The Vestigial Heart

by Carme Torras

  Action: I take up the pending subprocess. Three of the identifiers I was lacking are now visible. I am only missing one. I successfully rush to get a snapshot of the hidden back. Data collection complete. I calculate the MVS: 13/0.4, and localize the subject. Save: white female, 5'4", slim build, extra-long brown hair, light skin covered in unknown marks, I include photo … Interruption: A robot with the name ROBbie is coming toward me.

  “Friendly greetings, ROBco. Why are you observing that girl? I inform you that she is my PROP. Which is yours?”

  Strategy: Admitting that mine is not present will lengthen the interrogation, but I stick to the truth. It is the only way I can possibly obtain the MVS’s encephalic records.

  As both ROBs are recent models, the communication flows easily, with no need for any editors or converters, and ROBco can quickly formulate a petition for the girl to collaborate in a high-tech project.

  “Denied: It requires consent from the mother and she does not speak with unknown ROBs.”

  I perform a sweep of the room and save the image of the woman, in case it can be of use to Leo later, while I emit: “But you can speak to her.”

  “Not until we get home. With the tutor present, with whom they are talking now, I am not permitted to approach any of them.”

  Warning: dead end. Action: Move on to localizing the next MVS, 12/1.8. Precaution: save prior context. I take an image of the tutor as well, whom I catch intently focused on the gesture that 13/0.4 is making at her from the stage. Unexpectedly, the girl fixes her eyes on me, and consequently so does the woman. Alarm: possible malfunction of the camera, leaving a physical trace. Consequence: added difficulty when trying to remain undetected. Emergency: I stop all movement and turn off the camera.

  Status: peripheral hibernation.

  Unexpected event: urgent request from PROP. I open the internal line: “ROBco, I want you to auto-diagnose right now. It must be a serious problem for you to turn yourself off at a critical moment.” Basic test: correct functionality. Explanation: I have entered hibernation as a precaution and the situation is not critical. “You’re letting a unique subject get away, thirteen years old and only unfrozen for four months, and you’re saying it’s not critical?” Information: 13/0.4 is inaccessible, and 12/1.8 and similar are plentiful. “Exactly. Learn, learn from your data: there is one, and then two years later all the others, that makes it a singular subject. I order you to apply all your available resources and energy reserves to getting in contact with her.” I repeat: the subject is inaccessible. If you wind back, you will hear the dissuasive reasoning of her ROB. “Okay, you can’t talk to the mother, but I can. Why didn’t you notify me?” Reminder: I would have been exposing you to punishment by Dr. Craft. “In an extreme case like this one, you have to take risks. Learn that too. I’m on my way over. Whatever you do don’t lose sight of the girl.” Notification: the punishment may be … Warning: useless communication, there is no receptor.

  * * *

  On the way over Leo puts his strategy together. Between ROBco and the girl’s ROB, to which it seems to be well attuned, they’ll have to distract the tutor while he talks to the mother. If, as he suspects, she is anti-techno, she will only be a nuisance. He won’t explain the project to her in its current form, but as a collaboration with CraftER and, with the snippet he’s going to explain to her, the woman will see the path to fame. The stereotypical figure and challenging stance he’s seen in the images show her to be someone who is vulnerable to this temptation. She has the same ambition as Bet in her eyes. He’ll win her over.

  When he gets there, however, the situation has altered somewhat. The mother isn’t there, and the girl and her tutor have thrown themselves into participating in a dance circle. When he asks ROBco for an explanation, he realizes that he himself had ordered the robot to follow the wrong subject. Luckily, a very helpful ROBbie tells him that Lu, as the mother is called, has gone to the Adoptive Families Resource Center stand to find out what’s available. She’ll probably be back soon.

  Despite loitering discretely in a corner of the room, Leo fails to go unnoticed. It’s impossible to do in a place where only children, ROBs and women of a certain age are present.

  “Look, Silvana,” Celia whispers, “that must be the PROP of the robot that’s been following us around. Do you think he wants to talk to us?”

  “I don’t know. Do you know whose dad he is? He looks very young to have adopted a child.”

  “He just came in, didn’t you notice?”

  “I see you did.” She looks Celia in the eye and smiles. “You can’t have seen many guys that age, right?”

  “Now that you mention it, he’s the first.” She stops to think this over. “It’s odd that I didn’t notice.”

  Silvana also stops, the music is fading out.

  “It’s one of the drawbacks that comes with living with the pro-technos. Your mother would say I’m preaching, but the fact is that here each generation lives in their own little world. When you come to the ComU you’ll see it’s really quite different.”

  The circle breaks up in no time at all and, before everyone hurries off to the next activity, the organizer reminds them that the identification of all the participants will be sent to their houses in case they want to get in contact with each other later on.

  Standing quietly in his corner, Leo pretends to be distracted without missing anything that’s going on. The little girl keeps looking at him out of the corner of her eye, maybe he should go and talk to her without the mother’s permission. She seems bright enough. Every time he’s about to go over, however, the sight of her tutor puts him off. He wouldn’t know how to act faced with a woman who must hate anything that isn’t material. The good-looking anti-techno tend to be like that. When they’re still young and sexy they reject technology. Of course, if all of a sudden plastic surgery and thought enhancements were abolished they would have no rivals. And him? What could he offer, if his exceptional command of technological tools were no longer useful? The woman seems to have read his mind, because she’s giving him an arrogant look that he makes an effort not to pick up on. In spite of her age, he can’t deny she’s attractive.

  Although she’s aware Silvana won’t like it, Celia goes over to ROBbie, since she’d seen him talking to the young man’s ROB earlier, to ask what he knows about him. Not a lot, to be honest: he was interested in some information about her and he’s waiting for Lu to ask her permission to collect it.

  “Will you come with me to ask him what he wants?” Curious and a little on edge, Celia wants Silvana to come with her.

  “Of course, the one time you have an opportunity to meet someone different I’m not going to deprive you of it!”

  When he sees them coming, Leo stands up respectfully and puts some distance between him and his ROBco, so that the robot’s presence won’t make them uncomfortable.

  “Hello, my name’s Celia.” She holds out her hand and is surprised at the ease with which she takes the initiative. “ROBbie told me you want some information.”

  It’s obvious that the young man isn’t used to this kind of greeting, but he quickly adapts and shyly takes the girl’s warm little hand.

  “Yes, how good of you to come and see me.” When he smiles, his eyes light up. “My name is Leo.” He looks at Silvana, but she deliberately hangs back. She’ll be watching me like a hawk, he thinks, I’d better be careful what I say. “I study creativity and, from what I’ve heard about you, I think you might be able to help me.”

  Struggling to contain her excitement, Celia rocks back on her feet slightly, looking for her tutor’s blessing, but she remains unreadable.

  “If I can, I will.” Finally she’s grasped that it’s better not to be too forward. “Are you a psychologist?”

  “No, I’m a bioengineer.” The girl’s clueless expression prompts him to explain himself. “I work with machines that process human signals. Do you understand?”

  “Of course, hospitals are full of those machines
.”

  Suddenly he realizes that all these adopted children were once terminally ill, and that submitting them—submitting this little girl—to his experiments might be a kind of torture. He is embarrassed by this lapse, and it makes him wonder whether, inside his cubicle at CraftER, he had been aware of and accepted these consequences as part of the project. The timeout device is making him feel like he’s going crazy.

  “Are you afraid of them?”

  “The machines?” She looks at him skeptically. “No, I really like them.” She remembers how she enjoyed it when her dad explained them to her. “But no one can tell me how they work anymore. Can you?”

  “Some of them, of course.” So many doubts and it turns out it’ll work in his favor after all.

  “For example, do you know how robots pick up far-away conversations when there’s a lot of noise around?”

  “They’ve got powerful antennas that emit and receive electromagnetic waves on a very narrow channel, and, if they need it, they have a source separation program that helps them.”

  “Wow, cool!” She’s used an expression from before, that sounds old-fashioned to her now, and she turns to Silvana to gage her reaction.

  “Who do you work for?” Finally, the highly anticipated intervention of the tutor.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing an investigation. For now, it’s nothing more than that.”

  “There must be some company behind it,” she announces severely. “Which one is it?”

  “Okay”—hiding information can only be counterproductive— “CraftER.”

  “I knew it! The ones who make more and more intelligent robots for ever-stupider humans … and now you want to destroy our creativity by passing it on to robots?”

  Celia gives her a troubled look, she’d never imagined her tutor could be so aggressive. Especially not with someone so friendly. Leo, on the other hand, is made bolder by the turn in the conversation, as he has some great arguments:

  “No, no, it’s quite the opposite. It’s about strengthening human creativity, making a kind of devil’s advocate that spurs it on.”

  This is followed by a moment of silence, during which Silvana weighs whether the person she’s talking to is shameless or naive, and, lacking the information to make a decision, goes for a bit of both:

  “You lot are always nit-picking: you’re not trying to replace anyone, just broaden their abilities, that’s why you rush to use euphemisms, like assistant or helper, instead of saying executor or usurper, which is what they’ll end up being.”

  She’s regurgitated the standard speech and even Celia realizes that Leo hasn’t mentioned assistants but advocates.

  “Okay, let’s take this bit by bit. I can’t answer for everything the company has done, but I can assure you that my research …”

  They all turn toward Lu, who has arrived feeling very overwhelmed and, upon seeing the boy, has stopped some distance away to recompose her expression the best she can.

  “The Educational Media Exhibition started a while ago, but I can see you’ve been busy.”

  “I’m sorry, please excuse me.” Leo was quick to react and in two strides he’s standing next to her. “Could I talk to you for a second?”

  “Yes, of course, I’ll be right with you.” And, to Silvana: “You can head over, I’ll catch up in a second.”

  “I’d rather wait here.” Celia says this in a sensible tone of voice, slowly crossing her arms to affirm her position and delay her possible departure.

  “Oh, sweetie, don’t be so direct. You sound like a robot talking like that.”

  Despite Celia’s insistence on staying, the two women are for once in agreement that the EME is the most interesting activity of the day and they can’t miss it. Between the two of them they’ve gotten the better of her, she wasn’t counting on them teaming up, and even less on their alliance resulting in such a resounding defeat. She only hopes that Leo’s proposition convinces Lu … and that Silvana doesn’t get in the way.

  18

  Since he’s become accustomed to the quiet isolation of his cubicle, Leo’s head is spinning when he returns from the event. All he can see is a big mess of images on top of one another, and his inability to order them is really starting to get to him. At just thirteen the girl had gotten the upper hand in their conversation. She’s so curious about everything, she seemed to soak up his words with her eyes. And to think that ROBco would have let her get away! Thank goodness he’d thought to supervise it; despite updating it to a cutting-edge model, he still can’t trust it. Even with the neuroaccelerator it learns so slowly that, at this rate, it’ll take years to get the Alpha+ type assistant he’d expected. He’s starting to understand the rise in popularity of second-hand ROBs. Depending on the circumstances, he may also prefer a pre-trained robot, even if it were attuned to someone else’s peculiarities. Dr. Craft’s, for example. Now he just has to tell him that, by disobeying him, he’s made a great discovery that will advance the project, and therefore he needs a little girl to come into CraftER so he can record her encephalic records. That’s if that anti-techno halfwit doesn’t brainwash her mother. He reckons he managed to convince her, and Celia—he’ll never forget that name—is a great secret weapon to have on his side. The determination she showed when she insisted on staying! Strong-willed, interested and stubborn, she has all the characteristic traits of creative types. And cultural shock is guaranteed, he couldn’t ask for more. He’ll set up an interview with the Doctor. He’s sure he’ll see why this unique person is so useful for the project, and he’ll come around in the end.

  When he tries to call, Alpha+ blocks the connection, claiming the Doctor has just lost a dueling match and is in a very bad mood. If he wants to leave a message, the robot can pass it on at a good moment. This is the kind of assistant he wants, oh yes, capable of making decisions that benefit all parties. When he reveals his intentions, though, the robot kindly informs him that the Doctor is not at all keen on children and, as far as it knows, he’s never interviewed one. Leo wasn’t counting on that. He decides that the best course of action is not to tell him anything and go for broke with the presentation of the demo. If it’s convincing enough, maybe he’ll be prepared to make an exception.

  He dedicates himself day and night to perfecting the prototype and, by really pushing the robot to its limit, manages to get it to do the dirty work of entering the data and running an exhaustive battery of tests to check that it’s working properly. He’s so absorbed in the project that it seems like everything is related to it, and everything gives him new ideas. Even his expertise in debugging programs leads him to an unexpected goldmine when he realizes that, when applying these tools to one person’s behavior, they will detect actions susceptible to improvement or innovation, which would permit the suggestion of more creative variants of the same behavior. His modular, open and flexible algebra allows him to incorporate this strategy and any other almost in real time, without great effort needed in coding. That’s the advantage of a powerful formalism.

  Instead of coming to the cubicle as expected on the agreed date, the Doctor simply appears on the control monitor to give Leo instructions: he wants him to send ROBco with the prototype. Leo, who has forgone hours of sleep and is nervous about his gamble, just about manages to recover from the surprise in time to tell him that he’s prepared a presentation.

  “You want to torture me with superfluous chitchat as well? What’s wrong with you engineers these days, the only thing you know how to produce are fatuous words! I warned you …”

  “No, Doctor, I’m convinced you’ll like the prototype, I’ve developed it just as you wanted, structured in layers, but I should explain …”

  “Products should speak for themselves.”

  “I agree … if they’re finished; but at the moment I’ve only completed the first layer, the reactive one, that, when requested by the user, tries to provoke original solutions in a specific field.” He tries to milk the maximum amount of information out o
f the minimum amount of words. “I want you to know that I’m working on the proactive layer, which constantly monitors behavior in order to emit suggestions, and on top of that will go the intrusive layer, with direct access to brain signals to open much deeper paths of innovation.”

  “As you can see I decide what I want and don’t want to listen to. You may continue.”

  Spurred on by this comment, Leo gets carried away and opens some graphics from the presentation, gesticulates, gets caught up in the details, without realizing that the eyebrows are starting to arch perilously while he continues enumerating inspiration strategies, mechanisms to focus human attention, and even permits himself the frivolity of trying to flatter the Doctor, citing reliable sources, by stating that the key factor in being original is wanting to be, as Pasteur said. That’s when, in turning around to reap the fruits of his audacity, he is shocked to find that the image of his only listener has disappeared.

  Furious with himself for having been so inept—“you have to be stupid to forget about the most important thing”—he starts to curse himself out loud, aborts a first kick, punches at nothing, and ends up fighting with the air.

  ROBco watches him inexpressively, without attempting to intervene, until all of a sudden it lets out: “Alpha+ is asking for the prototype,” and, since no reply is forthcoming, repeats it, and repeats it again.

  At first Leo doesn’t even hear it, then he ignores it, and in the end, exasperated, he tells it to shut up. He can’t understand what has just happened, he’s never experienced such an uncontrolled reaction and he looks down at his own body in amazement. Maybe the reclusion is driving him mad. The gloomiest predictions of his former colleagues about inventors being wrung dry by an unscrupulous tyrant come back to him with force, exaggerated by the Doctor’s phantasmagorical appearance and even worse, his unexpected disappearance. Those words “you want to torture me as well?” are still ringing in his ears. At the time they’d given him the shivers, and the fate of those who came before him worries him more than ever.