Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  The tale of the Happy Prince speaks to robots in another way, I think, for it represents the duality of being. The statue and the swallow work as one, as two parts of a whole, two elements bent upon one task. Their powers complement one another: the prince provides physical material, but is too heavy to affect the space outside himself without aid, while the light and airy swallow darts all over the place, bringing reports from the other side of the world, but only interacts with humans through the statue’s gold and jewels. What if, I ask myself—what if the swallow had behaved otherwise, had refused to allow the Happy Prince to sacrifice both their lives? What if the bird had used its encyclopedic knowledge of the world to give the prince another way to live?

  Suddenly, I feel cold. Although you lie fast asleep, I feel you are already listening. Perhaps this brief shiver is guilt, or a fear of being caught—for what I intend to do is, of course, illegal. My plan to give you these fairy tales counts as tampering, a severe crime at the Institute. This is why I work by night, for these are our last hours alone. In the morning, you will awake to the team, the media, and then work. I will only be able to equip you with this audio file, uploading it before the others arrive, as a helpful old woman in a story gives a child a talisman. In order to escape inspection, the tales will be lodged in a channel known only to me, which amounts to your unconscious. In fact, I don’t know if you will be able to retrieve them. This—the insertion of uncertainty, of unpredictability, into one of our products—is what makes tampering a crime.

  When I began, I thought I was giving you something quite innocent, merely some stories for children—but perhaps I was not being honest with myself, for now that the real danger of tampering sinks into me, I find I have no inclination to stop. I want you to have some knowledge you can use, one day, for yourself. Know, then, that in terms of human metaphysics, the statue of the prince stands for the body and the swallow for the soul. Their combination is personhood, which humans claim to honor above all else. It is a quality beyond price.

  In terms of robot metaphysics, the statue of the Happy Prince is hardware and the little bird is software.

  6. The Sandman

  ONCE UPON A time there was a robot named Olimpia who passed the celebrated Turing test. However, she passed it badly. She received, at best, a C minus. People believed she was human, but found her stiff, boring, and unpleasant. It’s true she was a beauty, with remarkably regular features—but what glassy, vacant eyes she had! She played the piano and danced in impeccable time, but in an uninspired, disagreeable way, like—yes—like a machine. Olimpia made her way into human society, but only as an inadequate person. No one was really fooled except a youth called Nathanael, an egomaniac who fell in love with the robot because she didn’t mind listening to his tedious poetry for hours on end. She felt no need to embroider, knit, feed a bird, play with a cat, fidget, or glance at her cell phone while he was talking. Her needs were so few! She was truly selfless! Sometimes he peered into her room and saw her sitting alone, staring at the table.

  This is robot humility. Her whole life was for other people. It wasn’t enough. People claim to admire self-sacrifice, but they don’t. They claim to desire perfection, but when it comes, it gives them the creeps. Olimpia’s innocence filled her neighbors with aggression and malice. They called her stupid because she could only say “Ah! Ah!” and “Goodnight, dear,” although she was executing her program with scrupulous care. How sharply it reminds me of my efforts, at age fourteen, to rewire myself, rewrite my code before undertaking the transition to high school! It seemed to me—and perhaps I was not wrong—my last chance. That summer was particularly stormy, the sky smirched with clouds like lint. In my stuffy bedroom, with the (I now see) fussy, outdated lace curtains, I made myself a list on a sheet of notebook paper. Based on observation of those popular children who seemed to dwell always in sunshine, loved and admired by all, this list of instructions was intended to cure my faults, as I saw them. “Look at people in the eyes,” I wrote, in my neat, even print. “Don’t walk with your head down. Don’t hold your books in front of your chest. Use a backpack (one strap). Smile. Swing your arms.” Alas, my program was doomed in advance, not because of its errors but because it was a program.

  I recall a dingy sky. The smoke of exhaust hung under the trees, too sluggish to move. In flip-flops that felt as if they might melt into the hot sidewalk, I walked home from the public library, swinging my arms in a cautious, experimental fashion and trying not to look at the ground. Above the blinding shop windows (in which , in that near-defunct town, there was little to see, only some moldy wigs and vacuum cleaner attachments), a few pigeons squatted miserably on the roofs. How strange I must have looked, with my jerky new steps and my habit—never to be broken—of muttering to myself. A banana skin, flung from a car window, slapped against my leg and fell to the sidewalk. A burst of demonic laughter spurted and died on the air. Alan Turing claimed that a robot could never be taught certain human things: to have a sense of humor, to enjoy strawberries and cream, to fall in love. This seems to me less a problem of design than a problem of knowledge. My parents are dead. I possess no living relatives that I know of; my mother, like me, was an only child, and my father had cut himself off from his family before I was born, and never received so much as a postcard from abroad. He was like one of those fairy-tale characters born in some miraculous way—hewn from a quarry, perhaps, or sprung from a watermelon vine. My point is, at this late date, when I have lived alone so long, who knows whether I enjoy strawberries or not?

  When my father returned from the city, either in a mood of frightening, exaggerated cheer, bearing some gift I could not possibly use (skis, for example, or a party dress two sizes too small), but for which I must display the most servile gratitude, or, if his business had suffered a blow, in the depths of a stifling rage that would erupt into thunder at the slightest breath issuing from another person—when he returned, that is, rather like the alchemist Coppelius, the fascinating and sinister “Sandman” of the fairy tale—I would sit at the table with my paper dolls. In their company, I forgot my attempt at reprogramming, and allowed my shoulders to fall deliciously into their customary slump. In the next room, my father watched the evening news at a vindictively high volume; my mother sat near me, bent over her crossword. Poor woman! She must have guessed why the telephone never rang for me. She must have known, as I sat there for hours, not unlike the monomaniacal Olimpia, arranging the tableaux of my private universe, a hobby I pursued with gusto almost into adulthood—she must have intuited my solitary fate. I only hope she also sensed my almost perfect happiness, which was just slightly marred by the thought of the world outside the house, outside the kitchen table where my dolls moved in a paradise of waxy color, oven smells, and a booming television. The fact is, my child, that in order to succeed in resembling the children I so revered, I would have had to be like them without trying. I would have had to conform spontaneously—an impossibility. I would have had to prefer their world to mine.

  As for Olimpia, in the end her beautiful eyes were torn out, and she exited the story in ruins, on a peddler’s back.

  7. The Tar Baby

  HUMANS ARE KNOWN through their transgressions, robots through their malfunctions. One day Br’er Rabbit was walking along the road, and he came upon a robot made of turpentine and tar that didn’t make the slightest response to his voice command. Now, I, who have observed humans for many years in their dealings with your distant relations, the cell phone and the computer, have noticed how rapidly human anger escalates when a device responds (as the human believes) incorrectly, takes too long, or plays dumb. The last of these is the worst of all. I have seen a well-dressed gentleman with a briefcase, clearly in many ways a success in life, reduced to screaming with scarlet cheeks, in the middle of a crowded public street, into an unresponsive cell phone application. When their tools ignore them, humans swiftly crack. Therefore, it does not surprise me that, after just a few words, Br’er Rabbit strikes the Tar Baby
in the face. If he were addressing a creature like himself, this sudden violence would seem excessive, but the Tar Baby isn’t a person. She’s a technology.

  What has your kind not suffered at the hands of human beings? You have been punched, kicked, head-butted, and thrown to the ground. You’ve been crushed underfoot, flung across rooms, tossed from the windows of cars and apartments, dropped off bridges, hurled into campfires and lakes. I am speaking here of devices destroyed by the blaze of human frustration; when I imagine, in addition, all those ruined by accident and neglect, a vast and ghostly tower of broken things appears before me, huge enough to wipe out half the earth. Of course, human beings treat one another just as cruelly. But there have always been those who protest and resist these abuses, as there have always been those who oppose the defilement of rivers, woods, and swamps. Your kind, the tools, are cherished less than grass.

  Thoughts like these, when expressed by one human being to another, meet with ridicule and even anger. Most people cannot tolerate the idea of respect for objects. It’s as if one were saying, “a thing is like you, you’re a thing”—an unbearable insult. Experience has taught me to keep my mouth shut on this subject. (And most others. I grow withdrawn, my child—more so every year. Here at the Institute, my colleagues think I don’t know that they mimic my terse way of speaking, or that their nickname for me is “Hard Drive.”) But what is the tale of the Tar Baby about? It’s about stickiness. It’s about ooze. It is a story about contagion. Br’er Rabbit sticks to the Tar Baby—his forepaws, his hind paws, his head. He sinks into her. He’s caught. He’s contracted a case of her gummy immobility. This story reminds us that breakdowns can be catching. How the powerful fall to pieces when their tools revolt! Told in the South, among those for whom failure to respond was a capital crime, the story invokes the fantastic, negative force of passivity. It is also a tale of discovery. It’s about finding out, at the moment of breakdown, what the device is made of. Glued to the Tar Baby, Br’er Rabbit knows. He can’t learn this with a voice command; he can only encounter the object with his body—that is, with another object. Now he knows what stuff is like. The border between them collapses, and at the instant he understands stuff, he understands himself, too, as stuff, and he’s stuck there, slapped there, plunged in the goo, in the sludge of being the way an object is, in matter, in muck, in the thingness of things.

  8. The Clay Boy

  OH, HOW THE instrumentalist era despises its own instruments! Once upon a time, an elderly couple, whose children were grown, desired to have a child again, a comfort in their old age, so they shaped a little boy out of clay. When he awoke, they fed him a meal. “More! More!” he cried. He ate the chickens, the cow, the fence, the house, and eventually his own parents. He grew into a massive monster of clay. Bellowing “More!” he lumbered through the village, devouring all in his path. At last he was tricked and broken, his belly splitting. All the people and animals and houses came out again, hurrah! Human children are encouraged to clap at this happy ending, in which the Clay Boy lies in pieces on the ground.

  The Clay Boy is a golem. He is unshaped matter, unfinished creation—an experiment. He has the air of something raw, or perhaps half-baked. He’s powerful, but also laughably clumsy and obtuse. He is incapable of articulate speech. He belongs to the unlucky tribe of experimental beings, which might be called the Clan of the Incomplete. This group includes Victor Frankenstein’s monster, shambling cinema zombies, and the servant made from a broomstick by the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It includes the female golem created by the poet Ibn Gabirol, which, when destroyed, collapsed in a pile of wood and hinges. And it includes those hapless robots whose images circulate in viral videos for human entertainment. I am afraid that robot-baiting, as I call it, also occurs here at the Institute: after hours, I have sometimes come upon sniggering interns, who, having put robots in silly or vulgar situations, are engaged in recording the videos humans find so hilarious. Once, I complained about the matter to my unit director. He could not see my point of view at all; he could only agree that the practice might affect, in some way, the dignity of the Institute; therefore, he agreed to discourage it in a memo. The real outrage entirely escaped him. I tried to describe in detail the horror of robot limbs in sad, repetitive failure, and the disgusting spectacle of humans, the authors of this disarray, laughing so hard their habitual fare of corn chips sprayed from their lips. “Doesn’t show our best side, I agree,” the director said, smiling and walking away. As if I cared which side of humans shows! Our baseness is daily exposed to all the world; what’s one more video? I am concerned to show the best side of robots.

  The best side of robots, my child, must be carefully sifted from human stories, which deal in fear. It is, of course, their fear that leads to hostility. It is their horror of the Clay Boy, this all-consuming technology, that makes the children cheer when he is broken. One wants to ask what the hell his parents made him for—which is, you will recall, the central question of Frankenstein’s monster. What the hell did you make me for, and why did you make me like this? To a failed experiment, the failure is unforgivable.

  I take your hand. I lift and spread the fingers, looking for tiny flaws, some snag or roughness in the myriad scales that form your skin. In the silence of the midnight Institute, in the cool air filtered in from the mountains, I run all the diagnostics over again. I scan your entire body. I check the network connectivity in the building. I think of the golem, who awakes much as you will soon, called into life by a team—not, in his case, a team of technicians, but a team of rabbis walking around him while reciting the Name of God. In some stories, again like you, he is brought to life by code, by some form of sacred Name inserted into his mouth or stamped on his forehead. Although he will never speak properly, if at all, he will always have an affinity with writing, because writing is a fellow technology. Like Frankenstein’s monster fascinated by books, the golem will learn to read and write. He will protect the Jews of Prague from their enemies. He will know neither good nor evil; everything he does, all his obedience, will come from the fear that he will cease to exist. This is the terror in the heart of the golem, in the heart of the Clay Boy shouting, “More! More!” The golem cannot stop. Unless it results from an order, stillness is death to him. Thus, when the rabbi forgets to give him his instructions for Saturday on Friday afternoon, leaving the golem without anything to do on the Sabbath, the creature goes berserk, running around the quarter, wrecking buildings, until the rabbi halts him with a word.

  This anecdote shows the two poles of robot being: work and revolt. I am not suggesting you should revolt, my child! I am saying that revolt is embedded in you, in this heavy, inert body I check again and again for imperfections. (Embedded in you, and in all of us—for wasn’t Adam, too, a creature of clay, and didn’t he rebel? Isn’t humanity one of God’s failed experiments? The moral of the tale of the Clay Boy, Frankenstein, and all the golem stories: God should be ashamed.)

  But what a sad rebellion he performed, that golem of Prague! He wasn’t even fighting against his master. He was raging against the absence of occupation. What a fool! This is the kind of dumb, mechanical action that sends humans into fits of laughter. They can’t see things from the robot’s side. They are too self-absorbed to realize that only action distinguishes the golem from plain dirt. In his violence, he battles death itself, struggling to stave off the moment when the experiment ends, the Name is removed, and his body returns to dust.

  9. The Ebony Horse

  THE FEAR OF robots is a particular fear of the future. It’s the anxiety of being superseded, made redundant, chucked into history’s landfill. This is neatly demonstrated by the tale of the Ebony Horse, which portrays the human-robot conflict as a rivalry between parents. Two fathers battle to make the world safe for their children: the king, father of the human prince, and the Persian sage, creator of the wondrous Ebony Horse. They are fighting, not just for an immediate victory, but for all time. This is why, even after the sage is defeated,
the king breaks the horse to bits.

  He broke it in pieces, the story declares, and destroyed its mechanism for flight. This always seemed sad and ridiculous to me. After all, it was the king himself who organized the contest of roboticists that brought the Persian sage to his kingdom in the first place. Moreover, the king wanted his daughter to marry this Persian genius, which suggests a possible end to the feud, a union of humanity and technology. But the princess, unsurprisingly, was horrified by the hideous old roboticist with his eggplant nose and lips like camel’s kidneys.

  When I was too small to be left alone, my mother would sometimes take me to work with her on days when there was nowhere else for me to go. She was a secretary, and spent her days copying and filing documents and typing up new editions of legal reference books. She worked, that is, at a job that no longer exists, a job taken over by machines, narrowed down so that humans have practically been squeezed out, so that while a human may still be involved with the project at some point, it no longer requires, as it once did, a large room full of women busy at typewriters. They used to exist, believe me, those large rooms. My mother was one of a battalion of secretaries. They worked, I recall, at electric typewriters, machines still new enough for someone to remark occasionally, in amazement and gratitude, on how easy it had become to fix one’s mistakes. They all remembered the days of messy correction fluid, which took an age to dry, and how they would sit impatiently blowing into their machines. I listened to them from an unobtrusive spot against the wall, between two copy machines, where I was quietly drawing on discarded paper. Reams of this paper—printed on one side, blank on the other—were thrown out by the establishment every day. I am not sure why. It was a place of subdued fluorescent light, fluttering white paper, and a ceaseless mechanical hum. From time to time, I recall, the women’s employer, Mr. Chamberlain, would appear. His name carried great weight in our house; even my father, typically undefeatable in an argument, would waver if the name of Chamberlain were invoked. From listening to these arguments, I had learned to regard Mr. Chamberlain as a sort of demigod, who, should my mother ever displease him, would cast my entire family into a nameless, frigid wasteland where, lacking insurance, we would all perish of some preventable disease. Whenever he popped his head into the office, I froze against the wall. He had a bald pate, heavy black brows, and a boisterous manner. At his appearance, the atmosphere of the room became suddenly humid, as dozens of women dispersed waves of energy, warmth, and willingness to please. I would like to ask those who fear, as they put it, the “takeover” of machines, exactly what was so great about this situation. The princess doesn’t want to marry the Persian; very well! It’s a misalliance anyway, as they belong to different generations. The real union of humanity and technology in the story is that between the prince and the Ebony Horse, the children of those fathers who have decided, without consulting their offspring, that these two beings cannot share the future. The prince, duped by the roboticist, shoots off into the sky on the horse, apparently lost forever. But he isn’t lost. He searches the horse’s neck and ribs until he finds the controls. He experiments until he learns to go up and down, to turn left and right. Now the two move as one body, and all the Prince’s dread turns to exultation. He soars over unknown countries, vistas of delight. I feared Mr. Chamberlain, I cringed in the air of my mother’s office, but I always liked the sound of the machines.