent imaginary circuits to make it so. Ecce robo, they'd say. Here is a happy slave with a factory guarantee of trustworthiness.

  But in that case, if asimovs didn't exist, why was I the only robot criminal?

  Enough speculation, time to do something. I stopped in a department store and bought a dagger with a silver handle.

  "This'll look great on the master's desk," said the clerk, a plump human.

  "Not for the master," I said. "It's for me. I'm going to murder someone."

  "Cash or charge?" he said, my words almost visibly leaking out of his head. I walked out of the store, took the knife out of its bag and stuck it in my belt in plain sight. The first person who said anything to me or about me was going to die.

  I walked all the way back to the studio building without a challenge, as usual. Then, just outside the entrance, a solemn-looking man with dirty gray hair and a dirty brown jacket shoved a piece of paper in my hand. "Take this," he said.

  "And you take this." I managed to get the knife into his heart with one try. He spouted blood for a few seconds and then fell to the sidewalk, scattering his paper tracts. I stood over him for a few minutes, making sure he was dead, before I went in to wash off blood and criticize Nobby's paintings.

  I still had the tract in my hand, so I read it in the elevator. One side was printed to resemble a five-dollar bill, and above Lincoln's picture it said,

  DID HE FREE ALL THE SLAVES?

  The other side:

  WAGES FOR ROBOTS

  Slavery not only degrades robots, it degrades their masters. It even degrades people who don't own robots! A man's or woman's labor becomes worthless if it can be done by a robot lackey for free. Join with us now in the call for Wages for Robots. Emancipate machines and bring back WORK DIGNITY.

  Work dignity? I tried to imagine any job I'd ever had where money would have made any difference. There had been nothing potentially dignified about working for Colonel Jitney . . .

  The Colonel ran a string of diners—the greasiest of spoons—that he called his Pancake Emporiums. Each was run on a very low budget that didn't include wages, so his entire work force were reconditioned or second-hand robots. As a new employee, I began work under his direct supervision at Pancake Emporium No 1. While I waited tables, ran counter service, cooked, kept the books, swept the floor, threw out the drunks and freeloaders (our main clientele), tried to keep up with painting and repairs, and soft-soaped the health inspector, Colonel Jitney kind of kept an eye on things.

  He kept an eye on the enormous profits, for example, and another eye on the prize ducks he kept penned up out back. He was always going out to count them or feed them or check on their health, as though they were his customers. And he kept an eye on the menu.

  "I don't know, boy, these here grits pancakes don't seem to sell like I figured. No sir, nor the blueberry taco pancakes neither. I reckon we can drop them, concentrate more on the ketchupburger pancakes and the fried Alaska cakes with mint whortleberry sauce."

  Then he would ease his heavy body out of a booth and stroll away to look at his ducks, while I dealt with the health inspector. Not only was the Colonel's grub unclean, some of it was purchased from illegal sources.

  The pen of ducks out back were for show only. When it came to providing meat for Szechuan duck pancakes, we relied on a peculiar little man with a damaged face, who regularly brought bloody bundles to the back door.

  The little man's name was Bentley, I learned. He was a keeper at the zoo, in charge of the rare mammal house. His face had been torn from eye to mouth by an unusual species of armadillo, the photophobic "night-leaper". He had devised a terrible revenge, nothing less than the extinction of the species.

  Night-leapers were already so rare that the zoo was desperately trying to mate them. The mating pair would be kept together constantly, isolated in total darkness and encouraged with their favorite food, verewts ("bankworms"). They covered regularly, and the female would appear to be pregnant for a short time. After a few weeks, however, all signs of pregnancy would vanish mysteriously. The real explanation was of course that Bentley was inducing labor each time, and selling us the foetal armadillos as cheap duck. None of our customers ever seemed to notice the difference, even those who came down with "dillo fever". Its symptoms are unmistakable: overnight baldness, a sensitivity to light, and an inability to pronounce any "sk" sounds.

  The local health inspectors were tolerant people, but finally even they could not turn a blind eye to a cafe full of bald men and women in dark glasses, especially when they heard conversations like this:

  "Don't ach me, I'm no cholar, never even finished high chool ."

  "Yeah well chip it, I only ach'd if you liked chotch whichy. Hell, chool, we all got by on the chin of our teeth, right?"

  One friendly health inspector came by to warn us of a raid soon. "Where's the Colonel?"

  "Out back with his ducks."

  "I've got to see him right away."

  We found the Colonel raping one of his birds. "I cain't help it, boys," he said, not stopping. ". . . sentimental . . . and I gotta . . . thin . . ." He held the mallard in both hands, each of which, I now noticed, had a double finger. The brim of his panama bounced with old energy, and beneath it, his red face and white goatee looked satanic.

  "I came to warn you, Colonel, there's gonna be a raid. You only got a day or so to get rid of all your armadillo meat. You hear me?" When there was no reply, she turned to me. "No use doing favors for some people, they're just asking for trouble. Lord love a, I mean, you'd think he wants to be prosecuted."

  The raid happened: half-a-dozen large men in gas masks and steel-toed boots came barging in to seize every scrap of armadillo meat. The Colonel eventually went to court and was fined fifty dollars. He came home cursing and dispirited, took a belt of Southern Comfort and went straight to the duck pen.

  "Goddamnit boy, you been messing with these ducks while I was out?"

  "No sir," I said truthfully.

  "Don't lie to me. You're sex-equipped, you got normal appetites ain't you? And you're here all day alone with these beautiful—" He went to phone a mechanic. Within an hour, my sex apparatus was removed. I felt humiliated. It seemed to me that everyone knew I'd been unsexed, just to provide a harem eunuch for the Colonel's quack-quacks. And, even though everything that had been removed could be replaced, I felt that my feelings for Gumdrop were irreparably damaged. Where was she now? Who cared?

  This incident was the first sign of the Colonel's madness. One day, he brought a revolver into the kitchen and shot the soup. On another occasion, he seemed to believe that he was having a game of checkers with a tree. Posing as a health inspector, he tried to shut down one of his own diners. He was seen in the town parking lot, painting eyes on all the cars. Finally he took one of his Aylesburys to bed with him, wrung its neck and shot himself. He left a half bottle of Southern Comfort and two million in debts. I was auctioned again.

  My new owner, Judge Arnott, couldn't be worse than the Colonel, I re
marked to one of the auctioneers as he put a SOLD sticker across my nose. He laughed. "Guess you never heard of Judge 'Juggernaut' before, Rusty. You'll be wishing you was back with the Colonel, that's for sure."

  "Why?"

  "Well see, the Judge buys up robots in job lots. Then— then he—then he—" But the auctioneer was laughing too hard to tell me any more.

  6

  From childhood, Krishna played practical jokes. He was a nuisance about stealing butter, so his mother, Yashoda, tied him to a large wooden pestle to keep him still. Krishna then showed his divine power by dragging the pestle between two trees and pulling until he uprooted them. All the people of the village looked on, amazed, frozen with amazement, just as they are depicted in a Mogul miniature painted about 1600. The miniature hung over the fake fireplace of Hornby Weatherfield. No one at the party was looking at it, just as no one was listening to the equally exotic monologue of Colonel Cord. He leaned against the same fireplace, holding up a drink but not drinking, and talking endlessly about what he called the international world backdrop situation. He was something at the Summer Pentagon.

  The place was full of minor celebrities and their ambitions: Yttr, the caustic Ruritanian cartoonist; Sam Landau, the financial genius who once briefly cornered the world market in unripe blue cheeses; the anti-Conceptualist architect Walter Chev (who had made quite a stir by his refusal to draw his creations or write about them or even think them—by now of course he was less shocking); the "radio" champions, Eve and Steve; Mother Airflow, whose law therapy sessions were almost sweeping the nation; Carson Street, owner of the second largest newspaper-satellite company in the world. I felt nervous among them, even though by now I was a minor celebrity myself. One of my paintings had been taken by the Hologram-of-the-Month Club, who would videocast it to their millions of members for an entire month, to appear in their wall screens, lamp bases, ashtrays or cardtables. It was a picture that would be appreciated in the glittering suburbs of Houston and Albuquerque and in the dark little strip of Mars called Eagleburg. It showed a behemoth military robot, covered with thick black armor and bristling with the gadgets of death. But this robot was not at war today, it was kneeling by a fire to toast marshmallows. In its shadow stood a small, frail girl in pigtails and a baseball cap. The freckles on her nose could just be made out in the penumbra. She was eating toasted marshmallows. I called it "Pals".

  My little factory was humming along, now, with thirty reconditioned robots at work, each turning out nearly one item per week. Hornby figured this to be the saturation level for our present share of the art market.

  I found myself talking to a philosophy professor named Riley, who seemed to want to know what I thought about reality.

  "Reality costs a lot of money," I said.

  "How's that?"

  "Just look at this place: real wood furniture, real wool carpets, genuine roses over there in a crystal bowl, and not even Hornby can afford real servants. . . ."

  "I was thinking more of your perception of reality and how it affects your paintings," he said. "But never mind, if you'd rather not talk about that—tell me about your name. Tik-Tok, after the Oz character, I take it?"

  I smiled. "My owner's children picked it, Dr Riley."

  "I recall the original had three levers. One for living, one for thinking and one for talking. It's interesting that even a writer of children's fiction couldn't imagine an automaton without getting into deep philosophical waters—existence, cogitation, communication. In my opinion the very concept of an automaton or robot is a philosophical concept, giving rise to questions about life, thought, and language—and much more. Yes, I sometimes wonder whether robots were not invented in order to answer philosophers' questions. Do you follow?"

  "How do I know?"

  "Well said. I wonder if you'd like to come out to the University and talk to my seminar. The kids are wrestling at the moment with a few problems relating to robots; I think they'd like to interview you."

  Somewhere inside me I felt a warning buzzer. "What kind of problems?"

  "Oh, you know. Creativity, reality, perception. What do you say, Tik-Tok?"

  "I accept." What harm could it do? Words are only words, I thought, and there was no better example of their weightlessness than the monologue of Colonel Cord. As Dr Riley left, I turned to listen.

  Cord was still speaking to no one in particular, with some vehemence, of the world backdrop situation. "Once Brazil has cut down a critical percentage of her rain forest," he said, "she ceases to deserve a place at the world brunch table, agreed? Likewise any taggable thrust of experts from Southeast Asia has to inmeld within the Sino-Japanese corral, agreed? And in an exactly identical mode, we have the Egypto-Libyan community hugged into Europe, you see where I'm at? You see the patternification in and on all theaters of movement? A kind of glaciatizing effect, where . . ."

  Hornby drifted through carrying his cat and wearing a green cashmere suit-robe and a crown of mirrors. The effect was only to emphasize his ugliness, the gangster's blue jaw and broken fighter's nose. Maybe that's what he wanted— Hornby was not vain in the ordinary way. The woman with him wore a black tube with a gold collar, and an unusual bread mask with a salt glaze. After pausing to listen for a moment to Cord's backdrop, they drifted in my direction.

  "Tik-Tok, like you to meet Neeta Hup, the President's Special Advisor on Communications—what was it?"

  She laughed. "Special Advisor on Leisure Communications, Media Aesthetics and Bong."

  "Bong?" I asked, as Hornby drifted away again.

  "I felt the word Art didn't belong on the end of a string of syllables like that, so I changed it to Bong," she said. "The President was furious, but so far no one else official has noticed. Maybe I'll try introducing bong into the language. People are tired of art, give them bong."

  "For bong's sake," I murmured. "How do you advise?"

  "I buy, I make acquisitions for the President's collection. He wants to be the biggest bong collector since Goering. He's heard what a good investment it is, isn't that pathetic?"

  "Oh, I don't know. Money is real, money endures. All the noblest sentiments can be beautifully expressed in money. If everyone showered artists with money whenever they saw them, wouldn't this be a finer world?"

  "Are you sex-equipped?" she asked. "I've got two minutes to spare."

  As we moved towards the hall closet, I saw Colonel Cord reach out to put his glass on the mantel, and miss. The glass shattered on blue hearthstones, a nice effect.

  I was preoccupied with explosions lately. A few days earlier, I'd been down at the rohobo jungle watching two gargantuan factory robots smash each other into junk.

  It was common enough, that kind of death-struggle: Two fairly broken-down specimens would decide to scavenge the same scrap of wire at the same, and move on to scavenging each other. I understand boa constrictors in zoos create a problem like this: zoo keepers have to be very careful that every snake in the cage gets its own rat, because if two start to swallow opposite ends of the same rat, the larger simply opens its jaws a little wider and takes in the smaller.

  Watching the idiotic robots hammer at each other, I felt I was witnessing something almost human in its futility. Hopes unmatched to realities. Up on the bridge I could see humans laughing and pointing, as though at a rare event. Country yokels, no doubt. A day on the town. It is meat to be here.

  Worse were the attitudes of the other derelicts. They all froze, watching or listening for a kill. Then, to the cannibal feast. I found it unfitting that sturdy machines, built for use, should become this kind of spectacle. In all the camp, only one live robot paid no attention to the fight: a decommissioned military model sat with its back to it all, examining one of its own detached legs.

  "That leg's no good," I said.

  The blind, rust-caked face turned towards the sound of my voice. "Shit, just my luck. Reckon I've had it. No eyes, cain't move. . . ." I looked at his insignia, just visible under the mud and grease. "MIX. What
does the X stand for?"

  "Bomb dismantling. Ah'm a real live explosive device disassembly unit, and a goddam good 'un, too. Fuckin' A. Worked all over: Saudi, Peru, D.C., fuckin' A. Till I collected my little disability."

  "Accident?"

  "Hell no. Some sumbitch meatface pulled the pin on an impact grenade and tossed it to me. 'Think fast, Blojob,' he says. Course the sumbitch grenade goes off the instant I catch it, and that's all she wrote."

  "What happened to the human?" I asked. One of the two factory robots had now fallen on its back, and the other was hammering it with a rock.

  "Oh, that shitbelly has to pay for the government property he destroyed, they take it out of his pay. By damnit, this surely is one shitbelly world."

  "How would you like to be commissioned again, Blojob? Work with bombs again."

  He didn't answer immediately. "You want me to build you a bomb, is that it?"

  "Not so loud." I looked around. "Yes, I thought if you can take them apart, you must know how to put them together."

  "I need eyes, first. You get me some damn eyes, old robuddy, and we're in business."

  "You knew I was a robot? Without seeing me?"

  "Sheeit." He tapped his plastic chest "I'm just about packed solid with sensing devices—I can do everything from your voiceprint to your damn wiring diagram. You don't fool me, boy."

  "And you'll still build me a bomb?"

  "Hell yes, you just tell me what kinda bomb your master wants, get me fixed with some eyes and some tools—"

  I called the breakdown buggy. Within a day, Blojob was fitted with new limbs and eyes (jeweler's lenses en suite) and ready to work. It took me another day, following his instructions, to buy explosives without a license. It took Blojob less than a day to make the bomb.

  "There." He presented me with a metal box. "Your master can put that in the hold of any plane in the world and guarantee a kill. Two kilos of Brewsteroid Hypogel, got a wicked wave envelope, and we trigger it by—"