The parts that make us monsters are not the teeth or the heart but the mind.
The part that makes us monsters is bone and sinew, spirit and flesh.
We have not been ourselves here. We will not be ourselves here.
We are always ourselves here.
We are always
here.
7
“Scar Tissue” © Tobias S. Buckell
Originally Published in SLATE (Future Tense Fiction: May 30, 2020)
The evening before you sign and take delivery of your son, you call Charlie and tell him you think you’ve made a huge mistake.
“Let me come on over and split a few with you,” he says. “I haven’t seen the fire pit yet.”
Charlie—a short, compact man with green eyes and a shaved head whom you met when he delivered groceries the first few weeks you were housebound—brings over a six-pack. You walk out into the complex’s community garden together. It used to be a parking lot, and the path through the mushroom gardens under the solar panels is still faded gray asphalt and leftover white lines. You’re careful with your right foot; you still haven’t gotten used to the way your prosthetic moves. It’s easy to trip.
You and Sienna from 4B have a fire pit and stone circle dug out in your combined lots, and she’s grown a privacy wall of rosebushes that surround the relaxing space. Charlie sits on one of the cedar benches as you fiddle with twigs to make a fire.
This beats the awkwardness of sitting down to talk right away. Your parents didn’t raise you to be direct about feelings. Neither did the army, nor the warehouse you drove a forklift in. Charlie will, if you let him.
Making a fire gives you a moment to sort out all your feelings.
Or maybe it just gives you an excuse to delay talking about them.
Charlie knows all that. It’s why he created an excuse to come over.
The beer is warm, but the bottle still sweats enough that it drips across the pale plastic knuckles of your hand. You switch the bottle over to your other hand.
Regrowing your forearm and your leg. Like a damn lizard.
“It’s too late to back out now,” Charlie says.
“I know.”
“You need the money.”
The fire starts to lick at the twigs and burn brighter. You awkwardly drop yourself onto the bench across from Charlie and look down at his tattered running shoes and the frayed edges of his gray jeans.
“Everyone needs the money.” You swig the cheap beer that’s the best either of you can manage. You can’t wait to afford something from one of those smaller local breweries nearby.
“But … ”
You’ve been on disability since the forklift accident. The apartment’s small, but Enthim Arms is nice. The shared garden out back, the walking trails. You can’t use them as much as you’d like right now, but that physical therapist keeps saying June is when you might be able to make it to the lake and back.
It’ll hurt, but you’ve never cared so much about seeing a mediocre quarry lake before.
“Advent Robotics will pay me more money to raise it than I made at the warehouse, and I can keep focusing on recovery while doing it.” You raise your hand and flex it. A low battery alert blinks on your wrist.
Plus, the bonus at the end will give you enough to afford something only the rich usually can: regrowing your forearm and your leg. Like a damn lizard. The biolabs that do that are so far out of your reach you normally wouldn’t even consider it.
And you want it all back. You want it to be just like it was before the forklift started to tip over and Adam screamed at you to jump out, running toward you as fast as he could, ridiculously long hair flying, his clipboard clattering on the floor.
“So what’s wrong?” Charlie asks softly, and you have to stare back at the fire to avoid the discomfort of looking at another person.
“I told myself I’d never have kids.” You look up from the brown bottle and at the thorns that twist around each other in the vines that Sienna has so carefully trained. “Can’t see my way to passing on the shit my parents gave to me.”
“Damn,” Charlie nods, folds his hands. “Cory, you can’t think you’ll be the same people they were. The fact that you’re scared about this, that means you’re going to be such a better parent than they were.”
“No.” You point a finger over the neck of the beer bottle at him. “People say that, but that’s some backwards-assed logic. Refusing to pass on the bad mistakes, understanding maybe you’re going to screw up something you’re responsible for, that doesn’t mean you should go do it. I know I can’t go climb a mountain without a rope, I’m going to fall. That was true even before the accident. Understanding that fact doesn’t mean I’m going to be a great climber without a rope. It just means I realize I’m going to fall.”
“Fair enough,” Charlie says. “So you going to just send it back?”
You look at the blinking light on your right wrist.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
You should ask how things are going. Charlie started a new job helping an artist down the street weld large, corporate symbolic art sculptures. Better than all the gig-economy stuff he’d been piecemealing together.
You should finally thank him for spending all that time chatting with you when he’d unload groceries, losing money every second he went the extra mile.
Instead you drink and talk about the weather. Something inconsequential.
“Well, even if you do screw up, it’s just a robot, right?” Charlie raises the bottle of beer in a salute.
* * *
Your son crawls out of the crate the next morning. It thrashes pieces of the box aside and mewls in confusion as it turns on.
Instant regret grips you as you try to grab him, and one of his arms smashes the coffee table. Shattered glass bounces off the tile, and you let go of his unyielding artificial skin.
“Hey,” you tell the confused machine. “Easy!”
It crunches around in the glass, and you can hear its eyes snick in their sockets as it anxiously looks all around your small apartment. The sound unnerves you.
When it opens its mouth, a gurgling electronic scream warbles out.
It’s the most alien, unnerving sound, and it makes your whole spine tingle.
“Just relax.”
It’s taller than you. Heavier. The ultradense batteries mean that even as you try to physically stop it from flailing, you could hardly budge it.
Those ruby-red eyes with the LIDAR range detectors behind them lock hard onto you. You feel like you’re in the sights of something, and lick your lips.
The pediabotic trainers at Advent told you the first few minutes could be chaotic. You just need to make sure that you remain within its eyesight. Once you do that, it starts to imprint on you.
Like a baby animal.
Soothing tones and patience. You dance about as best you can to make sure it’s aware of you.
“Make sure you have a name picked out and keep using it,” you were told in the CARE training. “It’s a mind in a pre-language, pre-memory state. The language matrix plug-in will be aiding it, though, and even human babies start recognizing names and language much faster than you realize.”
It’s one thing to watch a video of a robot coming to life with its new parents calmly welcoming it into their new, perfect multiroom home. You, on the other hand, are hopping around shit you left out and trying not to fall over as you stumble after the thing. This, you know, is a huge mistake.
“I even forgot your name!”
You’re hunting about for something as the robot turns around and squalls at you.
“Rob, stop it, please.”
And the mechanical screaming finally stops. Sharrad, upstairs, has been banging on the floor, upset at all the noise.
“It’s OK, Rob. You’re OK.”
Rob cautiously approaches you.
“Hi.”
The coffee table has been destroyed. You feel a knot in your stomach, scare
d the machine might hurt you.
“At this point in our manufacturing iterations, there’s tremendous aversion to harming anything organic,” the recruiters at Advent have explained many times. “Just like people have a deep instinct of fear around a snake, our robots have instinctive fears about hurting anything.”
Rob gently crouches down in front of you and starts to pet your shoes, fascinated by the laces. He keeps picking them up and letting them fall back to the top of your shoes.
“OK,” you laugh. “Now let’s show you where your charging base is.”
Rob should have the instinct to go looking for one when he’s running low. The next important step is to make sure he can find it.
“Talk as much as you can. Language acquisition is key,” Advent has explained. “Narrate everything you’re doing as you go, and even when your foster robot is older, explain why you do everything you do. Context is key. The more you can do that, the better.”
You spend the next two days teaching Rob how to find its charging port and stay still on it. It’s constant and exhausting. The robot will stay charging for a while, but then get up and go chattering and exploring through the house. You have to keep moving it back.
On the third day you fall asleep on the floor as Rob warbles about and opens every single drawer and cabinet in the kitchen, working on fine-motor movement.
You wake up, panicked, to an unmoving lump next to you. You drag Rob over, the body limp in your arms, to the charger. “Please don’t be broken,” you say. You need this to work. Advent won’t pay you anything if you kill the damn thing in the first few days.
Back on the charger, Rob starts babbling nonsense and making faces at you. Relief floods through you and you slump down to the floor.
Three days of no sleep and that meaningless proto-speak. You punch the wall with your prosthetic hand, and it crunches through the drywall. Rob sees that and startles. It punches the drywall as well.
“No!” you shout.
Rob curls into a ball on the charger and looks at you through raised arms. It’s scared, and you did that. This is everything you feared. You remember your dad standing at the top of the stairs, that anger curdling you with fear.
“I can’t do this,” you say, curling into a ball on the floor. “I can’t do this.”
“You’ll be surprised at how exponential growth in learning works.”
Advent is all gleaming showroom factory floors. The human workers wear protective gowns, hairnets, and goggles. It’s as much lab as it is factory, you think.
The recruiter walks you by glass windows looking into the factory. You stare at the pieces of robotics, impressed by the circuitry and technology everywhere, but having no clue what any of it does.
“At first, your foster robot will seem like no more than an infant, and that’s because it is! But every time they get on that charger, they’re not just powering up their onboard battery—they’re taking in their experiences and uploading data to our servers to have it examined and encoded back to them, to accelerate their growth. Just like sleep and dreaming work for us, helping us to process our world.”
“At first, your foster robot will seem like no more than an infant, and that’s because it is!”
You’re told that in just months you’ll see significant developmental gains. And then the really big leaps will start to come.
It’ll take six months to fully mature your son.
Can you make it six months, taking care of a growing mind? Being responsible for a whole thinking being? Being a good parent? It seems like forever, and yet it’s not that long of a temporary job.
“Some of us do it for 20 years,” one of the recruiters laughs when you express this. She has professional highlights, perfect teeth, and shoes that cost more than your disability allowance pays out in a month.
She laughs too hard, you think.
But you say nothing and swallow anything acidic as she talks through the monthly payments and the bonus for a successful maturity.
* * *
“He’s ‘asleep’ for now,” you tell Charlie, the next time you take a moment to meet up around the fire pit. It’s been hard to find the time while raising a brand-new robot. Sienna’s annoyed, fairly, that you haven’t been out to weed, and the fire pit needs cleaning.
You don’t even bother to try and start a fire.
“You look exhausted.” Charlie hands you a beer, but you shake your head. You need a clear mind. You’ve given up one of the few vices you have.
“It takes everything I have to just keep up. I can’t go out much with him. Just too damn clumsy still. He’s broken half of everything I own.”
Rob has explored the backyard, the hallways. People stare at you when you go out, and you have to pull Rob back away from something because his coordination isn’t that good yet. They’re used to seeing robots doing things for people, not a person babysitting a robot. There are only a few hundred robots being fostered at any given time.
And it’s not babysitting when you’re the parent, you guess.
“Ahmed said you’re not at physical therapy anymore.”
“I’ll get back.”
Maybe.
In four more months, you’ll be free, and you’ll have that maturity bonus. In four months, you’ll be in a clinic watching flesh and blood regenerate.
You have to hold onto that.
Things can get back to the way they were if you just get through this.
“You gave it a name?”
“Rob.”
“Rob?”
“I panicked.”
“Rob the robot?”
A loud crash from the apartment, followed by a shrill shriek. “Shit, Charlie, I wanted to hear about that piece you’re working on for the city park, but he’s awake. You can head out by the gate.”
“Dad?”
You wake up as Rob taps your chest, his red eyes open wide as he stares down at you. You blink and pull back the blanket.
“Dad?”
You can’t escape him. It’s 2 in the morning, but he’s finished a charge cycle.
“Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad.”
You can wrap a pillow around your head, but it’s not going anywhere. That word.
Dad. Dad. Dad.
“You can’t just manufacture a thinking robot. We have to raise it.”
It’s new. Just in the last few hours before you went to bed. But he’s using the newly acquired word for everything. He has two words now.
He points at himself. “Rob!” He points at you. “Dad!”
You get up and turn on the lights.
“Dad!”
You’d asked one of the scientists that the recruiter brought in for the Q&A session why robots needed raising. The recruiter had explained it, but you wanted to get it from the egghead, not the Parental Unit Liaison.
“The simpler the animal, the less parenting it needs,” the scientist said. “Some are born with all the instincts they need.”
But a robot meant to move and look like a human being, to help people in nursing homes or other similar cases, that robot couldn’t just be programmed with a few repetitive functions.
To understand nuance, to get a theory of mind and understand context, one needed intelligence.
“You need to be raised, and in your own body. You’re not just a mind in a jar—that’s an old theory of consciousness. You’re a grown being. A whole being. Your gut bacteria, spinal column, the society around you, all of that creates an entire person, as well as the experiences and time that it passes through. You can’t just manufacture a thinking robot. We have to raise it.”
And to do that, Advent has to pay for human caretakers.
You passed the screening process, particularly because they’re interested in a variety of types of caretakers.
“It immerses units in a full scope of experiences, which makes our product lines more randomized, encompassing a wide range of interactions with people from different walks of life. Our robots pass that knowled
ge around, and it gives them a service-oriented edge.”
Raise a robot that works well and makes it through job training, you get rewarded.
“Once we have a functioning unit, then we can copy and paste it,” the scientist grins. “We have 2,000 different models and personalities you can interact with, now, for a variety of workplace functions.”
* * *
At the park you teach Rob to throw a baseball. It’s good for coordination.
“Dad, you’re breathing heavy,” he says as you walk back toward the apartments.
“It’s just been hard. I’ve been inside for three months taking care of you. I haven’t been doing my physical therapy.”
“I know. You keep saying I was such a hard baby to take care of.” Rob rolls his laser-red eyes dramatically.
You are struggling. You need to make sure to take the time and get outside for walks more. That quarry lake was the big target, wasn’t it? You never did get there. It feels like your whole life has just been the apartment or the yard for so long.
Charlie hasn’t called in a while. You saw online that he’s won a prize for the art he worked on with the collective he’s now joined. The sculpture is in a park near the courthouse. It looks like rusted iron spikes shaped like lightning bolts hitting the concrete pad it’s bolted onto.
The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) Page 9