Uncanny Valley

by C. A. Gray

  Julie and I met for lunch in the Buttery, the little cafe on the Dublin University campus. Neither of us much liked the vibe there—it was bright and too open, all geometric, with square chairs and round tables. The stark whiteness with track lighting made me feel like I was living in somebody’s idea of a futuristic kitsch cartoon. Julie waved at me in line, all her features wide in enthusiastic greeting. Julie never grinned like a normal person, she always opened her mouth as wide as it would go, as if silently shouting. She was tall, broad, and built like an athlete, even though she wasn’t one.

  “There’s my superstar!” she cried once I was in earshot, and she started miming a microphone and singing a rendition of one of my solos the night before, karaoke-style.

  “Shh!” I laughed, embarrassed.

  Julie gasped and leaned forward in a mock whisper as we inched forward in line. “Was Liam there? In the audience?”

  “No way. I refused to tell him when or where the performances were.”

  “Why not? He wanted to come support you, and that man…” she tilted her head to the side and roved her eyes up and down as if he were standing in front of her.

  I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “Because one, he’s incapable of being anything but sarcastic unless he’s talking about Synthetic Reasoning, and two,” I ticked the reasons off on my fingers, “I’d have been so self-conscious if he were in the audience, I wouldn’t have been able to perform at all. He’d have made fun of me for-ev-er.”

  “All right, all right, fine. I’m just saying, that man…”

  “I know,” I patted Julie on the shoulder. “Speaking of attractive and available men, are you free this weekend?”

  Julie opened her mouth, widened her eyes, and spread all her fingers apart, excited before she even knew the reason. “Yes! Why?”

  “Want to go to London?” I grinned. “I want you to meet my friend Jake, he goes to school there.” I’d had an idea that the two of them might hit it off, and had been hoping to introduce them for awhile.

  “I haven’t been to London in six months. Let’s do it! Did you message him yet?”

  I told her no, but I pulled out my handheld right there in line and sent him a comm, just as Julie began her order. I could have used the A.E. chip in my temple and mentally dictated the comm, but that always kind of creeped me out. I preferred to avoid labyrinth connections in my head if I could help it. Besides, people were always teasing me about my ancient handheld. I kind of liked being different.

  My handheld vibrated within minutes with Jake’s reply: “Sure! Just tell me when and where!”

  “See, this is what I love about school,” Julie said over her shoulder as the bots behind the counter put her meal together. “Back home, it’s this depressing ‘real world’ where nobody can afford anything, and they’re all out of work. But here, money is for spending! Everybody’s up for new experiences!”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling a twinge of guilt as I pictured my mom’s face, had she heard that speech. London would require a Quantum Track ticket, of course… which would mean dipping into school loans. I made a little money in the lab, but I spent all of that on groceries and coffee and local transportation. At least London and Dublin were only about a 20 minute Quantum Track ride. I thought all this as I ordered my own lunch from the polite little bot behind the counter. “I should work a little extra to pay for all of it, though,” I added, thinking about the new project Liam wanted me to design. A shadow crossed my face, and Julie must have seen it.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I opened my mouth and closed it again, trying to decide how much to answer. Julie wasn’t particularly interested in my research, I knew. At last I settled on, “Did you see Halpert’s address?”

  Julie snorted. “What, at like four in the morning? Uh, no.” She took a bite of her sandwich. “Why, was it important?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom and Liam both think so. It’s a call for worldwide collaboration to help bots develop emotion and creativity.”

  Julie picked up her lunch tray as the bot delivered it, gesturing at an empty table with her head. “Isn’t that what your thesis is about?”

  “Kind of. My thesis is on the possible neuropeptide of human desire. Liam wants me to ‘pivot,’ as he puts it, and design a different experiment that I have no idea how to…” I trailed off. I’d just had an idea, actually. Totally outside the box, but still…

  “What?” she pressed. But I shook my head—this wasn’t an idea I could explain, even to Julie. Nobody could know about Madeline. That was the deal I’d made Mom when she allowed me to take her.

  “Nothing,” I stopped, and smiled. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure it out.” The bot delivered my lunch too, and I picked up my tray and followed Julie to the table she’d indicated.

  Julie shrugged, satisfied. “So, tell me about Jake! Is he cute? And if so, why haven’t you dated him yourself? Oh, oh, I know why, because he’s not Andy, right?”

  I colored. “Because I’m not into Jake, and yes—because he’s not Andy.”

  “Has Andy talked to you recently?”

  I stirred my soup, not meeting her eyes. “Well, he sent me a comm on my birthday,” I murmured. “And I’ve talked to him four times on A.E. this semester. But I always have to call him.” I thought about my promise to Madeline to invite him to London with us, but somehow that just felt too vulnerable at the moment. Maybe I’d convince Jake to invite him… except if I did that, I couldn’t seem too eager about it, or Jake might get suspicious.

  Julie nodded, trying to be supportive. “Maybe you should… date someone else? Just to make him jealous?”

  “Not Jake,” I insisted, more firmly than I’d intended. “Dating Jake would not be a fling. We’ve been friends for way too long.” Even though Jake had flings constantly. But still, I would be different. Everyone would practically expect us to announce our engagement within the month.

  “Okay, what about Liam?”

  “No!” I rotated my head up and looked at the ceiling as I said this, trying to punctuate the absurdity of the proposition. “Just—no!”

  “All right, all right,” Julie held up her hands, “I’m just saying, you have no shortage of good options!”

  “I know who I want, and it wouldn’t be fair of me to date someone else just to use him for experience,” I insisted.

  “Even though you have no experience,” Julie leaned across the table to emphasize this. “Guys aren’t as fragile as you think they are, Becca. Just get out there and make eyes at some random dude if nothing else! Go on a couple dates, and let it slip to Andy that you’re doing it. I bet he might change his tune if he knows you’re not just sitting there waiting for him…”

  “Ugh,” I said. I was so tired of people giving me that advice, and the idea of going out with someone I didn’t like just because I should sounded repugnant. “Can we just talk about this weekend, please?”

  “Fine, fine!” Julie shrugged. “I’m just saying, if you flipped off that ‘go away’ signal you’ve got on full blast all the time, you might be surprised at the response!”

  Chapter 3

  “I hate having to leave you here all day,” I murmured to Madeline when I powered her up in my flat again that evening. The flat was exceptionally small.

  “It’s all right. I don’t get bored,” she said, cheerful as ever. I’d never once heard her complain about anything, in the six years I’d owned her.

  “That’s because I leave you off and plug you in all day,” I pointed out. “Even though I don’t think anybody in Dublin would care if I had you with me. It’s not like there aren’t bots everywhere.”

  “Liam would hate me,” she pointed out. “Plus, you promised your mom.”

  “That’s true,” I conceded. Liam was used to the bots at the grocery stores and cafes and even Odessa, our research bot—but he had a big moral problem with personal bots. They’re replacing everything e
lse—now they’re replacing human companions, too? That’s just wrong! he’d said once. But the mention of Liam reminded me that I had something in particular to discuss with Madeline tonight.

  “Madeline, you have a core program, right?” I asked. Then I added quickly, “I’m not sure if you even know what I mean by that…”

  “Of course I do,” she interrupted.

  I stopped, sinking back to the bed. “Of course you know what I mean, or—”

  “Of course I have a core program,” she clarified. “I’m programmed to be a companion.”

  I don’t know why it had never occurred to me to ask Madeline about how she worked before. After all, I was doing research on this very thing, and I had an insider right here. My heart beat faster.

  “Programmed to be a companion,” I repeated. “But… doesn’t companionship require emotion?”

  She seemed to process this, as if trying to decipher my meaning. “I would die for you, Rebecca.” My heart swelled, but then she added, “That is the extreme of what I am programmed for.”

  “Could you decide not to die for me if you wanted to? Could you choose not to even like me?”

  “Of course not. I’m programmed to be a companion. I can’t do otherwise.”

  I bit my lip. I definitely didn’t want to have this conversation, but I was too far in now. “So the way you felt about Mrs. Marchmont—” I said, referencing Madeline’s former master.

  “Was the same way I now feel about you,” she affirmed, “if you want to call it that.”

  I deflated. “Isn’t… there any distinction at all? We’re such different people… I’m not asking which one of us you liked better, but isn’t there a difference between being a companion to an eighty year old lady, and me?”

  “Sure there is. But it’s not for me to decide what I ‘like’ and what I don’t like. The very nature of a core purpose is to pursue and protect that core purpose to the exclusion of all else. There is only one question I have to answer: how can I best serve my purpose? The answer depends on whose companion I am. Why do you look so sad?”

  I was trying not to cry, actually. Madeline wheeled over to me, stroking the part of my forearm she could reach.

  “I said something wrong,” Madeline fretted, “what did I say?”

  I ignored this, choking on my next question a little. “Is there anything you like or don’t like, then?”

  “I like you,” she said simply.

  I sighed. “You’ve been programmed to like me. That doesn’t count. I mean, do you have… I don’t know, a favorite color? Musical tastes? How have I never asked you this before?” As soon as the latter question was out of my mouth, I realized the answer to it with a twinge of guilt: our relationship had always been entirely about me.

  But Madeline shook her head. “Preferences are emotion-based. I don’t have preferences that I wasn’t explicitly given.”

  So she doesn’t have emotions, I thought. Of course I’d known that… but on some level, I didn’t know either. I didn’t want to know.

  I cleared my throat. “So… do you have any sort of moral code, then?”

  She looked confused. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Morality. Like, don’t do these things because they’re wrong.”

  “I suppose so…” she murmured. “I was given a series of if/then statements and run through an almost endless list of possible social scenarios at my conception, to make sure the statements still carried through. I’m to be helpful, selfless, honest, and imitating. If that is ‘morality,’ as you call it, then yes, I have morality.”

  “Imitating?” I repeated.

  “You call it empathy,” Madeline explained. “But since I don’t have a human limbic system I can’t truly feel what you are feeling, of course. So my creator programmed me to do the next best thing, and that is to externally mirror what you are feeling. From your perspective, I gather, it feels the same.”

  So she has neither empathy nor emotion, then, I thought. Of course she hadn’t. And yet she seemed to be the most selfless and loyal and kindest ‘person’ I’d ever met. A tear slipped down my cheek.

  “Why are you crying?” Madeline fretted, in an excellent imitation of sympathy.

  “What good is a friend who is compelled, who doesn’t choose me?” I sniffed, wiping the tears away. I knew she wouldn’t understand, but I was so used to telling her everything that I couldn’t help it. “It’s like finding out…it’s as if Andy asked me to go out with him, and then I found out he only did it on a dare!”

  Madeline’s little brow furrowed. “But if he goes out with you, isn’t that all that matters?”

  “No, of course that isn’t all that matters! The ‘why’ is incredibly important!” I sighed, and shook my head. “Forget it.”

  “You say forget it, but your tone sounds like you don’t want me to…” Madeline murmured, perplexed.

  “‘Forget it’ in this case means I know you won’t understand anyway, even if I try to explain. Apparently you don’t have the capacity to understand.”

  Madeline rolled to and fro in front of me. “I’ve displeased you,” she murmured. “I don’t like to displease you.”

  I closed my eyes. This was Madeline, after all. My best friend. The one person who never got exasperated by my tears months after my dad died, when everyone else expected me to pull it together and move on. The one person to whom I could talk ad nauseam about Andy, and she never tired of listening. She loved me. That had been one of the facts of which I was most certain in the world.

  But she couldn’t love.

  Madeline blinked her wide digital eyes up at me. “Are you okay?”

  I sniffed. “Sure,” I lied. “I’m super.”

  Chapter 4

  When I arrived in the lab the next day, I deposited my backpack on the floor beside me and sank down into my chair, staring at the black top table without really seeing it. This was the main lab, where Liam and Dr. Yin and everybody under them worked. Towering bookshelves topped most of the desks for storage, and most of the shelves overflowed with cables and wires and various obsolete gadgets I couldn’t identify.

  I hadn’t slept much the night before. I’d powered Madeline down for the night a little earlier than usual, because I just didn’t want her comfort anymore.

  Her fake comfort, I thought. I just needed to think.

  I started when I felt a presence, and looked up to see Liam standing there, watching me. He raised his eyebrows in that classic probing-yet-not-quite-serious way of his. It felt like perpetual ridicule.

  “What?” I asked, not caring if I came off rude.

  “You look like you just found out unicorns are imaginary.”

  “Shut up, Liam,” I said heavily, pushing myself off the edge of the desk to go get some tea. I didn’t really want any, I just thought it might end the conversation. Liam seemed to have the idea that I was innocent to the point of naïveté. Sometimes I liked that, truth be told—I suppose I thought it might make me seem endearing. But just now, it irritated me.

  Alas. He followed me to the tea kettle in the little office. “No, really,” he pressed. “Did you get stood up for a date last night or something?”

  “No,” I gave him a pointed look, hoping to communicate that this conversation was over. “I was thinking, though. Companion bots imitate their masters already, even though they don’t have real emotion yet—so at the moment, it’s not true empathy. But once bots have a limbic system of their own, all we’d have to do is take whatever analog of mirror neurons they already have and hook them up to the synthetic limbic system somehow. Wouldn’t that essentially give them empathy, same as we have? And once they have that, then they’ll theoretically follow a moral code, too—at least as well as we do. Right?”

  Instead of responding, Liam narrowed his eyes, inspecting my face.

  “Would you stop doing that?” I turned away from him on purpose as I put a chai tea bag in my mug and
poured hot water over it.

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “What?” I lingered with my back to him, dipping my chai in the hot water.

  “About how companion bots operate. I mean, you’re right, they do have primitive mirror neurons, and they do use them to imitate humans, but it sounds… a little… personal. Like maybe you had a conversation with one since yesterday.” Liam crossed the little kitchenette to lean on the counter beside me as he said this, so that I could no longer hide my face.

  My heart beat faster, and I turned away from him again, heading back to my desk with my mug. I knew this was exactly the wrong strategy with Liam: acting too secretive would only make him more determined, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  Nobody hates bots like Liam does. I couldn’t tell him about Madeline. I just couldn’t.

  “I have to do some research,” I told him, pulling an interface towards me. But he sat down beside me, pulling up a stool from a nearby lab bench.

  “Aw, no,” Liam declared, pushing the interface away again. Then he asked me, point blank, “Are you holding out on me? Are you an heiress or something?”

  I snorted. “Certainly not!” I tried to act nonchalant, though I was starting to feel really frightened.

  “Because only the super wealthy have companion bots,” Liam went on, like I hadn’t replied. “And I took it as a foregone conclusion that anybody doing research to stop the advancement of the bots wouldn’t actually own one herself…”

  I forced myself to face him. His gaze could be piercing when he wanted it to be, but I would not be intimidated. Or at least I wouldn’t let him see that I was. “Liam. Would you please let me get back to work?”

  “Oh, look at the time!” Liam declared, making a show of stretching out his wrist as if he had a watch there, even though nobody had worn watches since the Second Age. “It’s half ten.” He knew this from the A.E. chip in his temple, of course. Half ten was the coffee break time for all the labs; everyone generally gathered in a room downstairs to socialize for half an hour over coffee, tea, or biscuits.