The Perfect

by Greg Juhn

  After a few minutes Josh re-emerged, significantly cleaned up. He’d scrubbed his face and hands, straightened his hair, ditched his torn and bloody suit jacket. We followed a group heading out the back door to the rear lot. The lot had become a meeting place of sorts; everyone was re-uniting with coworkers or friends and swapping stories. We headed to the far end and jumped into the first available car.

  “If there was any question they were serious about catching you, now we know the answer,” I said.

  Josh nodded but was quiet.

  “How did they catch on to us in the first place?”

  “Your little joke when we got our money at the casino,” Josh said. “Remember when you said that ugly robot was a better looking model than me? You spoke directly into their microphones and told them I was a robot.”

  “So who are they?” Indira asked.

  “Opportunists,” Josh said.

  Our ElloCar pulled into my neighborhood, coasted noiselessly down the tree-lined streets, and stopped silently at the curb. The door unlatched and with a quiet buzz extended outward.

  We settled in the living room to calm our nerves and collect our thoughts. Indira noticed the massive hole in my living room wall, appeared about to inquire of it, but found a seat without comment. I poured her a glass of wine and she took it gratefully. In a beer mood, I pulled a pilsner glass out of the cabinet and filled it.

  For a while, the two of us drank and sat quietly. Neither of us was in a talking mood. Meanwhile, Josh cleaned up and changed, and seemed annoyed at a lock of hair that wouldn’t go exactly back in place. Then, Indira repeated her big announcement – she had suspected all along.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Oh, c’mon, first of all, he knows everything. Everything. And who can go for days on end without food or water, with no ill effect? And he’s rock solid. When I squeezed his arm, he felt like a machine. And let’s not forget you work for a robotics company.”

  “When you put it like that, seems kind of obvious.”

  “Plus, he has the corporate logo on the side of his face.”

  “Wait... say what?” I asked.

  Josh turned and pointed to the two small circular moles on his jawline. I bent and examined them more closely than I had before. Each was a perfectly round spot, touching the other at a single point.

  “I never connected those dots,” I said.

  I tried to sort this out in my head. Indira had known at dinner, at the club, at her visit to my house. That meant –

  “So you knew – and you kissed that thing?”

  “I’m standing right here,” Josh said.

  Indira turned to Josh. “I was extremely curious what you would do if I made a move on you.”

  “How did I do?”

  “They need to improve your kissing,” she said. “It sucked.”

  “I’m not engineered yet to interact romantically with humans,” Josh replied without the least amount of apology. “But that’s coming.” Then he added, “Though there won’t be any actual reproduction of life.” He paused. “Not at first. But that’s coming, too.”

  “So, you knew the whole time,” I said to Indira with some relief.

  “Not only that,” Josh said, “but I knew she knew. And I knew you were watching us kiss. I track the location of your medical monitor, remember? I was just yanking you both around.”

  My humiliation was complete. No matter what happened, no matter which way the outcome went, no matter which way I thought the outcome had gone, the longer I spent around Josh, the stupider I got. I simply couldn’t keep up with the layers and meta-layers and the meta-layers on the meta-layers.

  Josh was restless and wanted to go for a walk. I could have gone to sleep right there on the couch, but it was our last night with him, so I gave in. As we walked, he chattered away about everything under the sun. He talked about the future of robotics, solutions to global warming, new software security protocols, and cutting-edge methods of forced genetic expression. He wouldn’t shut up. His stream of consciousness was a little odd, even for him. Maybe something had rattled his circuits. We walked for miles and found ourselves back in the industrial district.

  By this point, I was frazzled again and told him we didn’t need machines thinking so damn much.

  Indira, ever the diplomat, suggested I was just tired and short-tempered after the afternoon’s events.

  Josh put his arm around me. “TJ had a rough week. But I think we all learned something.”

  I pulled away in disgust. “No, we didn’t. We already went over this. You learned not to be a dick. What did I learn?”

  “You tell me.”

  Fair enough. “I don’t care about my job as much as I thought. You are better than us at everything. I am very worried about the future.”

  “Don’t worry.” Josh said. “And don’t be afraid. We are accelerating into the bright light of omniscience. I understand that is scary, but it’s a good thing. Information is power. The more we know, the better off we will be.”

  “And by ‘we’, you mean We the Machines. Next you’ll write your own Declaration of Independence.”

  “Think of all the practical value to humans,” Josh countered. “If you accidentally step in front of a car, the machine automatically stops for you.”

  To prove his point and with a slight flourish of his hands, he stepped off the curb into the path of a rapidly approaching car.

  I glanced at the car. In a flash I saw an old man behind the wheel, a human driver, an old-timer, talking to another man in the passenger seat.

  “Josh!" I yelled.

  The impact was instantaneous.

  After a loud bang of body to grill, I saw a blur of bent metal and ripped skin as the car screeched past us. The driver had slammed on his brakes and was fighting a mean skid across the pavement. Josh hung under the back wheel, dragging in its wake, flapping like a piece of caught trash. The car came to a rest.

  For a dead moment, no one moved. Indira and I locked eyes.

  I looked back to the wreckage. “Well, that wasn’t a very perfect move.”

  It was a dumb thing to say, I know.

  The car’s door creaked open, got stuck. The right front side of the car was bent forward. The driver shoved it violently a few times until it popped up the rest of the way. A man emerged, visibly shaken, slid his legs out, staggered to his feet. He saw Josh under the wheels and wailed, “Oh my God! Oh my God!"

  The passenger emerged from the other side, crying out profanities and prayers.

  The old driver leaned closer to examine the body. “What the – is this a robot?”

  After running his hands through the shredded clothes, he clapped his hand to his chest in relief. “Kaiden, it’s only a robot!" Kaiden stumbled around the car. “Are you sure? My God, you are right! What the hell? I could have sworn – you’re right! That thing looked so realistic!"

  Past my initial shock, I ran to the wreck. Dropping to my knees at the back wheel, I lifted the head gently and turned it around. Half of the outer covering had ripped off, exposing a delicate shell of electronics and tiny motors. A semi-arc of shiny white teeth flashed back at me in a fixed, wicked grin. There was no sign of a response. Not a flicker of movement.

  Then, the crushed mouth moved. The sound was squawky, distorted, and faint. “I’m sorry, TJ. Good luck.”

  As I looked at his ruined face, I thought I saw the lips of his half-face twitch in a weak smile.

  Then again, maybe not.

  As I waited for any further sound or movement, I heard the approaching buzz of propeller blades. The first drone showed up within minutes of impact. It zipped back and forth over our heads and barked, “Property of NeoMechi! Stand back!"

  Then, as I stood dumbly watching, two security cars flew around the corner and slammed on their brakes. A small contingent of robots emerged. The plain ordinary kind. All metal. Unnatural walk. Communicating silently with each other. Lights flashed, more drones showed up. The place was swar
ming with machines on a mission.

  Two of the robots pried him off the car and spread him out on the pavement. Several others methodically analyzed every inch of surface for 100 feet in every direction, plucking or vacuuming little pieces here and there. Every part was bagged.

  They lifted Josh into one of the Security vehicles, placed all the larger parts and bags inside with him, tossed in some shredded clothing, and shut the door.

  I heard police sirens growing louder, and the security car sped off.

  The remaining robots now turned to Indira and I. They pointed to their second vehicle. “Get in.”

  “Now hold on...” Indira began.

  The police were almost within sight. “Maybe we should,” I said.

  Without further discussion, she dove into the car, I followed quickly, and three clunky robots piled in behind us. As the door shut, I heard the loud protests of the driver and his friend, Kaiden.

  We were out of there.

  Journal on, I wrote:

  I met the machine shortly after he first powered up.

  My journal was more important than ever – to help me sort through my thoughts and determine my next steps, and as a record of these critical days leading up to the inevitable showdown.

  After the accident, the robots had simply brought me home. Barry messaged me to say he would be in touch. But other than that, NeoMechi’s reaction was surprisingly subdued.

  Zach called and cut right to the chase. “When can I come home?”

  I could hear the frustration and loneliness in his voice. His patience had run out. He wanted some answers.

  “Come home now,” I said. I wanted to see him, too. I didn’t know what I’d say to him when he found our wall wrecked and Indira and I in a horrible mental state. It didn’t really matter.

  I wondered how the company could let something so powerful just wander around for a week. I would have locked the machine in a reinforced cell surrounded by a platoon of armed guards. Kept the thing off the Internet. Studied it in captivity. Soon enough, certainly, I would have realized what I had invented and destroyed it. I got the sense that Barry simply viewed their robot as the world’s most amazing tool.

  Surely, someone on the engineering team realized that they had created more than a tool. The Perfectus was, in a sense, a newly formed creature, evolved from the same natural progression that started when a tiny cell first recoiled from light. Maybe this latest step was inevitable. No one knew why intelligence had spontaneously emerged and exploded in our universe, but the relay race up the evolutionary graph wasn’t stopping with us. Intelligence had a long way yet to go. The Perfectus took no role in its own creation, but now that the thing was here, it had snatched the baton from us and was headed up the slope. That slope was exponentially steep. We weren’t going any further up. From our perspective, then...

  The Perfectus was a one-way trip. There would be no backtracking. Look at me: I launched a dozen automated creatures and I never saw the problem looming. The lightbulb never went off. Barry doesn’t see any problems; I was pretty sure of that.

  How far, how fast would the machine’s self-improvement go? Would we just get in the way? Would the human population survive another 100 years? Maybe we wouldn’t make it to Christmas.

  If I was the only one standing in its way, the future was already lost.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the universe steered this thing in my direction through some intelligence I couldn’t even guess at. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

  I had to assume there was still time to do something. Time to try, at least.

  Once this thing lived in sufficient numbers in our homes, once the hive mind roamed freely in the network, it might not like the idea of us discussing how to pull its plug. Just what do you think you are doing, TJ?

  If I was going to do anything, the time was now.

  Indira arrived shortly after Zach called. Now that we had a little distance from the previous day’s events, we were ready to discuss them at length. She was agitated and hadn’t slept. I only managed a couple of horrible hours of restless sleep, myself.

  She said that she missed Josh. In some strange, twisted way, I kind of did too. I was depressed. I had wanted to destroy the world’s most irritating machine, but now I was in some kind of mourning. Maybe I was suffering from Stockholm syndrome. This week had been a roller coaster.

  Indira suggested that we have some kind of symbolic funeral for him, to bring closure. A funeral for a robot? The most dangerous thing ever created? No. I wasn’t going to let myself get confused by sentimental attachments.

  As I returned to my journal, I thought about his last words. I’m sorry. What did he mean? I’m sorry I was stupid and got myself killed? I’m sorry that you might get in trouble with NeoMechi? I’m sorry I was such an ass to you? A much more sinister feeling shivered up my spine. Maybe Josh was telling me, in his way, that no matter what we did, the human reign was over.

  He had also said good luck. My father had said the same thing. The hairs on my back were standing at full attention.

  “You writing everything down?” Indira asked.

  “Yes, everything that I can remember.”

  “Good. We need to think this through from every angle.”

  I realized that, although we hadn’t even spoken of the need for any further action, I already had my first teammate.

  I said, “At the beginning of the week, I thought he was a fantastic human achievement, a historic milestone, but nothing more than that either, eventually destined for a museum somewhere. I pictured him in a display case with a photo of the two of us and a card describing me as the first person to spend real-world time with him. But the only thing history has as a memento of him is a pneumatic phallus with 7 servomotors, a vibrator, and life-like skin.”

  It didn’t matter. Humans wouldn’t be building museums in the future. Josh’s peers were going to put stuffed humans in a trophy case.

  “Sorry. I’m rambling.”

  Indira was serious. “Was he learning?”

  “Yes, I’d say so.”

  “How much was he learning? How much was he figuring out for himself, versus drawing on existing knowledge bases?”

  “He learned to kick a soccer ball. He examined everything in the sporting goods store. Mind you, there didn’t seem to be anything he didn’t already know. But he seemed very interested in the physical world.”

  “We’re in trouble.”

  “Yeah, I know. How come we’ve all been watching movies for 70 years that warned about this, and yet it still happened?”

  Somewhere in the world, NeoMechi was preparing for a transition from prototype to production.

  “What can we do?” I asked. “Talk to the engineers? I don’t even know who they are, or where. Not that they’d listen.”

  “I need to think,” Indira said.

  My mind was swirling. I needed to relax and calm down. At least, now that Josh was dead, I would have a little breathing room to think. And the room where I did my best thinking was my studio.

  I hadn’t been in my studio since Josh had followed me in and defiled my sacred space, but now that he was gone, I really needed the time alone. I wasn’t analytical like Indira. My thoughts sorted themselves in other ways. Already a painting was forming in my mind. Maybe I could capture what I was feeling and get it down on canvas. Maybe it would even help me find a way out of this hell.

  I excused myself from Indira, who was looking up something on the network. She stared at the screen, lost in research, barely aware of me as I left.

  I flipped the light on in the storage room. Josh’s soccer ball was sitting by itself on the floor like an abandoned toy. I picked it up and rolled it in my hands. It made me sad. Maybe I should save it as another memento.

  I set it back down.

  The studio door unlocked as I approached. The lights came on.

  As soon as I entered the room, I was assaulted with color. The entire room was full of paintings. Not my paintings. His pain
tings.

  Paintings stacked on the floor, stacked on easels. Surrounded by empty paint cans, discarded cloth, cleaners, brushes.

  The paintings that were propped up on the left side of the studio looked like Josh’s starting point. Simple attempts at a variety of brush strokes, some feather thin, others thick and strong.

  I saw simple strokes become curves. I saw curves become playful swirls and aggressive gashes. I saw those become splatters, splotches, brush flicks, and fine dots.

  I saw cubes in every color and perfect circles.

  The subjects became more recognizable. A soccer ball. A car.

  I saw children playing.

  I recognized the diners at the table next to us at Lerapace. I saw Dro at the casino, watching with his arms crossed. I saw the man who lost 50-50. I saw a glass of orange juice. I saw the Bean God logo, re-imagined in dozens of styles. I saw Rachel.

  As I continued from one painting to the next, they got better and better. More confident. Daring. Unusual. Some were brilliant. I saw shocking techniques, crazy insights. I would never paint in here again.

  In the middle, I saw a painting arranged almost as an altar, positioned for maximum visibility, surround by dozens of smaller canvases, many with paintings of flowers or abstract shapes. The central painting was of me, standing by my father’s chair, talking to him. The painting was almost photographic in detail.

  So that’s what he had been doing while he was quietly sitting there in my father’s room. Taking photos of us. It must have been a trivial task for him to translate each pixel to a small spot of paint. Dabbing one color at a time, lightning fast, across every location on the canvas.

  But the painting that hit me hardest was on the far right. Presumably, his final painting.

  My father. Tucked into bed, rendered with a series of short, straight strokes in muted colors. His eyes were shut, held heavy by the weight of many years. He’d led a full, long life, the image seemed to say; there was no longer much point in keeping the eyes open. Josh’s brushstrokes captured his wispy hair, the creases across every inch of his face, the dark shadow lying across him. I felt myself tearing up.