by Carme Torras
When ROBco reminds him again, he jumps to the control panel—the situation couldn’t be made any worse by the Doctor receiving the prototype—and extracts a self-contained version of the system, ready to be installed in a ROB; once it’s been copied onto one of CraftER’s confidential storage devices, he hands it over to the robot to deliver and, while it’s at it, leave him to think in peace.
Now that he’s on his own, he automatically leaves the cubicle so he can contact Bet. He’s always done this upon finishing a project. What’s not so common is for her to respond right away. After exchanging only a few words, she delivers the verdict:
“I see you have your typical post-demo depression.”
It’s true that this has happened on other occasions after throwing himself body and soul into a job; when he finishes, he feels empty and doesn’t know what to do with himself. But this time it’s different, he claims. Since he doesn’t dare to share all his fears with her, he gets tied up in knots insinuating doubts about his abilities, and she interprets this as terror at the thought of receiving a critical evaluation.
“No, it’s nothing like that. If I’m sure of one thing, it’s that he’ll like the prototype.”
What are you afraid of then, the next step?” He’s got her pretty confused.
“Kind of, yeah.”
By answering with half-truths he starts to spin a web around himself, and his fear of the Doctor coalesces around the fact that, certainly, he will refuse an entry permit to someone who is key to the advancement of the prosthesis. Therefore the project will fail, they’ll fire him without a second thought, and, on top of all that, a promising prototype will be snatched away from him.
“You mean it’s a premeditated plan? Who is this key person?”
He finds himself deep in conversation about the get-together, how he’d turned up unplanned so as not to lose as singular a person as Celia, about the qualitative leap that she could bring to the project.
“She’s not like you or me, believe me: she reacts, she moves, she behaves in a different way. You should see her.”
His tone, which had been defeated, is now practically enthusiastic, and Bet is quick to accuse:
“All that back-and-forth to get to this? You’ll engineer something to get permission from the Doctor, I’m sure of it, and you’ll have your little girlfriend, sorry, your work material, available soon.”
She hangs up and, as much as Leo tries to reestablish the connection, unlike before, he comes up against all the intermediaries imaginable.
When ROBco gets back, Leo’s mind is still occupied with Celia and the tactics he could use to get permission from the Doctor. The most direct way would be for him to like the prototype so much that he gave him carte blanche. But, even if this were the case, it could take a while, as the installment of the prototype in Alpha+ has been postponed until the president resolves some other affairs.
Leo is lost in thought: what if he were to risk it and request permission through the emergency line, claiming it’s essential for the next layer, otherwise the project will have to be halted? Maybe in all the hurry he would be able to leave out the girl’s age and once the interview has been agreed to … Or he could hide it among a large group of people he wants to record, then the Doctor wouldn’t have to interview them one by one. This seems like a viable option, in spite of the extra work it would imply.
“Let’s see, ROBco, how many people have you identified that we would have to record here, within CraftER?”
“Recap: with certainty, only Celia, the others have been discarded. Question: What is the objective?”
“To get permission from the Doctor for these people to enter CraftER.”
“Suggestion: Consider whether this is the final objective or a way of achieving it.”
Leo raises his head, surprised, he can’t remember ROBco ever having taken the initiative to make suggestions. Maybe the neurolearning is finally starting to make a difference.
“Okay, the objective is to obtain permission for Celia; to place her in a group with other people is just a way of achieving that.”
“I insist: Is getting the Doctor’s permission your ultimate objective?”
“I’m glad you’re trying new things, but do you have to repeat yourself?”
“Explanation: Superfluous restrictions often get in the way, one must discern which are essential and which can be relaxed.” Leo has fallen silent. “Example: NASA spent years unsuccessfully searching for a metal that could resist high temperatures for its rockets, for when they reenter the atmosphere. Until someone realized that the objective was not finding this metal, but protecting the astronauts during reentry. The solution was a material with the opposite characteristics of those they were looking for, which burned very slowly, thereby keeping the heat far away from the actual vehicle.”
The story sounds familiar. It was in one of the creative-solution dossiers he’d decided to incorporate into the system. Could it be that ROBco had memorized some of the examples while he was introducing the data? In any case it’d hit the nail on the head.
“Okay, the astronaut is Celia. The only thing I want is for her to enter the CraftER atmosphere safe and healthy.”
“Incomprehensible: Do I have to change the context to interpret this?”
“Forget about it. Let’s say I already know the true objective, now what do I do?”
“Advice: Look for alternative ways to achieve it. Options: Try a drastic change of perspective, or start by disrupting the failed solution a little: change the type of material, the identity of the people, each of the elements that feature in the scenario.”
Little by little Leo’s suspicion is being confirmed and, although he could try to prove it right now, he refrains so as not to give the game away. He has more than enough reasons to want to go along with this step-by-step, and is curious as to how it will unravel; who knows, it might be useful. One rather drastic solution he’s come up with would be to sneak Celia into the building, but he envisions a heap of problems, so he decides to explore the first, more conservative option. There are two elements in the failed solution: the permission and the Doctor. If it’s not permission, what could it be instead? And if not the Doctor, who? There’s no need to work through any more deductions, or go over any mental lists, because it hits him in a sudden, fully formed flash: Mr. Gatew. He opens his contract with CraftER and reads it over carefully, like a man possessed: the requirement to report exclusively to the Doctor is limited to technical affairs, company protocols should be followed when dealing with administrative issues.
He must be stupid, the most obvious solution hadn’t occurred to him! He reads up on the regulations, fills out the corresponding form and sends it to management. He even affords himself the luxury of marking it as urgent.
With the request out of the way, he moves on to ROBco and, with the excuse of having to check that his circuits are working correctly, he opens its side panel and verifies that, indeed, it’s been installed with the prototype meant for Alpha+. He’s not at all bothered about benefiting from it himself, but he does feel he’s been tricked and isn’t sure what to think. He’ll have to wait a little longer for the Doctor to evaluate his work. What unsettles him most is that the action might have been premeditated—that’d be why the Doctor had given him the same ROB model as his—and also that now it’s been done, he hasn’t bothered to hide the plan from him. What is he up to? Maybe he wants to avoid taking the risk of installing the prototype in his own ROB and experimenting with it himself, especially since, according to him, there are several prototypes. Of course, it’s a way of testing them in parallel. Each inventor, spurred on by their creation, will have their capacity multiplied and will also see their shortcomings exacerbated. What an idea. This way a really positive spiral is set in motion, where differences are magnified, and, in the end, the evaluation will be obvious. Very clever, yes indeed; yeah, maybe he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s got plenty of wit. Leo just hopes it’s him who’s leading t
he field, otherwise his chances of winning will be slim. Luckily, the exchange he’s just had with ROBco is a good sign.
19
To Celia this particular school day feels longer and more boring than usual. It seems the day will never end, and the time that Lu is coming to pick her up isn’t getting any closer.
For hours she’s resisted the temptation to tell Xis where she’s going, but in the end she’s succumbed, and her friend’s revelation that CraftER is the company her mother works at has really surprised her. What a mistake! Since she found out she hasn’t stopped begging Celia to pay close attention to everything so she can tell her about it later; she’s never been allowed to go. As far as she knows, the building is immense, and it’ll be difficult to find her, but, just in case, she told her excitedly, her mother is blonde, not very tall, this morning she was dressed in red, and her name is Sus. This has made Celia even more nervous. She doesn’t want anyone muscling in on her adventure.
She can see herself walking along beside that good-looking engineer, past a series of prodigious machines, half-finished inventions, mysteries to be uncovered … the physics of miracles, as her father would say, and Leo, perfectly kind, will show her first one, then another, he’ll explain what she has to do, answer her questions, until the crucial moment when he invites her to sit down—or maybe she’ll have to lie down?—so he can set up the devices, or put a helmet on her, or whatever. All his attention will be focused on her. She’ll feel so important once she’s contributed to technological progress!—her father would be proud—and what luck that the reliable pair of hands won’t belong to a disheveled, crazy-faced old man like the experts in her science book, but those of an attentive and slightly shy young man she is so desperate to see again.
EDUsys’s insistent demands bring her back down to earth about ten minutes before Lu is due to arrive. Finally the time has passed, but after so much whispering to her friend and creating her own distractions, she’s been reprimanded so many times that she fears her teacher might make the most of Lu’s visit to share a few of his observations. And she ends up underestimating him, as on top of the usual accusations of a lack of interest in learning and a strong resistance to letting go of old-fashioned and now pointless knowledge, he finishes with a threat: the school won’t add even one more day to the period of adaptation than, by law, it’s obligated to provide.
Plunged into a tense silence, the journey in the aero’car would have been impossible for the two of them had it not been so short. ROBul is an expert pilot and in seconds they’re hovering in front of an imposing building, that to Celia looks like a giant, golden pinecone, planted stem-side down with its scales opened up and some pine nuts still attached. It’s nice to look at, even though so much brightness is a bit blinding. As they get closer, she realizes that the pine nuts are aero’cars and she excitedly imagines the maneuvers they’ll have to perform to get into one of the empty scales. But ultimately she’s disappointed, since the craft immediately heads down and lands on CraftER’s main platform, on the ground floor, where Leo has arranged for them to go through security. A mobile beacon guides them to their assigned opening and, once the aero’car has been parked, clear and punctual instructions are received: visitors must wait until their contact from within the company comes to meet them; under no circumstances may the ROBs abandon the vehicle.
Celia’s expectations are more than satisfied by the appearance of the engineer. As if by magic, the opening becomes traversable and he crosses it as naturally as George Clooney coming out of a spaceship in that film she used to like. She watches him stride purposefully toward the aero’car and it looks like he’s greeted them with a nod of the head, but it’s so slight she’s not sure it really happened. When they get out of the aero’car and they’re standing side by side, she finds herself reliving the feeling she experienced the other day, and stretches as much as she can to make up for the height difference. She almost misses the first words he exchanges with Lu as she’s distracted by a brief glance she perceives to have been directed at her legs, and after looking down to find out why, she looks up and identifies another glance, this time at her right hand, she’s sure of it.
It takes her a while to understand that the young man is waiting to see if she’s going to offer him her hand like the other day and, caught up in her own indecision, she feels a pleasant tickling sensation in her stomach. She’s not sure which of them has taken the initiative but she finds herself shaking a hand that holds hers weakly, perhaps because he’s afraid of hurting her.
“That’s how you greeted each other in the past, right?” Leo is trying to justify the gesture for Lu, but Celia, touched, sees it as an apology for his lack of expertise.
Introductions finished, he puts his hand into a cavity next to the opening—the same hand that a few moments ago was squeezing her own—and, once he has been granted free passage, a disembodied voice announces that management has awarded him credits for two visitors. They must go through the entry control one by one. They have to put their right hand in the cavity so that it can be registered in CraftER’s exclusive system and, when they cross the threshold, their identity chip will be read. The association of the registration and the identity chip will give them access to the company’s communal areas for the duration of the agreed period. In line with current legislation, they’re notified that a record of their movements will be monitored and saved.
As she’s used to going through similar controls, Lu has no problem carrying out the procedure. The problem comes when Celia, after putting her hand into the cavity, crosses the threshold and the voice booms: “Protected identity, the name Leo-1 will be assigned as proof of identity of the person responsible.” The most surprised is, weirdly, Leo himself, who looks from one of them to the other as if he were expecting an explanation. When he finally reacts and puts the question to the system, he discovers that CraftER, like most companies, only has permission to identify subjects of working age; the actions of a minor will be attributed to the worker who has requested their entry, and he will answer for their actions before the law as if they were his own.
Celia doesn’t need to understand all the terminology as she understands perfectly well the meaning of Leo-1 and responsible. She’s excited to see herself turned into a kind of double of the engineer, and his doubts, his worried expression when he receives the machine’s explanation, offend her. She’d never do anything that might get him in trouble.
Luckily, his eyes don’t take long to smile again and he invites them to head on down a kind of corridor dotted with openings on both sides. Celia immediately reverts to being thrilled, and is dying to ask questions. She’s intrigued by the fact that they’ve taken handprints, like the police used to do, she’d imagined they’d have a more sophisticated system.
“So what did you think it would be like?” Leo is pleased to rediscover this habit of noticing everything that had so surprised him last time.
“I don’t know, in movies they scan your eyes or your chip … is that not enough to identify someone?”
“I’m not familiar with the details, none of the users are, otherwise it would be pointless. But you can be certain that, as well as fingerprints, it codifies the distribution of pressure, how long you leave your hand in there, and it’s possible that they analyze the DNA in your dead skin cells. It’s an exclusive signature that no one else could reproduce because no one knows exactly how it’s measured. A chip can always be recoded, and as a last resort, transplanted; the hand, however …”
“Eyes can’t be transplanted either.”
“You’re right there. In the past some companies scanned retinas, but in the end it was banned, because it was too intrusive a system, it violated a person’s privacy. In this case it’s you who decides to put your hand in if you want to enter. With eye scans, the only way to stop yourself being identified everywhere would be to shut them, and that isn’t very practical …” He closes his eyes and clumsily holds his arms out in front of him, a position that�
�s even funnier because he didn’t intend it to be.
Celia laughs, finally some humor, and Leo responds with an odd expression, surprised by his own actions. Sucked in by the holographic advertising that follows them everywhere, Lu has missed what happened and her daughter’s laughter is what brings her back, though she’s not quite sure to where. She doesn’t know if she should scold her and, confused, she chooses to lose herself once again in the accelerated transformation of a fat woman into a model, thanks to the sculpturing massages that her top-of-the-line CraftER robot performs on her while she’s sleeping.
“Personalized advertising”—Leo doesn’t want to leave her out of the conversation—“it’s one of the advantages of identifying guests. If you’re interested in any of the accessories, let me know and I’ll see if we can include it in the compensation you’ll receive for your services.”
Almost without realizing, they’ve stepped onto a mobile platform that slides along a web of ribbons that remind Celia of old road junctions, but on a smaller scale. Their destination must be preprogrammed, as the turns are made at the crossings without Leo having to do anything, until they stop on a very high floor and a pleasant female voice welcomes them to the recording room.
The visitors are taken aback by how large the space is, full of machines with not a living soul present. Or maybe there is someone here, on the far side of the room it looks like something’s moving. It’s a robot, which had been hidden among the instruments, and it’s coming toward them.