That Sort of Partners

by Hollis Shiloh

  Especially since I was still figuring out this human and how to deal with him—and how I felt about him. Sometimes it seemed simple, other times incredibly complicated.

  Maybe I was getting too attached. With him sitting there in the gloom, staring ahead with a blank expression, I couldn't help but know he was feeling upset. And I wished I could fix it so he didn't have to feel that way.

  I cursed myself for a softhearted fool and dropped him off at his vehicle.

  Jake

  We spent the next day working through files. The captain wanted us to go over some cold cases. I didn't know if it was busy work to keep us out of view, or if he really thought Green would be able to solve things that others hadn't. I wasn't sure which was worse: that the precinct hated us so much, we needed to be hidden, or that Green really was so much better than everyone else. Or maybe I was looking at it from all the wrong angles, still freaked out about last night.

  It was a lot to wrap my head around.

  He was so blunt, there was no way he was hinting something, right? Wanting to be that sort of partners? He was far too professional. If he wanted a human lover, he'd look elsewhere, not make eyes at me. Then I thought of how wildly he'd driven, how that rogue bot had gotten to him. Green was a lot less driven by professionalism and logic than you'd think.

  At any rate, I was distracted and had to work hard to keep my head in the game today.

  Green was faster and better at this work than I was. He brought fresh eyes and fresh possibilities to two cases during that one shift. We weren't authorized to check them out ourselves, so we were guaranteed to earn new fans with the extra workload someone else would be carrying.

  He rose at exactly the time for knock-off, and I looked up at him. "Don't you want to finish reading that file first?" I pointed to the one he was closing with his careful metal hands, more delicate and yet far stronger than mine could ever be. It would be easy to get a complex with a partner like Green. If you were that kind of guy.

  He shook his head. "I have to go for an adjustment. I wouldn't want to be late. You'd have to track me down."

  I stared at him, gaping, as I realized he'd just smiled. That was definitely a smile, wasn't it? My partner was joking with me.

  I decided I liked it.

  And then I wondered, Is that robot flirting? I cursed my overactive imagination. I really needed to stop freaking out about that club. It was just a club. The fact that it existed didn't mean it should be getting to me in any way. As long as it was all legal and consensual, why should I care?

  Still, that night after I went home, I did some research on the topic. What the hell did a robot get out of it? And by research, I do mean research, not porn. But by bedtime, I wasn't really any closer to understanding the whole thing. Apparently, I was a bit of a country bumpkin not to already be up to speed on all of this. But I also wasn't the only one confused by it, so that was some relief.

  I was more and more starting to see Green as a person, an equal. It was hard to believe that just a few years ago, before I was born, he'd have belonged to someone who could melt him down if they decided to. That was weirder than anything else, really.

  But he wasn't programmed for libido—unless there was something major he hadn't told me. He wasn't a sex bot made free. Even a sex bot, I'd think, might want to pursue other activities when free to choose. Anyway, he'd said that wasn't why he'd brought me to that club, and I'd be better off to believe him and stop thinking about it.

  It was doing my head in, so I turned on an old movie and went to sleep to the background noise. Every time I thought I was actually adjusting to the future pretty well, something else threw me for a loop.

  Green

  My adjustment took longer than it should have. It seemed like I lay there for hours, staring up at the flashing colored lights from the metal table. I checked my internal chronometer after it was all over, and the elapsed time was only forty-four minutes. But that was approximately twice as long as any of my previous adjustments.

  The Red doctor bot met me when I awoke from the adjustment. The colors ended, I could move again, and I sat up. He was there with a clipboard.

  "Ah, Green." He examined it. "Our police officer."

  "What was the problem?"

  "No problem. Just a good, thorough adjustment." He sent me the sub-vocal blur-blip sound that used to mean All clear—everything is safe. More specific than a human smile, though I believed they often served the same purpose.

  It made my hackles rise. What was it about this guy that made him seem intent on patronizing me? Maybe he needed an adjustment himself?

  I walked home, slow and meandering. Wasn't I supposed to feel better after an adjustment? Many bots had no side effects at all. I wished I could be so fortunate. Instead, I found myself staring at the colors and patterns of light on wet surfaces as if they held some deeper meaning. Numbness seemed to fill me, and lethargy. I was not at all myself.

  It shouldn't have taken so much out of me, but by the time I got back to my niche, I felt in need of a long rest and recharge. Maybe a few hard restarts as well.

  After about three hours, I still felt odd. I felt like a part of me was nonfunctional.

  I almost never dreamed, but I think I had one that night. It was gone too quickly to leave a memory trace later, just the taste of something melancholy in my circuits.

  Jake

  When he came in to work that day, Green seemed decidedly like—well, a robot. I know that's not an appropriate way to talk anymore, but you know what I mean, right? He seemed to be off in the clouds somewhere, with none of the intelligence or emotion that I'd finally been getting used to. Just going through the motions.

  We had plenty of isolation in the room where the captain had set us up with the cold cases. By the fourth case we reviewed, I'd gotten sick of the cold shoulder, or whatever this was.

  I lifted a hand to wave it in front of him. "You all right?"

  His head swiveled slightly, as if he was registering my presence for the first time. He hesitated before answering. "I was adjusted last night. I am not quite myself yet."

  "Ah. Sorry to hear that." I regarded him. "Does it hurt?"

  "I find it unpleasant." He made three little beeps that meant nothing to me but sounded like something a bird might whistle to be derogatory, and turned back to his work. I stared at him like he was from Mars.

  Okay, that was weird. Better to chalk it up to brain freeze and not think too hard about that adjustment stuff, I told myself. I was just starting to get used to Green. Didn't want to think about him being a completely different robot now. Anyway, what did I know about adjustment? It might not work like that.

  But I was still worried about him, so after work, as I grabbed my jacket, I said, "Hey, you want to go somewhere? A drink or a movie or something?"

  This time, he stared at me like I was from a different planet. "Why?"

  I shrugged, embarrassed. What if he thought... "You've been making all the friendly gestures recently. I guess it's my turn. I'm a little worried about you, to be honest."

  He stopped and swiveled to stare at me. I thought he looked perplexed. "Why?"

  "You're not acting like yourself. I want to make sure you're okay. If you need to talk or anything." I shrugged. He was acting like this was a big deal. If he didn't want to go, all he had to say was "no."

  His hands squeezed slightly into fists at his sides. "I don't like being adjusted. I feel strange for a few days afterwards."

  We stood in the parking lot, waiting. As I watched him, he looked far away, as if he wasn't seeing anything in front of us at all.

  Then, slowly, he shook his head. "I guess I know how that robot felt. The Yellow Delta. I do not like feeling as though I am losing myself. I...I am even speaking more formally. I do not—I don't—like that. I enjoy slang and informal speech. I learned it because I like it."

  "I like it too," I said, not sure what else to say. I touched his arm, a little lighter than a friendly thump, but
not much. His metal was slightly warm under my touch. "Do you want to watch a movie and get some of it back?" I grinned up at him.

  He stared at me for a moment, till I started to feel uncomfortable, then he nodded slowly. "I would enjoy that."

  There were no movies playing at the theaters that he wanted to see, so I took him home with me and we ordered an old movie of the type he liked—filled with action and hotshot police partners solving crimes and saving the world. I crunched popcorn, and he drank a bit of oil and sat with his gaze glued to the screen.

  I felt comfortable on the couch beside him. Most of my old partners would have probably given in and watched a movie with me, but not without posturing to show they were too tough to need my friendship, or drinking too much. It was pleasant to simply have a quiet movie night together.

  I must have been more tired than I realized, though, because I fell asleep on the couch before the movie ended.

  Green

  Watching my partner sleep, I was aware of a growing feeling of softness towards him, something like pity. He looked so tired, so vulnerable.

  Jake couldn't just plug in and recharge for a little while and feel good as new; he had to sleep while his body fixed itself. If it couldn't, he had to carry the tiredness with him into the next day. And maybe the next.

  Watching the movie with him had made me feel a bit more like myself. I still didn't seem to be processing things at quite the right speed. Ordinary things seemed to take a little longer, a little extra processing power. It wasn't my normal feeling after an adjustment, and I didn't like it. At least I was using informal speech again, and at least I could find humor in the movie, as well as enjoyment in Jake's reaction to it. Before he fell asleep, that is.

  Was he my friend? Or did we just work together? It had begun to feel like more than a simple work relationship pretty quickly. I cared about his feelings, for one thing.

  I started to reach out to him, my hand hovering over his body, then drew back. I'd been ready to smooth his hair out of his face, and, along with possibly waking him, that would have been inappropriately intimate.

  What was I thinking? Friend or not, I shouldn't feel like I needed to touch him. He would likely find it highly offensive if I did. He was already struggling against feeling that he would be replaced, or was being looked down on, by myself and other robots.

  With him not awake to be embarrassed, I could really study him: the softness of his skin, the light rise and fall of his chest. So strange to think of him not being able to be programmed, for better or worse, except by genetics and experience and education. There was no easy way for him to download the information or feelings he wanted; he had to earn education the hard way, and deal with the hand he was dealt emotionally. He couldn't switch it off; he couldn't buy a program to override his feelings. He had to deal with them.

  In some ways, I wondered if robots didn't have more free will than humans. Poor things.

  Yet it wasn't pity I felt here, but curiosity.

  What would it be like to touch him, to elicit emotions and passions? It felt wrong to think about him that way when he was asleep, so I switched my attention back to the screen.

  I would think about it later, and I would be careful what I said to him. He became nervous enough around me already, and the trust he had displayed by falling asleep next to me was not unappreciated.

  Over the next few days, I slowly began to feel a bit more like myself, which was a relief. The side effects faded, and my self-diagnostics showed adequate functioning of all circuits and memory banks. Still, it displeased me very much that I'd had such a bad reaction to the adjustment. They should be easier than that.

  My soft and protective feelings for my partner seemed to be growing rather than settling into a normal, steady setting. That concerned me a bit, especially since I knew these feelings likely wouldn't be welcomed, combined as they were with a curiosity to touch him and explore what I could make him feel.

  The desire to be a part of a relationship where feelings couldn't be altered by programming or decisions alone, but experienced and lived in—the organic, messy, instinctual emotions of that sort of thing—had never been of any real interest to me. Why choose to be part of something you couldn't control the outcome of?

  But it did not feel academic now, because it was not a random, faceless human I was wondering about. It was my partner, a man I was growing to know both at work and as a friend.

  My preference for his company did not diminish, and my protective fondness of him grew on its own, without my influencing it. I could not protect him from the treatment of the other officers, who resented me but took it out on him, but I could fix him coffee the way he liked, take as much of the burden of paperwork off him as I appropriately could, and do other basic decencies such as making sure he always ate on time and not driving fast when we were going somewhere together.

  I noticed a significant correlation between his heart rate and the whiteness of his knuckles when I drove fast. Even though I was a very safe driver at any speed, I could modulate that speed for his sake.

  Little things like this were enough to clue me in to the fact that I could reprogram myself, or I could allow the feelings to linger and possibly grow, and perhaps eventually alert him to them accidentally.

  I did not give in to curiosity and touch him—in fact, I avoided contact. So far, he seemed to have no idea that I was even entertaining my curiosity.

  I thought it would be kinder—fairer—not to involve him in this curiosity. But I did not attempt to program my feelings away, either. For better or worse, I would rather deal with this on my own, as a learning experience, as long as I did not hurt Jake in the process.

  Jake

  Green was in some ways the best partner I'd ever worked with, which made me feel weirdly disloyal. He was so competent, and never purposefully unkind. Even his distressing bluntness was all right once I'd gotten used to it, because I always knew where we stood.

  I knew that robots had emotions, but I hadn't expected quite so many, or such sympathetic ones. I could detect so much emotion from my partner now, when I hadn't been able to at first. These days, I could read his tone easily. Maybe I was just anthropomorphizing him more, but it usually seemed to work—and it's not as though he didn't have emotions, because he did.

  The original emotions in robotics were based on human emotions, so it wasn't terribly odd to be able to intuit how he felt after knowing him for a while.

  He displayed a carefulness and empathy on the job that I'd rarely seen, and seemed to have an innate understanding that, as a police officer or a robot, there were some people who were scared of him—afraid he'd hurt them, just because.

  Instead of making him resentful or mean, this awareness seemed to make him kinder. I couldn't help but admire that, especially the way he treated anyone we had to interact with who was young, or elderly, frightened, or mentally unwell. He repeated himself as needed without getting angry or raising his voice, and displayed ample consideration and empathy.

  That made me like him even more than I already did as a friend on the job. He'd begun to feel like my only friend on the force, but that was how things went sometimes. The captain deciding that I was the best one to get along with the newcomer had made me a target, made me less able to get along with the regulars, but I would handle it. I always had before. It just hadn't been this intense before.

  I could handle it. I was tough.

  During this time, I started dating someone, which seemed like it would be a good way to deal with stress. Unfortunately, he was the sort of person who thought it was unimportant that I was a police officer, a "that's nice, dear" attitude, so I couldn't really talk about work stress with him.

  There was sex. That was a stress reliever, of course.

  Gregory wasn't looking for anything long-term, and continued to look for a younger model, or a hotter one, at least, including at least once when we were eating a meal together. Stuff like that made me feel more alone in the relati
onship than without one, so I suspected it would be short-lived. If he didn't call it off soon, I'd probably go ahead and do it.

  Part of me missed the days when I was younger, and dating someone new meant hope and fluttering feelings, and falling for them, thinking of future and love and till death do us part—all the things nobody else seemed to want anymore, or had already found with someone better than me. These days, I was in touch with a less romantic reality.

  I must have been a bit ashamed of myself for settling, though, from the way I reacted one day when Green came to pick me up after Gregory had stayed the night. He was still there, and the two of them met.

  I swear I wasn't late, but by the time I emerged from the bathroom, finished with brushing my teeth, I found Green there waiting for me, and Gregory talking to him. An unpleasant shock went through me, like I'd been zapped right down the spine. I froze for a second, then hurried over to join them.

  Green was speaking in his blandest voice. To me, he sounded faintly sarcastic, but I doubted he would to Gregory. Was I imagining it?

  "How thoughtful of you to cook my partner breakfast," said Green.

  "Yeah, well, I was here anyway. You know about sex, right? We were fucking." Gregory had an evil grin on his face, like he was trying to make someone jealous.

  "You must care for him a great deal," Green said blandly.

  "Oh, yes." Gregory put an uncharacteristic arm around me and snuggled close, trying to look angelic and instead looking exactly the opposite.

  "I see you two have met," I said, since it seemed to be past the point of no return. I extricated myself from Gregory. "Wouldn't want to be late for work."

  "I can't imagine," said Gregory, who didn't have to work. His family had old money. "I'll see you tonight, dear." His smile was still evil.