Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “I know that,” Lexa said. “But are you OK?”

  Philo sighed and put down his pen. Rubbed his temples. I should be used to this by now, he thought. He’d certainly had enough practice being a fugitive and an outsider. Even before turning pirate, even before the Pandemic, he’d never been anything but a stranger in foreign territory. Yet for all that, and for all his experience with childrearing under dire circumstances, fatherhood could still feel like the most alien country of them all.

  He must have shared some of Seraphina’s body chemistry, though, for the smile he gave Lexa—after a long pause—was genuine, weary but undefeated. “I’m as OK,” he finally said, “as any black Mennonite felon environmentalist submarine commander can be, who can’t write a noun without at least two modifiers and whose oldest kid wants to burn down the Louvre.”

  He took Lexa’s hand across the table, and squeezed it, and Rabi belched into her orange juice and said: “Love.”

  “Tom,” said the radio, “Tom, are you absolutely sure that no innocent bystanders were killed or maimed during this terrorist action?”

  “Well, Carol, they’ve got the barricades drawn pretty far back, and none of us have been allowed inside the terminal yet. It would be reckless of me to speak of mayhem without more proof, though theoretically, anything could be going on in there . . .”

  A Fifteen-Hour Egg

  “Tell me again what these microchips do,” Seraphina said. They were in a utility room that budded off one of the Lightning Transit track tunnels; in fact it was the same graffitied chamber where, once upon a time, Kite Edmonds and Vanna Domingo had stood their ground against an onslaught of poodle-sized rats. Now Morris fiddled with high tech beneath a dirt-caked, sixty-watt ceiling lamp. BRER Squirrel kept watch for feds in the tunnel outside.

  “They take abstract information and spin a self-aware personality out of it,” Morris replied. “It’s similar to the technology used to create computer personality templates, but this is next-generation, much more versatile and powerful.” In his hands he held a poor man’s Fabergé egg, homemade from the contents of Tom Sawyer’s pockets. Used string, a ticket stub, a candy wrapper, and a butterfly wing all floated in a hard resinous shell surrounding a yolk of pure Memory, a specially culled selection from Seraphina’s African Knowledge Store.

  “I’m not sure how it works, exactly,” Morris continued. He was teasing open tiny slots in the egg shell and inserting the stolen microchips. “Some kind of pastiche effect, like making up a fairy tale using stuffed animals and other objects you see lying around your bedroom. Although in this case you’re fabricating a psyche rather than a narrative.”

  “And it can really think?” Twenty-Nine Words asked.

  “Well. That’s probably an exaggeration. I mean it should pass a Turing test with flying colors, but true self-awareness is a toughy. The technology was pioneered by the army; they wanted to build a fully automated tank, so they took a set of these chips and wired them into the control systems of an M6 Buchanan. Then they fed the tank a big dose of military history and tactics and let it generate an id for itself.”

  “Did that work?”

  “Apparently not the way they intended. I don’t know the specifics, but my guess is it turned on them, maybe blew away a reviewing stand full of generals. The research program got cancelled in a hurry. That would have been that, except that the brown shirts at the Un-Un-American Activities Division somehow got clearance to borrow a set of the microchips for a Big Brother project of their own. This was on its way to an F.B.I. field-tech group in Silicon Valley before I had it diverted.”

  “This personality it’s weaving,” Seraphina said. “It’s not just going to be an Electric Negro without a body, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Morris said. “Electric Africa, maybe. Have to cross our fingers and see. Even if it’s a complete bust, at least the feds have one less piece of hardware to play with.”

  BRER Beaver, on the floor by Seraphina’s foot, slapped his tail twice. “I don’t like it. This whole experiment strikes me as unsafe. Artificial intelligence is nothing to be trifled with, particularly stolen artificial intelligence.”

  Morris popped another chip into the egg. “Hey Beaver, it’s not your job to be my babysitter.”

  “You may have intended to include that qualification in my programming, but you forgot. Which proves my point. You’re dabbling in things best left alone.”

  Seraphina thought to say something, but didn’t. Twenty-Nine Words chose that moment to lean closer to Morris, sweeping back the hood of his polar bear suit as he did so. The pink shell of his bare ear, dainty, round, and with a lobe you could nibble on for days, made Seraphina flush.

  “Not to worry,” Morris said. “First thing we’ll do is give it a complete psych evaluation to make sure it’s user-friendly and sane.” He popped in the last chip and thumbed a depression in the bottom of the egg. It beeped. “That’s it. Fifteen-hour gestation period, and we’ll have a baby . . . or something.”

  He held it up so they could all see. BRER Squirrel, minus her batteries, thumped to the floor beside him.

  “I’ll take that egg,” Maxwell said.

  BRER Beaver moved swiftly; so did Maxwell. He drew his Leg back for a field-goal attempt, kicking the Beaver hard enough to scramble its circuits.

  “I’ll take that egg,” Maxwell said again. He pointed the machine pistol at Twenty-Nine Words, who was groping for a bunny under his bearskin. “You better not be reaching for anything other than lint, soldier. Get your hands up!”

  They all put their hands up. “Listen,” Morris tried to say, “you don’t want to mess around with—” But Maxwell cut him off with a warning gesture. He jettisoned a few paperbacks from his jacket and pocketed the egg. Only then did he look directly at Seraphina.

  “Now,” Maxwell said. “Now we’ll see how you like it, having something stolen from you. Something important to you, something you loved, maybe, surgically removed by a stranger. See if you think it’s fun.”

  Still brandishing the gun, he backed out. A yellow-and-black Maintenance Engine chugged by on the near track; Maxwell snagged a handrail and swung himself aboard. The Engine carried him away.

  “Oh boy,” Morris said, lowering his hands.

  “He stole my Africa,” said Seraphina.

  “Maybe we can track him down and get it back,” Twenty-Nine Words said. “Do you know who he is?”

  “He comes in the library sometimes. I don’t know his name.”

  “Do you know if he’s computer-literate?” Morris was rubbing his chin, calculating. “He has a gun, so he can’t be that much of an intellectual, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Seraphina said. “Do you think he might break the egg?”

  “I’m more worried that he’ll plug it into a computer with an open network link without testing it first. The selection of Africana we used. . . . I purposely left out Louis Farrakhan’s more incendiary speeches, but there’s still a biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture and a history of the Zulus in there. There’s a teensy potential for trouble if it gets loose, you see what I’m saying?”

  “Oh,” said Seraphina.

  “Oh,” said Twenty-Nine Words.

  BRER Beaver, splayed up against the wall, sputtered: “I told you sss . . . told you sss . . . told you sss . . .”

  9

  Our old friend Ayn Rand has something to offer on the subject of pollution. On a Sunday afternoon in May, 1971, she appeared before a nation-wide television audience and denounced the ecology movement for being anti-life, anti-man, and anti-mind. Among other things she said it was a last-ditch effort to destroy what remained of the capitalist system.

  I’ve long forgotten her actual words, but my supercharged memory and her position on the ecology movement would suggest something like this:

  All of you out zere beyond ze age of twenty-nine should get down on your knees every time you zee a smokestack. . . . Pollution is ze symbol of human achievement. Wizzout t
echnolochy and pollution, man would still be living in ze stone age. . . . We are locked in a life-and-death struggle between nature and technolochy, between mindless rocks and trees and ze boundless genius of ze human mind. . .

  —Jerome Tuccille, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand

  Safety doesn’t sell.

  —Lee lacocca, “father of the Ford Pinto”

  2008: The Nigeria Landfill Protest

  Christian Gomez’s death was made possible by a grant from the Ford Motor Company.

  Between 1966 and 1980, Ford manufactured over twenty million cars and trucks with a defective automatic transmission design that allowed them to shift spontaneously from park into reverse. A vehicle left idling or parked on an incline might start rolling backwards at any time, surprising a motorist who had stooped to unload packages, or a child who had picked the wrong moment to crawl across a driveway. Runaway park-to-reverse Fords caused thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths but remained on the road because Ford management did not believe circumstances warranted the enormous expense of a recall.

  During this same period, then-Ford president Lee Iacocca took a special interest in the development of the Pinto, Ford’s answer to small-sized foreign imports like the VW Beetle. Rushed into production, the Pinto’s design included a poorly protected gas tank that tended to rupture and ignite during rear-end collisions at speeds as low as twenty miles per hour. A simple modification would have corrected the problem, but faced with an added manufacturing cost of $11 per car, Ford decided it would be cheaper to leave in the defect and suffer the inevitable liability lawsuits. Hundreds of Pinto passengers subsequently burned to death in accidents that would otherwise have been survivable.

  This is all ancient history, of course. The Ford Pinto was recalled in 1978; in 1980 Ford switched to a new automatic transmission design, and, in lieu of a recall, mailed out warning stickers to owners of older-model automatics, advising them to be really, really careful when parking. That was that, as far as Ford was concerned.

  But on May 1, 2008, Christian Gomez got a blast from the past. It had been a bad day already, a day of fruitless debate over the future of Gant Industries. The Gant Automatic Servant was shaping up to be the hot product of the early twenty-first century, the sort of success that offered boundless possibilities for growth and expansion of the business, sky-is-the-limit opportunities . . . all undermined by the fact that Gomez and Harry Gant couldn’t agree on what to do with their profits.

  Gomez wanted to invest in resource development in the new Free-Trade Zone of Sub-Saharan Africa. Entire countries full of exploitable land had become available in the aftermath of the ’07 War, and a company with a steady cash flow and a wage-free Servant labor pool stood to make billions. But Harry Gant didn’t think the African idea was “neat” enough. “It’s not that I’m dead set against it, Christian,” Gant had told him, “it just doesn’t excite me.” Of course where Harry was concerned, lack of excitement was as deadly as active dislike.

  What Harry wanted to do with the profits from the Servant was “invest in America.” Christian Gomez wasn’t sure what exactly that entailed—neither was Harry, probably—though it evidently included spending lots of money on the purchase and/or construction of very tall buildings. In a recent TV interview, Gant had confessed a secret dream to rebuild the Empire State Building (this dream was news to Gomez); he’d even gone so far as to contact a Manhattan realtor for a price quote on the property. He had also contacted Turner Broadcasting, which was looking to lease or sell the unfinished Turner Minaret in Atlanta so that CNN could afford to buy more news blimps.

  Beyond the skyscraper mania, Harry wouldn’t stop monkeying with their cash cow. “Little tweaks and refinements are one thing,” Gomez said, waving a twenty-page wish list of Servant design changes that Gant had drafted, “but this is overkill. OK, we don’t see eye to eye on the question of planned obsolescence, I can be flexible on that. As for your suggestion about making them look and sound more human, that might be worth considering once we get around to bringing out a domestic model. But right now, with our principal markets being industrial and military . . .”

  “Not military,” Gant said. “You know my views on that.”

  “We have to sell to the military, Harry. It’s patriotic and it’s smart. You know how many soldiers they lost in the Pandemic? Twenty-two percent attrition across the board. Four years later and the trained manpower shortage is still so critical they’ve got women driving fucking tanks and marching with the infantry. Rumor has it that’s the real reason the war in Africa ran hot—the Pentagon got scared that conventional forces wouldn’t be enough to cut it. But with Automatic GIs augmenting live units, we can get the mothers, daughters, and nukes back off the front lines.”

  “It’s violence and I don’t like it. I say no.”

  “Harry—”

  “You know, I talked to John Hoover. He told me that he thought we could have a prototype domestic model ready in a year, with human form, features, and voice. Not perfect at first of course, but in time we’ll be able to make Servants that look real enough to be family. That’s the product we want to sell, Christian: a customized home appliance that doubles as a faithful friend. Forget Automatic Soldiers; I’m talking about an Automatic Companion, an Automatic Significant Other . . . well, maybe not quite that. It’ll be a hundred times better than a Gant Interactive VCR, a thousand times better than a pet. Polite, hard-working, funny, sympathetic, reliable, safe . . .”

  “Safe,” Gomez echoed. “That’s another subject you’ve gone overboard on in this list. The Servants don’t need any more safety features.”

  “Not for coal-mine duty, maybe, but in a domestic role people are going to demand that they’re as safe as we can make them. Hell, I’m going to demand it.”

  Gomez leafed through the pages of the wish list. “Quintuple-fail-safe behavioral inhibitors . . . morally cognizant logic circuits . . . you’re talking about teaching the damn things ethics, Harry.”

  “Westinghouse has a new washing machine that can separate whites and colors by itself. Same principle.”

  “But will people be willing to pay for that principle?”

  “Of course they will.”

  “No, Harry. Safety sounds good, but the moment it starts costing money it turns into a big loser. Safety doesn’t sell.”

  “But we’re going to make it sell, Chris.”

  Of course half of Gant Industries belonged to Gomez, and in theory he could veto any or all of Harry’s initiatives, just as Harry vetoed his; but stalemate was no victory, and as the company name suggested, it was Gant who ended up calling most of the shots. The man was indefatigable, nearly impossible to wear down once his mind was set; he responded to each and every objection with a fresh wave of enthusiasm for his own point of view. Gomez just didn’t have the stamina to match him.

  Something had to be done. But Gomez didn’t want to break up the corporation, didn’t want to jeopardize their success curve with a court battle; who knew, Harry Gant might walk away from such a battle with sole ownership of the Automatic Servant patent. No, what Gomez needed to do was find a way to shift the balance of power by as little as one percent. Gant’s stubbornness would lose much of its potency if he could be outvoted.

  “We have to take it public,” Gomez decided. “Stockholders would ground your flights of fancy in a hurry, Harry.”

  So saying, Christian Gomez stepped off a street corner in downtown Atlanta, and died. A driverless ’77 Ford Lincoln Continental idled at curbside, and as Gomez stepped behind it the car dropped into reverse, automatically releasing its parking brake. It rolled, clipping Gomez in the shins with its rear bumper. He fell across the back trunk like a prize buck trussed by hunters. The Lincoln jounced over a pothole and accelerated.

  One witness later told police that Gomez had tried to jump off the runaway car but had been unable to. “He saw the cross street coming up and started shouting ‘Help, I’m stuck, I’m stuck!’”

>   “Fucked,” a second witness corrected. “He said ‘I’m fucked.’ He was right, too.”

  Stuck or fucked, Christian Gomez was borne backwards through one of the busier midtown intersections. Fortunately, the light was with him. Unfortunately, there was a parked car sitting just beyond the intersection, directly in the Lincoln Continental’s path. Very unfortunately, that parked car turned out to be a ’73 Ford Pinto—possibly the last one in the world—facing the wrong way, its Achilles’ backside exposed to the oncoming Lincoln.

  “It blew up,” the first witness said. “The Connie couldn’t have been doing more than twenty or twenty-five, but the little car just whooshed into flame. The guy on the Connie’s back hood whooshed with it.”

  The second witness nodded affirmation. “Damn Jap imports!”

  And so, in one whoosh, Harry Gant became the sole proprietor of Gant Industries and the Automatic Servant. The police inquest into the death turned up several irregularities. No owners could be found for the two cars; an attempt to trace the license plates and serial numbers through the Department of Motor Vehicles brought a response of NEGATIVE DATA OUTPUT MODALITY, which meant that the computer had lost the files. Also, investigators couldn’t help remarking on the coincidence of there being two thirty-year-old Fords in working condition in the same city. Though Gomez’s death was officially ruled accidental, an act of God and Detroit, Atlanta police continued to nurse suspicions that it had been more than just incredible bad luck.

  The mystery might have been taken up by the media, had it not been eclipsed by an even better story. Ellen Leeuwenhoek of The Long Distance Call was among the first reporters to reach the scene of the accident; she’d come to downtown Atlanta on unrelated business and reached the collision site before the metal cooled. On the street corner from which Christian Gomez had taken his last step Ellen found a broken-hinged briefcase and a blue folder stamped NIGERIA LANDFILL PROPOSAL. After snapping some pictures of the wreckage she faxed the contents of the folder to Lexa Thatcher in New York City. Lexa called Joan Fine.