by Hugo Huesca
“Makes sense,” he thought. The attitude towards the Act some people had, that disappointed him. He thought society was beyond those kinds of outbursts. Hell, not even since Chairman Jones’ party got into the White House all those years ago had Sigma seen people so excited against something.
But why had his brain registered the feeling as new? Disappointment was not new to him. As the first of the Robot Activism movement, he was familiar with disappointment. Hell, it was like every success needed years of failure as a condition to move forwards.
Amid the insults and the polite suggestions for him to kill himself, Sigma finally reached the stairs of the Council building, where the crowd of protesters ended. He took one last look at them: mostly middle-aged people, from every position in life and every color of skin. Something to think about, right there, but Sigma wasn’t in a reflective mood. All those different pairs of eyes, looking expectantly at him. Sigma shook his head and turned to the Council.
He reached the top of the stairs without trouble. His hydraulic legs didn’t tire, after all. He looked up; by the marble slab-doors of the entrance his friend and collaborator, Terry Millers, waited for him.
“Sigma! Good to see you made it without trouble,” said Terry, placing a long arm around the robot’s shoulders, “I wanted to be down there and give you some moral support, but… you know—”
“Of course, Terry, don’t sweat it,” said Sigma. It was only polite to let the protesters speak their mind to the person they protested without third-party interruptions. “The crowd was weird, by the way. Seemed almost apathetic.”
“Pay them no mind, old chap, that’s the face of defeat you are looking at. The Parity Act is finally going to pass and there is nothing they can do about it.” Together they walked towards the marble doors, which were open and waiting for them. The finely tuned hearing organs of Sigma already captured the excited conversation of the Council and the other representatives.
They came into a long corridor with red carpet and gold-coated hanging chandeliers, filled with tables with snacks and waiters in tuxedos receiving new arrivals with champagne for humans and refined oil for the robots. Not that the oil did anything for them, because robots didn’t need to drink, and couldn’t process food. But it was a tactful gesture the spokesmen of Robot and Human-kind had come up with. After all, a good deal of the diplomatic work took place over a drink. Now robots could hang out with everyone else, with a glass of some brownish drink in hand. Otherwise, they’d look just awkward standing there trying to figure out what to do with their servo-arms.
“Almost all the delegations are here,” explained Terry. He took two drinks from a waiter without looking at what he was grabbing, then gave them a sniff, gave one to Sigma and kept one for himself. “Everyone wants to arrive early for the party, huh? That should tell us something right there.”
Sigma nodded, although he quelled the urge to roll his eyes in exasperation. For the last half year of daily meetings, someone arriving on time –except his delegation, of course; was a novelty or a mistake they made sure not to repeat.
“No one wants to be here for work, but now that it’s time to celebrate the work is over…” one day he had told his colleagues, “well, tardiness is just human nature. Nothing we can do about it; we should learn to work together accounting for their limits, not judge them over them.” He had rehearsed his mini-speech overnight, to get right the inflections of each word. It meant to keep the spirits high among his delegation, remind them they had to be understanding and graceful. Then an assistant had shyly pointed out a third of the robotic delegations already come late too and that was it for his complaints about punctuality.
Terry and Sigma crossed the corridor and arrived at the antechamber where the party was taking place. It was a place to rest for a second while waiting for a turn to speak in the Council chamber. Today it had been refitted to house as many excited diplomats and politicians as possible. Sigma didn’t recognize half the people there, but the ones he did were easy to pick up, the people whose combined effort had produced one hundred and thirty-six drafts of the Parity Act. They were the ones either out-drinking everyone with a crazed expression in their eyes or the ones just hanging in a corner, pale as death and with terrified deer-in-the-headlights looks.
Terry had to greet about half the delegations, so he excused himself and promised to meet with him later. Sigma was alone in the middle of the room. Half a hundred humans and robots mingled and talked about the topics gossiped about in these parties since the days of the British Empire: politics, sex, gossip; anything but work, please and thank you very much. After Sigma carefully weighted his choices, he joined a good friend in a corner and matched his terrified expression.
“Can’t believe it’s over, huh?” said Gamma Dyson, after making a space for Sigma in his corner. “I honestly thought we would be drafting until the end of the century.”
“You are right, of course. I guess I am used to the routine. Coming in, waiting for the others to arrive, reading minutes, announcements, and then yelling at each other for half a day, then watching the humans go drink heavily, then repeat everything the next day. I think I’m going to miss it, in a way. It was kinda like college.”
“It’s our protocol software, of course. We can be comfortable anywhere, given enough time for our brains to identify a pattern. Handy little system, I think, but a bit scary,” said Gamma, “you can let some nasty things pass if you get used to them.”
Sigma didn’t find it scary. His human acquaintances could do the same, after all. It helped them stay sane.
“Hey, Gamma, Sigma, good to see you!” said another robot delegate, who was trying to out-drink everyone in the room. This was a very hard thing to do when you couldn’t get drunk. But no one noticed, and Beta Rockefeller did seem drunk. Perhaps he had been playing with his extroversion values, and lowering his inhibition, which would do more or less the trick. Some robots did so, the ones perhaps were a tad too fond of human customs, while the others looked at their antics with polite disapproval.
“Beta. Good to see you, pal,” greeted back Gamma. He worked with the robot for close to four stipulations of the Act. Beta tried to make a small, courtly reverence, but stumbled over a pool of spilled oil and crashed to the floor like only a half a ton metal man could do.
Sigma and Gamma looked the other way and pretended they didn’t see it.
“Thank god we have a pill to get rid of alcohol in the bloodstream,” thought Sigma, eying the small lady in the other half of the room who was trying to box the vice-president of Venezuela. Oh, she just knocked him down. The conversations died for a stunned second and then everyone cheered. Sigma sighed.
“I just walked across the protester’s crowd,” he told Gamma, after a minute to let die down other conversational threads, “it was… the reaction I expected from them, alright, and yet different. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Well, they looked tired,” Gamma said, “it is sunny out there, you know. They have been yelling at us since yesterday. They barely screamed at me this morning. But you are the poster child of the Act, they had to put on a show for the cameras. That’s my guess.”
Sigma considered this.
“Perhaps. It’s just… they reminded me of this time I went to the cinema and saw a really bad movie and people started demanding refunds.”
“They are racists, Sigma,” said Gamma, with the tone of someone who is ready to let the argument end now, “don’t waste your time thinking about it.”
Sigma nodded, and went silent. His friend was right; he looked too much into it. He should grab a beer –an oil; mingle like everyone else. The opening ceremony was only minutes from starting, then everyone would take their anti-booze pills and become serious again.
Or he could go talk to Mr. Edmund Chu.
Mr. Chu was no affiliate to any political party or even a delegate. He was the ‘opposition representative’, elected by those who opposed the Parity Act. Every Council meeting had t
o have one, even if it was mostly a ceremonial position. Sometimes they went out of control, though. The opposition representative of the Free Beaches for Everyone Act, two years ago, had brought the entire thing down. It was the reason most beaches were still owned by private entities.
Edmund Chu had been that representative, which explained why the opposition for the Parity Act had all gone to him and elected him unanimously. It didn’t help that took the cause seriously and was personally responsible for about a hundred of the redrafts on the Act. And because Sigma was its poster child, Mr. Chu was more or less the closest he had to an archenemy.
He was a racist –robophobic, smarmy little chubby guy, and Sigma had once said that he would rather lick a magnet than spend more than a second alone with the guy.
If someone knew what’s the deal with the protesters, it was he.
Sigma saw him standing alone by the entrance, two steps from a waiter with a tray filled with hors d'oeuvres, which Mr. Chu was eating straight from the tray, to the horror of the waiter. Sigma felt as if someone was drawing sand-paper across his ventral engine, then steeled himself and went to greet his nemesis.
“Mr. Von Neumann,” said Chu, his mouth filled with eggplant, “you have come to gloat? I didn’t expect that, but please, go ahead. Make my day.” The deal with Chu was, he really wanted him to gloat. It was off-putting, to put mildly. Maybe it was his fetish? Sigma deleted the idea from his short term memory before his brain could extrapolate any images of that.
“You always expect the worst from people, Mr. Chu. I have merely come to talk to you,” Sigma said. He took a tuna snack from the trail of the waiter, and held it in his hand.
“You know you can’t eat that, don’t you?” said Chu. He was right, of course. Sigma stared daggers at him: he was merely being polite, by eating with someone you were talking to. Chu didn’t even blink, so after a pause, Sigma sighed and handed him the canapé, which the man continued to almost inhale under his mustache. “The only part I like of these things, you know. The food.”
“I can see that, yes.”
“Why are you talking to me if not to gloat, Von Neumann? Don’t draw this over, I just want this dumb signing to be over so I can go home.”
For a moment, Sigma was stunned. It was the first time Chu admitted the constant infighting got to him too. He opened his mouth to say something comforting but then the man added:
“There is this strip club that just opened near my block and I’m just dying to check its Romanians out.”
Sigma closed his mouth. He looked around, while doing a mental count to ten.
“Of course you are,” he muttered. He decided to get on point, otherwise he ran the risk of Chu getting into detail of what exactly he wanted to check in those girls. “Listen, Chu, there is something I wanted to ask you about. Just a moment ago I walked through your friends’ demonstration out there.”
“I hope you liked it; it was in your honor, Von Neumann.”
Sigma ignored him. “I sensed some strange pattern beneath the expected robophobia and anger, and I hoped you could enlighten me on its nature.”
“Perhaps it was just your dignity, calling you from inside the Corporation buttocks where you left it,” said Mr. Chu with a venomous smile. Sigma raised a servo-powered eyebrow, and his mind-console alerted him that he was increasing his aggression matrix near safety margins.
“Robots are not property of any corporation,” Sigma said, dryly. “We are our own people. Father-Factories merely sponsor us in exchange for work, just like a normal employment contract, which is something you never heard about, I presume.”
“More like my toaster demanding me rests hours and paid vacations, I think.”
“If your toaster has a complex silicone brain, then you should give him, or her, those vacations,” said Sigma. “And you would know, exactly, how advanced that brain has to be if you went to the meeting where we discussed it, specifically.”
That meeting had lasted four days; and two diplomats who had majors in philosophy had passed out from screaming at each other and everyone else.
“With respect,” said Mr. Chu in a tone that made clear it was just an expression, “I am here to eat and drink fancy free stuff, not to talk about my home appliances.” He said that loud enough for others to hear.
“He went there,” thought Sigma, detachedly. A woman next to him was staring daggers at Chu, and the conversation in the party gradually disappeared into nothing. Someone whispered: “he just said the ‘H’ and ‘A’ words.” The opposition representative somehow pretended that everyone in the party wasn’t staring at him in disapproval.
Sigma considered just leaving, but Terry already had left his chat with the French counselor and stood by his side now. “Do we have a problem?”
“Just a tasteless joke,” said Sigma, after a moment, keeping eye contact with his arch nemesis. “Please don’t make a scene over it,” he called behind him. Reluctantly, people turned around and resumed their conversations, but quieter now, so they didn’t miss any sweet party-drama.
“You have an odd sense of humor, Chu,” said Terry to the chubby man, who was right now cleaning with a cloth some tuna from his mustache.
“Thank you, Mancer, but I was just talking about a toaster. It’s not my fault everyone seems so jumpy around words these days.”
“I think you knew what those words mean in some circles, given you represent them. And my name is Millers.”
Chu dismissed it with a gesture. Sigma was standing there with dignity while privately running a simulation of what would happen to the man’s face if he slapped it with his metal palm at 30 mph. “You asked me about my electorate, Mr. Von Neumann. What’s left to say? You know how they feel about you. I have exposed my points clearly in the meetings. Robots are a menace, can’t trust you, you are too strong, too numerous, and will surely rise against humans if allowed to prosper.”
At his side, Terry snorted, a tad too loud. “You crazy old bastard.”
“I have no plan of rising against mankind, Mr. Chu. We have made thousands of public declarations on the matter. We are just like y—just like Terry here, or that lady over there with the cat pictures. We have a brain, and a conscience, and people who we like, and people who we don’t like, and we don’t go around killing each other more than you do in civilized countries.” Some warlords still used conscious drone-missiles and robot tanks to wage war against one another, but their numbers dwindled by the day. Mostly because drone-missiles are very good at vaporizing warlords.
“You have artificial brains, made in the image of the real thing, and programmed consciences, and your likes and dislikes are imprinted at assembly at those father-factories of yours,” said Chu. “You are man-like, but no man. Whatever you have inside your mind that stops you from deleting your moral fail-safes and going on a rampage right now, you could delete in a day. Don’t lie to me, kid, I know how easily you can step around firmware, I’ve seen it happen before.”
“By faulty models, you lying cheat, you know that just as well as we do,” said Terry, who had now joined the fray as a full participant. “A normal healthy mind has no desire to go around their firmware.”
Since his first waiter had long ran away to the safety of other people, Chu captured the tray of another one with a quick snake-like motion. Then he stuffed other three hors d’oeuvres in his mouth, and chewed loudly.
“There is no evidence of that,” he said between chews, “even if never has happened before. Nowadays, their morals are useful to gain our confidence, but anytime now, when they are stronger than us, they will simply delete it and enslave us all.”
“Chu, you can delete those morals of yours too,” said Sigma, after taking a second to think of how he could reach that dense psychopath. “You only need to walk to a street psychologist, pay it a couple credits and you’ll have them removed by a machine in half an hour. But you don’t do that, even when it there’s proof moral-less people earn more in some business. Your morals are
a part of who you are. Taking them out would be like erasing yourself from existence and placing another guy inside your body, who would be somehow even more of an ass.”
“What makes you think I haven’t done it already?” asked Chu, with a smug smile. “Nothing you said proves anything at all. A human acting logically may not want to try it, and humans not always behave logically. But you are no humans. I don’t know what you may be thinking, if you think at all. There is no evidence of your intentions, other than your words.”
“And their actions,” interjected Terry. Chu kept on ignoring him.
Sigma was about to argue back, but then someone announced the ceremony was close to start. Humans started downing their anti-booze pills, some of them with shots of tequila. Those who had soiled their jackets with oil or other liquids ran to the janitors to get an emergency replacement. Sigma saw Beta standing there, frozen for a second, his cybernetic eyes shining with focus, and then he was perfectly sober, the immature dolt.
A constant stream of people left the room, into the ante-chamber. Later there would be another party, this one would last until early morning. But now it was time to work: The cameras were waiting, and so was the rest of the world.
“Seems like it’s your time to shine, Von Neumann,” told him Mr. Chu, stuffing his pockets of snacks with no shame. “I respectfully hope you choke during your speech.”
“I can’t choke,” said Sigma, confused, and then mentally slapped himself. A manner of speaking. Right.
Chu grinned, smugly. Which was hard to pull off with his packed pockets and his dirty mustache, but he managed just fine. “What you robots have in manufacturing strength and power, you lack in style. Pity, your robot uprising will be a sad affair.”
He stepped aside, but Sigma placed a hand on his shoulder. The mind console named his feelings as ‘dangerous exasperation’ and nicked his aggression levels to just below the safety point.
“Sigma…” Terry warned him, but Sigma dismissed him with a wave of his hand.