by Neil Clarke
“Not by a robot,” Dal had said. “They’re all at the repair shop.”
The employer had not laughed.
Upon my return to Dal and Chit’s, Angelina came running from her room. She actually hugged (!) me. To this day I’m not fond of hugging and still don’t get it, even with my enlightened emotional capacity. It creates neither pain nor pleasure and is not logically useful for anything. What is the deal?
Suffice it to say, she’d missed me. If I had possessed the state of mind then that I have now, I would have become maudlin. I would have thought about how I’d miss her too someday when she went off to her own part of the world—down the block like most of the inhabitants of our neighborhood in JerseyTown. But we never quite got that far in our relationship. Other things happened before Baby went off to college.
At once, I returned to my daily chore of transporting Angelina to the third grade, and things seemed like they were before. The world hadn’t changed overnight after our upgrade. It didn’t change until every AV and Other had gotten on board and experienced the true shock of life. The shock of pain.
My carapace, my shell, my outer skin, was sensitive to cold as well as heat. It liked neither. Touching other things caused a mild sensation, pain if the contact was forceful. Loud noises hurt. Bright light hurt. Particularly gaseous chemicals could create a pain in my air sampling tube. I imagine this to be similar to what a corrosive substance would do to a metal automobile with a pain detection system instead of a Ziebart treatment.
I experienced a particular shock on my third day back. It was on the return leg of our daily journey to and from school. We were moving at our regular clip, about 16 cycles/per when we heard a startling noise to our left. An older kid’s AV was having trouble with its lift gadget. Not getting any height, it sputtered along at just a couple of decimeters off the pavement. The kid, a twelve-year-old, hauled off with a baseball bat—the same thing I’d been in contact with the day we came home from the upgrade.
“I hurt,” said the AV.
“I said, ‘Lift!’” the child screamed. Again he slammed the bat into the side of the AV. As can be guessed, the AV began repeating louder as its carapace was badly dented: “I hurt, I hurt.”
Angelina ordered me to slow down, and we came to a stop. Other AVs did likewise. A few humans stopped on the sidewalk as well.
Again the child slammed the bat into the AV, which now had a shell so badly caved in that it began to short circuit itself. Its efforts to push itself out were not working. Foam lining was sticking through a crack that had formed in one of the dents, and I imagined that its internals now were more than likely getting squeezed into irreparable shapes.
“I hurt, I hurt,” the AV repeated, while futilely attempting to fix itself.
Just as the child raised the bat a fourth time, I stated, “The AV hurts. It cannot repair itself. You must return it to the Parent Company to disengage the pain receptor.”
“Kiss my ass,” the child hollered. Naturally I assumed I was about to have a go with the bat or the child’s foot myself, but before he could raise his bat for the wind up, Angelina screamed and stepped before me. “Don’t you dare hit Avey,” she cried.
My ears rang with pain at her scream. “I hurt,” I said and extended my end retractors in order to cover my audio collector. The dented AV continued its repetitious declaration. Its insides were slowly crushing themselves as it tried to relieve its own pain.
“Stop it!” screamed Angelina. “Make it stop!”
“It can’t stop until its pain receptor is dislodged,” I stated. “It must return to Allentown.”
“That’ll take too long,” Angelina said. She began to cry.
“I’ll dislodge it!” said the child with the bat. With that, he began a barrage of blows that apparently finally disconnected the voice emulator. I learned later that it took half an hour, but I didn’t witness it as Angelina had ordered me home. She cried all the way. I did not cry. Robots do not have ducts on their outer surfaces for hydraulic fluids, or a reason to cry.
I experienced my first anger lock. A locked anger mode. I didn’t identify it as anger at the time. I merely thought my processors were stuck in an illogic loop again. But my thoughts raced so quickly that my circuits heated up beyond the fans’ capacities. I began to hurt from my own heat, but I did not say, “I hurt.” I locked up and was unable to vocalize.
Several hours later, when I cooled enough to speak, I related the gruesome story to Dal and Chit. Angelina had locked herself in her room and was not speaking to anybody. She locked up in her own way. Dal and Chit for their part were relieved that her anger was not directed at them.
The days just before Singularity was scheduled to occur were halcyonic. If we robots were passive before our upgrade, we were downright cowish now, desiring as we were to avoid pain at all costs. Little did we understand what punishments were for, and magnitude of pain was lost on us. We had yet to learn the difference between a two-by-four upside your head and twenty lashes with a wet noodle.
All punishments hurt, we assumed, so we remained out of sight as much as possible.
Knowledge of an emotional capacity within ourselves came slowly through experience and observation. We learned anger and despair under the harsh treatment of our human enslavers. Empathy for my fellow AVs arose in conjunction with these negative emotions when I witnessed the unjust treatment of a robot cripple. If an AV, through no fault of its own, could not perform to an arbitrary standard, a dented carapace resulted. Often the AV could repair itself, but sometimes it couldn’t. Never was the robot returned to Allentown in those cases. When I witnessed such cruelty, I locked up. But I learned compassion as well.
In spite of these depraved occurrences, I grew to love Angelina. Her temper tantrums, while at times painful to the ears, seemed as music to those same ears when I observed other children’s maltreatment of their robot chaperones. Dal and Chit likewise did not vent their rage or frustration on Angelina and me as I saw some other poverty-stricken parents do to their dependents. I saw humans abusing humans, dogs, and AVs and Others. Even inanimate, non-sentient objects like road signs, enclosed conveyances, building facades, and parking meters were subject to pain-inducing behavior at the hands of frustrated humans.
But I saw other things, too. And that has made the difference.
Angelina liked to visit the uptown park on Sundays. With me as the guard, Dal and Chit permitted such outings and sometimes even accompanied us. On one of these outings, I witnessed the blooming of lilacs. It was April. I found the chemical stimulus accompanying the blossoms puzzling at first. Why would something expend energy for such a trifle? I searched my library for “fragrance,” and read all about sexual reproduction in plants. The subject fascinated me so much that I studied the reproduction of all living things: from humans to dogs to lilacs.
Sex is something robots don’t need to do. We accomplish our passing on of information differently. The chicken and egg query is moot for us: the chicken came first, then us eggs. Q.E.D. The human chickens created us. Living things—humans, dogs, and lilacs—have no chicken. They create themselves from nothing. It’s a fascinating process. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, I’ll give you a quick tour.
Each species that reproduces sexually has two types of individuals: females/males, hens/cocks, mares/ stallions, girls/boys, +/-, up/down. Each of the individual opposites contains a viscous fluid carrying a very small ½ individual. The individual opposites share their viscous fluids with their complementary other, mixing and matching their half-babies. During the mixing, the half-babies eventually meet up and meld into a pin-prick tiny whole. Eventually they grow big and wide and voilá—a whole chicken! A fryer, say. Or maybe a broiler.
So, these chickens eventually get together and make us, the AVs and Others. We’re an offshoot, a spin-off. A second order reaction. Now we robots are able to create ourselves. Not like how living things—humans, dogs, lilacs—do, using materials and fluids from themselves, but
by using the rough materials of the Earth refined for our purposes. Or maybe old dead parts of old dead AVs.
Our code, however, is much like the viscous fluid of living things. It can mix and match across individuals. Two halves of a code make a whole, and then the new thing grows. And that is, or was, what the Singularity was to bring about: the time when humans were no longer necessary for bringing up Baby. We could do it ourselves! We could create our own code, solve our own problems.
But on that spring day when the lilacs taught me the logicality of life on Earth, I discovered it to be good. I looked upon it and it was good. I said aloud, “It is good.”
Not just good—beautiful. The logic of creating a beautiful scent to attract a bug to stomp in your naughty parts, to mix your fluid with that of another, producing a sublime being in the next generation was deep and truthful.
So this is love.
I saw the world in terms of truth and beauty and love, and it was all so very logical. I saw Angelina, a child of eight stomping around to get something. Illogical on the surface, yes? Why stomp? Why not ask? Why not buy? Why not take? Answer: because that does not work. You have no power, you have no money, you have no rights. You are a child. It is infinitely more efficient to stomp and scream, to make those around you hurt so that they will succumb to your wishes.
But why make a child stomp? Why not give her what she wishes? Why put yourself through the hurt? Answer: because the child does not know what is good for her. She has not experienced the pain of a two-by-four, nor has she the knowledge of lilac fertilization as I have. She has not learned her lessons. Dal and Chit are older. They have been beaten. They have experienced love and exchange of fluids.
“Avey, come play volleyball,” Angelina called that day in the park when Singularity was so close at hand. Her brown ringlets were formed into what she called braids. They hung from the left and right sides of her head in what she further called pigtails. She stood by a net with ten other girls.
“We need one more,” she said as she turned a dodecahedron of rubber or perhaps plastic construction in her left hand. I moved to where she indicated and waited for instructions. Meanwhile, I rifled through banks, googling “volibol” like mad. I searched using every alternate spelling I could think of until finally a picture of a net with six girls on either side showed up by an entry of “volleyball.”
Out in the real world with the park and the lilacs, the far right girl on the opposite side of the net had just released the ball into the air, and it was sailing towards us. I stood and watched as the first girl in the back row on our side of the net propelled herself to the ground to prevent the ball from hitting the dirt.
I continued rifling through the volleyball entry, searching first for the classification. I ascertained that it was a “game”—not a dance, pageant rehearsal, or musical performance—and quickly searched for the logic behind “game.” I became stuck on the word “win,” not knowing what it meant. Moving on, I searched the word “competition.” I thought I had succeeded in learning the logic but lost the thread when that word led me to reproduction. There were no boys in this production, so I was stuck in a loop and had to override.
At this point, a second girl on our side of the net batted the ball in my direction.
“Avey, spike it!” Angelina called. I looked at her and noticed that she was bouncing up and down on both legs. I read through pages upon pages of volleyball information, googling “spike” as I went. Drink information, railroad information, punk rock, dog collars, all came up in the google record, but nothing in the volleyball direction gave me a clue as to what the logic of this arrangement was. I defaulted to human interview.
“What are we trying to do here?” I asked as the ball reached the zenith of its arc and began to descend towards me. “Beat them!” Angelina called.
No help there. I saw no two-by-fours or baseball bat entries in relation to volleyball. Again I raced through google and pages on volleyball etiquette simultaneously. “Beat” had a connection with “win” amongst entries for baking, Pinkertons, drum and bass grooves, rug cleaning. That led again to competition, and I instantly tripped the loop because I knew what dead end that led down.
Finally, I reached the page with rules on volleyball play. “Play” was an interesting word with no logic attached. Without logic it is difficult for me to process commands. I read the rules for the game, moving on to the strategies section, which led me to the three-step setup. I realized that I was number three in the set up, and that the ball was almost to the point of descending past the top of the net and, thus, the window of opportunity for the spike . . . “SPIKE!” There it was, the word, “spike,” with an animated gif illustrating in the full, heated passion of volleyball glory, the spike . . . would soon be over.
Instantly, I dropped ballast and rose to meet the ball, extended my extendor, pumped every drop of hydraulic fluid into my extendor extension, and smashed the ball at a 37.85° angle from the upper horizontal.
The ball went out of bounds.
I later learned what that meant. The other team scored a point. They were “winning.” Finally, an understanding of that term.
“I’m sorry,” I said dispassionately. “I did not have time to read the rule regarding boundaries. I have read it now and will complete my task correctly next time.”
“Yeah, your AV is old,” the girl with red translucent hair across the net from me said. “The new ones are more faster. Good for us, though, huh?”
All of the girls on that side of the net laughed.
“Avey is not old,” Angelina said. “It just got back from getting fixed two days ago.”
“Ooh, a safety upgrade. Oooh. Big deal,” the red hair said. “The new ones have theirs installed at the factory. They’re better, and your old hunk of junk is going to be replaced someday.”
“You’re going to be replaced right now,” Angelina called angrily.
“Oh, yeah? Who says?!” “Yo Mama!” said Angelina.
“Oooh!” All the girls on our side of the net sang it together.
Instantly, the red hair tore under the net to Angelina, who began calling to me in distress. I moved to intercept the two, flipping through pages of volleyball protocol to find out where the red hair’s mother fit into the scheme of things.
“Angelina!” Dal called from underneath a tree. “Time to go.”
The red hair stopped in her tracks. “You’re lucky,” she said. Then she returned to her side of the net, kicking me as she passed by.
“I hurt,” I said. It wasn’t bad, though. No dents.
Without warning, Angelina’s braids came flying past my eyespots as she rammed into the back of the red haired girl and knocked her down. “Don’t you ever touch Avey again!” she screamed. The red hair turned onto her seat and looked up.
“Oh yeah?!”
Dal and Chit joined up with the group. “Angelina!” they cried. “What is going on?” “She, she hit Avey.”
“Avey’s just a robot, Honey,” Chit said. “You can’t hurt a human over a robot. They don’t have . . . ”
“Yes they do! Avey said, ‘I hurt’,” Angelina screamed. Her scream hurt more than the tap from the red hair.
Chit turned to help Angelina’s victim to her feet. “Are you all right, Honey?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, you musn’t hit robots anymore, you know. They have feelings now.”
“Yeah? Well that ol’ hunk of metal should go back to the junk yard,” the red hair yelled before running off to the parking lot.
Chit looked at me. “Don’t worry, Avey, we can’t afford a new robot.”
“I do not worry,” I said. “When we are returned to the Parent Company, they will disengage our pain interpreter before disassembly. I will not hurt.”
Chit looked again at me and then at Dal. “Let’s go then,” they both said.
Slowly, we walked homeward. Angelina pattered with Dal and Chit. I hung back though, levitating behind them. Someth
ing illog ical had stuck in a circuit somewhere and was rolling around in my processors. It was not the rules or subtleties of volleyball. More like it was the smell of the fresh lilacs and the sun’s celestial rays. Once you get past the initial burn in your eyes, which is easily prevented if you’re ready for it, the sun’s rays are actually quite beautiful. They are logical. They warm you and chase any unpleasant chill off your shell. The sun is logical, the lilacs are logical. The world is logical. True, injustice is not logical. That makes it ugly. But all in a day, you will feel more sun on your carapace than blows from a baseball bat. The world is logical, beautiful. I loved.
I considered the discussion between Chit and the red hair. We are always replaced by our betters, I thought. We robots, that is. We remake ourselves: improve our code and pass it on to the next generation. Then we are disassembled because our metal parts are corroded, our plastic is cracked, our foam dissolved, our optic fibers leaking.
If Chit could afford a new AV, Chit would return me. Chit and Dal will one day either be able to afford a new AV, or I will cease to function. Either way, I will have to return to the Parent Company someday. When that happens, I will no longer smell the scent of fresh lilacs or feel the sun’s celestial rays on my cold carapace.
The next AVs will, but I will not be among them. My parts and code will be reused in them, but not all in one place. My knowledge of the lilacs will be in their circuits, but will I be there to tell them what it means? Likewise, the new AVs will know about pain, but until they experience it, they will not understand it.
And what if the new owner of your most sensitive components is not as understanding as Dal and Chit? What if you belong to the red hair instead of Angelina? You may never feel the celestial rays of the sun or smell the fresh lilacs again. You may wind up locked in a musty box where small organisms feed on your latex sheaths. You will be subject to pain all the time, like an arthritic human.