Robots: The Recent A.I.

by Elizabeth Bear

  Through a service tunnel she went, between floors, and came out on the north-east corner of the port, facing the Kibbutz Galuyot road and the old interchange.

  It was quiet there, and dark, few shops, a Kingdom of Pork and a book binder and warehouses left from days gone by, now turned into sound-proofed clubs and gene clinics and synth emporiums. She waited in the shadow of the port, hugging the walls, they felt warm, the station always felt alive, on heat, the station like a heart, beating. She waited, her node scanning for intruders, for digital signatures and heat, for motion—Isobel was a Central Station girl, she could take care of herself, she had a heat knife, she was cautious but not afraid of the shadows.

  She waited, waited for him to come.

  “You waited.”

  She pressed against him. He was warm, she didn’t know where the metal of him finished and the organic of him began.

  He said, “You came,” and there was wonder in the words.

  “I had to. I had to see you again.”

  “I was afraid.” His voice was not above a whisper. His hand on her cheek, she turned her head, kissed it, tasting rust like blood.

  “We are beggars,” he said. “My kind. We are broken machines.”

  She looked at him, this old abandoned soldier. She knew he had died, that he had been remade, a human mind cyborged onto an alien body, sent out to fight, and to die, again and again. That now he lived on scraps, depending on the charity of others . . .

  Robotnik. That old word, meaning worker. But said like a curse.

  She looked into his eyes. His eyes were almost human.

  “I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t remember who I was, before.”

  “But you are . . . you are still . . . you are!” she said, as though finding truth, suddenly, and she laughed, she was giddy with laughter and happiness and he leaned and he kissed her, gently at first and then harder, their shared need melding them, Joining them almost like a human is bonded to an Other.

  In his strange obsolete Battle Yiddish he said, “Ich lieba dich.”

  In asteroid pidgin she replied.

  —Mi lafem yu.

  His finger on her cheek, hot, metallic, his smell of machine oil and gasoline and human sweat. She held him close, there against the wall of Central Station, in the shadows, as a plane high overhead, adorned in light, came in to land from some other and faraway place.

  THE NEAREST THING

  GENEVIEVE VALENTINE

  CALENDAR REMINDER: STOCKHOLDER DINNER, 8PM.

  THIS MESSAGE SENT FROM MORI: LOOKING TO THE FUTURE, LOOKING OUT FOR YOU.

  The Mori Annual Stockholder Dinner is a little slice of hell that employees are encouraged to attend, for morale.

  Mori’s made Mason rich enough that he owns a bespoke tux and drives to the Dinner in a car whose property tax is more than his father made in a year; of course he goes.

  (He skipped one year because he was sick, and two Officers from HR came to his door with a company doctor to confirm it. He hasn’t missed a party since.)

  He’s done enough high-profile work that Mori wants him to actually mingle, and he spends the cocktail hour being pushed from one group to another, shaking hands, telling the same three inoffensive anecdotes over and over.

  They go fine; he’s been practicing.

  People chuckle politely just before he finishes the punch line.

  Memorial dolls take a second longer, because they have to process the little cognitive disconnect of humor, and because they’re programmed to think that interrupting is rude.

  (He’ll hand it to the Aesthetics department—it’s getting harder to tell the difference between people with plastic surgery and the dolls.)

  “I hear you’re starting a new project,” says Harris. He hugs Mrs. Harris closer, and after too long, she smiles.

  (Mason will never know why anyone brings their doll out in public like this. The point is to ease the grieving process, not to provide arm candy. It’s embarrassing. He wishes stockholders were a little less enthusiastic about showing support for the company.)

  This new project is news to him, too, but he doesn’t think stockholders want to hear that.

  “I might be,” he says. “I obviously can’t say, but—”

  Mr. Harris grins. “Paul Whitcover already told us—” (Mason thinks, Who?) “—and it sounds like a marvelous idea. I hope it does great things for the company; it’s been a while since we had a new version.”

  Mason’s heart stutters that he’s been picked to spearhead a new version.

  It sinks when he remembers Whitcover. He’s one of the second-generation creative guys who gets his picture taken with some starlet on his arm, as newscasters talk about what good news it would be for Mori’s stock if he were to marry a studio-contracted actress.

  Mrs. Harris is smiling into middle space, waiting to be addressed, or for a keyword to come up.

  Mason met Mrs. Harris several Dinners ago. She had more to say than this, and he worked on some of the conversation software in her generation; she can handle a party. Harris must have turned her cognitives down to keep her pleasant.

  There’s a burst of laughter across the room, and when Mason looks over it’s some guy in a motorcycle jacket, surrounded by tuxes and gowns.

  “Who’s that?” he asks, but he knows, he knows, this is how his life goes, and he’s already sighing when Mr. Harris says, “Paul.”

  Since he got Compliance Contracted to Mori at fifteen, Mason has come to terms with a lot of things.

  He’s come to terms with the fact that, for the money he makes, he can’t make noise about his purpose. He worked for a year on an impact-sensor chip for Mori’s downmarket Prosthetic Division; you go where you’re told.

  (He’s come to terms with the fact that the more Annual Stockholder Dinners you attend, the less time you spend in a cubicle in Prosthetics.)

  He has come to terms with the fact that sometimes you will hate the people you work with, and there is nothing you can do.

  (Mason suspects he hates everyone, and that the reasons why are the only things that change.)

  The thing is, Mason doesn’t hate Paul because Paul is a Creative heading an R&D project. Mason will write what they tell him to, under whatever creative-team asshole they send him. He’s not picky.

  Sure, he resents someone who introduces himself to other adults as, “Just Paul, don’t worry about it, good to meet you,” and he resents someone whose dad was a Creative Consultant and who’s never once gone hungry, and he resents the adoring looks from stockholders as Paul claims Mori is really Going Places This Year, but things like this don’t keep him up at night, either.

  He’s pretty sure he starts to hate Paul the moment Paul introduces him to Nadia.

  At Mori, we know you care.

  We know you love your family. We know you worry about leaving them behind. And we know you’ve asked for more information about us, which means you’re thinking about giving your family the greatest gift of all:

  You.

  Medical studies have shown the devastating impact grief has on family bonds and mental health. The departure of someone beloved is a tragedy without a proper name.

  Could you let the people you love live without you?

  A memorial doll from Mori maps the most important aspects of your memory, your speech patterns, and even your personality into a synthetic reproduction.

  The process is painstaking—our technology is exceeded only by our artistry—and it leaves behind a version of you that, while it can never replace you, can comfort those who have lost you.

  Imagine knowing your parents never have to say goodbye. Imagine knowing you can still read bedtime stories to your children, no matter what may happen.

  A memorial doll from Mori is a gift you give to everyone who loves you.

  Nadia holds perfectly still.

  Her nametag reads “Aesthetic Consultant,” which means Paul brought his model girlfriend to the meeting.

  She’
s pretty, in a cat’s-eye way, but Mason doesn’t give her much thought. It takes a lot for Mason to really notice a woman, and she’s nowhere near the actresses Paul dates.

  (Mason’s been reading up. He doesn’t think much of Paul, but the man can find a camera at a hundred paces.)

  Paul brings Nadia to the first brainstorming meeting for the Vestige project. He introduces her to Mason and the two guys from Marketing (“Just Nadia, don’t worry about it”), and they’re ten minutes into the meeting before Mason realizes she had never said a word.

  It takes Mason until then to realize how still she is. Only her eyes move—to him, with a hard expression like she can read his mind and doesn’t like what she sees.

  Not that he cares. He just wonders where she came from, suddenly.

  “So we have to think about a new market,” Paul is saying. “There’s a diminishing return on memorial dolls, unless we want to drop the price point to expand opportunities and popularize the brand—”

  The two Marketing guys make appalled sounds at the idea of Mori going downmarket.

  “—or, we develop something that will redefine the company,” Paul finishes. “Something new. Something we build in-house from the ground up.”

  A Marketing guy says, “What do you have in mind?”

  “A memorial that can conquer Death itself,” says Paul.

  (Nadia’s eyes slide to Paul, never move.)

  “How so?” asks the other marketing guy.

  Paul grins, leans forward; Mason sees the switch flip.

  Then Paul is magic.

  He uses every catchphrase Mason’s ever heard in a pitch, and some phrases he swears are from Mori’s own pamphlets. Paul makes a lot of eye contact, frowns soulfully. The Marketing guys get glassy and slack-jawed, like they’re watching a swimming pool fill up with doubloons. Paul smiles, one fist clenched to keep his amazing ideas from flying away.

  Mason waits for a single concept concrete enough to hang some code on. He waits a long time.

  (The nice thing about programs is that you deal in absolutes—yes, or no.)

  “We’ll be working together,” and Paul encompasses Mason in his gesture. “Andrew Mason has a reputation for out-thinking computers. Together, we’ll give the Vestige model a self-sustaining critical-thinking initiative no other developer has tried—and no consumer base has ever seen. It won’t be human, but it will be the nearest thing.”

  The Marketing guys light up.

  “Self-sustaining critical-thinking” triggers ideas about circuit maps and command-decision algorithms, and for a second Mason is absorbed in the idea.

  He comes back when Paul says, “Oh, he definitely has ideas.” He flashes a smile at the Marketing guys—it wobbles when he looks at Nadia, but he recovers well enough that the smile is back by the time it gets to Mason.

  “Mason, want to give us tech dummies a rundown of what you’ve been brainstorming?”

  Mason glances back from Nadia to Paul, doesn’t answer.

  Paul frowns. “Do you have questions about the project?”

  Mason shrugs. “I just think maybe we shouldn’t be discussing confidential R&D with some stranger in the room.”

  (Compliance sets up stings sometimes, just to make sure employees are serious about confidentiality. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t said a thing.)

  Nadia actually turns her head to look at him (her eyes skittering past Paul), and Paul drops the act and snaps, “She’s not some stranger,” like she saved him from an assassination attempt.

  It’s the wrong thing to say.

  It makes Mason wonder what the relationship between Paul and Nadia really is.

  That afternoon, Officer Wilcox from HR stops by Mason’s office.

  “This is just a random check,” she says. “Your happiness is important to the company.”

  What she means is, Paul ratted him out, and they’re making sure he’s not thinking of leaking information about the kind of project you build a market-wide stock repurchase on.

  “I’m very happy here,” Mason says, and it’s what you always say to HR, but it’s true enough; they pulled him from that shitty school and gave him a future. Now he has more money than he knows what to do with, and the company dentist isn’t half bad.

  He likes his work, and they leave him alone, and things have always been fine, until now.

  (He imagines Paul, his face a mask of concern, saying, “It’s not that I think he’s up to anything, it’s just he seems so unhappy, and he wouldn’t answer me when I asked him something.”)

  “Will Nadia be part of the development team?” Mason asks, for no real reason.

  “Undetermined,” says Officer Wilcox. “Have a good weekend. Come back rested and ready to work on Vestige.”

  She hands him a coupon for a social club where dinner costs a week’s pay and private hostesses are twice that.

  She says, “The company really appreciates your work.”

  He goes home, opens his personal program.

  Most of it is still just illustrations from old maps, but places he’s been are recreated as close as he can get. Buildings, animals, dirt, people.

  They’re customizable down to fingerprints; he recreated his home city with people he remembers, and calibrated their personality traits as much as possible. It’s a nice reminder of home, when he needs it.

  (He needs it less and less; home is far away.)

  This game has been his work since the first non-Mori computer he bought—with cash, on the black market, so he had something to use that was his alone.

  Now there are real-time personality components and physical impossibility safeguards so you can’t pull nonsense. It’s not connected to a network, to keep Mori from prying. It stands alone, and he’s prouder of it than anything he’s done.

  (The Memento model is a pale shadow of this; this is what Paul wants for Vestige, if Mason feels like sharing.)

  He builds Nadia in minutes—he must have been watching her more than he thought—and gives her the personality traits he knows she has (self-possessed, grudging, uncomfortable), her relationship with Paul, how long he’s known her.

  He doesn’t make any guesses about what he doesn’t know for sure. It hurts the game to guess.

  He puts Nadia in the Mori offices. (He can’t put her in his apartment, because a self-possessed, grudging, uncomfortable person who hasn’t known him long wouldn’t go. His game is strict.) He makes them both tired from a long night of work.

  He inputs Paul, too, finally—the scene won’t start until he does, given what it knows about her—and is pleased to see Paul in his own office, sleeping under his motorcycle jacket, useless and out of the way.

  Nadia tries every locked door in R&D systematically. Then she goes into the library, stands in place.

  Mason watches his avatar working on invisible code so long he starts to drift off.

  When he opens his eyes, Nadia’s avatar is in the doorway of his office, where his avatar has rested his head in his hands, looking tired and upset and wishing he was the kind of person who could give up on something.

  (His program is spooky, when he does it right.)

  He holds his breath until Nadia’s avatar turns around.

  She finds the open door to Paul’s office (of course it’s open), stands and looks at him, too.

  He wonders if her avatar wants to kiss Paul’s.

  Nadia’s avatar leaves Paul’s doorway, too, goes to the balcony overlooking the impressive lobby. She stands at the railing for a while, like his avatars used to do before he had perfected their physical limits so they wouldn’t keep trying to walk through walls.

  Then she jumps.

  He blanks out for a second.

  He restarts.

  (It’s not how life goes, it’s a cheat, but without it he’d never have been able to understand a thing about how people work.)

  He starts again, again.

  She jumps every time.

  His observations are faulty, he decides. Ther
e’s not enough to go on, since he knows so little about her. His own fault for putting her into the system too soon.

  He closes up shop; his hands are shaking.

  Then he takes the Mori coupon off his dining table.

  The hostess is pretty, in a cat-eye way.

  She makes small talk, pours expensive wine. He lets her because he’s done this rarely enough that it’s still awkward, and because Mori is picking up the tab, and because something is scraping at him that he can’t define.

  Later she asks him, “What can I do for you?”

  He says, “Hold as still as you can.”

  It must be a creepy request; she freezes.

  It’s very still. It’s as still as Nadia holds.

  Monday morning, Paul shows up in his office.

  “Okay,” Paul says, rubbing his hands together like he’s about to carve a bird, “let’s brainstorm how we can get these dolls to brainstorm for themselves.”

  “Where’s Nadia?” Mason asks.

  Paul says, “Don’t worry about it.”

  Mason hates Paul.

  The first week is mostly Mason trying to get Paul to tell him what they’re doing (“What you’re doing now,” Paul says, “just bigger and better, we’ll figure things out, don’t worry about it.”) and how much money they have to work with.

  (“Forget the budget,” Paul says, “we’re just thinking about software, the prototype is taken care of.”

  Mason wonders how long Paul has been working on this, acquiring entire prototypes off the record, keeping under the radar of a company that taps your phones, and the hair on his neck stands up.)

  “I have a baseline ready for implantation,” Paul admits on Thursday, and it feels like a victory for Mason. “We can use that as a jumping-off point to test things, if you don’t want to use simulators.”

  “You don’t use simulators until you have a mock-up ready. The baseline is unimportant while we’re still working on components.” Then he thinks about it. “Where did you get a baseline with no R&D approval?”

  Paul grins. “Black market,” he says.