by Sarah Archer
“Welcome,” he began, spreading his arms, as if today’s whole event were his. “I thank you for joining me here today for a very special birthday. The birth not just of Brahma—but of a whole new era of robotic technology.” He began putting the robot through his paces on a mock kitchen set, demonstrating that his glinting carbon-fiber arms could lift a whole refrigerator, yet also had the fine motor control to separate an egg. The crowd murmured appreciatively—the display was impressive. Kelly practiced her calming breaths.
“As if Brahma weren’t special enough, I have another special guest for you today. Please welcome Melvin to the stage.” Robbie gestured to stage left, and Kelly waited. And waited. Finally, Melvin made his way to the center of the stage with the help of his walker. He had the pace of a tortoise, as well as the shriveled, benevolent face of one. “To truly appreciate Brahma in action, you need to see how he interfaces with a user. So our guest, Melvin, is going to demonstrate how much simpler his life will become with Brahma in his home. Melvin has never seen Brahma before, correct?”
“That’s right,” Melvin replied, looking warily at the robot.
“So you can all see just how easy and intuitive it is for even an elderly person to use Brahma. All you have to do is talk to him. He’s just like a person—only far better.”
“Brahma, will you make me an omelette?” Melvin asked the robot. He practically yelled it, enunciating each word loudly and slowly.
“Of course,” Brahma replied. He began making preparations, switching the stove on and whipping eggs, smoothly and rapidly.
“That’s pretty neat!” Melvin said. Robbie beamed. “Can you make it with cheddar cheese?”
“Cheddar cheese has six grams of saturated fat per ounce,” Brahma replied. “I will prepare it with spinach.” Melvin’s face fell slightly.
“Brahma is designed to not only help you live your life, but to live your best life,” Robbie explained to the audience.
Brahma thrust a plate with an omelette and fork on it at Melvin, who reached out slowly to take it, his old elbows creaking. Almost before he had it in his grasp, Brahma pulled away and shot over to the cabinets. Melvin was just managing to grab the plate when Brahma was back, shaking pills into his hand. “Your medication must be taken with food,” he instructed rapidly.
“Thank you,” Melvin said, struggling now to juggle the plate and the pills, but Brahma was already across the kitchen again, filling a glass with water, then wheeling back to hand it to Melvin.
“Ten ounces of water should be consumed at every meal,” the robot said.
“See?” Robbie enthused. “Under Brahma’s meticulous care, users will reach optimal health.”
Melvin dropped a pill to the floor with his shaking hand as he tried to grasp the cup. “Could you—” he began, but he started when the screen on Brahma’s torso lit up with a flash.
“Notification: your daughter is calling,” Brahma intoned.
“Ooh, I’d like to talk to her,” Melvin said.
Instead, a lightning icon blazed onto Brahma’s screen with a sound like a thunderclap. Melvin jumped and spilled his water. “Alert: thunderstorm watch in the area,” Brahma said.
“But where’s Jennifer?” Melvin asked.
“GPS request. Would you like me to locate Jennifer?” Brahma said rapidly while zooming around the kitchen, cleaning up after cooking.
“Yes—no—I’m not sure.” Melvin was clearly getting overwhelmed. It was too much, too fast. “I—I don’t think I want to live my best life anymore.”
A few bursts of laughter ascended from the audience. Panic washed over Robbie’s face. “Don’t be absurd, everyone wants to live best life.”
Melvin shook his head, setting his plate and cup down on the counter and gripping his walker to make his way offstage. “Slow down! Read a book!”
Now the audience erupted in laughter. All color had drained from Robbie’s face, leaving him as white as his shirt. Part of Kelly knew that Robbie had brought this on himself in his hubris. Part of her knew that his failure here meant a surer chance of her own success. But mostly she felt sorry for him: he had gotten the technical part of his project down perfectly, but had missed the mark on the human element. She could relate.
The tap on her shoulder from behind scared her so much that she jumped.
“Ethan!” There he was when she whirled around. His hands were held behind his back. “What are you doing here?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, his voice low. “I snuck in. The guy at the door thinks I’m Alfred Cochran from Pine Capital. All that research paid off. I just had to wish you luck and give you something before you go on. I know you like all those bouquets I make for you on the computer, but I realized that I’ve never brought you actual flowers before and, well, digital is not the same as the real thing, right?” From behind his back he pulled out a bouquet of poppies, all velvety reds and pinks.
Kelly took the flowers, looking down at them. “Ethan, they’re—they’re—I love you.” She looked up. It wasn’t until the words had spilled from her lips that she realized she had never said them before, not to Ethan or any other man. She wondered how long she had been feeling them.
“I love you.” He smiled at her. She searched his face: the trusting eyes, the lips so ready to smile her way. His words were an exact reflection of her own.
“Kelly Suttle!” Anita’s voice drummed her out of her reverie, pulling her up as if from underwater. She hastily set the flowers down.
She reached the center of the stage laboriously. In the lowered lighting of the auditorium, the faces of the investors stared back at her, all watching eyes, like creatures lurking at the edge of a forest. Kelly caught herself, trying not to think about forests, anything but that stupid third-grade play. She paused under the spotlights, forcing herself to inhale and exhale. The audience could wait for her for one second. Everything was going to be all right.
And then somehow, amazingly, it kind of was. She turned to the watching crowd. “Thanks for joining us today,” she said. “I want to show you something I’ve developed—actually, more like someone. There are other caregiver robots on the market, but there’s nobody quite like Confibot. I think you’re going to like him. I sure do. Of course, I’m kind of biased.” The investors laughed.
“Confibot started as a machine, but he’s developed into so much more. He truly has the potential to develop substantive relationships with human users. Trust me when I tell you that I know how meaningful that can be.” Kelly couldn’t resist glancing back, stage right. There was Ethan, expression alight just in watching her.
“So—let’s meet him,” she said. A light came up on stage left, carving Confibot out from the sheath of darkness. He was seated facing her, hands resting on his thighs, face molded to a pleasant, neutral smile. And he looked good. Kelly heard the audience murmur and stir—after all the functional wizardry they had witnessed today, there was still something viscerally impressive about the level of human realism she had achieved. She felt a little warmth—this reaction was good, this was what she had counted on all along. Fleetingly, she hoped that Confibot’s appearance translated through the video feed so her dad could see. She suddenly imagined Priya watching, too, probably crunched into a conference room at AHI with the other engineers from her division, all cheering and jeering in turn.
She had his routine all cued up—all she had to do was start the conversation. “Hi, Confibot, how are you today?” she asked.
Like a flower sprouting in a time-lapse video, the robot stirred to life. “I’m great, Kelly, how are you?” This time the audience’s reaction was louder. It was one thing to make an android who looked good from onstage, but the subtle fluidity of Confibot’s movements, the ease of his intonations—this was not the Hall of Presidents. In the wings, Anita glowed. She looked positively hungry.
“I wanted to ask you a few questions,” Kelly continued.
“I’m great, Kelly, how are you?”
The script was so entrenched in Kelly’s head that it took her a second to realize he had gone off it. There he was, still smiling blithely at her. “Sorry, you must not have heard me,” she said, more to the audience than to Confibot. “I said, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I’m great, Kelly, how are you?”
The audience was talking, all right, but their tone had changed. They maintained a polite hush when they were making positive remarks, but apparently forgot to bother when things turned negative. Kelly couldn’t help herself; she glanced at Anita, who had descended with frightening speed into full-on “off with her head” mode. Kelly’s gaze went irresistibly back to Ethan, who was knitting his forehead. His whole being was focused on her success.
“Confibot, I wanted to ask you a few questions,” Kelly repeated more slowly, as if that would help. The adrenaline surging through her body made every muscle feel weak and loose. She had no other moves. She had no clue what was going wrong. After all the preparation she had done, all the thousands of simulations she had run, he chose this time to develop this problem …
“I’m great, Kel—” Kelly took her phone from her pocket and used it to switch him off before he could finish the sentence. Now she wasn’t just confused, she was lost. And scared of the look on Anita’s face. But just as Anita swooped forward to come out from behind the curtain and call the disaster off, Kelly looked at Ethan again. She had built him just to service her as a wedding date, and at every turn, he had done so much more for her than she had asked or anticipated. But it was time that she started doing the right things for herself. She had to ask him to do one final thing.
“It looks like we’re going to need the help of one more person to pull this off,” she said. Anita hesitated. Kelly faced Ethan squarely. “I’d like you all to meet my fiancé. Ethan, can you come out here?”
Ethan shrank back as if unsure she meant what she said. She nodded at him encouragingly, trying to show more confidence than she felt, then took his hand as he approached, leading him toward the center spotlight. “Ethan, how about you and I chat for a bit instead?”
“Of course, Kelly. What did you want to talk about?” Ethan lowered his voice, though it was still audible to the crowd through her microphone. “Is this part of the plan? I thought you hated audience participation.” The audience laughed. In the wings, Anita was so tense, so ready to jump in and pull the plug, she was practically levitating.
“No, no, let’s just—talk. How are you?”
“At the moment, I’m confused.” The audience laughed again.
“Um—” Kelly looked around wildly for inspiration. “Come on, let’s dance!” She wrapped her arms around a completely befuddled Ethan and swung him around the stage.
“Are you all right? I thought you hated dancing too.”
Kelly ignored him. “He’s an excellent dancer!” she called loudly to the audience. Then she abruptly stopped dancing. “What’s 5,789 times 4,362?”
“25,251,618,” Ethan replied immediately. “But why—”
“When did Andrew Jackson die?”
“June eighth, 1845.”
“What’s my favorite time of year?”
Ethan slowed, looking at her. “November,” he said. “You love cloudy days.”
The audience was stirring, confused. “We get it, your boyfriend’s a catch!” one of them called out, to uneasy laughs. Anita stepped swiftly forward, but Kelly gestured firmly for her to stop, surprising herself with her boldness even more than Anita. She felt sick at what she was about to do, but she was sure. She took a breath and faced the crowd.
“He’s not a catch. Oh, he’s great—intelligent, good-looking, easygoing, funny. He’s the best-read person you’ll ever meet, but he’s not above doing laundry. Everyone who meets him loves him. I love him.” Kelly forced herself to meet Ethan’s eyes. “But a catch would imply he’s someone I found. And that’s not quite true.”
She looked out at the faces of the crowd, glowing palely in the dark auditorium. “Confibot appears to be having a glitch today,” she said. “I made a mistake. But it’s okay; I know that I can still make him everything I’m promising that he is, because I’ve done it before. I have another model here to show you.”
She lifted her hands to Ethan, but froze, unable to do what she needed to. But he caught her eye and gave her the faintest nod, the faintest smile, as if he knew, as if he was giving her permission. Obediently, he turned his back to her. Kelly took a breath and lifted the back of his shirt, the starched cotton faintly warm from his skin. She located his control panel, and before she could stop herself, she flipped the switch. Immediately Ethan powered down—lifeless, still, head bowed stiffly atop his neck like the top arm of a crane, dormant on a work site at night.
The audience gasped. Kelly swiveled Ethan’s back to them, lifting his shirt so they could see the control panel.
An image flashed into Kelly’s mind of her family watching at home, their shocked faces all in a row. Anita shot onstage with the closest thing to gracelessness Kelly had ever seen her display. “I’m sure you can all appreciate my engineer’s eccentric sense of humor,” she assured the investors. “She maintains the purity of her genius by isolating herself from all human society. I promise you, this is not her real pitch.”
But the same investor who had heckled Kelly earlier burst to his feet. “I’ve got to see this!” He pushed his way down the aisle and bounded onstage, examining Ethan closely. Kelly flinched as the man jammed his sausage fingers all over Ethan’s face. “Absolutely unbelievable!” he cried. He strode to Anita, hand out like a blade. “Let’s talk.”
As Anita watched the rest of the crowd trickle from their seats, rushing the stage, she transitioned seamlessly to a silken smile. She had planned this all along. This was all the carefully architected outcome of her calculations, not a coup by some engineer, some cubicle citizen. She grasped the man’s hand. “My pleasure.” In the midst of the turmoil, Kelly noticed Robbie gawping like a gutted fish. She knew that if anyone’s heart was thumping harder than hers in this moment, it might be his.
Kelly’s gaze found Confibot in his chair. In a way, despite being neglected for Ethan, he was the center of all of this. Through her daze, she realized that her project was real now. Confibot was happening. The bold investor fought his way toward her. “Incredible work,” he half shouted over the din. “You have an office model yet?” he joked. “I could use someone who actually spends more time filing than on Snapchat.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Excuse me—” Kelly turned back toward the center of the stage, distracted. In the madness of the throng, she couldn’t see Ethan at all.
twenty-six
Kelly wasn’t sure if she would ever see Ethan again. But she didn’t dare ask Anita what she had done with him, and barely had the luxury of thinking of him at all during the daytime. Time passed in a vortex of investor meetings, team hirings, budgetary allocations, marketing plans. At first, watching so many other heads come together to get hands-on with her project, her baby, was almost physically wrenching. Nobody else could understand Confibot like she did. What if they screwed it up? They were obviously going to screw it up. But the more Kelly worked with the various experts joining her team, the more she realized that they knew what they were doing. Confibot was growing and changing, becoming something different from what she had expected—different, but bigger and better. Kelly was learning how to cede control. She was pleased with the newfound respect with which Anita, in her own, tempered way, began treating her; thrilled to finally have her own office, aka closed door behind which to eat Cheez-Its; and ecstatic at the early glimpses of the ways in which her technology, with the ample funding now coming to it, could change people’s lives. Watching what had started as an ephemeral idea in her own head become a reality, something that would be in people’s homes, improving their quality of life, that would employ countless others in manufacturing and shipping and marketing—the whole thing was magical. She even got a w
rite-up in Wired magazine—not bad, she considered, for someone who was only thirty.
As exhilarating as all the work on Confibot was, it was also exhausting. Every night, when Kelly dropped into bed, the thoughts that she could push to the side during the day came rolling forward: the light in Ethan’s eyes when he had said “I love you,” the trusting way he had turned his back to her right before she had shut him off for good. She knew that she had done the right thing, but she couldn’t shake the sadness that overwhelmed her when she thought of him. She missed him. All she could do was push ahead.
Dr. Masden stayed on as a consultant, and Kelly not only got used to working with him, but began to enjoy it. One day when they were preparing for a meeting, shortly after the presentation, Kelly could tell he was holding something back. “What is it?” she asked.
“I just can’t believe that you built a robotic boyfriend,” he burst out. “There’s so much to unpack there.” He put his hands up. “But don’t worry, don’t worry. I won’t analyze you again.”
“It’s okay.” Kelly laughed. “I know it’s a crazy story. Believe it or not, it all started with—”
“Your mother.”
Kelly stared at him. “How did you know?”
He leaned forward. “Kelly, I’m a psychologist. It’s always the mother.”
One hour and six Freudian slips later, Kelly was laughing as he told her a funny story about his own mom.
“So you’ve got family … psychoses—or whatever the clinical term is—too.” She shook her head.
“I think the word is ‘issues.’ And I think everyone has them.”
“So if I’m essentially Confibot’s mom, does that mean he’ll have issues with me?”
“Don’t worry,” he assured her with a smile. “I’ll still be around to help when he’s a teenager.”
Kelly rolled her eyes. But having someone around to help—it was kind of nice.
