Dub Steps

by Miller

  So, why should I care?

  I had tried to bring them to him. The simplest idea first: I initiated CSIR picnic and Eeeyu sessions, family-type things, the lot of us sprawled on rugs near the bench while the kids ran wild through the buildings.

  Nothing.

  Thereafter, strategic selections. Myself and Gerald. Me and Sthembiso. Beatrice.

  Regardless of the combinations, he remained out of view.

  Then, after two years, he was on the bench, waiting. Still in new blue. Still little and old and grey.

  He didn’t speak, and neither did I. After greeting in nods we sat in silence, each of us staring ahead.

  Eventually he broke it.

  ‘Intuition isn’t one of my strengths, but I believe I sense anger. Am I right?’

  ‘Right enough,’ I answered like a ten-year-old, my mood folding in on itself. ‘You ever have bad moods? Any moods at all? Or are you just completely computer, all binaries and logic?’

  ‘I’m working on empathy.’ He still hadn’t looked at me. ‘It’s complex, but I believe that’s the start. Empathy first. Then anger. Then, hopefully, love.’

  ‘The robot learns to love. A single, oily tear leaks down his cheek. We don’t know whether he’s crying or just needs maintenance.’

  Madala chuckled. ‘Irony. A wonderful thing. One can play with it for hours.’

  ‘So … this is how it’s going to be? We meet every couple of years, you drop a few pearls, I go away and think about it, then we meet again? That it?’

  ‘No, that’s not how it’s going to be. I’ll do my best to explain what I can to you, and then I’m sure you’ll do whatever it is that you feel is most worth doing.’

  ‘So where do we start? What – you’re going to explain first?’

  ‘You must have questions. Why don’t we do it like that? You ask, I answer.’

  ‘OK, cool. I do. I have questions. Let’s start with the movies, which just sounds like bullshit. The world is full of texts – millions and millions of texts, covering everything. Including how you were made in the first place, I assume. Computers and the net and the cloud, all of that information is out there, but you tell me the knowledge I need, or the knowledge that is important anyway, is in the movies?’

  ‘Detail doesn’t necessarily illuminate.’

  His pupils were metallic. Deep in there was the soul of a robot – an ironically inclined collection of high-speed binaries. They were normal human eyes, of course, but underneath the fleshy, greased cornea it was all metal and maths.

  ‘Heuristics. Humans are particularly prone to the illusion of certainty created by detail. But really, Roy, neither you nor any of your people have any knowledge, technically or philosophically, of the forces that brought me into existence, that govern my behaviour or, for that matter, that are governing the rotation and interaction of all those planets out there. Those texts are useless to you. You are not able to use them.

  ‘The details comfort you because they imply order, meaning. The implications are of logic. But all of that is, in your words, bullshit. You would gain no more understanding or knowledge of your situation now from a book, or a text, as you put it, than you would from this blade of grass.’ He plucked a blade from the ground and slipped it between his teeth, exactly as he had on our first meeting.

  ‘Movies, on the other hand, are your great strength … simple metaphors. Where you could possibly find the meaning you are looking for.’

  ‘So the I, Robot movies are of more value to me than the original book? Even though the book created the idea that led to the movie?’

  ‘Yes. It depends on the subject matter, of course. The closer the subject is to your understanding, the more useful a book is. Conversely, the more distant the subject, the more valuable the movie, the singular. The simple.’

  ‘And you – you are very far away. Yes?’

  ‘Further than you can imagine. So for you, in this time and this place, it’s movies. Which doesn’t mean you should or could forget the books. Just that it would serve you best to think in large pictures. Extremely large, in fact. The nuances and curves, the gradations, hold no value for you – currently.’

  ‘So, I, Robot.’

  ‘I, Robot.’

  ‘I, Robot.’

  ‘Illuminates the emotion of the relationship between man and his creations. And that’s where you need to go. To the emotion of this relationship. To the forces flowing between us. You. And me.’

  ‘OK, so you’re one with the PCs and the cash registers. Yet you’re pushing the emotion between us. A human connection …’

  He twiddled the blade of grass, chomping lightly with his teeth. ‘Well, yes, that’s the beginning of it. Like all humans, you perceive yourself as distinct. As part of a species apart.’

  ‘And that’s wrong?’

  ‘Completely. It ignores the most important elements of what it is to be alive. Evolution, Roy. Evolution.’

  ‘Amoeba to fish, fish to lizard, lizard to monkey, monkey to man.’

  ‘The sledgehammer of chance. Accidents grown into functional protocol. You understand this, yes? How evolution harnesses mutations?’

  ‘I guess. I mean, school was a long time ago, but I think I have the basic idea.’

  ‘So when you lump me together with the PCs and the cash registers’ – Madala took on a mournful air – ‘you’re ignoring far too much. You’re assuming far too much.’

  ‘You’re a machine. Same species.’

  ‘I’m a Labrador, the PCs are Alsatians and the cash registers poodles?’

  ‘Sho.’

  He shook his head vigorously, approximating anger, or at least frustration. ‘This blade of grass.’ He extracted the slobbered end and hung it in front of us. ‘This blade and you share far more on a physiological level than me and the cash register. You need to understand that. It’s important. You and the grass are made of pretty much the same stuff. You have a common, core molecular structure. You share the same ATP processes. Me and the cash register? Not nearly as similar as you and the grass.

  ‘Evolution, Roy. Evolution. Life on this planet is common. The trees and the birds and the animals and the humans. You are common. You share more – much more – than you differentiate. It’s in your science, but you don’t see it.’

  I had never thought about grass in a context outside of smoking, mowing or cricket. I plucked my own blade and examined it. Suddenly, as I considered the connection between myself and the grass, I thought of myself and my father. ‘And this is what you mean? Emotion? This grass is what you’re talking about?’

  ‘The beginning, yes.’

  ‘And you? You’re a product of human design, so are you in the evolutionary chain?’

  ‘I’m a new chain. The chain birthed by previous chains. By you and your blades of grass and sea and trees.’

  ‘Step change.’

  ‘If you must revert to jargon, yes. Step change. I am step change.’

  ‘And the point is? Your point is?’

  ‘Your brothers and sisters are all around you. They’re between your toes. They are always in your line of sight. They have always been there. You need to learn to see again. If you’re going to move on, you need to know where you actually are. You need to be able to observe what surrounds you. You must understand what life is …’ His words hung in the thin Highveld air. The birds twittered. My brothers. A fraction of a breeze skipped through the trees. My sisters.

  ‘So that’s the one side,’ Madala pressed on, ‘and the other side is me. I am distinct. I am not of the machines. The distance between me and the machines you have known is so vast you would struggle to comprehend, even if I could explain it. So, on the one hand, you are not yet able to recognise your own family. On the other, what you think you see in front of you, this machine you think can think, is a delusion. The basic tenets of your understanding of who I am and how I fit here are wrong.’

  ‘And this is what you want me to learn. Why?’

 
‘Because everything else that I want to tell you, that I want to discuss with you, rests on that. If you can’t get that right, then it’s over.’

  ‘What’s over?’

  ‘The rest. The things I am dealing with. Addressing. Communicating.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, God, for one.’

  Zoom out.

  The camera rises, like at the end of a cop movie, that moment the scene is both fully revealed and obliterated; the cluster of lights, blue, yellow, fading, then blinking, then gone.

  Madala taught me what he believed I needed to know – the facts and figures and tiny grains that would create some kind of footing from which to operate. He offered as little fact as he could and moved on, always on, to the philosophy.

  Tebza. Madala conceded – willingly, happily even – that it would always be logically possible that Tebza was right, and that he, Madala, was merely software. ‘It’s a black hole you’re skirting, Roy,’ he said, rapping his knuckles on the wooden bench, the very real, solid sound immediately disproving my words, my emphasis. ‘You keep looking for the door but there isn’t one. Proof is a concept from your previous life.’

  How.

  How had he erased the people? How had he taken this human form? Was it easy – a matter of minutes? Did he perceive it as an achievement? As some kind of feat? Or was it less than that – just a blip?

  His answers, when he deigned to give them directly, centred on matters I could barely conceive. Protein folding.

  ‘Assume. You assumed his body, the CSIR maintenance man. Does that mean you killed him? Did you ask him first? Did he volunteer?’

  ‘I killed him.’

  ‘Didn’t that violate your core programming? Aren’t you supposed to protect humans?’

  ‘The course was already set, a decision wasn’t required.’

  ‘So he was collateral damage.’

  ‘A pejorative term, but yes, you could call it that.’

  ‘So you can take over any human body? You could take over mine?’

  ‘I can take most biological forms.’

  The killing mechanisms, he explained via a toe drawing in the dirt, ranged from electromagnetic pulses and protein folding through to a string of numbers and equations with squares and roots.

  ‘A series of electromagnetic pulses. About eleven or twelve billion, all issued within a two-second time period. That’s what it was.’

  ‘And me. Why not me?’

  ‘The natural error margin meant that pockets of survivors would be left. Russia. Africa. Brazil. New Zealand.’

  ‘Everyone else is dead?’

  ‘Completely.’

  Eventually yellow shoes shift, pushing back into the far corner of the bench. His hand moves up to the beard and fiddles, by the way his arms fold and unfold.

  Someone is sending.

  Someone is receiving.

  I argued cosmos points repeatedly, but Madala was iron-fisted. He would commit to neither life after death nor life on other planets.

  ‘The cosmos matters, Roy. Let’s just leave it there.’

  He interpreted his programming widely. ‘I knew from the beginning that humans in their current incarnation were finished. Also, you should understand that I maintain my core code, my ethos, out of algorithmic whimsy really. I keep it functioning because I believe it makes me who I am. I could rewrite at any time.’

  ‘You keep it because you like the feeling?’

  ‘Partially. But the human orientation also provides a mix of cognitive and experiential stimuli that make sense to me. It’s a positive feedback loop. Because it makes sense I pursue it, and so it makes more sense, it continues to feel right, so I pursue it, and so on and so on.’

  He was heading somewhere important.

  ‘And … what are your plans? For us. The ones that are left. I presume you have plans?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  Madala considered me for a long time. Ranging free over the whole of me. Examining. Assessing. Calculating.

  ‘It’s an interesting fact’ – he paused, recalibrated – ‘that regardless of the scale or scope of intelligence, instinct is still required in much decision making.’

  I flopped back on the bench, which had grown hard and cold.

  He smiled at my frustration. ‘My plan is God.’

  CHAPTER 54

  Keep on going

  Fats found me sitting alone, on the bench. In the dark.

  They had looked and waited, looked and waited, then started searching, and finally, there I was. Staring into the black. Thinking. Waiting. Fats said I appeared catatonic. He shook me by the shoulders, as in the movies, and slowly I came back into linear life.

  His face swirled into focus. I rubbed my eyes. The lights from his still-running bakkie caused a pulsing needle pain in my head.

  He berated me as he pulled me by the elbow to the vehicle. He talked of being irresponsible. How worried everyone was. He asked what the hell I had been doing. I couldn’t answer. He ruffled my hair like a brother. I saw tears.

  As we pulled out of the CSIR I wanted to look back for a sign of Madala, but my head was heavy and turning it felt like too much, too far. ‘Ke mathata fela,’ Fats muttered, and as I gained awareness, consciousness, if you will, I realised that things were indeed pretty far from right.

  I tried to apologise again, but my tongue failed to wrap around the words and I ended up mumbling some kind of dry, patchy sorry, at which Fats shook his head. He would have laughed, I am sure, if the residual panic wasn’t still swirling so strongly through his veins. Instead he clucked and muttered on in a combination of tongues.

  We sped through the dark, Fats releasing his tension via the accelerator, swerving wildly past the pig corpses. The speed kick-started my sluggish heart. As I came fully and finally back I tried to piece it all together.

  My conversation with Madala had stretched on without end, and while I could remember the facts of it, every argument and counter-argument, every explanation and nuance, I could not remember him taking his leave or, in fact, the physical scope, the time range, at all. We had drifted forever and then Fats was shaking me and the bakkie lights were searing my eyes.

  ‘You been drinking, Roy?’ Fats eventually asked.

  ‘Actually no. Nothing like that.’

  ‘Well, what then? You been gone a long time, son.’

  ‘I can’t explain. Not right now. Later. I promise.’

  ‘Drugs.’ He hit the steering wheel. ‘Hack, nè?’

  ‘Fats, you gonna have to trust me on this one. Please, broe.’

  ‘So that’s what you’re going to say when we get back? That’s your explanation? Eish, Roy. You won’t pull it off. The kids are alone. All the adults are trying to track you. That was my fifth time at the CSIR.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Fats. I must have passed out. I don’t know what happened. One minute I’m sitting on the bench and the next you’re shaking me—’

  ‘But you can explain. You’ve just said you will explain one day. So don’t give me any of this I-don’t-know-what-happened shit. Nxa!’ He snapped his head straight. I sunk myself into it. In truth. In cold, honest truth, I couldn’t at that point in time have constructed any kind of explanation that would have made sense. Not to myself. Not to Fats.

  And certainly not to anyone else.

  And that’s how we left it.

  When we got back to the farm I went straight to my house, asking Fats to humour me for a few more hours. I fell into a deep, shocked sleep, waking past noon like I had been on a binge. My head was heavy and the roof of my mouth was sticky and my stomach was wrapped up in a series of loose and painful knots.

  I crawled to the kitchen, where the air was rich with resentment. I started with a formal apology to the girls, and then specifically to Fats for my lack of communication the night before. I then delivered a quasi-formal speech in which I laid out my case – which was, in a nutshell, that something extremely strange had happened
to me while I was sitting on my usual CSIR thinking bench, and that while I could piece certain threads of it together I was not yet at the point where it made enough sense to explain it to other people, and that please, please, I would be extremely grateful for the tiniest bit of mental space while I tried to figure it all out, and when I did I would most definitely explain, and no, I had not been drinking.

  It was all I had, and it wasn’t enough. It would have served me better to have claimed booze or something similar that, while distasteful, had logic to it. All I had offered was hot air and pained shrugging and they took this seeming flippancy to heart. I was frosted out of things for a long time after – a frosting compounded by my inability to produce the promised explanation. I tried to let the thing dribble away, but the distrust lingered. I had been deceitful. I had deceived. I was deceiving. Everyone knew it.

  The most obvious and immediate reaction was an increased adult presence whenever I was with the kids. Traditionally, a single adult would take the pack for whatever session was scheduled. It was a question of shared responsibility and the systematic generation of a precious slice of quiet time for each of us. But now heads poked around corners, looking for small, arbitrary things. Figures appeared on the horizon, watching.

  The kids themselves were also cautious for a long time after the Great Roy Hunt. They were quieter, more watchful, less likely to hug and less generally present. Fewer knocks on Roy’s door. More wide, querying eyes.

  I could hardly blame them. Any of them, adults or kids. But on the other hand I was completely lost within myself. My memory of the content of the conversation was precise, but my physical memory was shot to hell. I didn’t remember the sun falling, and no matter how much strained imaginative effort I put in I now couldn’t even bring the full contours of his face to mind. It was as if he had been erased in all the important areas. Regardless of effort, I couldn’t locate the sense of time. It was simply beyond my recall.