We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  Over the next few weeks, the girl’s life is turned inside out. A man from Delhi offers to become their agent and “handle everything the right way, so you don’t need to worry at all.” He whisks them off to Delhi, to the home of a millionaire toy manufacturer who allots them a corner of his factory, a workspace larger than their village. At first, the toymaker has no idea what to do, but his daughter brings out a toy kitten, one of a handful of carvings she managed to salvage from their shop back home. She picks up a brush, dips it into a bottle of white paint, and begins her work on the kitten, telling it the tale of a cat with a huge smile. Following his daughter’s lead, the toymaker begins carving, making kings and queens and wizards and their horses and lions and tigers into which his daughter paints life. He is asked to sign a few documents and affixes his thumbprint on them, not understanding the lawyer’s convoluted explanations. He is a woodworker, his work is to do with wood and chisels and hammers and saws; he doesn’t care about anything else.

  The toy manufacturer shelves his plans to create a new range of designer dolls and launches a publicity blitz for the wooden novelties he has named the “Magic Collection.” Soon, there are snaking queues of people waiting outside stores to buy the handmade creations, and the manufacturer pushes the toymaker and his daughter to create more of them, and faster. The girl is taken out of school and given private tutors so that she can devote maximum time to painting the toys. She is supplied with scripts of stories she is to tell the toys and scolded when she goes off-script. A couple of Hollywood movie studios hear of the girl’s talents and rush to collaborate with the manufacturer. The toymaker is asked to create a line of superhero toys, and the girl finds herself repeating the same story day after day to a bunch of costumed figurines.

  Every morning, Mahesh Yadav pops a handful of breath mints into his mouth before he reports to work. His head throbs with a hangover as he drives the car from his employer’s posh South Delhi home to the kid’s school, and the loud Hindi music that the kid demands he put on doesn’t help much. One chilly winter morning, his eyes droop as he dreams of hot pakoras and a glass of whiskey, and thus doesn’t see the thin man crossing the street.

  The toymaker is taken to the hospital, where the doctors try to stem the flow of blood. Yadav’s employer, a prominent textile mill owner who rushed to the hospital on hearing the news, tries to comfort the toymaker’s daughter and offers to pay for her father’s treatment. The girl just stares hollowly at the whitewashed walls. The mill owner is keen to avoid any negative publicity and requests a favor from the toy manufacturer, who had accompanied the girl to the hospital. The two businessmen reach an agreement just as the doctor exits the emergency ward to inform them that they should make arrangements for the funeral.

  The toy manufacturer gives the girl a month to grieve. He hires counselors to help her open up, but she doesn’t speak a word. Her tutors try to engage her in studies, but she stares blankly at the board. She is taken to the workshop and given toys and paints to work with, but they lie untouched. One month turns into three, and she still has spoken not a word. The toy manufacturer threatens to throw her out on the street, but she is unresponsive. Journalists give up on the story of the talking toys; a beak-nosed boy has been born in Bhatinda and crowds throng the hospital, believing him to be an avatar of Garuda, the eagle mount of the god Vishnu.

  I meet the girl on my second reporting assignment. I moved from Mumbai to Delhi a month ago, accompanied by a volley of tantrums from my son, who is furious at having to find a new set of friends to play cricket with. My wife also misses the weekly beach hangouts with her college gang and is unhappy with the “phony wannabe” neighbors she now has to put up with. My home has become a battlefield; I take refuge in reportage and follow the story of the magical village girl.

  I meet her in a crowded tenement which houses many other workers from the toy factory. Her caretaker, a middle-aged mother of three, says that the factory’s manager called her husband, the leader of the workers’ union, gave him some money, and dumped the child on him. The toy manufacturer’s men visited occasionally to cajole and bully the girl to work again, but they haven’t come around for a month. And now the allowance for the girl’s upkeep has stopped.

  The girl sits on the bed in a corner of the room. The bedsheet is grimy, the coverlet spotted with curry stains. Beside the bed, a small table holds wooden figurines and art supplies, all covered with thick layers of dust. The girl does not look at me when I enter; nor does she respond to my questions. I had seen a few pictures of her, holding on to her father’s arm, glancing uncertainly at the camera. She looked like a spirit then; she is even more wraithlike now.

  I ask the caretaker if she has any objections to my taking the girl away. She shrugs—looking after the girl brings her no benefit, and the child’s ghostly demeanor unsettles her. I give her my address, in case the toy manufacturer wants to contact the girl, and lead her from the house. She does not object, and sits quietly beside me in my car, staring straight ahead.

  My wife is upset that I have brought a strange no-name girl into our home, but she sets up the guest room for her. She tries to persuade her to talk, to listen, to display some interest in her new surroundings, but it is of no use. My son is intrigued by the new arrival. He gives her his books, shows her his favorite cartoons, and even tries to teach her to play video games. He isn’t troubled by the lack of response; he simply continues his efforts with a reporter’s dogged persistence.

  My son attends a two-week summer camp in Rishikesh. He comes home bubbling about the skills he’s learned, especially with a hammer and chisel. We buy him a block of wood from the local carpentry shop to keep him busy, and he hacks at it until his room is full of wood shavings. The girl watches his exploits silently, but I fancy that I see a flicker of interest in her eyes.

  One Sunday afternoon, an exultant cry comes from my son’s room. He runs out and displays to us a rectangular blob with legs.

  “Don’t you see? It’s a dog!”

  My wife pats his head; I nod distractedly from behind my laptop. There is a slight noise and I look up. The girl has come out of her room. She extends her hand and my son puts his figurine in it. She goes to his room and pulls his art supplies kit from under the bed, where he shoved it after the exam. She sits on his bed and begins to work, oblivious to the three of us standing in the doorway.

  “Have you heard the story of the lonely dog?” she says. “There once was a dog that lived on the streets of Engram. With its white coat and black ears, the dog stood out from the other street dogs, which were sandy and tawny. The street dogs shunned him for his appearance, barking and nipping at his face if he tried to befriend them. The lonely dog ate carrion and refuse from dumpsters, while the other street dogs gorged on juicy bones discarded by the city eateries.

  “One day, the prince of Engram was passing by and saw the lonely dog standing apart from its brethren, watching them squabble over the meat thrown out from an eatery. The prince felt sorry for the dog and asked his coachman to bring the lonely beast to him. He gave him meat and a nice kennel to live in, and played with him whenever he had time away from his royal duties.

  “One day, when the prince was traveling through the city with the dog beside him, a man with a knife leaped at him. The prince’s guards pinned down the attacker, but then an arrow came whizzing through the air and struck the prince in the shoulder. The lonely dog caught a glimpse of the archer at a window and took off to catch him as the guards rushed the prince to hospital.

  “The dog broke into the room from which the archer had taken his shot, but there was nobody within. There was, however, a rag the archer had used, and the dog picked up the archer’s scent from it. For three days and three nights, the dog traversed the streets of Engram hunting for the archer, until he found him stowed away aboard a grain ship. The dog attacked the archer and dragged him through the streets to the palace. A letter from a nobleman was found in the archer’s pocket, along with a slip for payment o
f three hundred gold pieces. The wicked nobleman confessed to orchestrating the attack as part of a larger ploy to grab the throne and was thrown in the dungeons.

  “In gratitude, the prince elevated the lonely dog to the rank of Royal Hound. The royal family’s crest was redesigned to depict a white dog with raised black ears. When the dog died, it was given a royal burial in the Cemetery of Kings.”

  My wife and I stare at each other when the story ends. The girl finishes painting the dog, walks over to us, and shyly holds out the figurine to my son. My son takes it and strokes its back, and the dog growls in pleasure.

  That night, my wife and I talk about the girl. We have come to like her, despite her grimness and reticence, and we believe that, with time, she may come to like us, too. But if word gets out that she is once again able to give life to wooden carvings, I fear she will be exploited again.

  The next morning at breakfast, we speak to the girl, and to our son.

  “If the world finds out that you have regained your ability,” I say, “they will want you to use it. The toy manufacturer will wave his contract in our faces and the authorities will take you away. We like you and want to adopt you into our family. However, that will probably mean you cannot tell your stories to these toys ever again. It is too dangerous. Do you think you would be okay with that?”

  The girl stares at me, her big eyes filled with tears.

  “Yes,” she whispers.

  The adoption procedure takes two years. The girl goes to school with my son, makes new friends, always comes first in art class. She tells my son stories, and soon he tells her some back. He writes down his stories, sends them off to a few newspapers. The day he publishes his first story, the wooden dog barks so much we are afraid the neighbors will hear.

  The day the adoption is finalized, the girl gives me and my wife a box. We open it to find three identical carvings of a family, a man and a woman with a boy and a girl. The woodwork is a little crude, but the brushwork is delicate.

  “I know you asked me not to make any more talking toys,” says the girl, “but I couldn’t stop myself from making these. I have never carved anything before. I hope you like them.”

  My wife’s carving stands on her dresser, mine on my office desk, and my son’s on his dorm-room table. The girl is pursuing an apprenticeship in Paris under Olivier Manet, one of the world’s foremost still-life artists. She has exhibited some of her paintings, and critics have raved about their lifelike quality. The carvings occasionally talk to us, tell us about the girl’s adventures—her first taste of crème brûlée; her awe on staring up at the majestic Notre-Dame; her roommate who gave a solo violin recital before the French President. And sometimes they tell us about a village in the foothills of the Himalayas, where a father makes a toy elephant and his daughter paints it and tells it the tale of Shukram.

  (2017)

  On 6 November 2014, at a day-long conference on human-machine interaction at Goldsmith’s College in London, Rodolphe Gelin, the research director of robot-makers Aldebaran, screened a video starring Nao, the company’s charming educational robot. It took a while before someone in the audience (not me, to my shame) spotted the film’s obvious flaw: how come the film shows a mother sweating away in the kitchen while a robot is enjoying quality time with her child?

  The robot exists to do what we can imagine doing, but would rather not do. What’s wrong with that? Nothing – except that it assumes that we always know what’s in our own best interests. Given that we are now able to hand entire parts of our lives over to robots, we should be thinking even harder about how we want to spend our lives.

  The stories in this section articulate some of the big nightmares we entertain about robots – that they’ll steal away our jobs, our livelihoods, even our happiness and our life’s purpose – but what’s remarkable is how innocent so many of the robots seem. That’s the problem with technology: it really is neutral. It really is what you make of it, day to day. No wonder technology is so good at magnifying all our classic mistakes.

  Robots are a sort of dark mirror for ourselves, filling in for the bits of life we’d rather ignore. That’s why they provide such a fine vehicle for satire, whether exploring civic impotence in Charles Dickens’s “Full Report of the Second Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything Section B” (1837) or the bankruptcy of our spiritual life in Fredric Perkins’s “The Man-Ufactory” (1877) – two fine early stories.

  There was a fair degree of satire in Czech playwright Karel Capek’s original conception of RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the play which in 1921 launched the word robot on the world. According to Capek, in an article in London’s Evening Standard in 1924, inspiration came when he had to take a crowded tram from Prague’s suburbs to the city centre and noticed how people were behaving: not at all like cattle in a truck, which at least show signs of life and suffering, but like dead things, mechanisms, machines.

  As it developed, Capek’s play acquired a visionary political edge. His countrymen were not only being dehumanized by the spread of mass production and “scientific management”; they were being thrown out of work. (Seeing striking textile workers marching through the town of Úpice made a strong impression on him.) The bloodless logic of industrial capitalism has rarely been expressed so well as when Rossum’s general manager Domin reassures Helen Glory (what a name!) about the great benefits robots will bring to the world. Sure, they’re making humans redundant, but

  “within the next ten years, Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There’ll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there’ll be no work left to be done. Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves.”

  Again, the vision’s fine as far as it goes, but the devil’s in the detail. In Domin’s utopic future of endless leisure, will we even know how to perfect ourselves? Are we equipped for such a task, physically, morally, intellectually? Is perfection even a state to aspire to? Or are we all just going to rot?

  We obsess over the “labour-saving” capacities of our machines, and hanker endlessly for more “free time”, but we never think to consider the value of labour itself. Every activity we replace by machine – even dirty, noisy, dangerous activities – is a kind of loss for us. Even factory work, hard, repetitive and brutal, even housework, invisible, unmeasured, unrewarded, can be a source of pride.

  What if we save ourselves from the very labour that makes our lives worthwhile? It can’t be an accident that, now that bread- and beer-making are largely automated industrial activities, schools are opening up in my city to teach people with disposable money and time on their hands how to knead dough, and ferment beer. And, easy as it is to sneer at these fetishised activities, surely the really ludicrous thing is how we’re getting machines to do the things that we turn out, after all, to enjoy. (Cornell scholar Morris Bishop hits this particular nail neatly on the head with “The Reading Machine” (1947).)

  The other problem with Domin’s vision is that it assumes human beings can simply step off the merry-go-round. With robots making everything for free, the horns of plenty will never cease to overflow. Is he right?

  Well, no. For a start, there’s the small matter of only having one planet to live off. And right now, we’re not just running out of materials; we’re running out of things to do with materials. Why do you think our economy has shifted, in the space of less than a generation, from one of goods, to one of services, to one of mere attention?

  As far as the machines are concerned, we’re not just consumers. We’re also stuff. Consumables. Our data – which is to say, how we live our lives – already has a money value. Automation hasn’t liberated us from the capitalist machine. We’re still in the machine. Hell, we’re its feedstock.

  Stories by Robert Reed, Paolo Baci
galupi, Nick Wolven and Dan Grace all explore this crisis point from different angles. I have to admit that in my own mind I keep coming back to one of the more surreal moments in the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 movie The Matrix, when it’s revealed that our robot overlords are so desperate for power that they’re using us as glorified batteries.

  The trouble with capitalism – the trouble that keeps even dyed-in-the-wool capitalists up at night – is that it’s an engine without brakes. Running out of fuel doesn’t stop it. It simply starts digesting its own muscle. It’s a monstrous positive-feedback loop in which even the robots aren’t safe, as Rachael K. Jones, a relative newcomer to the field, makes clear in “The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant”, one of the funniest (and nastiest) stories in this anthology.

  In Romie Stott’s “A Robot Walks into A Bar”, a robot and a human are both trying to navigate the same (sexual) economy. It’s quite understated, and also, for my money, an essential read. What kind of relationship will we develop with our robots, if both they and we are in hock to “the System”?

  NIGHTMARE NUMBER THREE

  Stephen Vincent Benét

  Between the years 1928 and 1943, Stephen Vincent Benét was one of the best-known living American poets, whose books sold in the tens of thousands. Today no-one knows who he is. Experiences of the Great Depression drew from Benét, a normally gentle, rather sentimental writer, a series of angry, sometimes apocalyptic poems. Nightmare Number Three is fairly representative of a sequence that also includes “Metropolitan Nightmare”, a futuristic story of climate change in which newly evolved steel-eating termites infest New York. With the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, Benét threw himself unsparingly into propaganda work, driving himself brutally until, in 1943, his fragile health gave way and he died in his wife’s arms.