Shine Shine Shine

by Lydia Netzer

  “I’m afraid to do it, because I’m afraid I’m going to cry or throw up or something.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re going into space. I’m worried. People worry about their spouses going on business trips to Kansas City.”

  “Well, Kansas City is perilous. The gravity there is nine-tenths of what it is in Virginia.”

  “That’s not even true.”

  “I bet I can get the news guy to believe it.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I bet I can though.”

  Eventually he had chosen to wear a NASA polo shirt and navy dockers. As they took their places on the set, she appraised his appearance and found him acceptable.

  “You look good,” she told him. “Just don’t start talking about the robot that can really understand the tango and we’ll be fine.”

  “You’ll be fine,” said Maxon. “The robot that can really understand the tango was my only material.”

  Les Weathers bounded onto the set, fresh from hair and makeup, no doubt. He was still wearing his tissue-paper shields tucked into his collar to keep his crisp white shirt from getting smudged with foundation.

  “Hey, guys! How we doing today?” he said. He grinned his enormous grin and grasped hands with first Maxon, then Sunny. His hand was warm, strong, generous. She knew that Maxon did not like to shake hands. Seeing Maxon’s sharp white fist close around Les Weathers’s suntanned paw made Sunny stare for a moment. Maxon was not tanned below the line his bicycle gloves made on his wrist. Here is the man I married, she thought. He has a fist like the talons of a hawk. Here is the man I did not marry. He has the skin tone of a lion in full sun. She wondered if they put foundation on Les Weathers’s hands.

  “Great,” said Maxon. “Doing great.”

  “Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview,” he said to Maxon. Then conspiratorially, to Sunny: “Go WNFO, right? What a scoop!”

  “What a scoop,” said Maxon. “Go WNFO.”

  “Les, you’re so kind to bring us in, and help us share Maxon’s rocket launch with the world. I really appreciate it,” said Sunny, unleashing a radiant smile. She lowered herself into a chair between Maxon and Les Weathers, crossing her ankles under her so that her cork-wedge sandals were tidily arranged. They were going to tape the interview, show it during the evening news, when there would be the largest number of viewers. This way it would be syndicated to all the affiliates across the country. Maybe the Today show would pick it up after all.

  Depends on how the mission goes, said the producer. Now, what does that mean, asked Sunny.

  Was Les Weathers about to become famous on the back of Maxon’s mission to the moon? One big story, the correct flashing teeth all lined up in a row, and a man with nice blond hair could be headed for the big time. But only if something terrible happened. Or at least something unexpected. The fate of the anchorperson depends on a tragedy or a revolution. Sunny looked at Maxon and back at Les Weathers, and felt a ripple of nerves across her chest.

  “Are you all right?” asked Les Weathers.

  “Oh, it’s the pregnancy,” she said. “I’m absolutely fine. Thank you for your concern.”

  The producer told them where they were to look (Les Weathers, each other) and where they were not to look (the cameras), and how they should smile and be animated.

  “Act like you’re talking to a friend, at a party,” said the producer. “We’re happy here. We’re going to the moon!”

  They had already been pretending Les Weathers was their friend. This would not be hard.

  The interview began. What does this mean for America? What does this mean for the world? Maxon produced answers from the script he had been rehearsing. It was almost as if he were sort of a humanist, affirming a manifest destiny in the stars. He described the bright future, successfully veiling his real self for the camera. For now he was not the terse, bony guy about to leave the Earth for the first time. He was buoyant, almost cheerful. He did not say, “I rounded up a gang of robots, and I’m headed for the moon, to take it over.” He did not say, “This is the way we evolve. This is the way our culture transforms.”

  Instead he said it serious: “It is a great move for mankind.” He said it droll: “We’re finally furnishing our motherin-law suite.” He said it poetic: “Machines on the gray desert of time’s horizon.”

  Sunny smiled and nodded, her knees pressed lightly together, coral cardigan wrapping the sides of her pregnant belly. She felt a droplet of sweat begin to roll under her wig. The lights were hot.

  “And how do you feel about all this?” Les asked Sunny warmly.

  “Les,” she said, “I married a man in love with robots. Am I really surprised he’s making off with a robot harem, to populate the sky?”

  And everyone laughed. Had Sunny married a man with a job as an anchorperson and a thick arm in a neatly pressed shirt, she would have been very shocked if he made off with a robot harem, to populate the sky. She would have expected to go to Norway, to have a literal motherin-law suite, like the kind over a garage, not the kind on an astral body.

  “Let’s talk about you, Sunny Mann,” said Les Weathers. “This launch comes at a difficult time for your family.”

  He gestured awkwardly, charmingly toward her huge, pregnant belly, and smiled.

  “Well, Maxon’s launch was scheduled well before mine,” Sunny purred. “And the moon waits for no one.”

  “But aren’t you worried, leaving your wife at this time?” he pressed. Sunny stretched out a hand and took Maxon’s in hers. It was cool and dry. He had hard hands, long strong fingers.

  “Les,” said Maxon, “the timing of the mission is dependent on the orbital path of the moon, which affects everything about the launch.”

  This was bullshit, Sunny knew. She felt her heart thump in her chest.

  “The slightest variation in timing could cause a differential in gravitational pull that would throw off the telemetry significantly. You know, for example, the variations in Earth’s gravity. Everyone knows Kansas has nine-tenths the gravity of Virginia. In some parts of Oklahoma, it’s even less.”

  “Oh,” said Les Weathers. “I guess I didn’t know that.”

  Maxon produced the facial expression that communicated, “I am letting you in on a secret.” Then he winked, right at the camera, where he wasn’t even supposed to look.

  “I’m not worried about my delivery,” said Sunny. “I’m not worried about Maxon’s either. He’ll get his robots to the moon, and when he comes back, there will be a new baby here to welcome him back.”

  “Do you know what you’re having, a girl or a boy?”

  Sunny laughed mildly. “Les, we’ve been so busy preparing for Maxon’s trip, I have not even had time to find out if this baby is human.”

  6

  “There are three things that robots cannot do,” wrote Maxon. Then beneath that on the page he wrote three dots, indented. Beside the first dot he wrote “Show preference without reason (LOVE)” and then “Doubt rational decisions (REGRET)” and finally “Trust data from a previously unreliable source (FORGIVE).”

  Love, regret, forgive. He underscored each word with three dark lines and tapped his pen on each eyebrow three times. He hadn’t noticed that his mouth was sagging open. He was not quite thirty, the youngest astronaut at NASA by a mile.

  I do what robots can’t do, he thought. But why do I do these things?

  The spaceship traveled toward the moon. Maxon wrote with his astronaut pen. In his notebook there were hundreds of lists, thousands of bulleted points, miles of underscoring. It was a manner of thinking. He was standing in his sleeping closet, upright and belted into his bunk. The other four astronauts were in the command pod, running procedures. No one liked spending time in the sleeping closets except Maxon. He kind of enjoyed it. It was not time for the lights to go out, but the rocket to the moon was nearing the end of its first day in space.

  Maxon’s list of things a robot can’t do was a short one now, par
ed down from a much longer list that included tough nuts like “manifest meaningful but irrational color preference” and “grieve the death of a coworker.” Maxon made his robots work better and last longer by making them as similar to humans as possible. Humans are, after all, the product of a lot of evolution. Logically and biologically, nothing works better than a human. Maxon’s premise had been that every seeming flaw, every eccentricity must express some necessary function. Maxon’s rapid blinking. Sunny’s catlike yawn. Even the sensation of freezing to death. It all matters, and makes the body work, both in singularity and in collusion with other bodies, all working together.

  Why does a man, clapping in a theater, need the woman next to him to also be clapping? Why does a woman, rising from her seat at a baseball game, expect the man on her left to jump to his feet? Why do they do things all at once, every person in every seat, rising, clapping, cheering? Maxon had no idea. But he knew that it didn’t matter why. They do it, and there must be a reason. A failure to clap in a theater can result in odd looks, furrowed foreheads, nudged elbows. So Maxon would write:

  Let anyone in any theater contradict it.

  “Whatcha doin’, Genius?” asked Fred Phillips. He stuck his head into Maxon’s sleeping closet, gripping both sides of the doors as his body floated out behind.

  “I’m working, Phillips,” Maxon returned.

  “You’re not working. You’re dreaming.” Phillips smiled cheerfully, glancing at Maxon’s paper. “Dreaming of making sweet, sweet love to your robots. But you just can’t make them love you back.”

  “First of all,” said Maxon, “I’ve seen your medical. Your IQ is in the genius range. So your nickname for me, ‘Genius,’ is not sensible. Secondly, I am not dreaming of a robot who can love. Anyone could program a robot to do that. All you’d have to do is arrange an illogical preference. Making a robot love you over anyone else would be like making a robot love the color orange over any other color. I could have done it years ago. But it’s a pointless behavior. And I won’t.” How was loving Sunny different from loving orange? Phillips would not understand.

  “Whatever, Genius,” said Phillips. “Houston wants us to run a sim of the docking procedure. You want to watch? Or, are you too busy? We all know you have nothing to do until we hook up with your girlfriends in orbit.”

  Phillips swung free of Maxon’s closet, brought his foot up and wedged it into a handle, and propelled himself back through the tube into the command module. Their sleeping closets were arranged around the wall of the rocket, with an empty cylinder in the center where they could get in and out, one at a time. Maxon was not claustrophobic. He was suited for space travel, and he was wearing his space suit for astronauting.

  “Robots can’t cry, Genius!” said Phillips, retreating. “Ito’s Laws of Robotics: Robots can’t cry, robots can’t laugh, robots can’t dream.”

  Maxon sighed. He knew this was bait. But he was already unbuckling his straps. The hook was in his brain. Maxon had made robots that did all three of these things. James Ito was a hack, some AI putz working for a car company. His book was a farce. Pop culture, not science. When Maxon met Ito he hadn’t liked the guy’s face. A humanist. The kind of guy who would paint the future bright by predicting that the transformation offered by robots was really recidivism to a world gone by. A robot wife would be a pre-feminist wife. A robot worker would be a pre-socialism worker. The guy had no idea what was actually just around the corner. A different world, not better, not worse, but full of change.

  Robots could laugh, and cry, and dream, and everything else. For example, there was a robot named Hera. Six iterations of it waited for him now, in an orbit around the moon, in the cargo bay of the rocket that had been fired last week, which they would soon be docking up with. Hera laughed at nonsensical juxtapositions, like a fat man in a little coat or a wheelbarrow full of whipped cream. Its laughter was not a sound delivered to human ears through a speaker, meant for human appreciation and approval. The laughter was an internal, systemic reaction, a clenching of joints, a shaking of components, a temporary loss of function. It could be shared with other Hera models, could spread like a contagion throughout a group of them.

  “Incorrect,” said Maxon, following him. “Hera laughs. It’s what makes Hera so reliable.”

  “I don’t believe in it,” said Phillips. “It’s pointless. A robot that laughs. What the hell?”

  When he was strapped into his seat, Phillips said, “Go ahead, Houston. Aeneid rocket is ready to run the sim. All crew present.”

  Maxon was familiar with the language of naysayers. They were afraid. Sometimes their faces showed that, the same thing as confusion, with the eyebrows down and chin raised. When Hera’s software was first coded, some people said it was a kind of abomination. Other people said it was a gimmick. They were interested in torque and tensile strength, in the size of robots and what they were composed of. An article in the International Journal of Robotics Research called him “a gearshrinker,” with scorn. He didn’t read the article, because he had determined from the title that he wouldn’t like it. For Maxon it was not a question of good or bad, or even why, but just a question of what’s next, and then ultimately, not even a question, but just a history. A history of humanity, in all the ways they were alive.

  Then there was the Juno model, who experienced a similar jostling of gears and clenching of hydraulics when she was left alone, away from other Juno models, for a specified amount of time. Juno’s crying was a lot like Hera’s laughing, except there was no viral spread. Her visual sensors became impaired and had to be cleared, by her or another Juno who was moved to participate, or not, by her own if/then clauses. An article in Wired magazine called “The Lonely Robot” had described one Juno meeting another, and how they shook when they were separated. This was before the Juno code was wired into a construction frame, made so rectangular. Magazines are only interested in the humanoid functions of humanoid robots. Make them look like bulldozers and you can get away with anything.

  What didn’t matter much to Maxon was the shape the robots took externally. How to put a microscope in them. How to make them smaller, bigger, work in the human bloodstream, simplify bipedal mobility. He had an abundance of research assistants to task with these technical details. His job was coding, thinking, more coding, and the completion of lists. He moved through his labs back at Langley like a wraith, stained hair falling down around jagged cheekbones, hands dangling at the end of his long arms, spine convex. He rode his bicycle for hours, working out command sequences on the pavement in front of him, every square meter like an open stretch of whiteboard, there and then erased.

  “Houston, we are go for this procedure,” said George Gompers, mission commander. “Standing by.”

  Their screens wavered, and instead of the clear view of space they all saw a holographic projection, where the moon loomed large and they could see the cargo module, containing all the robots they would be taking down to the lunar surface. Their job, in orbit, was to dock with this cargo, extract the three containers, and then convert the command module into the lunar lander. While the pilot, the engineer, and the commander repeated orders, fired small rockets, repositioned, and aligned the rocket for the simulated docking, Maxon looked at his cargo module full of robots.

  He wondered what they were doing in there, what they were dreaming.

  All of Maxon’s robots, like Maxon, could dream. A randomly generated string of code gently stimulated the processors during their mandatory off modes, testing the chemobionic reactions while the official electronic pathways were shut down. It hadn’t even been hard, shattering this particular old ax. It had come apart like a clay pot. The robots remembered the events of their lives, the data they had recorded. In dreams, they transposed numbers, brought sets adjacent that were never meant to be interpreted together, and when they “woke up” they often had new “ideas” in the form of patterns and connections read in the chaos of their jumbled sleep.

  The more like a hum
an the better, whether the bot was as small as a fragment of nanotech cleaving the valves of the heart or as big as a sentient harbor crane. Humans work. They are an evolutionary success. The more they evolve, the more successful they become. Maxon had once thought that at this moment, when he was ready to land on the moon, his list of things that robots couldn’t do would have had every entry crossed out in a dark line. He had planned that the phrase “quintessentially human” would have been obviated by now. Indifferent to all protest, he had relentlessly made dreaming, faceless, laughing robots that were inexorably closing in on humanity.

  The AI was startling. People had to admit. Maxon’s robots did what other robots could not do, thought what other robots could not think. That was the reason he held so many patents, and had such an astonishing bank account at such a young age. But the most important thing, the reason he was employed by NASA and on his way to the moon: Maxon’s robots could make other robots. Not just construct them, but actually conceive of them, and make them.

  To create a moon colony, a lot of robots are needed. Robots to build the station, robots to run it, robots who don’t mind breathing moon atmosphere, who don’t mind moon temperatures, robots to take care of human visitors. The moon colony proposed would belong to the robots for many years to come; this was understood. Humans would be their guests. The problem was that no one could shoot a robot big enough to construct a moon colony up to the moon. There just wasn’t enough room in a rocket for diggers, cranes, stamping presses.

  So the answer was to shoot up a robot that could make another robot big enough. Juno and Hera were the robot mothers: steely, gangly, whirring, spinning mothers, built to mine the materials and fabricate the real robots, the real builders, who would re-create the world on the moon. Only a laughing, crying, dreaming robot could be a mother. An awful thought, for some. A perversity—but this was the reason for everyone else’s failure. All this business of a human purview. As if it weren’t all electricity, in the end. Maxon couldn’t remember ever thinking that something a robot did was awful.