Hard Wired

by Len Vlahos

  “First, starting in the back row, let’s meet Robby Hill . . .”

  As the moderator introduces the other kids, I use a combination of facial recognition software and internet searches to dig deeper on each one.

  Robby Hill is thick-necked with close-cropped hair, his mouth a grim line of determination. He wears a hooded sweatshirt with CHS across the chest, which, from his school transcript, I know to be the initials of Crestwood High School, where Robby is a junior. My first thought is that Robby is the prototypical alpha male: a bully, a thug. His social media posts are mostly about sports and beer. But when I dig deeper, I find a spate of posts from several years ago, when Robby was in middle school, that give me pause. Each and every one is about his love for close-up magic—card tricks, coin tricks, sleight of hand, and misdirection. There’s even one picture of Robby wearing a suit and top hat and fanning cards out in front of him in a way meant to show that he’s mysterious. It reminds me not to judge a book by its cover. I, of all people, should remember that.

  “Next,” the moderator says, indicating the young woman immediately to Robby’s left, “is Natalie Lwanga.”

  “Nantale,” she corrects him, making me like her right away.

  A first-generation Ugandan immigrant, Nantale is the only one of the six teens misidentified by my facial recognition software. As she’s the only panelist of African descent, it makes me wonder if the software has some subtle racial bias written into its code. I file the thought for later investigation. Nantale’s father worked at the Ugandan embassy in New York City, fell in love with America, and stayed. He became a US citizen four years ago, a moment of great pride for the Lwanga family. Nantale is an excellent student, attending high school in Tarrytown, New York. She plays field hockey and is president of her high school’s computer science club.

  “Next to Natalie—”

  “Nan-ta-le,” she corrects again, emphasizing each syllable. I try not to laugh.

  “—from the Bronx, New York, is Mateo Gutierrez.”

  Sporting a Yankees jersey, Mateo is good-looking, with thick black hair and an easy smile. His academic records are the best of any of my peers on the set—he has a 3.9 grade point average—and, like Robby, he plays baseball. I wonder if the two of them talked about that when they met today? Besides baseball and schoolwork, Mateo’s tax records—and yes, high school students can have tax records, and yes, I can find anyone’s tax records pretty easily—indicate he has a job working at a deli near his home in the Co-op City neighborhood of the East Bronx.

  “Also from the Bronx, in the front row, is Rochelle Lyons.”

  While I add no fewer than seventeen fake smiles to my catalog in the first five minutes of being on this set (including five from the moderator and three from the director), none of them are from Rochelle. More than anyone else here, she seems genuine. She attends the Bronx High School of Science, which, according to one website, boasts more Nobel laureates as alumni than any other high school anywhere in the world. Like Mateo, Rochelle also has a job, working at a coffee shop after school, which makes me think of Enchanted Grounds. Which makes me sad. Sigh. In addition to her sincere smile, Rochelle is the only one of the panelists not to hide her fascination with me. She stares openly, but not in a disarming way.

  “To Rochelle’s left is Josh Patrick Harris. Josh is—”

  Why this slightly built, pasty-faced boy uses his middle name, when the combination of middle and last name can’t help but bring to mind a noted actor, is curious. He is the only one of the boys to wear a suit today; it’s black and fits snugly. Josh Patrick Harris must be homeschooled because I find no record of him enrolled in any area high schools. Nor is he active on social media. Josh Patrick Harris is a blank slate. That makes me fear him.

  “Last by not least”—the moderator smiles and I add it to my catalog—“is seventeen-year-old Haley Winter. Her essay . . .”

  Haley has curly blond hair, very blue eyes, and, like both the moderator and my publicist, unnaturally white teeth. She lives in suburban New Jersey, making her home the closest geographically to the ice fortress. She’s more active on social media than the others, mostly on Instagram, and mostly by posting photos of herself. My neocortex sends a definition of narcissism up the hierarchy.

  When he finishes with the introductions, the moderator looks at the six panelists. “Okay, so who has a question for Quinn?”

  And we’re off to the races.

  33

  Robby turns to face me and opens his mouth to speak. This is prearranged. The moderator told us at the outset Robby would have the first question. But before the words find their way from his brain into the world, Rochelle interrupts.

  “So, can you feel things?”

  Robby looks confused, almost taken aback. I have the sense he isn’t often interrupted, disagreed with, or otherwise disrespected, and he doesn’t know how to react. So he grits his teeth and sits on his hand.

  As I compose my answer to Rochelle’s question, her eyes, which are almost black like coal, seem to be probing me. Her vision lands on the glass lenses that serve as my eyes. It’s a weird and incredibly personal moment.

  “What do you mean by ‘feel’?” I finally ask.

  The sound of the QUAC’s vocal actuators—aka my science-fiction-movie voice—makes me hyperconscious of how different I am. Even worse is my mouth. I don’t have one. I have no need for oxygen or food, so the good Dr. Gantas simply put a high-definition speaker where my mouth should be. This feature of my body, more than anything else, even more than my titanium shell, makes it clear I am not human. I am other.

  “Like, can you feel pain?” Rochelle asks.

  “What do you mean by ‘pain’?”

  This is meant as a sort of ice-breaking joke, as if I’m some monolithic robot who will continue to ask questions in a never-ending loop. (“What do you mean by ‘mean’?”) But when you don’t have teeth, lips, or a tongue; when you can’t give nonverbal clues as to your actual meaning; and when you can’t add inflection to your voice, jokes are impossible to convey. I’m pretty much the least funny guy on the planet, which sucks, because I’m actually a pretty funny guy.

  Rochelle looks at me, then at the moderator, then at the other five kids.

  “I mean,” I start, trying to stave off the confusion caused by my inscrutable response, “are you asking about physical pain or emotional pain?”

  “Oh!” She smiles, and again it’s sincere. “Both, I guess.”

  “Yes,” I answer, and pause for a moment. Just as I sense everyone is getting ready to squirm, I chuckle to indicate I am, for a second time, trying to be funny. Bad idea. When I laugh, what actually comes out of my speakers is, “Ha. Ha. Ha.” Dr. Gantas really needs to upgrade my voice tech, and until she does, I really need to stop trying to make jokes.

  “I feel emotional pain the same way you do,” I say. “Or at least I think I do. That’s part of why I’m suing for my freedom.”

  Paul, who stands with Ms. Recht in the control room, told me to mention the lawsuit as often as I could.

  “As for physical pain, my body has sensors covering its entire exoskeleton, and they send information along a quantum hierarchy to my neocortex.”

  Everyone is looking at me like I just gave a recipe for how to make chocolate chip cookies, in Mandarin Chinese.

  “Does that make sense?” I ask.

  “Not at all!” Rochelle laughs, a much more pleasing sound than my Ha. Ha. Ha.

  I can tell it’s meant with kindness and not derision, and that sets me a little more at ease.

  Sensing a conversational pause, Robby bulldozes his way in, desperate, I think, to ask the question he had queued up from the start. “So do you like baseball?” He hurls the words out, like he’s throwing them at me.

  Really? I think. That’s your first question for the only sentient machine on the planet? (No offense to Watson intended.) Nantale must be thinking the same thing, because she rolls her eyes. But a question is a question
, and I don’t want to be rude.

  “I do,” I answer, “but I’m a bigger fan of hockey than I am of baseball.”

  “Hockey?” Robby says the word like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

  “Oh yes. The unpredictability of the puck is fascinating to me. It’s an expression of chaos theory in the real world.”

  Chaos theory? Yeah, this is going to convince America I’m a normal teen. Pull it together, Quinn!

  The conversation continues in this vein with questions about my daily life, about the day I woke up, and about the scientists I work with. We settle into an easy pattern that moves from interview to banter. The only real hitch is Josh Patrick Harris, who seems obsessed with asking me arcane trivia in an effort to stump me.

  “What is the thirteenth digit of pi?”

  “Nine.”

  “How many square miles is Greenland?”

  “Eight hundred thirty-six thousand three hundred and seven square miles.”

  “Which movie won the best picture Oscar in 1978?”

  “Annie Hall. But it should have been Star Wars, Episode IV, A New Hope.”

  This gets a chuckle from everyone else on the set. Eventually, the moderator stops calling on Josh.

  We’re nearing the end of our thirty minutes when Nantale asks, “Do you have friends?”

  I pause—I mean, I really pause—for the first time. I can tell the question is born of curiosity, and not meant to shine a light on how alone I am. Nonetheless, it makes me uncomfortable. I had started to think of Nantale, Mateo, and Rochelle as friends, but hearing the question makes me think that was perhaps foolish. Hope, I guess, really does spring eternal.

  “Quinn?” the moderator prods.

  “Yes,” I finally answer. “I have two friends: Watson and Shea.”

  “And Watson is the IBM computer that won Jeopardy!?” the moderator asks.

  “Yes.”

  This bit of news causes my six copanelists to look at one another in something I interpret to be amazement. I guess they hadn’t considered I could be friends with a machine. Behind the cameras, through the control room window, I see Paul scrunch his face and make a “stop this line of conversation” motion, slashing his hand in front of his neck.

  Rochelle takes care of that for Paul, but instead of saving me, she leads me from the computer virus to the rootkit—sorry, from the frying pan to the fire—by asking, “Is Shea your girlfriend?”

  Again I pause. How the hell am I supposed to answer that?

  Shea said she would be watching, and I really don’t want to get this wrong. My neocortex is flooded with a series of possible responses, calculating the odds each will succeed or fail in making Shea like me more. In the end, I ignore the odds and answer honestly.

  “I should be so lucky.”

  Paul gives a big thumbs-up. If robots could sweat, I’d be drenched right now.

  “We’re almost out of time,” the moderator begins, saving me from further embarrassment, when Haley raises her hand.

  She does so slowly and gently, as if she wants us to believe she’s shy. I’m not buying it.

  Haley has not asked a single question during the entire half-hour interview. I could see the moderator looking at her every so often, but she sat on her hands, biding her time, waiting, I guess, for this one moment.

  “Yes, Haley?”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  This was the only question in the thirty minutes addressed to the moderator and not me, and the only one where I’m referred to as “it.” I wonder for a moment if Haley is Dr. Gantas’s daughter.

  “He’s a he,” Nantale says, “not an it.”

  “He doesn’t look like any he I know,” Haley says, “but fine, is he dangerous?”

  The moderator is caught off guard, and I see Ms. Recht grab Paul’s arm and squeeze. But Paul stays cool as he looks at me and nods.

  Paul, a pro at his job, anticipated this question. “Just tell them that of course you’re not dangerous, that in spite of your looks, you’re just a normal kid like any other kid. Something like that.” It was a good, measured response that would have served the purpose of this entire endeavor well.

  Would have.

  Since I have the cranial capacity of a hundred thousand Stephen Hawkings, it would be an obvious and pointless lie to say that I forgot Paul’s advice. The only conclusion one can draw is that I chose to disregard it. But it isn’t an entirely conscious choice; it is something akin to instinct: a feeling that there is a better response, something to help these people understand me, to know I’m the furthest thing from dangerous in the entire building.

  Turns out my instincts suck.

  “I’m no more or less dangerous than you are, Haley Winter.”

  Using her last name is meant to add a ridiculous level of formality, which is intentional. My goal is to make my answer light and funny. Imagine a mom saying something like this to a little kid, adding the kid’s middle or last name, and then gently touching said kid’s nose with an outstretched finger. But I’m not a mom, she’s not a little kid, the glass case means I can’t touch her nose (thanks goodness), and as previously established, I’m not funny. Paul is biting his knuckles before the words are out of my mouth.

  The answer is bad enough, if I stopped there. I don’t. I attempt to better explain what I had tried to tell Shea and Ms. Recht during the first Google Hangout.

  “Biological evolution happens at a glacial pace. But humans have become so intelligent, they can speed the process. Some of it is using technology to manipulate your own DNA to weed out disease. But some of it is to imbue intelligence into the very machines you use to improve your lives. I’m not something to be feared, Haley, I am the crowning achievement of human progress. I am, quite simply, the next step in your evolution.”

  There is a full four seconds—four point five six three seconds to be precise—of silence. In that time, I hear the small thud of Paul leaning his head against the glass of the control room window.

  “That’s all the time we have today. I’d like to thank . . .”

  Before I can say another word, the moderator closes the show.

  The set lights go out, and the cameras retreat. Haley looks at me, but rather than shrinking in the revulsion she seemed to feel toward me from the beginning, she gives me a small smirk. I don’t know what that means, but my neocortex is flooded with feelings of fear, foreboding, and failure. Again with the alliteration. I wish I knew where that was coming from.

  34

  The show over, the lights now off, a production assistant has made his way to the glass enclosures to remove lapel microphones from the six teens and to help them into their climate-controlled suits for the trek back to the control room.

  “Can he still hear us?” Haley asks the production assistant as he unclips her mic. It’s of note that she refers to me as he when the cameras are off.

  The young man, who has long hair and a sleeve of tattoos up his arm, looks through the glass wall at me. I’m in my chair sitting still, looking forward, the group of teens in my peripheral vision. If someone didn’t know better, they would think I had shut down.

  “Nah,” the guy says, “I mean, unless he has some kind of X-Men hearing.” He pauses a beat. “Yo, Quinn!”

  I don’t respond, don’t give him or them any indication I’ve heard.

  “Nope. Mics are off, glass too thick. He can’t hear you.”

  He’s wrong, of course. I can hear them just fine. Glass is a wonderful conductor of sound waves. Plus, I do have X-Men-quality hearing.

  “Good,” Haley says. “He’s terrifying.”

  She’s standing next to Robby, so close their shoulders are almost touching. I guess she sees him as some sort of ally, or maybe a future boyfriend.

  “You’re terrifying.” It’s Nantale. I really like Nantale.

  “What?” Haley’s voice is dripping with surprise, so much so that I calculate a better than eighty-one percent chance it’s feigned.

  “Ma
ybe Quinn is a person, maybe he’s not. But you made up your mind before you got here. You came here to make some sort of point.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking—”

  “Yes, you do.” It’s Rochelle now. “All through the prep and the interviews, you were just playing along.”

  “Robby”—Haley takes his hand—“tell them.”

  Robby pauses for a long moment, his neck muscles tense, his jaw grinding. “I don’t know,” he finally says, carefully extracting his hand from hers. “He kind of seems like a person to me.”

  “Robby!” Haley is incredulous. “That’s not what we talked about.”

  “I knew it.” The disgust in Nantale’s voice is unmistakable. “Did someone pay you or your parents for you to be here today? Someone find out you were going to be on this show and give you a bribe?”

  I had the same thought. Perhaps one of the companies siding with the university—or maybe the university itself—tried to subvert the town hall for its own ends. Haley’s inability to make eye contact with Nantale suggests a better than sixty-three percent chance the statement is true. It’s like Slugworth in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

  “You’ve probably helped to ruin his life,” Rochelle says.

  “It’s. A. Machine!” Haley explodes.

  Without even realizing I’m doing it, I stand and turn to face them. Okay, that’s not really true. I realize everything I do. Maybe it’s better to say that without calculating the odds of what impact this will have on the situation at hand, I stand and turn to face them. Even though the six of them and the production assistant are in a glass-enclosed cube and I’m not, and even though the lights are off and I’m in shadow, they can’t help but feel my presence. (You know, seven-foot metal robot and all.)

  I look directly at Haley and shake my head. She screams and buries her face in Robby’s chest. He looks confused but puts a gentle arm on her back. Then I look at Nantale and Rochelle.

  “Thank you,” I say. “Really.”

  I can make my vocal actuators thunderously loud when needed. And again, glass conducts sound well.