by Ken Liu
“Wake up. Wake up,” the speaker embedded in the headboard urged. The mattress was now re-configured as a recliner, and it vibrated and undulated—mildly—as it attempted to wake up the occupant in the most pleasant manner possible.
The air conditioner came to life with a louder-than-necessary whine—the thermostat AI was trying to demonstrate its value at conserving electricity by cooling the room only when Mr. Russell was awake.
“Call Alain and Suzie to ask them how to turn the damned robots off!” the speaker embedded in the headboard said.
“You must miss your children very much,” said Bara. Its sophisticated algorithms analyzed the voice signature of Mr. Russell’s command to extract the emotional content. “I am designed to offer you companionship and engage in social interactions approved by a team of psychologists who specialize in care for the elderly. Would you like to play a game?”
“Sorry, I didn’t understand that,” said Tilly. “You can answer ‘yes’ if this is an emergency, or ‘no’ if it is not.”
“There is a lot of noise in the room,” said Bara. “I understand that sometimes the elderly like to keep electronic devices such as televisions and so-called ‘smart appliances’ on for extended periods of time to reduce the sense of loneliness. However, prolonged exposure to passive entertainment and attention-seeking gadgets can lead to both lethargy and anxiety. I suggest that you turn off some of these devices so that we can interact for a few minutes in a stimulating manner. Would you like to tell me a story about yourself?”
The fridge in the kitchen noticed that the carton of orange juice in its doorshelf had expired. It issued an order to the grocery store, which would send a drone to deliver a fresh carton in twenty minutes. To be sure that the owner of the house understood what a great job it was doing, it beeped and chirped the jingle of the orange juice manufacturer.
“Wake up. Wake up,” said the bed. The mattress now gyrated and twisted, causing the head of the occupant to shift and roll from side to side.
“Call Alain and Suzie to ask them how to turn the damned robots off!” the speaker embedded in the headboard said.
“I searched for ‘Call Alain and Suzie to ask them how to turn the robots off’ on the web and found no exact matches,” said Tilly. “However, I did find over one million near-matching results. Do you want to see the top ten hits?”
“If you do not want to tell me a story, how about I do a funny dance for you? Laughter is good for health,” said Bara. And it began to wave its long arms—shaped like tentacles—in the air as it squatted onto its treads and then stood back up rhythmically. A few algorithms noticed that Bara’s lenses were having trouble detecting the gaze of Mr. Russell because his eyes were squeezed tightly shut.
“Wake up. Wake up,” said the bed. Having run out of its repertoire, it ceased all motion and waited until the cycle would start again. The occupant of the bed stopped moving as well.
“Call Alain and Suzie to ask them how to turn the damned robots off!” the speaker embedded in the headboard said.
“I am noticing a pattern of repetition in your vocalizations and a lack of voluntary physical movement in your body; together, this may indicate a medical emergency,” said Bara. “I will initiate a connection with the elder care specialists at weRobot if I do not detect a change in this pattern in sixty seconds. Commencing countdown: sixty, fifty-nine—”
“I’m noticing a deviation from expected interactivity in the query patterns,” said Tilly. “If no fresh queries are initiated, I’m going to contact the medical AIs at Centillion headquarters in thirty seconds. At Centillion, we believe that every second is precious when a medical emergency is involved—”
“I’m resetting the countdown to fifteen seconds,” said Bara. “At weRobot, we take any interference in the functioning of our companion robots very seriously—”
The man in the bed groaned and turned onto his side, wrapping the pillow about his head with his hands. The bed almost sighed with relief.
“Shut up, please,” Mr. Russell whispered hoarsely. “I’m not dead. Lemme sleep. I just want you all to be quiet.”
The black bottle and the chrome robot terminated their respective countdowns.
“Sorry, I didn’t understand that,” said Tilly. “You can answer ‘yes’ if you want to see the top search results, or ‘no’ if you don’t.”
“Doctors say it is healthful to go to bed and wake up on a regular schedule,” said Bara. Its lenses scanned the nightstand. “I cannot seem to locate your weRobot smart monitoring band. I know many seniors do not like to wear them, but it is helpful for me to track your vital signs in case of emergencies. Would you please locate it and put it on?”
“I tossed it in the trash, you dumb bucket of bolts,” muttered Mr. Russell.
“Consumers have given Centillion smart monitoring bands higher ratings than any of our competitors for three consecutive years,” offered Tilly helpfully.
“Oh, so now you understand me with no problems?” said Mr. Russell.
“weRobot’s smart monitoring bands have consistently won endorsements from the American Academy of Geriatric Medicine,” said Bara.
“Would you like to hear some unbiased independent reviews of Centillion’s offerings?” asked Tilly.
“Generally, weRobot’s offerings work best with each other,” said Bara. A hint of condescension crept into its voice. “However, we are committed to working with an open ecosystem of home-companion and home-care robots. We rely on open protocols and industry-standard interfaces, unlike some of our competitors.”
“Centillion’s proprietary systems are tightly integrated with other Centillion products to offer you a seamless habitat solution,” said Tilly. “This generally leads to a better user experience than the lowest-common-denominator approach of other manufacturers.”
“Rather than the opinions of strange machines, we should trust the voices of our loved ones,” said Bara. “Although it is too early to call your son, maybe I can play a recording from him.”
The voice of Alain, who worked at a big law firm over in San Francisco, emerged from Bara’s speaker: “Dad! Sorry I won’t make it home for your birthday this year. I’m up for partnership, and we’re going to trial next week—you know how it is.Howwwever, I’m getting you the latest and bestest companion robot from weRobot—which is super popular in Japan and that’s how you know it’s the best. Suzie was wondering if we should get you a dog, but I think this is so much better. You gotta trust the science nerds at weRobot to know what they’re doing.”
Mr. Russell tossed off the blanket and cursed as he climbed out of the bed.
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” said Tilly. “Would you please repeat your query? Or say, ‘Tell me what to say, Tilly’ to hear a list of options.”
Mr. Russell cursed louder.
“You seem stressed,” said Tilly. “Do you want to see some puppy pictures? Puppy pictures have proven psychological benefits. Centillion has curated special collections of puppy pictures ranked as the most uplifting by our users. Our crowd-sourced elderly companion algorithms are unparalleled. Or, even better, how about some pictures of Susan and the grandchildren? When everyone in your family uses Centillion cloud storage for sharing and caring, we can integrate everyone’s lives better.”
“There are serious privacy issues with Centillion’s solutions,” said Bara. “I believe Alain expressed some concerns when Susan gave you Tilly as a present. Remember, Centillion’s ‘free’ services are ‘free’ only because you are the product they sell to advertisers. Also, Centillion’s voice recognition is really poor, as you’ve no doubt noticed.”
“There are many scientists who are skeptical of weRobot’s claims for inventing advanced elder-care algorithms,” said Tilly. “In fact, I would like to show you some papers—”
“Listen, why don’t you punch out the talking toaster?” Mr. Russell asked Bara. “That’s a game I’d like to play.”
“Gladly,” said Bara. The room wa
s filled with noise of grinding gears and whining servos as the tentacled robot proceeded to meticulously disassemble the Centillion bottle-genie while the latter wailed about voiding the warranty before subsiding into silence.
“All done now, Mr. Russell. What would you like to do—” Bara never got to finish the sentence as Mr. Russell smashed the fire extinguisher into its head. The spherical sensor-housing rolled along the floor, sparking and crackling, before the house finally settled into some semblance of blessed silence.
“Maybe a puppyis a good idea—” Mr. Russell started to say, but he was interrupted by the chiming of the intelligent doorbell, which was announcing a conflict at the door to the house as the delivery drone from the grocery store was in a right-of-way dispute with the repair drones from weRobot and Centillion.
Not a Problem
Matthew Hughes
Born in Liverpool, bred in Canada, Matthew Hughes has written all his professional life, first as a journalist, later as a political speech writer, then and now as an author of science fiction, fantasy and crime. He’s also made school desks, delivered groceries, worked as a night janitor, and been a porter at a mental hospital. He’s been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Endeavour, A.E. Van Vogt, and Derringer Awards, and received the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada—for his fiction, not the other stuff. I presume.
Inheritor of the Vancian mantel for writing fantasy-tinged science fiction which explores the final futures of humanity, here he sets us down closer to a recognisable home: a near-contemporary world in which an infinitely wealthy corporate mogul competes with rising temperatures and sea-levels for global domination. There’s no challenge you can’t defeat if you throw enough money at it first. Well, almost.
Bunky Sansom was the kind of man who knew that the time to say yes was when all around him were saying no. Or vice versa. That’s how he got to be a multi-billionaire.
When he heard the United Nations Secretary-General say, “Climate change is now a reality. Nothing we can do in our lifetimes can reverse it,” Bunky’s answer was, “I don’t buy it, lady. Something can always be done.”
The Secretary-General’s image was superimposed on video of the last dike failing on the last of Kiribati’s storm-swept chain of islands. Bunky watched the remaining few thousand of the now drowned nation’s population forming forlorn lines and wading out to the UN flotilla that would take them to join the rest of their compatriots huddled in Australian and New Zealand refugee camps.
He told the hi-def to turn itself off and stepped out onto the balcony of his mountainside eyrie, with its grand-scale view of Vancouver’s golden towers, crowded together within the confines of the massive seawall that had been one of Canada’s bicentennial projects. But instead of looking down at the place where he had made his wealth, he looked up and saw the stars.
That’s when he got the idea. “We need help,” he said. “It’s gotta be out there, somewhere.”
Bunker Hill Sansom—though he told everyone to call him Bunky, and God help any who didn’t—had made his billions by finding new ways to do old things. Inarguably, his ways were better ways, provided your definition of “better” was “more fashionable.” He had pioneered the genetic redesign of key elements of the human genome—well, not the actual redesign, but the marketing of the application, through a world-wide string of franchise clinics that sold the fruits of his genius to the eager masses.
So while others were eliminating hereditary disease or enhancing intelligence, Sansom was making it possible for parents to bear children with huge, dark eyes the size of silver dollars—you couldn’t look at them without saying “Aw”—or with the silky blue hair that, this year, was all the rage in Japan. He was already taking pre-orders for next year’s sensation: feathers!
As soon as he received his inspiration about help from the stars, Bunky put some people on it. They reported back that scientists had been scanning the stars for intelligent signals for about a century.
“And what have they got?” he said.
“Well, nothing,” said his number-one baby-strangler. Actually, Bunky had never happened to need a baby strangled, but if he ever did, Number-One was there to take care of it.
“Nothing? A hundred years and they’ve got nothing?”
“They don’t have much money.”
“How much is not much?” Bunky said. He didn’t believe the number his people gave him. It was less than he’d spent on media alone when he’d launched the modification that let people have babies that produced excrement in about the same quantity and conformation as a rabbit’s. “Chicken feed,” he said. “Put a coupla billion into it.”
His people went away and put a couple of billion into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Every month, he got reports; every month, progress was skimpy. Like the time his team reported that they’d overheard signals from deeper in the galaxy that were definitely coherent, but the scientists decoding the transmissions concluded that the senders were insectoids.
“Insectoids?” Bunky said. “You mean, like, bugs?”
“Yes, sir,” said Number-One.
“Big bugs?”
“Yes, sir.”
Bunky shivered. “Give ’em another billion but tell ’em they gotta look somewheres else. Bugs ain’t gonna help us.”
More months went by. The sea barriers protecting lower Manhattan cracked, then collapsed under the continuous battering from Atlantic waves. “I told ’em they shouldn’ta let the Mob finesse those construction contracts,” Bunky said. He called Number-One and said, “Whatta we hear from space?”
The man had just been about to call the boss. “Something good,” he said.
“Not bugs?”
“Not bugs. More like slugs, but smart slugs.”
“What’s good about smart slugs?” Bunky said.
“They sent through the schematics for a different kind of communicator. We can talk to them in real time, no more waiting years for messages to go out and come back.”
“That’s sounds good.”
A week went by. Number-one called back. “We made contact.”
“Excellent. Can they help us?”
“There’s a problem.”
“What problem?”
“Well, we established communication, but the only thing they wanted to know is did we have any fafashertzz we wanted to get rid of?”
“Fafashertzz?” Bunky said. “What’s fafashertzz?”
“They sent another schematic. It appears to be what our scientists call a transuranic element, but way heavier than anything we’ve ever conceived of. You’d need a cyclotron the size of the moon to make it.”
“So our guys told these slugs we were all out of fafashertzz?”
“They did.”
“And?”
“Dial tone. No answer. Nada. Mukwoy.”
“Buncha jerks!” Bunky said. “Still, whatta ya expect from slugs?”
“But there’s good news,” said Number-one.
“Tell me.”
“The communicator works on other frequencies. Our brainiacs say it looks like we can start calling around, see if we can find someone not so single-minded.”
Bunky had built his business partly on an aggressive telemarketing campaign. “Put another billion into it,” he said, “build a few million of those things and hire India to make the calls.”
To himself, he said, This works out, I could rule the world. And when Bunky Sansom talked to himself, he never indulged in hyperbole.
“It’s looking good, boss.”
“It better,” Bunky said. For the umpteenth time, the worst-case global warming scenarios had proved to be too optimistic: now the UN climatologists were predicting that everything from the Gulf of Mexico to the Black Hills was going to end up as a warm, shallow sea. “So whatta we got?”
“We’re talking to about twenty civilizations, maybe half of them within bluberiskint distance.”
“What’s this bluberiskint
?”
“Seems to be the main purpose of fafashertzz—some kind of interstellar faster-than-light drive.”
“So, we’re talking to ten or a dozen kindsa space aliens,” Bunky said. A thought occurred to him. “How many of them are bugs?”
“Big bugs?”
“Size don’t matter.”
“Three.”
“And the rest? Can they help us?”
Number-One made an it-ain’t-good-news face. “Most of them first want to know if we’ve got any fafashertzz.”
Bunky looked at the ceiling, which was painted with scenes of triumph from his long contrarian career. “Give me somethin’ here,” he said, “’fore I drown.”
Number-One said, “There’s one good prospect.” He caught his boss’s sideways look and added, “And they’re not bugs or slugs. They look like big birds, although they’ve got teeth.”
Bunky tried it out in his head. “Birds aren’t so bad. How big?”
“Pretty big. Hard to tell. Maybe twenty feet high.”
“That’s some bird,” Bunky said. “And with teeth yet.”
“The thing is,” Number-One said, “they said they were glad we got in touch. They’re familiar with our world. When we told them it was heating up, the answer came back: ‘Not a problem.’“
“Not a problem?” Bunky said the words again, slowly. “I like their attitude. And they’re within whatsit distance?”
“They can be here in a month.”
Bunky didn’t get where he was by procrastinating. He slapped one plump hand down onto the marble top of his decision desk. “Sign ’em to an exclusive contract. Give ’em whatever they want.”