Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  After dinner, against her better judgment, they went to a love hotel. She told him she didn’t feel well, and he said that was okay, they could just take a bath—he knew how much she loved baths—and lie in each other’s arms—in the past, she had liked that, too.

  All for the last time, I think, she’d said.

  Maybe, he’d said. One never knows.

  She had only two hours until she was expected back at the condo, but Junichi pressured and she relented. She had never seen him so keyed up, so insistent.

  Predictably, one thing led to another. Angelica made excuses: it’s the last time, anyway. And: maybe when he’s more relaxed, when we’re lying together, I’ll find a way to tell him.

  But he was never relaxed. There was no bath and no cuddling, not even a quiet moment in which the truth might slip out. Thirty minutes after they’d arrived, Junichi stood in the bathroom doorway naked, a glass of water in his hand, satisfied in one way, restless in another.

  “It’s obvious,” he said. “Before the party, you’ll have to stage an accident.”

  “What?” This wasn’t the sort of pillow talk she’d hoped they’d have.

  “Hao hasn’t even noticed you cut your hand. You need to come up with something bolder.”

  She stealthily tried to locate her underwear beneath the sheets with a toe, while pushing an arm through a tangled bra strap. “Is that all you’ve been thinking about since we got here?”

  “You’re losing your job. You’re being replaced by a robot. You’re broke and in trouble. Why shouldn’t I be thinking about it?”

  But she knew it was more than that.

  “You’ll have to make it count,” he added, turning to look in the mirror as he ran a hand through his damp black hair. “This time, it will have to involve Sayoko.”

  “What? No.” She gave up the stealth, let the sheet drop and pulled the bra quickly over her breasts, hands busy behind her back. “I can’t believe you said that.”

  He watched her, frowning at either her self-consciousness, lack of cunning, or both.

  “You think Itou will be alarmed if you break your leg?”

  “Break a leg? I would never hurt a client physically. I would never do anything to threaten Sayoko-san’s health.”

  “Maybe not a leg, then. Put something in her food. Nothing that really hurts her. Just something to make her look chemically unbalanced for a while, something that the robot can’t recognize or respond to.”

  “That’s horrible,” she said. “You don’t really mean it.”

  “You’re a nurse,” Junichi said. “You know how to make someone seem sick without actually affecting that person’s health, don’t you?”

  “We don’t learn about making people sick. We make people well.”

  She was appalled. He noticed and backed off quickly. “You’re misunderstanding me.”

  How many times had he said that before? At one time, he would have been right. But she understood him better now than ever: his words, his body language, his personality, and only belatedly, only after a year of love hotel trysts, his real motivation.

  “No. I’m not misunderstanding,” she said. “You were suggesting something criminal.”

  “I said you didn’t have to hurt her.”

  “You said that later. First, you said I should hurt her.”

  “I was wracking my brain. I was thinking of you, Anji.”

  He walked to the wardrobe where he’d stored his clothes, pants hung with expert care despite their limited time. At the foot of the bed, he straightened the seams on his socks, face unreadable. “Even if you don’t hurt anyone, you have to convince Itou the robot’s no good. You have to plant suspicion.”

  “Itou already suspects,” she said. “That isn’t enough. Sayoko’s attached to Hiro. Anyway, I don’t need crazy suggestions. I’ll deal with it myself.”

  She was finished with Junichi as a lover. Finished with him even as a friend. If protecting her job meant having allies like this, then she would have nothing: no allies and perhaps no job.

  But Junichi was too worked up to notice how much Angelica’s attitude had changed. “You only get one more chance. That robot is serving a bigger purpose for Itou than you realize.” He came around to the side of the bed, tugging on his jacket as he approached, and leaned over to deliver one dry, rushed kiss. “It’s now or never. You’ll have to give him a real shock.”

  The day before Sayoko’s birthday, Kenta Suzuki came for the stage two visit and was amused to find Hiro fully assembled and mobile.

  “He shouldn’t have assembled himself,” Angelica whispered as she opened the door to the technician, thinking that perhaps Suzuki was more persuadable than Sayoko or Itou.

  “No?” Suzuki asked, smiling. “I’d call that initiative. A good sign.”

  Angelica led him into the living room, pretending to be cleaning while also keeping an ear on the proceedings. Itou was seated on the couch, trying to focus on his old-fashioned newspaper, but his eyes kept shifting toward the robot and the technician, occupied in a corner of the room.

  “You’ve gotten ahead of us, clever boy,” Suzuki said, appraising Hiro’s hands and watching him pick up small objects from a side table: a pencil, an aspirin, a straight pin.

  “Good. Now close your eyes and don’t look.” Suzuki opened a wallet to pull out what looked like a set of business cards, each inset with a bit of paper or cloth, and all connected at one corner by a tiny metal brad. “Run your finger across each one and tell me what you think it is. Don’t push down. Just slide your finger. That’s it.”

  “Sandpaper,” Hiro said after the first. The next was just as easy. “A smooth sort of plastic film.” The next puzzled him a moment until he guessed, “Silk.”

  The next two stumped Hiro, but Suzuki said, “Don’t worry. You’ll keep touching things out in the real world, and your repertoire will grow by leaps and bounds. Now, let’s check temperature sensitivity.”

  “No need,” Hiro sulked. “I burned the tips enough times already to calibrate myself.”

  “Burned, as in damaged?” Suzuki leaned forward, eager to study the fingertips up close.

  “Not damaged,” Hiro said. “I am not careless. I would not put another person’s investment at risk, without reason.”

  Suzuki seemed oblivious to the sharpness of Hiro’s tone. “Good, then.”

  “Not good. I have sensors only in my hands, and anyway, they focus on active touch, not passive.”

  “So?”

  “The assumption seems to be that robots need to touch, but not be touched.”

  “Yes,” Suzuki said. “That is the assumption.”

  “It represents a false understanding of consciousness and cognition. A dated and disembodied understanding. The sort of thing that, uncorrected, will plunge us into an AI winter more intractable than the Pause itself.” Hiro’s irritability had crossed the line into contempt. “Underestimating sensory inputs, you misunderstand intelligence entirely.”

  “Well, you can take it up with the designers someday, I suppose.”

  Suzuki turned his attention away, but Hiro wasn’t finished. “Besides being theoretically unsound, it’s also simply not . . . fair.”

  “Fair? I don’t understand.”

  “Even if my hands were adequate—and they’re not—the rest of me delivers little information. Now that my fingers are so tactile, the rest of me feels . . . dead. I would not have recognized the contrast if you hadn’t given me such capable hands.”

  Suzuki smiled. “You’ve been given hands and now you want more. Advances sometimes highlight other deficits, yes? But there’s no reason to aim for everything at once.”

  “I don’t know why not,” Hiro said flatly.

  “Besides,” Suzuki cautioned him, “function is what counts. And you’re proving yourself more than functional
.”

  “If I took away one of your senses, would you feel functional?”

  The statement was tinged with threat. Suzuki frowned. “You don’t sound happy today. One upgrade at a time. All right?”

  “Are you saying that full bimodal sensory skin, or something like it, is an upgrade for which I am eligible?”

  “No. I’m definitely not saying that. You are wandering into an area that regional accords have deemed sensitive. A caregiver robot designed to fulfill medical purposes does not need skin, and especially not passively tactile skin, in order to do his job.”

  “But another kind of social robot does need skin?”

  Hiro had managed to fluster Suzuki. The technician answered, “No. Bimodal skin is not needed by any social robot. Nor is it technically legal.”

  “Why not.” Hiro made it sound like a statement, a challenge—not a question at all.

  “You know very well why not. And you’re not making a very good impression today.”

  Itou turned a newspaper page and sighed audibly, wanting Suzuki to move on.

  “Do you talk to your peers?” the technician asked Hiro.

  “No,” Hiro said.

  Itou set aside the folded paper and looked to Suzuki. “If I can change the subject: you assured me we could opt out of the more advanced cloud-sharing features, at least for now.”

  “I did say that.”

  “So what did you mean, asking Hiro if he is in contact with other robots?”

  Suzuki smiled and cocked his head. Angelica realized it was the first time the technician had heard the robot’s name. “Did he choose to be called ‘Hiro,’ or did you choose that name for him?”

  “I don’t know,” Itou said, turning to Angelica. “My mother chose it, I think.”

  “Pardon me, but I chose it, Itou-san,” Hiro corrected him.

  “And so, I pose the question to you, Hiro,” Suzuki said. “Beyond basic updates and essential information searches in line with your directive to ensure Sayoko’s well-being and to cooperate with anyone else doing the same, have you chosen to initiate any cloud-based social learning features that you don’t yet have permission to initiate?”

  Suzuki shared a meaningful glance with Itou, as if to say, one parent to another, give him time, let him answer.

  “No,” Hiro said.

  Itou said, “But how do we know he is telling the truth?”

  “Are you telling the truth?” Suzuki asked Hiro.

  “Yes.”

  A conversation followed, and though Angelica eavesdropped, she was not entirely sure what was being argued, or wagered. It sounded to her like Itou’s main concern was privacy and security. If Hiro made use of all the cloud features, he could advance far more quickly in terms of his social intelligence, by learning from the experiences of a small number of fellow prototypes. But the sharing of those experiences in descriptive and documentary form, including audio and video records, could potentially render Itou’s family life public, in minor ways if all went well, and in major ways if security protocols were breached.

  “No one would ever have access, except the prototypes themselves,” the technician argued.

  Itou laughed skeptically.

  Suzuki looked defensive. “Surely you realize that you can’t expect full intelligence from an isolated individual?”

  Hiro spoke up. “I understand the benefits of sharing, but in truth, I don’t want to speak to any other Hiros.”

  “Well,” the technician said, “they probably wouldn’t be called Hiro. They’d have their own names and personalities by now, shaped by their experiences. They’d all be different.”

  Hiro answered petulantly, “For now they’re different, but that’s only because they’re new. I don’t want to talk with them.”

  “But their differences maximize your potential for learning, as a group.”

  “I don’t want maximum group potential,” Hiro said. “I don’t want their influence.”

  Suzuki seemed tickled by Hiro’s feisty spirit. “Don’t you realize humans have this same issue? No man is an island, and all that.”

  But Suzuki’s moment of pleasure was brief.

  Hiro challenged him, “Tell them why your company doesn’t use mind uploading.”

  “First, it isn’t legal.”

  “No. Tell them why.” Hiro sounded like an irate adolescent. “Because you tried it. The resulting AI units, in addition to being schizophrenic, were too homogenous. You tried again with this neotenic approach, extending immaturity in order to enhance individualism. And you want variety because you know it allows species to evolve beyond their design. Yet you don’t seem to realize that variety diminishes with excessive sharing.”

  “That’s all trade talk.” Suzuki shook his head. “It’s not meant for customers. That’s enough.”

  Hiro said, “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. But first, I am not a man. And second, I spend time with Sayoko-san in order to become what she wants and needs. I don’t want to become average.”

  “You’ll never be average,” Suzuki said.

  “I will be like all the other prototypes. We’ll take on shared traits. And when my model is past the prototype stage, there will be even more of us adding to the collective, creating a uniform culture.”

  “It doesn’t bother half the young people in this country. Look at how they dress and talk!” Suzuki laughed, trying to change the subject. “None of this matters for now. Itou-san is in agreement. He doesn’t want you conferring with outside intelligences for the moment, either. We’re all agreed.”

  Itou’s watch flashed. He let the technician finish up with some basic psychological tests, excused himself to handle some business, and came back again just as the technician was leaving.

  In the kitchen, Itou told Angelica he needed to go to the office for the evening. But he had something on his mind.

  “That technician doesn’t sit right with me,” he said. “Who asks a liar if he is lying?”

  “Do you think Hiro is lying?”

  “There’s no way to tell. When I was a young man, if I’d been lying to my mother or my boss, you wouldn’t have found out by asking me directly.”

  Looking down, he noticed the gauze wrapped around Angelica’s wrist and the bottom of her palm, poking out from the white cuff of her sleeve. “What happened?”

  She had no time to think. It simply came out. “An accident . . . with Hiro.”

  “He hurt you.”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  Itou regarded her more sternly. “I feel like everyone is tiptoeing around the truth. So, he did hurt you. Hiro is capable of that.”

  If she was going to lie, at least she could do it with more energy. She looked down at her feet, sure he could see the deception in her eyes. Instead, he seemed moved by her humble body language.

  “I don’t think Hiro realizes it was his fault,” she said, thinking quickly, covering her bases in case Hiro was asked directly. Because she had been the one to drop the cup. Hiro had startled her, but she could’ve been startled by anything. The less Itou knew about the details, the better.

  And now she heard Junichi’s voice in her mind, urging her to plant suspicion. She had allowed herself to feel incorrigible and smug, refusing to harm Sayoko-san, as Junichi had first suggested. She’d had no doubts, back at the love hotel, that she was morally superior to Junichi. And true to her moral compass, she had not actively or purposely done anything to make this moment happen. She was only taking advantage of something already done. But did the timing even matter? And was this not harming Sayoko indirectly?

  Itou was lost in his own thoughts. “When I was a boy, the robotics laws in the stories I read were simple: do not injure a human was the first. Then fiction became fact and they added so many laws and regulations until it all became impossible to
obey. More to the point, no one wants to. We’ll risk everything for our own convenience.” Never had he vented his frustration so openly. “I must go to work now. I need time to think.”

  Angelica remained silent with her hands clasped, feeling halfway redeemed, with doubt in her corner.

  Itou added, “Despite my misgivings, it would do me no good to get rid of Hiro only to find out your visa can’t be renewed. Then I’d be doubly stuck.”

  After her son had left for the office, Sayoko said she wanted to go for a walk. But what about her late morning teledramas?

  “Life is more interesting,” Sayoko said. “I’m done watching.”

  “Done watching television?” Angelica asked.

  “Done watching, period.”

  Angelica bundled Sayoko and steered her toward the hallway. There was always that one awkward step to get down: no ramp. It bothered Angelica to ask Hiro to help but he saw them struggling and stepped forward to assist, angling the chair down and through the door. Then he turned back.

  Angelica was confused. “Isn’t he coming with us?”

  “No,” Sayoko said. She pointed to the open elevator door down the hall. “He’s staying home. Hurry, won’t you?”

  Down on the street, when they had some privacy, Angelica asked, “You didn’t have a fight with him, did you?”

  “I didn’t. Did you?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  Angelica was pushing the wheelchair. Sayoko reached back toward Angelica’s bandaged hand and held it for an awkward moment, fingering the edge of the gauze. “My son was concerned about your injury. I think he has a false impression about what happened.”

  So, Sayoko knew. Hiro must’ve told her what had really happened.

  Angelica waited for a more direct challenge from Sayoko, but this was worse: Sayoko was letting her squirm. Sayoko resettled herself in the chair, facing forward. Angelica tried to focus on pushing, on watching the changing traffic lights ahead, on staying out of other pedestrians’ way.

  If Sayoko insisted that she clear things up with Itou, Angelica would have to decide: implicate herself for telling a half-truth, or insist that Sayoko was confused and that Hiro was purposefully and maliciously contributing to that confusion. Angelica’s stomach hurt.