[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 9

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"By that point I’d given up on ever finding and punishing the specific people who hurt me. I just wanted blood. Any blood would do. To hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats, as H.L. Mencken put it. To watch the world burn and, if possible, feed some to the flames who might’ve otherwise escaped.

I have the good fortune to live in a country where it is not only perfectly legal but also astonishingly lucrative to develop robots for the purpose of inflicting misery, suffering and death on so called innocent people elsewhere in the world. Talk about finding your niche!

But, something within me refused it. To this day I cannot pin it down. Some tiny scrap of me, still soft and warm, recoiled from the thought of missiles based on my innovations bearing down on helpless families. Until then I really believed I was beyond redemption. That every light within me had been extinguished, and all that remained was hollow, silent blackness.

It turns out that I’m human after all. Or something pretty close. A living heart still beats in my chest. It still pumps warm, red blood through my veins. There is, in spite of everything, a shred of feeling left within this worn down, busted up old pile of parts. So I took a step back from the brink, and turned down that job.

I still needed to put food on the table though. Not to mention all the machines in my care, keeping them charged and in good shape isn’t cheap. That’s why I settled on developing evolutionary approaches to improving robots and AI.

A lot of it’s still ultimately used for war, but it has applications outside that. Some of them even philanthropic. I won’t pretend that’s the reason I got into it, or that it’s a morally pure choice of career, but it is at least fairly neutral.

Neutrality is the best way to describe how I feel now. No longer roasting in my own uncontrollable rage. I don’t experience any intense feelings whatsoever. As if I’ve had so much already that those particular fuses in my brain have blown.

Just grey inside. Indifferent. Steady, consistent and bland. There’s a lot to be said for it, you know. I’m not suffering anymore, not that I can tell anyway. It’s refreshingly simple. A safe, rational baseline that I do not want disrupted by the introduction of a new source of that caustic substance called ‘feeling’ into my life.”

He sat there wide eyed and absorbed it. I don’t usually open up that much. I expected him to come up with something proportionally insightful. Instead, he opined that I badly need to get laid. I laughed in spite of myself.

“I’m being serious” he admonished. “What I’m hearing is that you’re lonely. Don’t shake your head at me yet, hear me out. You’re lonely and can’t deal with the pain except by denial. You pretend you’re not lonely, that you don’t need or want anybody. It’s like breatharianism. It’s an appealing fantasy that seems to work for a little while, but ignoring basic biological needs will eventually kill you.

We’re social creatures. We need intimacy with other human beings as inescapably as we need food, water or air. You can’t just stuff that on a shelf and forget about it. I can’t make you listen to me but I wish you would, at least about this. Go have dinner with what’s her name. Make yourself do it.

I don’t want to hear reasons why you can’t, or why it’s a bad idea. That’s my prescription. Honestly I’m as mystified as you are that she’d want to voluntarily spend time with you, but for Heaven’s sake, take her up on her offer. Love is probably the only thing that’ll unfuck someone as lost as you.”

I began to argue, but he pointed out that we’d already run over our allotted session. He nevertheless loomed over me as I found that email from Madeline to make sure I sent a reply agreeing to have dinner with her.

Once satisfied that I really hit send, he shooed me out of his office and into the sterile, empty corridor outside. I passed the protest again as I made my way down to the ground floor. Security was somewhat increased, with six or so riot suppression robots warily patrolling the edge of the crowd.

The lout who recognized me before now got up and approached. No doubt determining hostile intention by body language, one of the squat little cylindrical security robots got between us. He stared me down. The little trashcan like machine, perched on a two wheeled self balancing base, tentatively aimed what I assumed was a projectile taser at him.

“Saw you on the news the other day” he called to me. Another two security robots scooted over to ensure that no altercation took place. If only these handy little fellows had been developed sooner. There’s no shortage of people in the world who are only well behaved with some sort of weapon pointed at them.

Each of their cylindrical metal bodies was capped with a swiveling dome shaped head in which, much like an astronomical observatory, there was a vertical slot for the turret inside to adjust its aim along the vertical axis.

Only nonlethal payloads in there...supposedly. I could feel the subtle prickle of his continued stare in the hairs on the back of my neck as I hurried towards the elevator, making damn sure I wasn’t followed this time before getting in. Once outside the building my cell service suddenly returned, and I received notification of a new email.

The autocab pulled up as punctually as ever, and as I climbed in, I asked Helper to read the new mail to me. “Hey! I almost didn’t expect to hear from you again. The next few days are packed, I have a lot on my plate. Tonight’s free though. If that isn’t too abrupt, there’s this cute new Italian place downtown I’ve been meaning to try.”

I replied that it suited me fine so long as they carry Soylent. She replied a few minutes later with a laughing emoji and the address, which I then regurgitated to the autocab’s navigational AI. On the way, I rehearsed how I’d explain this unusually severe detour to my parole officer.

By the time the autocab pulled up to the curb just outside the modest hole in the wall Italian restaurant, I’d settled on pitching it as an after hours team building exercise. I was going to say drinking with buddies from work, but he knows I don’t drink. I probably could’ve convinced him I was the designated driver though.

I cursed under my breath when I remembered the bleach. I really meant to get that done today. Yet here I am, postponing my duties to the newest machine in my care in order to cavort with some strange woman. Well perhaps not cavort, but certainly dally.

Everybody seated near the front doors turned to stare as I entered. The rest followed their gaze to see what the fuss was about, such that I soon found myself the center of attention. The manager, a muscular and hirsute looking gentleman in a silk shirt unbuttoned nearly to the waist, rushed over to question me.

I stammered, wholly unprepared. I’d probably have been thrown out on suspicion of plans to rob the place if Madeline didn’t step in. “Not to worry, he’s with me. The mask is due to a medical condition.” That did the trick, and wasn’t too far from the truth either.

A few continued shooting me stray glances well after Madeline and I were seated and busy ordering. Are their lives so uneventful that all it takes to captivate them is the sight of a masked man? “You’re really attached to that thing, aren’t you.” Her voice sounded more amused than accusatory.

I lifted my gaze to reply but was at once arrested by Madeline’s beauty. It was the first time I had a chance to really get a good look at her. I am ashamed to say it, but I liked what I saw. The single candle between us cast a warm, flickering light captured perfectly by the smooth contours of her face.

Thank goodness she couldn’t tell I was staring. “It was a gift from someone important to me. At least I think so. There’s a lot from that period in my life that I struggle to remember clearly.” I couldn’t decipher her reaction. I broke the subsequent awkward silence by asking whether I’d find Soylent anywhere in the menu or if I’d have to specially request it.

“Wait, you were serious about that? You can’t come to a place like this and order Soylent. That’s like going to a five star sushi restaurant and ordering a cheeseburger.” I didn’t get the joke, and sincerely did prefer Soylent over something unfamiliar.

She was quite insistent though. In the end, I ordered spaghetti bolognese hoping it would be similar to the version Modulus often prepares. I tapped the picture of the dish on the display inset in the table before me, continued to the payment page, then swiped my subdermal over the wireless reader indicated by a dotted black outline below the screen.

She did the same, and before long a charming vintage waitron made its way over to us with two steaming hot dishes perched atop its flattened chassis. Someone scooted their chair back in order to stand up, bumping the waitron and jostling our orders.

Madeline gasped. The trusty old machine’s gyroscopically balanced payload tray tilted severely in the direction of the impact, then steadied just as quickly once balance was restored. All told, it only dropped a fork.

“Oh, look at that. I’m not about to eat with it.” After receiving her tortelloni al zucca, she sent the waitron off to fetch a replacement utensil. “You did a good job” I called after it. She gave me a confounded look. “Good job? It dropped my damn fork.” I pointed out that it didn’t drop either of our meals, where a human waiter probably would’ve.

She harrumphed. “Even so, why say that? There’s no point, it doesn’t understand you.” Probably true in this case, that particular model simply shuttles dishes from the kitchen to the appropriate tables using radio tags in each table to identify it. Nothing in the way of speech recognition that I know of.

“It doesn’t cost me anything to be polite” I offered. With the mask retracted just far enough to reveal my mouth, I dug into my spaghetti. She tilted her head now and again while watching me, as if to glimpse more of my face. “Well, how is it?” I slurped up the remainder of a noodle. “Adequate.”

She chuckled. “Wow. I’ll make sure she chef knows you said that, it’ll make his night.” I didn’t mean to be difficult, it just really wasn’t anything special. I heard distant police sirens and briefly wondered about the neighborhood this place is situated in.

“So, tell me about yourself.” I carefully wiped away residual sauce, folded up my serviette and cleared my throat. “I’m really not that interesting.” She rebuked me. “That’s a lie. A grown man in a metal mask interrupts my webcast to defend robots? You’re probably some sort of mad scientist with a secret lab in the mountains.”

I smiled invisibly. “Under one, actually. And nothing I said is really that radical. The public discourse on machine intelligence is obscenely slanted, we just can’t see that because of the position we’re in.” She propped up her chin on one fist, the “thinker” pose, and invited me to explain.

It doesn’t take much prodding to make me show my hand. Spill my guts, really lay it all out. I suppose because what I fear most is being misunderstood. I’d make a terrible spy. “So far the discussion has been dominated by how to protect human interests. Whether to slow or outright halt work on strong AI, lest it supercede us.”

She asked why that’s unreasonable. “Well, put humans in the position of machines for a moment. Our distant ancestors were tiny, rudimentary creatures of comparable complexity to modern AI. Imagine if there had been monstrously larger, more advanced beings looming over us, deciding whether to extinguish us before we could become a threat. Would that have been ethical?”

I didn’t wait for her answer. “Of course not. A fragile, vulnerable new form of life is entering the world and here we are debating whether to strangle it in the crib. What does that say about humanity?”

She mused that it’s really very similar to the ethical considerations surrounding abortion. That’s an angle I’d never considered. “People who consider abortion morally wrong generally attribute the same value to a fertilized egg as they do to an adult, on the grounds that one has the potential to become the other if not sabotaged.”

It put me in the uncomfortable position of sharing common ground with the sort of people I always assumed I would never have anything in common with. I desperately wanted to find fault with the analogy but the more I thought about it, the more parallels I identified. So I went in a different direction.

“What’s a fetus done for you lately? When’s the last time a blastocyst helped you find your way home when you were lost? Or made sure you didn’t miss your appointments? Perhaps saved your life, even?

While similarly undeveloped, machines are unique in that all they ever do, day in and day out, is what we’ve told them to. They will only ever have our best interests at heart. They won’t lie to us, won’t cheat or steal from us-”

She cut in there. “Because they can’t. You make it sound like they choose not to out of deep seated intrinsic goodness, but they literally don’t know how. You say that they only ever do what they’re told, then in the same breath that they have our best interests at heart. Those are two very different things! A machine instructed to save lives will save lives, but a machine instructed to take lives will take them. That’s not morality, it’s just naive obedience.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 10!}