We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  If I wanted, I could reach out to her. Her bare thigh was right there. And I knew, absolutely knew, she wouldn’t object to me touching her.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  Any other murder suspect would have been in the back seat. Would have been cuffed with her hands behind her, not in front. Everything would have been different.

  Was I thinking these thoughts because I knew she was a robot, and not a real woman? I would never have considered touching a real woman, a suspect, no matter how much she tried to push my buttons.

  I would never have done any of this.

  Get a grip, Rivera.

  *

  Her owner’s house was large, up in the Berkeley Hills, with a view of the bay and San Francisco beyond, glittering through light mist and rain.

  Mika unlocked the door with her fingerprint.

  “He’s in here,” she said.

  She led me through expensive rooms that illuminated automatically as we entered them. White leather upholstery and glass verandah walls and more wide views. Spots of designer color. Antiqued wood tables with inlaid home interfaces. Carefully selected artifacts from Asia. Bamboo and chrome kitchen, modern, sleek, and spotless. All of it clean and perfectly in order. It was the kind of place a girl like her fit naturally. Not like my apartment, with old books piled around my recliner and instant dinner trays spilling out of my trash can.

  She led me down a hall, then paused at another door. She hesitated for a moment, then opened it with her fingerprint again. The heavy door swung open, ponderous on silent hinges.

  She led me down into the basement. I followed warily, regretting that I hadn’t called the crime scene unit already. The girl clouded my judgment, for sure.

  No. Not the girl. The bot.

  Downstairs it was concrete floors and ugly iron racks, loaded with medical implements, gleaming and cruel. A heavy wooden X stood against one wall, notched and vicious with splinters. The air was sharp with the scent of iron and the reek of shit. The smells of death.

  “This is where he hurt me,” she said, her voice tight.

  Real or fake?

  She guided me to a low table studded with metal loops and tangled with leather straps. She stopped on the far side and stared down at the floor.

  “I had to make him stop hurting me.”

  Her owner lay at her feet.

  He’d been large, much larger than her. Over six feet tall, if he’d still had his head. Bulky, running to fat. Nude.

  The body lay next to a rusty drain grate. Most of the blood had run right down the hole.

  “I tried not to make a mess,” Mika said. “He punishes me if I make messes.”

  *

  While I waited in the rich dead guy’s living room for the crime scene techs to show, I called my friend Lalitha. She worked in the DA’s office, and more and more, I had the feeling I was peering over the edge of a problem that could become a career ender if I handled it wrong.

  “What do you want, Rivera?”

  She sounded annoyed. We’d dated briefly, and from the sound of her voice, she probably thought I was calling for a late-night rendezvous. From the background noise, it sounded like she was in a club. Probably on a date with someone else.

  “This is about work. I got a girl who killed a guy, and I don’t know how to charge her.”

  “Isn’t that, like, your job?”

  “The girl’s a Mika Model.”

  That caught her.

  “One of those sex toys?” A pause. “What did it do? Bang the guy to death?”

  I thought about the body, sans head, downstairs in the dungeon.

  “No, she was a little more aggressive than that.”

  Mika was watching from the couch, looking lost. I felt weird talking about the case in front of her. I turned my back, and hunched over my phone. “I can’t decide if this is murder or some kind of product liability issue. I don’t know if she’s a perp, or if she’s just…”

  “A defective product,” Lalitha finished. “What’s the bot saying?”

  “She keeps saying she murdered her owner. And she keeps asking for a lawyer. Do I have to give her one?”

  Lalitha laughed sharply. “There’s no way my boss will want to charge a bot. Can you imagine the headlines if we lost at trial?”

  “So…?”

  “I don’t know. Look, I can’t solve this tonight. Don’t start anything formal yet. We have to look into the existing case law.”

  “So… do I just cut her loose? I don’t think she’s actually dangerous.”

  “No! Don’t do that, either. Just… figure out if there’s some other angle to work, other than giving a robot the same right to due process that a person has. She’s a manufactured product, for Christ’s sake. Does the death penalty even matter to something that’s loaded with networked intelligence? She’s just the… the…” Lalitha hunted for words, “the end node of a network.”

  “I am not an end node!” Mika interjected. “I am real!”

  I hushed her. From the way Lalitha sounded, maybe I wouldn’t have to charge her at all. Mika’s owner had clearly had some issues… Maybe there was some way to walk Mika out of trouble, and away from all of this. Maybe she could live without an owner. Or, if she needed someone to register ownership, I could even—

  “Please tell me you’re not going to try to adopt a sexbot,” Lalitha said.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Come on, you love the ones with broken wings.”

  “I was just—”

  “It’s a bot, Rivera. A malfunctioning bot. Stick it in a cell. I’ll get someone to look at product liability law in the morning.”

  She clicked off.

  Mika looked up mournfully from where she sat on the couch. “She doesn’t believe I’m real, either.”

  I was saved from answering by the crime scene techs knocking.

  But it wasn’t techs on the doorstep. Instead, I found a tall blonde woman with a roller bag and a laptop case, looking like she’d just flown in on a commuter jet.

  She shouldered her laptop case and offered a hand. “Hi. I’m Holly Simms. Legal counsel for Executive Pleasures. I’m representing the Mika Model you have here.” She held up her phone. “My GPS says she’s here, right? You don’t have her down at the station?”

  I goggled in surprise. Something in Mika’s networked systems must have alerted Executive Pleasures that there was a problem.

  “She didn’t call a lawyer,” I said.

  The lawyer gave me a pointed look. “Did she ask for one?”

  Once again, I felt like I was on weird legal ground. I couldn’t bar a lawyer from a client, or a client from getting a lawyer. But was Mika a client, really? I felt like just by letting the lawyer in, I’d be opening up exactly the legal rabbit hole that Lalitha wanted to avoid: a bot on trial.

  “Look,” the lawyer said, softening, “I’m not here to make things difficult for your department. We don’t want to set some crazy legal precedent either.”

  Hesitantly, I stepped aside.

  She didn’t waste any time rolling briskly past. “I understand it was a violent assault?”

  “We’re still figuring that out.”

  Mika startled and stood as we reached the living room. The woman smiled and went over to shake her hand. “Hi Mika, I’m Holly. Executive Pleasures sent me to help you. Have a seat, please.”

  “No.” Mika shook her head. “I want a real lawyer. Not a company lawyer.”

  Holly ignored her and plunked herself and her bags on the sofa beside Mika. “Well, you’re still our property, so I’m the only lawyer you’re getting. Now have a seat.”

  “I thought she was the dead guy’s property,” I said.

  “Legally, no. The Mika Model Service End User Agreement explicitly states that Executive Pleasures retains ownership. It simplifies recall issues.” Holly was pulling out her laptop. She dug out a sheaf of papers and offered them to me. “These outline the search warrant process so you can mak
e a Non-Aggregated Data Request from our servers. I assume you’ll want the owner’s user history. We can’t release any user-specific information until we have the warrant.”

  “That in the End User Agreement, too?”

  Holly gave me a tight smile. “Discretion is part of our brand. We want to help, but we’ll need the legal checkboxes ticked.”

  “But…” Mika was looking from her to me with confusion. “I want a real lawyer.”

  “You don’t have money, dearie. You can’t have a real lawyer.”

  “What about public defenders?” Mika tried. “They will—”

  Holly gave me an exasperated look. “Will you explain to her that she isn’t a citizen, or a person? You’re not even a pet, honey.”

  Mika looked to me, desperate. “Help me find a lawyer, detective. Please? I’m more than a pet. You know I’m more than a pet. I’m real.”

  Holly’s gaze shot from her, to me, and back again. “Oh, come on. She’s doing that thing again.” She gave me a disgusted look. “Hero complex, right? Save the innocent girl? That’s your thing?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Holly sighed. “Well, if it isn’t the girl who needs rescuing, it’s the naughty schoolgirl. And if it’s not the naughty schoolgirl, it’s the kind, knowing older woman.” She popped open her briefcase and started rummaging through it. “Just once, it would be nice to meet a guy who isn’t predictable.”

  I bristled. “Who says I’m predictable?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. There really aren’t that many buttons a Mika Model can push.”

  Holly came up with a screwdriver. She turned and rammed it into Mika’s eye.

  Mika fell back, shrieking. With her cuffed hands, she couldn’t defend herself as Holly drove the screwdriver deeper.

  “What the—?”

  By the time I dragged Holly off, it was too late. Blood poured from Mika’s eye. The girl was gasping and twitching. All her movements were wrong, uncoordinated, spasmodic and jerky.

  “You killed her!”

  “No. I shut down her CPU,” said Holly, breathing hard. “It’s better this way. If they get too manipulative, it’s tougher. Trust me. They’re good at getting inside your head.”

  “You can’t murder someone in front of me!”

  “Like I said, not a murder. Hardware deactivation.” She shook me off and wiped her forehead, smearing blood. “I mean, if you want to pretend something like that is alive, well, have at her. All the lower functions are still there. She’s not dead, biologically speaking.”

  I crouched beside Mika. Her cuffed hands kept reaching up to her face, replaying her last defensive motion. A behavior locked in, happening again and again. Her hands rising, then falling back. I couldn’t make her stop.

  “Look,” Holly said, her voice softening. “It’s better if you don’t anthropomorphize. You can pretend the models are real, but they’re just not.”

  She wiped off the screwdriver and put it back in her case. Cleaned her hands and face, and started re-zipping her roller bag.

  “The company has a recycling center here in the Bay Area for disposal,” she said. “If you need more data on the owner’s death, our servers will have backups of everything that happened with this model. Get the warrant, and we can unlock the encryptions on the customer’s relationship with the product.”

  “Has this happened before?”

  “We’ve had two other user deaths, but those were both stamina issues. This is an edge case. The rest of the Mika Models are being upgraded to prevent it.” She checked her watch. “Updates should start rolling out at 3 a.m., local time. Whatever made her logic tree fork like that, it won’t happen again.”

  She straightened her jacket and turned to leave.

  “Hold on!” I grabbed her sleeve. “You can’t just walk out. Not after this.”

  “She really got to you, didn’t she?” She patted my hand patronizingly. “I know it’s hard to understand, but it’s just that hero complex of yours. She pushed your buttons, that’s all. It’s what Mika Models do. They make you think you’re important.”

  She glanced back at the body. “Let it go, detective. You can’t save something that isn’t there.”

  (2016)

  CASPAR D. LUCKINBILL, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?

  Nick Wolven

  Nick Wolven’s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Clarkesworld, among others. He currently lives in Bronx, NY, and works at Barnard College Library.

  I

  I’m on my way to work when the terrorists strike. The first attack nearly kills me. It’s my fault, partly. I’m jaywalking at the time.

  There I am, in the middle of Sixth Avenue, an ad truck bearing down in the rightmost lane. I feel a buzz in my pocket and take out my phone. I assume it’s Lisa, calling about the TV. I put it to my ear and hear a scream.

  There are screams, and there are screams. This is the real deal. It’s a scream that ripples. It’s a scream that rings. It’s a scream like a mile-high waterfall of glass, like a drill bit in the heart, like a thousand breaking stars.

  I stand shaking in the street. The ad truck advances, blowing paint and air, leaving a strip of toothpaste ads in its wake. I have enough presence of mind to step back as the truck chuffs by. I look down and see a smile on my toes: three perfect spray-painted teeth on each new shoe.

  When I get to the curb, the screaming has stopped, and a man is speaking from my phone.

  “Caspar D. Luckinbill! Attention, Caspar D. Luckinbill! What you just heard were the screams of Ko Nam, recorded as he was tortured and killed by means of vibrational liquefaction. Men like Ko Nam are murdered every day in the FRF. Caspar D. Luckinbill, what are you going to do?”

  What am I going to do? What am I supposed to do? I stand on the curb staring at my phone. I have no idea who Ko Nam is. I have no idea what the FRF is. And what in God’s name is vibrational liquefaction?

  I give it a second’s thought, trying my best to be a good, conscientious, well-informed citizen of the world. But it’s 9:15 and I have teeth on my shoes, and I’m already late for work.

  *

  My employer is the contractor for the external relations department of the financial branch of a marketing subsidiary of a worldwide conglomerate that makes NVC-recognition software. NVC: nonverbal communication. The way you walk. The way you move. Our programs can pick you out of a crowd, from behind, at eighty paces, just by the way you swing your arms. Every move you make, every breath you take. Recognizing faces is so old school.

  We claim to be the company that launched ubiquitous computing. Every company claims that, of course. That’s what makes it so ubiquitous.

  Recognition software is not a technology. Recognition software is an idea. The idea is this: You are the world. Every teeny-weeny-tiny thing you do ripples out and out in cascades of expanding influence. Existence is personal. Anonymity is a lie. It’s time we started seeing the faces for the crowd.

  I believe that’s true because I wrote it. I wrote it for a pamphlet that was sent to investors in the financial branch of the marketing subsidiary by whose ER department I’m employed. I don’t think they used it.

  For eight years running I’ve worked in this office, which is probably a record here in the soi-disant capital del mundo. My wife, Lisa, says I’m wasting my time. She says that someone with my smarts ought to be out there changing the world. I tell her I am changing the world. After all, every teeny-weeny-tiny thing I do ripples out and out in cascades of expanding influence. Lisa says it’s obvious I’ve sold my soul.

  Really, the corporate culture here is quite friendly. The front door greets me by name when I enter. The lobby fixes me coffee, and it knows just how I like it. Seventy percent pan-equator blend, thirty percent biodome-grown Icelandic, roasted charcoal-dark, with twenty milliliters of lactose-reduced Andean free-range llama milk and just a squirt of Sri Lankan cardamom sweetener, timed to be ready the moment I arrive.


  It’s a classy workplace. The bathroom stalls are noise-canceling. The lobby plays light jazz all day long.

  Today when I go in, the jazz isn’t playing. Today there is silence. Then a crackle. A hum.

  And then the screaming begins.

  This time there are words. A woman is sobbing. I can’t make out the language. Some of it sounds like English. All of it sounds very, very sad.

  The receptionist listens from behind his desk. It seems to me that his eyes are disapproving.

  The sobbing goes on for several seconds. Then a man begins to speak.

  “Caspar D. Luckinbill!” the man says. “What you just heard were the cries of Kim Pai as her husband was taken away by government agents. People like Kim Pai’s husband are abducted every day in the FRF. Caspar D. Luckinbill, what are you going to do?”

  The voice cuts off. The light jazz resumes.

  “Abducted!” says the receptionist, looking at the speakers.

  “It’s… something.” I try to explain. “It’s a wrong number. It’s a crossed wire. I don’t know what it is.”

  “The FRF!” the receptionist says, looking at me as if I’ve fallen out of the sky.

  I hurry to my desk.

  My desk chair sees me coming and rolls out to welcome me. My desk is already on. As I sit down, the desk reads me three urgent messages from my supervisor. Then it plays an ad for eye-widening surgery. “Nothing signals respectful attention to an employer, a teacher, or a lover quite like a tastefully widened eye!” Then it plays a video of a man being killed with a table saw.

  I jump out of my chair. I avert my face. When I look back, there’s no more man and no more saw, and the screen is vibrant with blood.

  “Caspar D. Luckinbill!” blares the computer. “Caspar D. Luckinbill, do you know what you just saw? Steve Miklos came to the FRF to teach math to learning-disabled children. Because of his promotion of contraceptives, he was afflicted with acute segmentation by supporters of the HAP. Caspar D. Luckinbill, how can you possibly allow such atrocities to continue? Will you sit idly by while innocent people are slaughtered? Caspar D. Luckinbill, what are you going to do?”