We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  I see all that.

  Our audience has to see it too.

  For me, this non-verbal barrage has two takeaways. First, I’m eating lunch with a very successful man, and the true Sam Kahlil is thrilled with his life and the world that made his success possible.

  “Don’t fuck with my apple cart,” those eyes tell me.

  And the second takeaway?

  In this world, I’m the lesser-known face. But I have the strong sense that between us, if we want to be honest, I’m the better actor.

  *

  “Hit a lot of good people hard,” I repeat.

  Repetition gives the brain time to write fresh lines.

  Sam has acquired a sudden fascination for his Cobb salad. What matters is holding his fork with a decisive hand, stabbing those bits of red indistinguishable from bacon, except for every pigless atom and every pigless chemical bond.

  That’s when inspiration strikes at least one of us.

  “I miss those old days,” I say.

  His shyness goes away, anger flaring. But then he remembers the situation and back comes the shy guy. With his face pointed down, his eyes turn up to me, just for an instant. Am I going to dwell on the fictional surgeon?

  Not at all. “I’m talking about those couples, three months after The Event. Those were really interesting times, and I loved them.”

  Down goes the fork, and he sits back.

  “All that drama,” I say.

  “I guess so,” he says softly.

  “I’m not talking about the world being transformed. Considering how much happened, it’s amazing how little genuine excitement that generated. Know what I mean?”

  “I guess so,” he repeats.

  Working on his next fresh lines, probably.

  “No, I’m talking about the crazy passion inside our heads.” I tap my skull. Two taps feels like the right number. “Think about it. The landscape got reworked and reworked hard. The most unimaginative person can’t escape what’s obvious. She wakes to find herself without a job, without status. The unproud member of a species enjoying zero importance in the universe.”

  Sam offers a breathless little laugh.

  “Which is pretty much how things were before,” I continue. “Being nothing, I mean. Really, do you think the Earth’s conquest got half a mention in any alien newspaper? No way, never. But still, we once had this little planet, and for a few centuries we even got to be the biggest, most important creatures. Except for ants and bacteria, of course. But you understand my point, don’t you?”

  No. Looking at those eyes, I can tell that my companion is utterly lost.

  Thank you, Truman Capote.

  “Nobody has work, but we have our pennies,” I continue, my voice running a step too fast. “We get enough to live on, but some of us make a few more pennies. All we have to do is… well, you know what we have to do.”

  He nods.

  “Sure,” he starts to say.

  I interrupt him, saying, “Imagine this restaurant, and it’s a month after The Event. What would we see here?”

  The question triggers laughter. Sam holds some entertaining memories about that subject.

  But I keep talking. “Remember how couples used to fight? Every public meal was an excuse for a battle. ‘You cheating bitch, you ugly bastard.’ That sort of mayhem, sometimes capped with sex on the tables.”

  A fond, rather embarrassed sigh. “Oh, yes.”

  “But mostly, it was curses, and every few minutes, someone threw a punch, and food, and dishes had to get broken. Our audience promised to pay for human drama, and that’s what people thought they were giving.”

  Sam looks at my eyes.

  Honestly curious, I think.

  “You know how real people look?” I ask. “When we fight, I mean.”

  “Not really,” he says, sounding half-proud.

  “I once had a couple boyfriends battle over me. ‘F-this, F-that.’ But when the words quit, everything got quiet. There wasn’t any breath to waste on curses. Quick movement and a lot of ugly swings. Each fellow was as likely to make himself fall as his opponent. The whole thing was pathetically fun, if you want my blunt opinion on this.”

  “When aren’t you blunt?” he asks.

  This should be a funny moment. A kidding, happy moment. But nothing in his tight voice invites laughter.

  I wave at our surroundings. “In a restaurant like this, every lunch would look staged. Know what I mean? Like people who never dance attempting Russian ballet. That’s how ridiculous it all was, and there’s something in that mayhem that I truly, deeply miss.”

  “I don’t understand,” he admits.

  “The wild, over-the-top bullshit. People frantic to be as human as they could possibly be, nothing gained but embarrassment and accidental bruises and not many pennies either. Because as everybody realized, sooner or not, our audience won’t pay for melodrama.”

  Sam gives me a little nod.

  Just looking at the round face, I can tell. He’s wondering what would happen if he punted this nonsense about being old classmates. When you do a job and do it well, there’s always pleasure in sitting with one of your peers, happily talking shop.

  Except that’s not the way I want to steer us.

  “Want to hear about my current boyfriend?” I ask.

  “Not especially,” he starts.

  “He used to be a doctor too,” I say, smiling at him. “But not the medical kind. A PhD in Astronomy. Which is another one of the jobs that got stolen away. Not that most of humanity took much notice, what with all the surgeons and billionaires left with nothing to do.”

  Sam eyes me carefully, unable to guess where this is heading.

  “The big telescopes got closed down,” I say. “And every other science facility too. Since science is just another job done best by machines, and my boyfriend has nothing to do today but sit in bed, thinking about all the big problems that he can’t actually study.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sam says again. “What are we talking about?”

  “My ex-stargazer has a theory,” I say. “About the audience that’s supposedly watching us.”

  “A theory?”

  “Well, it’s a hypothesis. Because theories are bigger than guesses, and he doesn’t have any hard evidence.”

  “What’s his guess?”

  “Nobody is watching us. Our audience is imaginary. The Earth was abandoned, maybe minutes after we lost control of everything. We think we see gods because the pennies keep coming. Because society remains orderly and comfortable. But really, the AIs just dropped their own little machines into place, programmed to control us, and that includes throwing us made-up money whenever we act like good polite people. You know. Civilized lunches in the restaurant, and no collapses into civil war.”

  And with that, one scene ends.

  One of us makes the decision. Pushing aside the uneaten Cobb salad, Sam becomes a different person. He takes one breath, and without exhaling pulls in another, two gasps fighting inside the same aching chest. Then the spent air comes out with the words, “You cannot.”

  Raw emotion pushes into his face, carried along with the livid, miserable blood.

  “I cannot what?” I ask.

  “Tell me they aren’t watching,” he says, troubled to his core. “Because they are. I feel them always. Their eyes are on me now, and they love me so much, and bitch, you won’t make me stop believing that.”

  *

  I try to work the park, but the afternoon is too happy for my tastes. So off early to a busy tavern where a young lady can bounce between ten conversations and as many characters. After that, I head home. Too tired to think, and three days left before I get paid and get the logs to study what the payoff might be for a lunch that increasingly feels like a lousy idea.

  Bed sounds wonderful.

  But I drop in on my mother first. She lives next door in the little house rented with my pennies.

  “Evening, Greatness,” she says to me.r />
  Just as she always does.

  We chat about my day, which is a brief conversation since I avoid any mention of Sam Kahlil. Mom would probably know the name, and believing that bigger, better people deserve to be treated with respect, my story would depress her.

  Besides, I like being the biggest, best soul in her life.

  Done with that duty, I finally reach my front door. Robots treat me like a queen. A feast is generated from gas and memory. But I don’t get far when I hear the laughter coming from the bedroom.

  My boyfriend sits in the middle of my considerable bed, naked and cross legged, reading one of his old books.

  “What’s funny?” I ask.

  “What isn’t?”

  I sit with him for a minute. No cameras watching, but I play the scene as if the audience matters.

  The audience is him.

  “I didn’t know you were coming over,” I finally mention.

  He reads and smiles, and then he closes the book but keeps reading those same words. Inside his head. Funny words, and certainly wise. I can tell that much from watching the play of his smart dark eyes.

  “So where did they go?” I ask.

  He knows exactly who “they” are. Because he’s a very smart man as well as the famous ex-astronomer crowbarred into today’s pivotal scene.

  “Off to distant stars, or jump into another, more interesting universe?” I prod.

  Different nights bring different guesses, but he hears something else in my voice. Taking my hands, he asks, “What’s wrong?”

  I dip my head, admitting, “I have my own guess.”

  “Do you?”

  It would be easy to hear a tone in those two doubting words. So I choose not to notice. Instead I tell him what I’ve been imagining for a long while. “The AI gods were never real,” I offer. “A few geeky geniuses cut our power and Internet and conquered us while we were scared. The world that we live in now? The safety net, the peace? Every good day free of pain and need is their fancy doing.”

  He grins and laughs, appreciating some or all of this fantasy. Then the ex-astronomer asks, “And they did this why?”

  I say nothing, letting the silence play.

  “Because it was such a neat idea,” he says at last, speaking for me.

  I try to laugh.

  He watches me fail, and then gripping my hands harder, he asks, “What is so wrong, Pony?”

  “I broke a man today,” I confess.

  Real tears running.

  (2016)

  Robots exist to do work that no-one else wants to do – because it is too dangerous, perhaps, or because it is simply too dull. Traditionally, the dangerous jobs have fallen to men, and the dull jobs have fallen to women. So it’s no surprise that robots often emerge from their labs pre-gendered. Ken Liu (“The Caretaker”, 2011) and Lauren Fox (“Rosie Cleans House”, 2017) have a great deal of dark fun with the way old attitudes fester in new machines.

  Some jobs are so important, we expend a great deal of time explaining why we love doing them, even if they’re dangerous, even if they’re dull. Getting parents to admit this in public requires patience and often a certain amount of alcohol, but childcare is one of the most tedious chores on the planet. It’s one of those activities that gives lasting value to life while affording us absolutely no happiness in the moment. It’s a set of tasks robots can certainly help with and which, for our own long-term good, we absolutely must not hand over to them.

  This territory isn’t wholly new (there are many good Edwardian stories about upper-middle-class families, and the damage done when they farm their children out to “the help”) but when the help is robotic, these moral dilemmas acquire an often savage edge. Some of the more disturbing and affecting stories here are about children and parents. They include Brian Aldiss’s “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” (1969), Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” (1950) and V. E. Thiessen’s “There Will Be School Tomorrow” (1956) which, while much less well known, captures to a T the uneasy power relations that pertain between parents, children, and civic authority.

  A lot of robot trouble is simply turbo-driven servant trouble, and servant trouble, make no mistake, is a deadly serious business. (Recall how James Fox’s foppish Tony comes a quite spectacular cropper in Joseph Losey’s film The Servant (1963).) If we’re going to let robots into our homes, we should all be taking lessons in how to treat the help, lest it exploit and infantilise us. We certainly don’t want to end up like Helena Bell’s passive-aggressive client in “Robot” (2012).

  Are we destined to exploit, or be exploited by, servants to whom we never really relate? The humans in the most on-the-nose “robot as slave” story in this anthology, Clifford D. Simak’s “I Am Crying All Inside” (1969), at least recognise this tragedy for what it is. Other stories, meanwhile, hint at the possibility of happier outcomes.

  Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (1938) borders on the unreadable now, not so much for its laughable sexual politics as for its wincingly juvenile dialogue. But Del Rey was no dummy, and with a bit of patience the reader will begin to see something really quite revolutionary going on as our male protagonists, proud owners of a fembot servant, begin to to discover, through her example, what real love is, and how a real marriage works. It is, quite unexpectedly, one of the most extraordinary male coming-of-age tales in science fiction.

  A full generation later, Sandra McDonald’s 2012-vintage “Sexy Robot Mom” tells an analogous tale for a different political moment, when an outcast human discovers, in the algorithmic behaviour of an unthinking robot, a moral code worth striving for.

  That’s the exciting and terrifying thing about personal robots: their very existence challenges us to become better people.

  OLD ROBOTS ARE THE WORST

  Bruce Boston

  Bruce Boston was born in Chicago in 1943, and grew up in Southern California, graduating from the University of California, Berkeley. Deeply involved in psychedelia and the political protests of the 1960s (experiences that informed his novel Stained Glass Rain (2003)), he has worked as a computer programmer, college professor, technical writer, book designer, movie projectionist, gardener, and furniture mover – but he’s best known as a poet, with a Bram Stoker Award and a Pushcart Prize taking pride of place on his groaning trophy shelf. He now lives in Ocala, Florida.

  Lurching down the stairs,

  asking questions twice,

  pacing in lopsided circles

  as they speculate aloud

  on the cycles of man,

  the transpiration of tragedy,

  debating the industrial revolution

  and its ultimate unravelling

  in sonorous undertones.

  And all the while

  they are talking and pacing

  and avoiding our calls,

  we must wait and listen,

  annoyed, yet with increasing

  wonder at the depth and breadth

  of their encyclopaedic knowledge,

  the strained eclectic range

  of their misunderstandings.

  And all the while

  their tedious palaver grows

  more sophistic and abstruse,

  the nictitating shutters

  of their eyes send and receive

  signals we have yet to translate,

  a cyberglyph of a language

  composed of tics and winks

  and lightning exclamations.

  At last they come to answer,

  to wheel us to the elevators,

  and you know, despite their

  incompetence and intransigence,

  beyond their endless babbling,

  one gets attached to the old things,

  inured to their clank and shuffle,

  accustomed to the slow caress

  of their crinkled rubber flesh.

  (1989)

  VIRTUOSO

  Herbert Goldstone

  Herbert Goldstone (1920–2009) was for many years the politi
cal editor of the Long Island Daily Press, and public relations advisor to the Nassau County Democratic Party. His tastes naturally tended towards nonfiction, but he did publish the political satire The Wisenheimer Machine, The Jubilee of Touchstone Able (a novel about buddies in World War 2), and this story, his only venture into science fiction. A lot of stories of the period wondered whether there was anything that machines couldn’t do better than humans. Goldstone went a step further: if machines could best us, then what would they choose to do?

  “Sir?”

  The Maestro continued to play, not looking up from the keys.

  “Yes, Rollo?”

  “Sir, I was wondering if you would explain this apparatus to me.”

  The Maestro stopped playing, his thin body stiffly relaxed on the bench. His long supple fingers floated off the keyboard.

  “Apparatus?” He turned and smiled at the robot. “Do you mean the piano, Rollo?”

  “This machine that produces varying sounds. I would like some information about it, its operation and purpose. It is not included in my reference data.”

  The Maestro lit a cigarette. He preferred to do it himself. One of his first orders to Rollo when the robot was delivered two days before had been to disregard his built-in instructions on the subject.

  “I’d hardly call a piano a machine, Rollo,” he smiled, “although technically you are correct. It is actually, I suppose, a machine designed to produce sounds of graduated pitch and tone, singly or in groups.”

  “I assimilated that much by observation,” Rollo replied in the brassy baritone which no longer sent tiny tremors up the Maestro’s spine. “Wires of different thickness and tautness struck by felt-covered hammers activated by manually operated levers arranged in a horizontal panel.”

  “A very cold-blooded description of one of man’s nobler works,” the Maestro remarked drily. “You make Mozart and Chopin mere laboratory technicians.”

  “Mozart? Chopin?” The duralloy sphere that was Rollo’s head shone stark and featureless, its immaculate surface unbroken but for twin vision lenses. “The terms are not included in my memory banks.”