by Logan Keys
“But why?”
“Okay, Tinman, I need coffee before we debate the reasons for your existence anymore. Besides, I don’t just mean robots, babies, art, music, and other things, too. Some of it is to enjoy, and the others, maybe so you have someone to enjoy them with.”
I like that. I enjoy Lilz. And she keeps working on me…to share things with me.
She goes to answer the beeping and I stand up. “I don’t like Fritz. I think I hate him. He’s not nice to you, Lilz.”
The door flies open and in walks Fritz.
He looks from me to Lilz. “You’ve been up here screwing a robot! Ignoring my calls!” He lunges for her, but I snatch him by the wrist.
“Ah! Ow!” Fritz falls backward, but I follow him to pin him to the ground. “Get off! Get this freak off me!”
“Barkley stop! Barkley! Let him go!”
I allow Lilz to pull me back from Fritz, and she gets between us.
“You can’t do that, Barkley, you understand?” She puts a hand on my arm and shoves me. “Barkley, I will turn you off. Do you want me to do that?”
Fritz backs away from me, eyes wide.
“Turn it off, Lilz. Turn it off!”
“I can’t just---”
“Now!” He gets in her face. I go for him again. Fritz puts his hands up and backs away to the door, then turns and runs.
“See what you’ve done!” Lilz races after him.
She doesn’t return for three whole days. I even worked up the gumption to ask God for a soul. By the third day, I already worked out that we were meant to be together. If God had made her, and she made me, then it was destiny.
Lilz does finally come back, and when she does, it’s with more bruises.
The door opens, and she tells me, “Don’t start, Barkley.” Her one eye is the color of bad fruit.
She notices the state of the attic, pauses, before asking, “What happened in here? Why did you destroy this room?”
“I can clean it,” I say.
“Why, Barkley?”
“Because I was angry.”
“At me?”
“At you. At Fritz. What do you need a boyfriend for anyway, Lilz? I’m your friend. I look like a boy.”
She shrugs, still looking at the room dumbfounded. “I dunno how to explain it, Barkley. We kiss. We do… other things, humans interact like that.”
“You could kiss me.”
“I can’t kiss you, Barkley.”
“Why not?”
Lilz cocks her head. “Do you want to be kissed?”
I realize that I do. I want her to kiss me.
“Yes,” I say.
She smiles, but it’s not a happy smile. It’s a sad smile. I’ve learned these things, over time.
She touches my cheek again, only it doesn’t feel as good as before. It feels like rejection.
I cover her hand with mine. “Don’t see him anymore, Lilz. Fritz is a bastard.”
She laughs, crossing her arms. “We can agree on that.”
Lilz sighs. “Come on, Barkley. Let’s clean this place up.”
How don’t you get it? I think. I would die for you. Me. A robot. I’m not much, but what I have, I would give without needing kisses, or sex---she thinks I don’t know about these things, but I’ve seen them on the screen when I’ve used her watch while she slept.
Lilz realizes I haven’t moved. “This is all my fault,” she says.
“No.”
“Yes, it is, Barkley. I made you feel this stuff. In my hubris, I upgraded you, just to see how it would be. And now, here you are, trapped in a room, and I’m watching you struggle with all of these emotions.”
She approaches me. “I can take them away, if you like?”
“No!”
“But, Barkley, you wouldn’t hurt anymore.”
It’s true. I do hurt.
And I can see in her owl-eyes, how she regrets it. Making me.
“Does God ever regret making you, do you think?”
“Excuse me?”
“Not, you, I mean like, people. Like Fritz. Does he want to take it away from them, too?”
“Barkley, just lift up your arm.” She sighs and sticks a disk in her mouth.
She grabs some tools and comes over spitting the disk out, “I’m gonna make you sleep now, Barkley, and when you wake up, you won’t remember any of this, okay.”
No. I won’t let her.
It’s worse that I cry, but I can’t seem to not. “I don’t want to stop feeling. Please, Lilz.”
She pauses. Her watch dings.
“Don’t worry,” she says, seeing my angry reaction. “It’s just my dad. I’ll be back. Don’t do anything, promise?”
“Promise.”
The days turn back into what they were before, with Lilz leaving and returning either very sad or ready to work on a new gadget. When she was up, she was up. Down though, meant misery for us both. One time, she comes upstairs looking afraid, pale. She spends all day working on something, like it meant more than all the other things, then she shows me a little chip. “See this, Barkley?” She puts it into a metal box and locks it. “It’s me. All of me. I figured out how to basically put my life’s work on that chip. It’s a program I worked on before you came, where it watched me, took my mannerisms, everything about me. I want you to know where it is. If anything ever happens to me…”
“Lilz, you’re scaring me.”
She looks at the wall, eyes blurry. “I scare myself sometimes.”
The next time Lilz leaves, she doesn’t come back. Days pass and that turns into weeks.
I lose my patience, after almost a month, and I do something bad. I use an old watch I found in her attic, it’s got issues, but after watching Lilz for so long, I’ve learned how to fix things. I use it to call her.
The screen pops up immediately in answer, but Lilz isn’t near the camera, she’s in the corner, in a ball.
She’s got no more owl-eyes. They look dull, lifeless.
“Where are you?” I say, but she doesn’t look at me or even turn her head.
He did this. He made Lilz go away. She was going to turn me off, but Fritz turned Lilz off, first.
“Hold on!” I say. “I’m coming.”
I open another line and call Buggy, “Buggy, it’s me, Barkley.”
“Hey there, Tinman. Where’s Lilz?”
“I need help. She’s in trouble, can you find her watch?”
“Don’t need to search her. I know if she’s in trouble, she’s with Fritz. Here’s his address. I’m hours away. Can you go? Come on, Tinman, I’m counting on you.”
He gives it to me and I hang up. I look back at the line with Lilz, she hasn’t moved.
I’ll find Fritz and I’ll turn him off. Like he has buttons, too.
I pause at the door. I’m suddenly afraid. That’s a new feeling.
I’ve never left the room.
I’m not even sure if I can.
Self-doubt.
But, I take the stairs, and open the front door.
The streets are the same as before. There’s the bad corner where I took little Boss that one night.
Fritz lives near the bad corner. That seems right.
I don’t knock on his door because that’s for friends. I simply kick it in and call for Lilz. My only friend.
Fritz is in the hallway, his eyes wide. “Get away from me, you creepy machine!”
“You hurt her. You hurt my Lilz!” Something cracks on the inside.
Connectors disconnect. Capacitors unpolarize.
The night I stole little Boss, the day I lost my family, brought me here. And Lilz is my new family.
I grab Fritz by the neck. I do it tight, tighter, and don’t let go, not until he turns off.
Afterwards, I search the home and find Lilz. I lift her from her place in the corner and carry her from the bad house, past the bad corner, and we arrive back at the attic.
Her father waits for us.
I hand him Lilz, and he sobs, carrying her
to her room.
Gently, I move her hair from her face, and we both gasp at the damage. “Fritz is dead,” I say, without regret, and Lilz father blinks at me, like an owl, and says, “Thank you.”
Lilz wakes long enough to let me feed her soup. She can barely swallow past the painful bruises on her throat, and the swollen side of her face holds no emotion.
But the other, is crying.
“I have to say goodbye, Lilz. I don’t want to shut off, not in that way. I want to remember.”
She sobs and shakes her head holding onto me.
We sit like that, holding hands, until she falls asleep.
“Can you hide me?” I ask her father and he nods.
He’d explained that the police were already aware of a Robot carrying a girl downtown, and they’d find me and wipe my memory, probably take me apart.
“I want to remember,” I’d told him and he’d agreed to take me to his work.
I’d hide inside a shipping container headed somewhere far away.
It didn’t matter to me.
I’d remember Lilz.
That was enough.
I feel the ship move over the rolling waves, and it feels endless, the flowing, and after many days, it becomes still.
Locked inside, my battery needs the power of the sun, and eventually I’m too weak to light my way in the dark. I go into sleep mode, and eventually out of energy, I shut down completely.
Chapter Three
“Dominik, you know I hate hand-me-downs.”
“Vintage, my love. He’s vintage.”
“Old, you mean. And we already have a Bretta.”
“She’s boring, without any quirks.”
“Just how I like my robots.”
“Shhh, he can hear you.”
“How can you tell?”
“Jolene, look how realistic they were, even back then. This tech is top notch! He even has eyebrows, real hair. The shop did a good job repairing him, too. He was rusted completely through. I got him for a steal, really. They don’t make them like this anymore, everything nowadays is plastic. They found him in a shipping yard that went bankrupt, the poor thing was stuck in a container.”
“No kidding.”
“The thing is, he’d been in there nearly fifty years. Can you imagine?”
“Mummy, can I touch him?”
“Not yet, sweetheart. Let daddy get him up and running first.”
“Hi there? Can you hear me…er…Barkley, is it?”
“Hello,” I say and the family backs away from me instinctively. “Where’s Lilz?” I ask.
“I’m sorry, who?” the man answers.
“My last owner?” But they’d said fifty years.
Had it really been so long?
“Aw, how sad,” the woman says.
She’s pretty. Perfect. Then I realize, they must be a family of robots. They’re all too perfect, just like Lilz used to say about me. She’d tell me if I was more banged up, I’d fit in better.
“What should we call you? Is Barkley okay?” the woman asks.
“Barkley five oh.”
“No one ever named you,” the man says.
I don’t answer. I’m stuck, for some reason. Lilz had called me Tinman, but I shake my head, not able to speak of her in the past tense, older, or maybe gone…
The woman frowns and the first wrinkle appears. So…humans.
I almost miss the little boy hiding behind his mother’s skirt.
The woman says, “I’m Jolene, this is Dom, and Little Dom, and Karel.”
“Barkley, how are all of your systems,” Dom asks.
“Good.”
“Excellent. Jolene needs a new bodyguard. Can you fulfill that role? We will update your programs for physical combat, and weapon information.”
“All right.”
The man laughs, fixing his glasses. “Whoever did work on you did an incredible job.”
“Yes. She did. Thank you. Her name was Lilz. She is incredible.”
“Where can we find this old owner of yours? I’d very much like to meet her.”
I eagerly give them the address. Dom writes it down, but he then looks at Jolene who pinches the bridge of her nose before giving me a smile that makes me feel funny.
“What is it?” I ask.
The funny feeling becomes dread.
“That’s close to the ocean, Barkley,” Jolene says. “No one lives there anymore.”
“How come?”
“There’s been fighting between our country and a few others. I’m sure you know about the ongoing war? Yes? Good. Certain types of weapons used in the ocean spread out until it affected the land. People got very sick.”
The woman touches my arm, before snatching her hand away, her cheeks turning crimson. It seems she’s never comforted a robot before. “I’m sure your friend got away.
I block the emotions. I find my first bout of denial.
I copy the smile the woman gave me. “What would my duties entail?” I ask, instead.
The Merkels have a strict routine. Everyone is out the door by seven am, with their special masks for emergencies. Mrs. Merkel has a driver, and a cook, and a nanny, but I’m the only one allowed inside her office. She’s a politician. Jolene has to give that weird smile a lot. It’s all very practiced, and I’m learning so much from my new owner.
I keep mine on whenever we are in front of reporters.
I can also see why Jolene needs a bodyguard. People are always trying to get close to her. Most of the time, to scream in her face, and now they get to do it into mine, instead. Almost always, they are demanding that she change her stance on the Radiation Act of the New Americas.
But Jolene is quite stubborn.
Everyone carries masks around. The world is quite changed.
On one day, I grow brave enough to try to look for Lilz.
But the information comes up empty every time.
It’s like she never existed.
I keep on smiling, just like Jolene does.
She’s a smart lady. She almost never has emotions.
If Lilz was able to download emotions into me, maybe someone uploaded them back out of Jolene.
Jolene says, “That’s crazy, Barkley, I’m not a psychopath. I just keep them, you know, bottled up. Inside.”
Like her, I try and keep mine on the inside now, too.
But at times, late in the night, after a few glasses of wine, she talks to me.
Like tonight, after a man tried to attack her, she’s drinking and telling me things she’s never said before.
The man had shot a gun at Jolene, hitting me in the arm, instead. And Dominik had had to spend all night repairing me.
I stayed with her after Dominik went to bed. Jolene drank several extra glasses while she sat in the dark, a tremor running through her hands. It made the red drink slosh in her glass.
She’d put the kids to bed Herself, reading them stories, and even pulled her hair down from its bun.
Jolene stared at a piece of carpet, and I did the same.
“Barkley” she says, her words slightly slurred. “Thank you for saving me today.”
“No problem.”
She snorts. Covers her mouth and then laughs. “You know. I almost believe you. Almost. But you’re a liar. You lie as well as any human I know. Too bad you can’t drink. I’d liquor you up and find out the truth. Just like…me I guess.”
“Why do humans lie?”
“Why do you lie?”
“I’m not.”
“Oh, Barkley. Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.” Jolene puts her glass down before she tucks her feet and leans her chin on her palm. “You really love her, don’t you?”
I stay focused on the patch of carpet.
Sometimes, when everyone is asleep. The kids are snoring softly, and Jolene is too, finally, in her office chair, more loudly, and Dom is asleep in his room after having snuck and looked at porn, and the house is quiet, except for the sounds of peaceful dreaming, I’ll walk
through the rooms, imaging another existence.
I’m a father of little Boss. He’s big enough to walk now, and he’s running to me. I catch him and swing him up high like I’ve seen Dom do. Lilz is there, she’s little Boss’ mom, and I’m dad, and we are a happy family who sits by the fire. There aren’t any robots. Just humans. We are just…us.
“Ah. I see,” Jolene says, her dark, keen eyes, seeming to read my thoughts. “Do you know that as hard as it is to talk about her, it’s the same for me, too? Only, it’s when I try to be a mom.” She sighs, slumping down, heavy lidded. “This may sound crazy, but whenever I read them stories or bake them cookies, I feel so much pain. I just want to end it all, right then, on a good note. You might look at me and think what does she know about being a mother? She has nannies, and they do everything, but I wasn’t always like this, Barkley. I breastfed for God’s sake.” She checks her glass to make sure there isn’t a drop left. “I still hear babies cry. Isn’t that funny? At night, I’ll turn my music way down and listen for a moment, thinking I hear them cry. But they aren’t babies anymore. I feel a slight tingle when it happens, too, just here.”
She touches her chest.
Jolene starts to cry. She’s an ugly crier.
“What sort of world have Dom and I brought them into, you know? This place isn’t fit for babies. Or babies grown into kids, who, like you and I, will eventually lie all day to avoid that pain.”
I don’t feel like Jolene needs an answer.
But I do.
I need answers.
But she says, “Thank you, Barkley. For being a part of our family. For being here…for saving me today.”
And then I listen to them all snore through the night until morning.
The morning comes with more new.
The nanny’s out. After yesterday’s shooting, she’s quit.
“I want them home, Dom.”
Jolene’s blurry eyed, drinking coffee by the pot.
Dom leans on the counter, fixing his glasses. He’s not one to argue with a hung-over Jolene. But he tries. “They should be in school.”
“Don’t be an ass. This isn’t about how things look to the public. This is about our children. They stay home. With Barkley.”
Dom looks as if he’s biting back a nasty retort. Mostly after she mentioned this being about the children. “Why?”