We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  *

  We go back to the reefhouse when the water gets cold, then me and Vera hop in the hot tub while Aline raids the minibar for mojito supplies. With a big billowy cloud of steam between us, it’s easy to imagine Vera’s got her updates and her perfect hair, which in turn makes it easier for me to realtalk her. Which is my duty as first best friend. Sure, Aline’s way wattage and way funtime, but I am Vera’s confidante.

  “So how actually are you, V?” I ask. “No need for brave facial, love. Be serious, okay?”

  “I’m actually good,” she says, tipping her head back. “Now that I’m out of neural recovery, really good. The hospital food was shit.” She grins and flicks some water at me.

  This is not how I was envisioning it. I thought she’d admit how miserable she’s been all month, maybe cry a little, and I could comfort her and reassure her that when her Face is back it will be like it never ever left. I did not envision her so blissy about everything. Maybe a few mojitos are needed first.

  “You’re being so brave about the situation,” I say, because I didn’t have a backup plan. “And when your Face is back online, it’ll be like nothing ever happened. You will forget this month so fast.”

  “Not exactly, Bess.” She raises an eyebrow, which is way furrier than an eyebrow has any right to be.

  “Not exactly, what?”

  “If they get my Face running again, it won’t have any of my old stuff,” Vera says with a shrug. “That’s all gone. Permagone.”

  She says it so nonchalant that for a second I do not even understand, and then when I do, I know this is selfish, but the first thing I think is how her Face, or at least her update cloud, was like 35 percent me from all the party-streams and snaps and curated convos we shared, and now all of that is gone and she doesn’t even care. I could slap her until I remember that she is recovering from a serious viral strike and probably medded sky-high. Maybe she should not be drinking mojitos.

  “Why’re you saying if?” I ask. “Why if?”

  “When,” Vera corrects.

  I narrow my eyes. “V. That night you caught the virus, do you remember what you chatted me? Looking for…”

  “Mojitos!” Aline announces. “Except with no mint. So, rum and lime juice.” She hands us our drinks, then sticks the handle of rum and the plastic bottle of mix and the few remaining Bacardi Slushes into the little floating thermos that is bobbing around with us in the water. She slips into the tub between me and Vera and sends me a Whispa at the same time, like, why are you AMAing her about the night she got viral, she does not want to think about that right now!

  I do not want to reply, so instead I hold up my not-mojito. “To Vera’s health, right? Um, salud.”

  “Yeah, whatever, salud,” Aline says, but she holds up her glass and grins. Vera holds hers up, too, but doesn’t look at me when we drink.

  *

  The hot water and cold drinks do their tingly headrush thing, and pretty soon all three of us are turvy and blissy and laughing. We make a drinking game out of the floating thermos, as in whoever it floats to via the current has to drink, and for some reason it keeps coming back around to Aline, and she’s kicking her feet at it like no, no, no, you evil little robot, and Vera is hiccupping how she does when she laughs too much, and it feels almost like we’re drinking for the first time again.

  Me and Aline apologize to Vera, ultra-blubbery, for the Venice thing. Then, still in the repentant spirit, Aline confesses that she was still hooking up with Thierry when I started dating him, but I already knew and never much liked him anyway. Vera tells us how her mom ordered her a bunch of physical makeup from some specialty place, but she had no clue what to do with it and ended up smearing it all over her hospital room’s wall, pretending to suffer a delusion where she believed she was Pablo Picasso.

  Before long Aline flicks out, sliding down the side of the hot tub and mumbling about how she way way loves us, which is sweet. We get her out and nest her in some towels on the couch, propped on her side just in case. Then it’s just me and V and we’re drunk.

  “What’s it feel like not to have your Face?” I say. “Besides horrible.”

  We’re in the kitchen now because we’re looking for acetaminophen. You crush one and mix it in a glass of water and you wake up without a hangover, or at least Aline thinks so.

  “It was only odd for a few days,” Vera says, scraping around on the shelves, up on tiptoe. “And then you feel… light.”

  “Light how?”

  “Like a balloon,” Vera says. “Up, up, and away, strump.” She turns around, twisting a fistful of the fabric of her shirt in a way a Face probably would not allow. “You want to try?”

  It seems really obvious to me, now that I’m drunk and I remember back to that night when she chatted me. Maybe I’ve known this whole time.

  “You got the virus on purpose.”

  “Yeah. Did.” Vera looks relieved to say it. She smiles her unwhite smile and it makes me so angry. “Looking for a way to be real again, remember?”

  “I thought you were looking for fucking fashion leaks,” I snap. “Thought you tapped something bad by accident. Everyone was so gutted for you, and worried—”

  “You want to try?” Vera repeats, ignoring me as she does when she’s drunk. “Not a full deletion. Just a flicker.” She sinks down onto the glassy kitchen floor, tugging me down by the wrists. Her bare skin is warm and well textured even though I thought it would be cold and goopy for some reason.

  “But don’t you love us still?” I ask, the mads transmuting to sads all at once. If I was Aline I’d be throwing the cartoon tears by the bucket. Instead I just feel like I’ve got hard plastic in my throat. “Everything we did together, V. It’s gone, V?”

  “I’ve still got it where it counts,” Vera says, pulling me into one of those sloppy hugs that usually only happen after one of us throws up. She feels softer than normal.

  “Like, you offsite stored it somewhere?” I sniff, only half-joking.

  “Just try it for a bit,” Vera says. “Just us two.”

  She shows me how to get there, down under all the masked protocols and shit, past all these blistery red pop-ups asking me what exactly I am doing. The override is so simple, just a little off/on toggle.

  “That’s why I had to use the virus,” Vera says. “Too easy to go back, otherwise. That’s what other people were saying.”

  The toggle revolves around us on the kitchen floor, a glowy little satellite. I don’t know if I can do it.

  “Minimalism might be back in,” Vera says. “Right?”

  “Yeah, strump, whatever, strump.” I take a deep breath. “Hold my hand, would you?”

  I know I can’t preview before I do it, because if I preview I’ll see myself looking so ugly and lonely and small and anonymous I will not be able to go through with it. Instead I try to think about how Vera looked in the waves, how I looked as a kid.

  Holding hands with her, I switch off my Face. Everything dissolves around me, all my updates, all my streams, all my little bits of manufactured me, and it feels almost like coming up for air.

  (2016)

  THE TURING TEST

  Chris Beckett

  Born in Oxford in 1955, Chris Beckett is a former social worker who now writes and lectures on this subject. He is the author of seven novels (the most recent, Beneath the World, A Sea, came out in April 2019) and won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2012 for his novel Dark Eden. Beckett deploys robots only occasionally, but to devastating effect, laying bare all the ways we value, and fail to value, each other. In his debut novel The Holy Machine (2004) a man obsessed with a sexbot finds himself defending her burgeoning sentience. The following story – originally published in Interzone and collected with thirteen others in The Turing Test (coll 2008) – fought off excellent non-genre competition in 2009 to win the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

  I can well remember the day I first encountered Ellie because it was a particularly awful one. I run a London gall
ery specializing in contemporary art, which means of course that I deal largely in human body parts, and it was the day we conceded a court case and a very large sum of money—in connection with a piece entitled “Soul Sister.”

  You may have heard about it. We’d taken the piece from the up and coming “wild man of British art,” George Linderman. It was very well reviewed and we looked like we’d make a good sale until it came out that George had obtained the piece’s main component—the severed head of an old woman—by bribing a technician at a medical school. Someone had recognized the head in the papers and, claiming to be related to its former owner, had demanded that the head be returned to them for burial.

  All this had blown up some weeks previously. Seb, the gallery owner, and I had put out a statement saying that we didn’t defend George’s act, but that the piece itself was now a recognized work of art in the public domain and that we could not in conscience return it. We hired a top QC to fight our corner in court and he made an impressive start by demanding to know whether Michelangelo’s David should be broken up if it turned out that the marble it had been made from was stolen and that its rightful owner preferred it to be made into cement.

  But that Thursday morning the whole thing descended into farce when it emerged that the head’s relatives were also related to the QC’s wife. He decided to drop the case. Seb decided to pull the plug and we lost a couple of hundred grand on an out-of-court settlement to avoid a compensation claim for mental distress. Plus, of course we lost “Soul Sister” itself—to be interred in some cemetery somewhere, soon to be forgotten by all who had claimed to be so upset about it. What was it, after all, once removed from the context of a gallery, but a half kilo of plasticized meat?

  That wasn’t the end of it either. I’d hardly got back from court when I got a call from one of our most important clients, the PR tycoon Addison Parves. I’d sold him four “Limb Pieces” by Rudy Slakoff for £15,000 each two weeks previously and they’d started to go off. The smell was intolerable, he said, and he wanted it fixed or his money back.

  So I phoned Rudy (he is arguably Linderman’s principal rival for the British wild man title) and asked him to either repickle the arms and legs in question or replace them. He was as usual aggressive and rude and told me (a) to fuck off, (b) that I was exactly the kind of bourgeois dilettante that he most hated, and (c) that he had quite deliberately made the limb pieces so that they would be subject to decay.

  “… I’m sick of this whole gallery thing—yeah, yours included, Jessica—where people can happily look at shit and blood and dead meat and stuff, because it’s all safely distanced from them and sanitized behind glass or on nice little pedestals. Death smells, Jessica. Parves’d better get used to it. You’d better get used to it. I finished with ‘Limb Pieces’ when Parves bought the fuckers. I’m not getting involved in this. Period.”

  He hung up, leaving me fuming, partly because what he said was such obvious crap—and partly because I knew it was true.

  Also, of course, I was upset because, having lost a fortune already that day, we stood to lose a further £60,000 and/or the goodwill of our second biggest client. Seb had been nice about the “Soul Sister” business—though I’d certainly been foolish to take it on trust from Linderman that the head had been legally obtained—but this was beginning to look like carelessness.

  I considered phoning Parves back and trying to persuade him that Rudy’s position was interesting and amusing and something he could live with. I decided against it. Parves hated being made to look a fool and would very quickly become menacing, I sensed, if he didn’t get his own way. So, steeling myself, I called Rudy instead and told him I’d give him an extra £10,000 if he’d take “Limb Pieces” back, preserve the flesh properly, and return them to Parves.

  “I thought you’d never ask!” he laughed, selling out at once and yet maddeningly somehow still retaining the moral high ground, his very absence of scruple making me feel tame and prissy and middle-class.

  I phoned Parves and told him the whole story. He was immensely amused.

  “Now there is a real artist, Jessica,” he told me. “A real artist.”

  He did not offer to contribute to the £10,000.

  *

  Nor was my grim day over even then. My gallery is in a subscriber area, so although there’s a lot of street life around it—wine bars, pavement cafes, and so on—everyone there has been security vetted and you feel perfectly safe. I live in a subscriber area too, but I have to drive across an open district to get home, which means I keep the car doors locked and check who’s lurking around when I stop at a red light. There’s been a spate of phony squeegee merchants lately who smash your windows with crowbars and then drag you out to rob you or rape you at knifepoint. No one ever gets out of their car to help.

  That evening a whole section of road was closed off and the police had set up a diversion. (I gather some terrorists had been identified somewhere in there and the army was storming their house.) So I ended up sitting in a long tailback waiting to filter onto a road that was already full to capacity with its own regular traffic, anxiously eyeing the shadowy pedestrians out there under the street lights as I crawled towards the intersection. I hate being stationary in an open district. I hate the sense of menace. It was November, a wet November day. Every cheap little shop was an island of yellow electric light within which I caught glimpses of strangers—people whose lives mine would never touch—conducting their strange transactions.

  What would they make of “Soul Sister” and “Limb Pieces,” I wondered? Did these people have any conception of art at all?

  A pedestrian stopped and turned towards me. I saw his tattooed face and his sunken eyes and my heart sank. But he was only crossing the road. As he squeezed between my car and the car in front he looked in at me, cowering down in my seat, and grinned.

  *

  It was 7:30 by the time I got back, but Jeffrey still wasn’t home. I put myself through a quick shower and then retired gratefully to my study for the nourishment of my screen.

  My screen was my secret. It was what I loved best in all the world. Never mind art. Never mind Jeffrey. (Did I love him at all, really? Did he love me? Or had we simply both agreed to pretend?) My screen was intelligent and responsive and full of surprises, like good company. And yet unlike people, it made no demands of me, it required no consideration, and it was incapable of being disappointed or let down.

  It was expensive, needless to say. I rationalized the cost by saying to myself that I needed to be able to look at full-size 3D images for my work. And it’s true that it was useful for that. With my screen I could look at pieces from all around the world, seeing them full-size and from every angle; I could sit at home and tour a virtual copy of my gallery, trying out different arrangements of dried-blood sculptures and skinless torsos; I could even look at the gallery itself in real time, via the security cameras. Sometimes I sneaked a look at the exhibits as they were when no one was there to see them: the legs, the arms, the heads, waiting, motionless in that silent, empty space.

  But I didn’t really buy the screen for work. It was a treat for myself. Jeffrey wasn’t allowed to touch it. (He had his own playroom and his own computer, a high-spec but more or less conventional PC, on which he played his war games and fooled around in his chatrooms.) My screen didn’t look like a computer at all. It was more like a huge canvas nearly two meters square, filling up a large part of a wall. I didn’t even have a desk in there, only a little side table next to my chair where I laid the specs and the gloves when I wasn’t using them.

  Both gloves and specs were wireless. The gloves were silk. The specs had the lightest of frames. When I put them on, a rich 3D image filled the room and I was surrounded by a galaxy of possibilities which I could touch or summon at will. If I wanted to search the web or read mail or watch a movie, I would just speak or beckon and options would come rushing towards me. If I wanted to write, I could dictate and the words appeared—or, if I prefer
red it, I could move my fingers and a virtual keyboard would appear beneath them. And I had games there, not so much games with scores and enemies to defeat—I’ve never much liked those—but intricate 3D worlds which I could explore and play in.

  I spent a lot of time with those games. Just how much time was a guilty secret that I tried to keep even from Jeffrey, and certainly from my friends and acquaintances in the art world. People like Rudy Slakoff despised computer fantasies as the very worst kind of cozy, safe escapism and the very opposite of what art is supposed to offer. With my head I agreed, but I loved those games too much to stop. (I had one called Night Street, which I especially loved, full of shadowy figures, remote pools of electric light… I could spend hours in there. I loved the sense of lurking danger.)

  Anyway, tonight I was going to go for total immersion. But first I checked my mail, enjoying a recently installed conceit whereby each message was contained in a little virtual envelope which I could touch and open with my hands and let drop—when it would turn into a butterfly and flutter away.

  There was one from my mother, to be read later.

  Another was from Harry, my opposite number at the Manhattan branch of the gallery. He had a “sensational new piece” by Jody Tranter. Reflexively I opened the attachment. The piece was a body lying on a bench, covered except for its torso by white cloth. Its belly had been opened by a deep incision right through the muscle wall—and into this gash was pressed the lens of an enormous microscope, itself nearly the size of a human being. It was as if the instrument was peering inside of its own accord.

  Powerful, I agreed. But I could reply to Harry another time.

  And then there was another message from a friend of mine called Terence. Well, I say a friend. He is an occasional client of the gallery who once got me drunk and persuaded me to go to bed with him. A sort of occupational hazard of sucking up to potential buyers, I persuaded myself at the time, being new to the business and anxious to get on, but there was something slightly repulsive about the man and he was at least twice my age. Afterwards I dreaded meeting him for a while, fearing that he was going to expect more, but I needn’t have worried. He had ticked me off his list and wanted nothing else from me apart from the right to introduce me to others, with a special, knowing inflection, as “a very dear friend.”