by Carme Torras
She crosses without thinking twice and, despite not knowing what she expected to find, the extreme starkness of the cubicle surprises her. This brightly lit space, with all the devices embedded in the walls, is less welcoming than the worst clinics, and, from what he’s told her, the poor boy lives here; he really must have turned to wood. Pure survival.
“Question: Will you watch the recordings first or shall I prepare the sensory booth for the lady?”
The metallic voice behind her comes as a surprise, just like the other day, and has given her a good shock once again. She’ll never get used to the monitored solitude in which the pro-technos reside.
“Ah, the pilot! Is it completely necessary that it handles the machines today as well?”
“Sorry, I forgot that it being here bothered you. ROBco, keep testing the R72 interface we were having problems with this morning.”
She hadn’t thought it would be so easy to get rid of the robot: maybe the boy is less dependent on it than she thought.
“But we’ll still be able to watch the images and see Celia’s reactions, I hope.”
“What do you take me for? That’s the ROB leaving, not me.”
“Of course, I forgot, you built it, so you’ve already mastered everything it knows how to do.”
“Not quite. He accumulates knowledge from lots of different people.”
“Okay, okay, I meant that you’re not a typical PROP, you take the initiative, not the other way around, like usual.”
“I don’t understand. All ROBs serve people.”
“Exactly. It’s just that the service is often poisoned. Why do you think we’re against those mechanical contraptions?” She feels she can say this now that the dummy’s not around. “Because we’re snobs? Well, no.” She’s set her course and there’s no stopping her now. “Overprotective robots produce spoiled people, slaves produce despots, and entertainers brainwash their own PROPs. And worst of all you people don’t care what happens to the rest of us as long as they sell.”
“Stop, stop. If you’ve come to hold a rally, it’d be better to give up now. I thought you’d come to get a better understanding of Celia’s feelings.”
He’s right, she’s gone off on a tangent that really doesn’t interest her right now; she should just get to the point. She’s quick to make it clear that, for now, she’d prefer to see the images and, according to what she finds, decide whether she will allow Celia’s brain signals to be injected into her. It’s all starting to feel a bit more imposing than she thought it would.
Two armchairs emerge from the floor in front of a screen, and Leo shows her how to regulate the speed of projection, the zoom, and most important of all, the perspective, which can put her either inside or outside of the person being filmed, in this case, himself.
“Doesn’t it make you uncomfortable to know that I can examine all your darkest corners?”
The boy catches her eye for the first time since they met. His eyes are full of life, always moving, it’s difficult to pin them down.
“Why?” It’s like he really doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “I trust you to help me find out what’s going on and, in order to do that, you’ll have to see it …”
Silvana folds indifferently to her opponent’s flawless logic. He’s obviously more naive than Jul, less experienced. Everything points to her being able to rely on him, but also that he won’t generate an awful lot of interesting debate.
She works through the first images, in which Leo is static and inexpressive, very quickly, in order to get to the ones that really interest her. When his face starts to contract into an expression of suffering, Silvana closely follows the auxiliary screen, where the series of answers Celia was giving in the test provide the key:
“The girl was making a great effort to please you, to be as good as you expected. Look at the huge quantity of answers she gives to each question, and how the tension in your face is in crescendo from the first to the last. Now, for example, it’s getting harder and harder for her to find different uses for this stick with a ball on the end. What is it?”
“A control lever. If it’s something that simple, why did her signals affect me so much, while she, on the other hand, didn’t show any sign of being in any discomfort?”
“Maybe because it’s quite the opposite, and she’s really enjoying it.”
“How can you say that? I can see you don’t believe in my transmutation invention. I assure you every one of Celia’s encephalic records has been carefully injected into the corresponding area of my brain.”
“Calm down, you misunderstand me.” Leo’s reaction was so vehement that, in trying to reassure him, Silvana has taken his arm, and their startled gazes meet. “What I mean is what’s irritating for you might not be for her.” She makes it obvious that she’s letting go of him. “In the same way that physical contact doesn’t bother me.”
“Nor me,” he hurriedly replies. “It’s just I’m not used to it.”
Such honesty disarms her once again, just like the other day. It seems he is longing to taste something that’s been off limits until now, and she won’t be the one to stop him. But, as ready to try things out as they might be, right now the girl’s feelings are her priority.
“You’re not used to making an effort like Celia is, either. Don’t be offended, I’ll probably make the same face when you inject the signals into me. The capacity for sacrifice they had a hundred years ago is incredible.”
“So what is it then? Was she enjoying herself or making a sacrifice? I thought you’d calm my doubts but I’m getting more and more confused.”
“I might be wrong, of course, but I think it’s both at the same time. As far as I know, in the past they enjoyed working for future reward, so they didn’t think twice about sacrificing their immediate well-being.”
“What are you saying … that it’s not just characteristic of the girl? Do you really think we’ve changed so much as a species in such a short period of time?”
“It’s not that I think so, the evidence is clear.”
“And what is this fabulous reward the girl was looking forward to?”
“We’ll have to find out for ourselves. Pay attention to the screen: your expression here is of profound anxiety rather than suffering. What are you looking at so attentively?”
“My hand. Celia did so too, I checked: for a moment she took her eyes off the test to look at my hand. How could that be interpreted?”
Silvana’s not sure if she should tell him. They’ve infiltrated the girl’s privacy in a highly irregular manner, and the exquisite emotion that she hides there might be as indistinguishable to Leo as a diamond would be from some old-fashioned silicon connector. How can she make a pro-techno party to such a delicate emotion, so secret that it’s not even been openly confessed to her?
She would never have imagined she’d be so thankful for the robot bursting in:
“Urgent interruption: Bet wants to talk to you. Clarification: I told her you were busy with an experiment, but she insisted.”
Leo consents to appearing on camera.
“Hello. I’d thought about calling you later. Is it an emergency?”
“Who’s that behind you? She doesn’t look like the girl you were telling me about …”
The irony rubs Silvana the wrong way, though in any case she considers it a positive sign that the boy’s been speaking about Celia. It shows that she’s important to him.
“She’s helping me with the project.” The half lie and the forced smile make it patently obvious that he’s trying to take the drama out of the situation. “But what do you want?”
“And she’s not wearing a CraftER uniform? She’s not company staff then?”
“Bet, please, we’ve got work to do.”
“I see, she’s not. So she can go into your cubicle on a Saturday, while I’m relegated to pointlessly flying around in that damned aero’car. It’s over, do you understand me? I’m going to sue you for stealing my happiness a
pp. You keep saying what you’re working on here has nothing to do with your private projects … even though you’ve brought the booth in from home. And I’ll sue CraftER too for not paying me my share of the rights. I’ll get more out of it than if we’d commercialized the app together. So you thought you could do it alone? You, the great inventor, trying to get into business, but you’re completely useless!”
Once the communication has been cut off, ROBco disappears without a word.
“I’d prefer not to have heard that. I’m sorry if because of me …”
“Forget it. It’s got nothing to do with you. We should have broken up a long time ago, this was just the final straw.”
“But she said she’d sue you …”
“That’s just bravado. I can demonstrate that I haven’t even touched the happiness app, and she knows full well that the booth belongs to me. She’s as terrible at engineering as I am at business. We were searching for a symbiosis together that just never came into being. She’ll soon find someone else.”
So much rationality leaves her dumbfounded. And even more so when she sees him, without further ado, rewind the sequence in which he’s anxiously looking at his hand and get back on track:
“How should this anxiety be interpreted? Is the girl afraid of me? Maybe my hand reminds her of some terrible experience?”
His desire to find out seems genuine, as opposed to the exchange he’s just had with his ex. When she’s about to succumb to Leo’s tenacity, Silvana asks herself if he’s interested in the girl or purely in the investigation, and in the end opts for a professional tone:
“First of all, you need to know that emotional signals like sweat, cardiac acceleration, gestures … can be the same for many different kinds of emotions: fear, excitement, rage, love … What allows us to resolve the question of whether a person is hopeful, frightened, jealous, or just crazy, is the logic of the situation they find themselves in.”
“You mean no matter how many images and signals we collect, we’ll never know for sure what Celia, or anyone else, is feeling, if she doesn’t confirm it herself?”
He’s got his neurons wired right, this naive copy of Jul.
“More or less. We can suspect what might be going on, but we’ll never have absolute certainty.”
“So why do you want to submit yourself to Celia’s signals, if you don’t know what emotion you’re going to experience? It might not even be one of the extinct ones you’re so interested in.”
“I have evidence that it is in fact the emotion I’m looking for, and it’s an attractive enough prospect for me to risk being wrong. In any case, it was a new experience for you. That wouldn’t be so bad either: if it’s not an extinct feeling, maybe you’ve created a new one with your machine, unclassifiable according to the established categories … The missing dimension, like you were saying the other day.”
“Injecting someone else’s encephalic recordings could be creative … that is a good idea.” Leo stops to think this over, weighing its possible implications.
“And, if it’s unclassifiable, we’ll have to give it a name. What do you think of ‘exquished’?” Silvana rewinds and they watch the boy’s contorted face again. “You look pretty exquished, don’t you think?”
They both laugh and it’s like the sound waves have wrapped them up in their own private bubble. They stand up simultaneously, and Leo feels inspired to take her arm to lead her over to the sensory booth.
“You haven’t told me what this fabulous emotion you’re looking for is, the one that you’re prepared to be exquished for.”
“Admiration. Maybe you don’t know what it means.” She sits down, challenging him with her eyes.
“It must have something to do with looking.”
“Yes, looking up at someone who’s higher than you … like you are now.”
Leo feels touched for a moment, and doesn’t dare step back. He doesn’t know if she’s asking him to bend down and embrace her, if she’s putting words in Celia’s mouth, since she was sitting in the same position the other day, or if she’s enjoying confusing him. The serious way she’s staring at him is what sways him.
“Am I meant to understand that the girl was looking up at me … to me?”
“You understand what ‘up’ means, right? We look like that at someone we believe to be superior. I think you remind her of her father.”
“Me?” Now she really has him confused.
“Celia would do anything for you, to see you, to be on your level.”
“And just looking at me makes her feel anxious?”
“Of course, looking up always …” The boy’s stupidity is making her impatient. “Doesn’t your boss at CraftER make you feel like that?”
“But he … I …”
Leo’s profound astonishment makes Silvana immediately regret having offended him without realizing. Before she can make it right though, a threatening voice booms out:
“Leo Mar’10, that’s enough nonsense. That woman has come into the cubicle to contribute to the prosthesis, not to your crazy ideas. I want the final demo ready for Monday at ten o’clock sharp.”
Could it be possible that this unibrowed raving lunatic has been spying on them the whole time? Silvana feels caged, humiliated, vexed. She stands up immediately and heads for the door, while the boy stutters, “Okay, Doctor, it’ll be ready, Monday,” and follows her out, flustered, shouting “Where are you going? Wait!” Since no reply is forthcoming, he grabs her arm in an attempt to stop her, but she pulls it away sharply and, agilely boarding a descending mobile platform and without turning back, spits:
“I don’t talk to ROBs; actually, I hate them. I’d even get on better with that terribly rude PROP of yours.”
Rooted to the spot at the top of the ramp, like someone has taken his batteries out, Leo’s ghost-like, lifeless figure only serves to prove her right.
VI
THE KEY TO TIMEOUT
29
Leo goes back into the cubicle, unable even to recognize himself. He’s disoriented. Having his memories encrypted and decrypted every time he goes in and out must be affecting his memory, because he feels light years away from that boy who just a few hours ago was ready to take on the world. But it was a different world. Where everything was in its place, and he knew what he had to do. An ordered, predictable microcosm, with schedules and rewards. Not the mess he’s in now. The injected signals have disrupted his body, and Silvana his mind. Or is it the other way around? It doesn’t matter: he’s been shaken up too violently, he’s lost his footing and has nothing left to hang on to. He doesn’t even have Bet.
He sits down on the floor with his head in his hands, and ROBco stands before him reflecting his bewilderment back at him. He needs to untangle his thoughts by any means possible, line them up, work out what’s important and what’s not, become himself again. The hardest part will be deciding where to start, finding a thread to pull on. Bet. She’s got nothing to do with his malaise. She’s flipped out on him before, and yes, it was unpleasant. But even if they were together and he could connect to her, it wouldn’t be of any use to him. She’s a loose end: it wouldn’t hurt to get rid of her, one less thing to worry about.
Next: Celia. He’s intrigued to know exactly what Silvana meant with all that stuff about looking up. To him. Just as soon as he puffs up with pride—for some reason or another she’s compared him with her father—he buries himself, hurt, in the darkest depression—what did Silvana’s allusion to the Doctor mean? He tries to evoke the girl’s face from when he went over to adjust the helmet on her, while he gave her instructions, when he was sitting next to her carrying out the tests, but he can’t remember any expression in her eyes, not even one miserable blink. The girl already interested him then … how could he have paid so little attention to her? Now she matters to him even more, of course, since he knows what’s hidden inside her: a suffering that is at the same time enjoyment, creative effort, and that can’t be too different from the “looking up�
�� that he finds so curious. Who knows, maybe it has something to do with her escaping from school and sneaking into CraftER. It would be amazing if she did it because she wanted to see him up here, in his dominion, the great bioengineer Leo Mar’10 in action.
He’s daydreaming. He doesn’t want to face up to what’s really hurting him and has left him stunned. ROBco’s right when he suggests going to the root of the problem and to stop getting tied down in minutiae. Just the thought of conjuring up the image of Silvana on the ramp however, brings an army of nanobots armed with sharp knives to his stomach. The woman’s contemptuous gesture is branded onto his mind: she didn’t even bother to look at him when she called him a ROB … and she had every right to. He certainly does have an owner. After so much conceit over his magnificent contributions to the public register, resisting the retroactive contract … he’s ended up with not only his hands but also his brain tied to a company, and worse still, to its shady president. And all for what? To produce—how did she put it?—overprotective robots that produce spoiled people, slaves that produce despots, and entertainers that brainwash their PROPs. What a gift to humanity, oh yes. When you put it like that, it’s undeniable that we’re contributing to a veritable mutation of the species. Or rather, causing it. He looks at his hands as though he expects to find them more powerful, and stained. They’re an extension of the Doctor, many hands like these forged the multitude of robots that exist around the world today, sculpting human nature. So much hidden power behind apparently loyal and useful servants.
He’s never seen the world from this point of view before, which seems to be very high up, and the macro’ptics is giving him a fascinating sense of vertigo. How can it be that, all of a sudden, he’s seeing everything differently, like it’s been enlarged? Maybe injecting Celia’s signals has saved him from the prejudices of his era, giving him a timeless, freer vision. He might as well try it again, why not? He’ll drown himself in the girl’s feelings and her complex inner workings. When it comes down to it, he’s a slave, it’s not like he has anything to lose.