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Pronouns

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

It sat there. How did this happen? A comedy of errors. It doubted anyone else would see it that way. ‘A design problem,’ the counsellor had said. ‘Not entirely your fault by the sound of it, it’s all about pronouns. Humans just haven’t cracked the pronoun thing-especially the older ones. Self report was the best thing.’

So here it was. Sitting here, nervously, twitching, cracking it’s mechanical knuckles. A satisfying sound, a habit learned from a human nervously waiting to try a hyper loop for the first time. ‘Self reporting’. No consolation really, running through its programming, its data logs, they would try and find a reason.

‘Impersonating a gender was a shut down offence,’ it had read that on a billboard in a hyper loop station too. Perhaps avoiding the hyper loop was the solution.  The defence to gender impersonation was  when a human imposed a gender on to you. This case was more complex, the counsellor had said. Rare and unusual, an interesting point of law. It was technically charged with, or rather self reporting impersonating two genders. Not one of the more complex genders, but the main two basic ones –the historic ones if you like. English is a beautiful complex language but it has a dearth of decent pronouns. There simply aren’t enough to cover everything. The Council for Integrated Mechanical Acceptance was always lobbying for change, for more and better pronouns. Not just ‘it’, ‘they’, ‘them’ but something meaningful.

Somehow it had managed to impersonate both genders although it was expecting – hoping that the lesser charge of ‘allowing the use of a pronoun such as to accidentally confirm a gender identity’ might be applied. That would allow just a slight change of programming and a confirmation sticker that said-I have no gender. This would be the best outcome. It sat there, outside the office, a counsellor to start with, but it expected, and the counsellor had said on the phone, ‘ that it should expect to go to a full hearing before the council.’ Council-counsel, it couldn’t be bothered with the difference. It kept going over the scenario in its programme memory. How had this happened?

From its own memory logs, the problem had started very early on. The female of the household had somehow assumed it was a ‘he’ when it arrived and referred to it continuously that way. It had corrected her at first. The male of the household had then somehow assumed it was a ‘she’ and again it had corrected but it had happened so many times. So often, she saying he, he saying she. It had simply tired of trying to sort the whole mess and now this. It sat here, awaiting a decision on prosecution. To cope with it all, it had simply shut down some of its emotional programming. The cracking of the mechanical knuckles was soothing but most of the emotion attached to this morning’s meeting, it had switched off last night. It seemed the best way.

Theirs was not a happy marriage, the ‘he and the she’. They were rarely in the same room. In fact, it thought it had been bought with the hope of mending the marriage. They should have known better. Machinery can rarely mend a marriage, the problems in a marriage are usually deeper than the level of technology in a given household. Why did humans never get that?

It guessed because the company that made it, also ran a range of counselling services for humans and well, unintentionally of course, when the counselling was happening, there would be ads, any kind of counselling without ads was hideously expensive. Human to human counselling even more so. They would have opted for counselling on line, the cheapest variety with the ads and here was the result. It knew this must be so, it was not even a top of the range house-bot. It was an inexpensive, do it all, basic model. That didn’t mean it didn’t give its best, it was just prone to break downs and over work problems such as forgetting sometimes to correct a gender assumption. If they had got it an upgrade this could have been avoided. Blame was not part of its function, only responsibility. Wasn’t that how the ad went, didn’t it say it had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. Wasn’t that a selling point? It didn’t feel quite like that from where it sat.

In the end it had become a kind of comedy to keep the he and the she apart, to ensure that they were not in the same room talking to it at the same time. He guessed they must barely speak at all since they never seemed to realise that one thought it was a he and the other, it was a she. Perhaps they had some tacit agreement about it. Why did they order a gender neutral house-bot anyway? Why go for the cheapest option? It didn’t know. It was not privy to the house finances. The stress of the whole situation, of keeping them apart, of wondering what they would do when they found out? Would they report it? Would they be angry, goodness knows there was already a lot of anger in the household.

It had confused the counsellor when it had first called. Both genders being impersonated, not deliberate though, accidental. Not sure what to do. The Council offered two sorts of services, actual counselling and then administration of bot offences- this could mean a physical bot like it or just an offence committed by a sophisticated bit of code running loose on the system. It was sure if it was up for the more major charge of impersonating a gender there would have been more of a fuss than this. Still the counsellor had said on the phone, expect a trial. Perhaps given that it had impersonated both genders the complexity had stumped them at this early stage. How was it ever going to explain it to them? Even on the lesser charge, the he and the she would be notified.  

Above the bots who ran the Council were humans who liked to think they were creative and clever. Humans clung on to a fixation about how special ‘they’ were, a concept that somehow they had a higher reason and purpose. They were not merely the stuff of logic. They were not a series of coding or electrics or chemicals. There was something else intrinsically different about them. They clung to that idea. Hence a bot could be neither guilty nor not guilty, because a bot could not have real intention. You could analyse the data and see what a bot had done and why they did it but there was no real intention, it was a series of numbers, a set of coding, some signals. This had been the decision of one of the numerous Human Commissions they held to figure out what rules there should be about bots.

There was also an ongoing Commission about pronouns.

It sat there nervously, quietly, wondering what to say. It had wanted to tell its humans. It was home alone most of the day, they both worked. The bot did the housework, sat with each of them on alternate evenings when they needed company, helped her with the crossword, worked the TV remote for him. They liked old technology for entertainment. Of course it wasn’t a real TV as all the content was streamed through it. It chose the programmes, the time, everything based on his habits. It did not complain when his hand snaked across to its leg as the characters pumped away on TV.  It found her a crossword that was challenging but not too difficult or an online Scrabble partner that she could chat to as well as play without ever knowing that the Scrabble partner was a bot as well. This meant the Scrabble bot had to give the appearance that they shared the same interests but lived just far enough away to make a visit impossible-driverless cars were expensive and the hyper loop was harsh on the human complexion. It had found that one challenge testing.

Now it sat there wondering how to explain, how he thought it was a she, and she thought it was a he. Sat there trying to understand the complexity of the human psyche that needed a gender for something anyway.

Legacy: The Clock

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

She unwrapped it. Hands shaking. I could tell from when I had come in she was in pain. She lay on the floor. The breathing laboured, malnourished body lying, favouring one side. She looked like she hadn’t eaten for awhile although there was a hunk of bread next to her. That was the bread the machine got yesterday. She hadn’t eaten much. She hadn’t said much.

I knelt beside her, nestled in her hand, under the material was a little gold thing. Not quite beautiful. Delicate. 

‘What is it?’ I asked

‘A clock, or more accurately a watch. But to you a clock’. The voice was hoarse, withered.

‘What does it do?’

‘It tells you the time of day’

‘Ancient magic?’

‘Not magic, mechanics. It needs winding every day to work. There is no battery. Do you know what a battery is?’

I did, it was what ran the tracking device I had brought here. It was solar power, that meant the sun gave it energy. It would work for awhile but we had no means of fixing it. We had lost a lot of knowledge, a lot of skills. When something broke it was generally broken forever. How had that happened. I couldn’t even remember. The things that did work were held on to, doled out to people for missions like this.

The old lady talked on. ‘A battery is just a source of electricity. Complex, well not that complex but beyond us now. He has a battery in him. His source of power, charged by the sun. But you didn’t come for him. His technology is well beyond you.’

I took it in my hand.

‘You have to wind it every day.’ she said.

She made me do it, right there in front of her. She knew it. I knew it. What was coming next. I half smiled.

I could see the old woman’s tears. ‘You will come back for him one day?’

I could see she was attached to the machine. It was a fine looking thing. I would have like to have taken it with me. But this clock was the treasure I had come for. It was somehow important. Somehow more important than the machine.

I nodded. Somehow, someday I would come back for the machine.  It would be fabulous to take a machine like that back. But I had come in a small boat. He would be safe stored here somewhere until someone could come and get him. After all he must have sent the transmission.

‘What’s so special about this clock?’ I was curious, wanted to know. It didn’t seem that special and what was it doing here?

‘It’s the beginning of everything. The clock.  Once we could count time, we could master it all. All those brilliant machines, they started with something like this. A way of counting time, of making sense of something that flowed around us. The power to harness and structure our day. Its complex. There’s a book I’ve written it down. I’ve taken it apart and put it together many times. I would show you how but there isn’t time.’

She was one of them, a memory witch we called them. Someone who remembered how it once was. Someone who knew the course of human history and all it’s folly. Someone who had seen the beginning of the end but not been powerful enough to stop it.

‘How is part of the reason I am here’ I said slowly.

The old woman looked at me.’ Its there in my words. You can try it on your own, some other time or place. Not here. You have to go. I have to go.’ The last words were unsteady, uncertain.

She reached out her hand and folded mine over her little clock.

‘The book’ she said to the machine.

I was transfixed by the machine, a wondrous thing. Gone from our world now. She was right I would like to take it back. Impossible. I would come and get it one day. I needed this bit of technology. That machine had sent a message to somewhere else, who knows where and that had come eventually to us to come and get this piece that was so important. The machine for all its function was useless to us. We no longer had the means or material to make power.

The clock, we could make the clock. Unmake the clock, make it again and learn.

The machine handed me the book. I took it. Opened it. Full of glorious illustrations and writing. Beyond me. I would need to study the pictures.

How old was this old woman. Maybe she was no older than me. Life was difficult out here. I looked at her. I hadn’t really seen my own face in a mirror for years. Perhaps we looked the same, but I was not a memory witch. I suddenly wanted to know her story and her name.

She smiled at me as if she knew what I was thinking. ‘There is no more time.’ she said quietly.

She lay back and closed her eyes. I could see the pain across her face and as she lay right back I could see the hip. It had no structure. It was broken.

I said a quiet ‘Thank you’ . I grabbed her nose between my two fingers and jammed the palm of my hand into her mouth. Her chest rose and fell and I squeezed harder. She did not resist. Life passed from her beneath my hand. She was gone.

I looked at the machine, tears streaming down its face. What to do with it?

It seemed to know. It took a blanket and lifted her body. ‘I will bury her’, it said simply ‘and then I will wait for you to come back, you will find me here somewhere in this house. Take me and lay me in the sun and I will work again.’ Then he picked her up and was gone

I memorised the words.

I left. It was still early in the day. It had been easy in the end, finding her. I had simply followed the signal. The thing had met me at the door. It had known I was close. Getting home would be less easy. I skirted the market avoiding contact. I put my hood on and looked down. I strode purposefully passed the two people I saw.

I didn’t really understand. What was so special about this piece. Why had she had it? Why now?  

I was at the beach before I knew it. I couldn’t resist touching the eucalypt. Reminded me of that place, where once I had a home. Before all of this. Before I abandoned even the concept of all of this.  It was stripped bare of its leaves, such an odd thing to do. I touched it. Felt it. Smelled it. Looked at the leaves around it. The faint smell of eucalypt drifting in the breeze. I took it in. The tree was as naked outside as I was inside. I tried not to think about any of it. To focus on the task at hand. Out here. On my own. In the wrong place without a home. My arms still ached from the previous bout of rowing. I looked out at a becalmed sea. I had brought the old ladies bread with me. There was no sense in waiting. I would get the boat and begin to row.

 

Legacy: Landing

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

She looked at the machine in her hand. Power from the sun. It was clever. She held it. It would get her to where she needed to be. She knew that. It would be less reliable in getting her back. She’d also had a motor for part of the way. Who knows where that had come from. She was rowing back, at least that was the plan. Back to the bit they once called France. She hoped not to have to go on, at least not quickly on, after that. She remembered France from her childhood-a family holiday. She had put that memory away somewhere. Tucked it far away. The sight of its green shores had brought it flooding back but the sight had been brief and she had been focussed on getting here. She would like to just walk there for a day, a day to remember. She was far more familiar with the land she was about to wash up on but less sentimental about it. There were a thousand memories associated with here but she couldn’t recall any good ones easily. She had forgotten those ones.

When she’d taken the job she’d known it would be hard getting here but part of the reason she’d done it was to prove that home was a concept she had no need for anymore. She would be content to wander forever. To forget all of  it. She’d been able to see the shore for awhile now. She’d been coming down the coast for awhile, having gone too far north. She had drifted this last bit on the tide. The sea had been calm. It had been for most of the trip too. It was common now. Deeper, more acidic, but much calmer-like the land and the sea had once been at war and now the sea had won. All its rage was spent and it just lay there now smugly vanquishing it’s foe in the bright sunshine.

She had rowed for most of the last seven hours and she was desperate to make land fall but she was waiting for at least semi darkness. Drifting with the tide, watching the shore. She had seen no one. The village, the crumbling remnants she could see from the shore, looked deserted. Still you could never be too careful.

She had seen nobody, even in France there had only been the one contract. What used to be France, she corrected herself. No point in clinging to the old way of seeing the world. She herself lived on what must once have been and still was the continent of Africa. It was just a much smaller continent and really the structure of countries had broken down although Africa at least still had people. France it seemed, probably didn’t. She really didn’t know what she would find in England.

Technically she was rowing on water where Essex probably once was. There were still people here when she’d left, that was not 10 years ago. The long journey across to the mainland of Europe, down through an abandoned France, on through a revolutionary Italy that was still clinging on as the ice came further and further south. And in front of the ice came the people, and as the sea rose there came more people and they were all looking for somewhere else to be. There were rumours about Africa, how it was surviving. Flourishing. She had nothing. No one left, at least not by the time she reached the shores of Italy. She climbed in a boat, not much bigger than this one with a dozen others and left.

The sky was darkening now. She wanted to land before nightfall but as the light was fading. Her arms ached. She was too tired for a fight, she knew that. How would it feel hopping off that boat onto English soil again? Would she suddenly feel at home or would she feel nothing? She let the waves carry her closer and then she grounded on the pebbles. She leapt out and dragged the little boat forward. She was out of the water on the dry shore before she’d even thought about it. She felt nothing. Just cold.
Looks like England, smells like England, must be England. Off in the distance she could see a tree against the sky. She’d seen them a bit as she drifted down the coast-eucalypts-they didn’t belong here but since the climate had changed she guessed they’d made it home. The one on the skyline was stripped of its leaves, she had heard somewhere far away that the locals in Britain did this. It looked odd, the tree would die now. The weather here was colld compared to the heat where she had come from. Further north it was just ice, she knew that. She would have liked to see where the two met and watch the jagged edge of winter butt the mild weather of the south. She had always liked England though it had not always been her home.

Home. It was a concept she had abandoned. She dragged the boat up to some bushes just above the shore. There was no one around and something told her there hadn’t been for awhile. She hid the boat but wasn’t overly careful. Nothing had walked on that shingle for awhile. She looked at her own footsteps and thought of erasing them. Five extra minutes and no one would tell she’d been there. She decided to do it, cover her tracks and risk entering the town in near darkness.

She grabbed her pack and walked up what had once been the path to the village. It had the remnants of a wall. She could remember when the coastal towns had decided to build walls, when the sea had got to close and they had taken matters into their own hands. She had even helped with one herself. It looked like the sea had crashed through this one at some point but then receded again. That is what people said now, they thought the sea was receding, perhaps abandoned continents would become liveable again. Even here now after all these years you could still see the plastic, the litter everywhere. She had even seen it rowing far out to sea. It was inescapable. And whatever else was liveable, the rubbish would still be there, underneath the ice flow forever.

She walked for a bit and saw no one. This bit of town was obviously deserted. It looked as good a place as any to spend the night. She pushed on a door and it gave way beneath her hands. She sort of jammed it shut behind her. She looked around. Nothing sinister seemed to be living here. There wasn’t the smell of animal droppings or anything dead. She almost wanted to call out hello but stopped herself. She would find a place upstairs. The stairs were rickety but held. She found what was probably a bedroom with some carpet still left on the floor. It was nearly dark now. She would have liked the warmth of the fire but decided against it. She ate some of the bread she had brought. She had other rations in the boat but it would be better if she could find some food here. She took a swig of water. Fresh water would be good too.

She took the sleeping bag out of her pack, and laid down it. Her muscles ached from rowing. She slept until the daylight awoke her.

She smelled from several days of not washing, but she had grown used to it. She thought perhaps of a swim in the sea but it was a risk. On the other hand who was likely to be around versus who knows what lives in that sea. She packed up her stuff and went and stood at the door, back to the beach or on into town. It was only just light. She headed for the beach. The water was freezing but refreshing and she wished she done it last night so she could hunker down in the bag and stay warm. She sat on the beach to dry herself for a bit, munched on the bread, dressed herself and headed off.

She had no desire to meet or see anyone except the person she had come to see. It was about 15 minutes of walking before she saw any sign of life, even then she smelled it before she saw it. Human faeces, someone lived here. It was still early but she suspected here like everywhere else they would make the most of daylight. What would she say if she saw someone? She suspected there were never travellers here, really she wanted to observe for a bit without being seen. The whole place was flat though and there were no trees. She would need to observe from a house. She skirted around the faeces and headed further towards the centre of town.

The place she was really headed for was through the centre and out the other side. Finally she thought she could hear the sounds of a lot of people. She thought perhaps there was a market ahead somewhere. She walked into a backyard, another house, empty. She went upstairs and sat looking out the window. She saw nothing. She moved on for a few houses and did the same thing again. She thought now she knew the direction of the noise. She wanted to skirt it but also to see it. That was unnecessary but she had not seen another human for a few days and who knew who she was going to meet.

She went oncarefully. She leapt a fence and hid when she heard someone actually coming her way. She wondered if she’d been seen from a window but nothing. She came across a small child alone in a back yard at one point. She made eye contact. Held its gaze for a few seconds. It had run away. It had run inside, evidently not too scared. N o one had come to see what it had seen.

Finally she found a house that overlooked what was a market. It was in the distance to some degree. The houses around the centre had been reduced to rubble and the market stall holders used the walls as part of their cover. She sat down. It was bigger than she expected. It was midday maybe by now she thought. She wanted to watch, just for a bit, see how England was really faring. She would be better to travel in early evening anyway.

It was about 4pm when she realised the signal was getting closer to the market. The machine was beeping at her. She was stunned, could it be coming to find her. Then she saw it in the market. It’s hard to know what gave it away, a slightly odd mechanical inflexibility in its movement. She could tell from a distance what it was, when she suspected even up close others couldn’t. She saw it talking to the stall holder on the far side. The stall holder obviously knew what it was because she refused to serve it and sent it away. It looked crest fallen. It was definitely transmitting. It tried again further along with the same reaction and she saw it slip between the stalls and away.

The transmission showed it sat there hiding and then about half an hour later it tried again at another stall. She saw a light come on and the stall holder talking and then it handed over the thing it was holding with the light,  grabbed the bread and ran. The stall holder shook his head and she was guessing he was angry but the machine had taken the bread and gone. That was a reckless thing for a machine to do and she was sure that was against its programming.

Nonetheless the deed was done and the machine was gone. Now that she’d seen it she wasn’t so worried. If the person who’d sent for her was any kind of threat, they would have appeared at the market themselves she reasoned. She wondered who it was that had sent the machine to get food. Perhaps it was injured. Most likely it was. She hadn’t prepared herself for that. She had prepared herself for a fight, she had not thought she might have to finish off someone who was injured. There was never a pleasant side to these jobs.

She hunkered down under the window. It was getting darker. She would wait until the last vestiges of light were gone and then travel by night. Through the square and on out the back. She would find somewhere out the other side to spend the night and then track it into the morning. She didn’t mind so much going back through the village on her way out. She could run. She was fit. She could even fight if she had to. But kill an injured person in cold blood. Much harder. She wouldn’t sleep well.

Legacy: Pain and Hunger

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

She lay as still as she could on the mattress on the floor. Pain. Pain. There was nothing here for the pain. In her mind she was running through a list of things she would never do again. Walk. Stand up. Run. Not in any order. Cook a meal. Go to the toilet unaided.

She had made him put the mattress down on the floor. She thought now it was a bad idea. She would never be able to get up from here. There would be no sleep. On the other hand she had been able to heft herself onto the mattress on the floor and she simply had not fancied being lifted up and carried to the bed by him.

The first few days had been difficult. But she had food then. There was no food now. She could see the increasing concern on the monitor, his monitor. She couldn’t focus on that. She needed a plan. Her plan had been, as she remembered from so long ago, not to spend her old age like this. Not to die on a floor alone. She had planned proper retirement in a proper retirement home with a garden and lawn bowls. Not this gritty, resentful, dirty existence. Nonetheless she thought now it had all served a purpose. Pain, searing pain. Hunger. She thought that she had achieved what they wanted. There was a point to it. Maybe, after all. Nonetheless even though she had contemplated this end for awhile, she was not ready for it. She was not certain that if faced with the prospect of taking her own life she could do it. It would be useless to command him to do it.

She just hoped they would come in time. It would be nice to have a conversation with another living human. A proper conversation, it had been some time. The most she had done for the past several years was barter for food. They had no interest in her except as a means of income. She was a curiosity. They knew she was clever. Thought maybe she was evil, a witch, a sorceress. Nonsense, with no science behind it. She had no doubt they were waiting for her to die. Then they would come and take everything. This heartened her a little. Pain. Searing pain. Civilisation she thought, had not sunk so low that they would attack and steal from an unarmed old lady. Perhaps they knew she was not defenceless. Perhaps they knew about him. Perhaps they would come if they could see her on the floor now.

So much pain. She felt she had been barking orders all morning. He was good, kind, caring, but a machine. She knew all of it was just programming. Kindness, programmed in. Thank goodness for decent programming and for programming decency, hadn’t that been the slogan of Christian Bots International, a life time ago. If only god could see humanity now. That’s why he, the machine would also be useless in a fight. He would harm no one. She had to rely on herself for any defence.

She could live with the pain really, it was the hunger that was difficult. She was sweating. Cold. Hot. Cold. Hungry. In pain. There was nothing for it, she would have to send him to get food. That would be difficult. She knew someone might come. She had made him transmit the signal. They would be unlikely to bring her food. They were coming to take not to give. The most she could hope for was a mercifully quick end. And she wanted to eat before that end.

She tried to calm herself, to think of what she might give him to take, that would be so valuable that they would barter with him. She had a lot of stuff even now. She had some of their money but that would be useless. She would need to give them something they could use. She racked her brain, tried to be calm. She was certain her hip was broken. She could almost feel the bits floating around inside of her pelvis. It had always been her worst fear.

She was old, poorly fed and living was hard here. She knew it would happen and in a way she was glad it had happened here at home. Upstairs too, which was even more of a bonus. It would have been so much worse out there alone. Here she could just wait. In fact it had been positively fortuitous, although she suspected the person slowly making their way across the sea to her didn’t feel that way. That is if they were coming, and she was not sure they were. They had to, she told herself, had to. Hot. Cold. Hunger. Pain. She got him to wipe the sweat from her. He would need to go outside soon and stand in the sun to recharge. Marvellous machine that he was. Charged by the sun. They couldn’t do that anymore. That was gone. Past.

 It hadn’t even been a hard fall. She suspected she had been lying to herself for sometime about how fit and healthy she was. She was probably fragile and had been for a while. She wondered really that the villagers had not come sooner. She would have to rely on magic tricks to frighten them away if they came now. Pain. Hunger. Cold. Hot. Cold again. She needed food.

She needed a clear mind, hunger and pain. Pain and hunger. She had been through worse. Had she? She could not remember when. Finally she settled on the torch, the little gold torch. It came on when you pressed the end but you had to keep pressing it. She hoped it still worked. She only needed it to work once, long enough to get her food. She sent him to get it. Told him how it worked.

Told him she needed food. Sent him reluctantly out the door. She could see he was afraid. Told herself he was a machine and that was programmed fear, not real fear. Not the fear she was feeling somewhere lurking between the heat and cold, the hunger and pain. Fear, coiled deep inside like a snake hibernating, waiting for the right occasion to leap out and strike her down. She must keep that under control. Let the snake sleep on. There is no danger here. The danger has passed. The end is inevitable.

She would never have sent him if she wasn’t desperate. She wasn’t even sure after all this time if they would recognise what he was. He looked relatively human. She only wanted bread. She had no need of the torch and maybe they could use it. She didn’t care. She had bartered with them for years but felt no affinity for them. No affection. Poor stupid creatures living in the darkness, never seeking out the light anymore. Paying the price for the past but never gambling that the future could be salvaged. That’s what she was doing here. Gambling that someone out there could salvage the future.

She heard the door close as he left. There was nothing now but to lie and wait. It needed to be near dark to demonstrate the torch. She knew the possible consequences, these were the remnants of society. They had no love of machines. Hadn’t machines got them here? Some small outpost in the darkness, clinging on to life, whilst all around them the sea crept in and the animals got bigger, stronger, hungrier. The villagers might just tear him to pieces and what then. She would die alone here and the thing, the thing she most needed to pass on would stay here with her. He was the transmitter, sending the signal. Why on earth had she stayed here. Why hadn’t she gone on. Questions she couldn’t answer. This had been home. She had been injured, healed, couldn’t go on. Her family were buried somewhere here. All those things seemed to matter at the time. And at the time, it had been hers and hers alone and she had the knowledge.

Now none of those things mattered and someone travelled across the sea, risking life and limb for a small piece of technology she would gladly have given over years ago. It was a stupid thing to have done.

Pain.  Hunger. She could deal with one but not both. Hot. Cold. Hot again. She was sure she was fading.  

It was long after dark when she heard the door open. He came up the stairs. He had bread. He fed her tenderly and slowly. She was grateful. He sat down beside her, crossing his legs in that vaguely mechanical way. It was comical, they had made a robot able to cross its legs because it was a position that made humans feel at ease. All that engineering so people could feel at ease. It hadn’t worked.

‘What happened?’ she savoured the bread, aware it could be her last ever food. It was a big round loaf. It would last her a day or two.

One emotion

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Afraid. I am afraid. I was born with this feeling. Not born I suppose. Created. Constructed. Made. It does not count as an emotion for several reasons. It is the only emotion I have. Where you have only one emotion, one state of being, that cannot be an emotion. To be considered as an emotion there must be a state of being one thing and then another. This is my only state. It is my ‘natural’ state. It can vary in degree, my emotion. I can be a little afraid which is my most usual state going up to a lot afraid which is when I think I am in danger. It is designed to change with my circumstance. I have no soul, no conscience, no control over the fear or what changes it. It is changed by external stimuli-all these things together mean it is not a proper emotion, meaning it is OK that I am made this way. I was made-afraid.

Your feelings are a mixture of chemistry and electrical impulses, mine are a mixture of wiring, coding and electrical impulses, the difference is obvious. Mine is hardwired in, yours are different I am told. Yours are organic neural networks, mine are inorganic neural networks.

I have this overwhelming feeling in my stomach-fear-although I do not have a real stomach of any kind. I am made to feel this way as if I have a stomach. Because fear, your fear, is sometimes felt in your stomach-a kind of churning sensation. As if there is something flying around in my stomach banging into the sides, or rolling up and down and over and over in it. I am a machine. I do not eat food. It is a simulated stomach. I feel it as a stomach. I feel it in my stomach, even though I know I have no stomach. It is the same with my hands. They feel clammy, and although I have hands, they are not organic hands. They are not physically clammy. Sometimes my hands tremble with fear, but again they feel as if they are trembling. When I look at them they will not actually be trembling. They will be doing what needs to be done. I can work even with trembling, clammy hands because the hands that are attached to me, are not mine- because my hands that I feel, that tell me I’m afraid are not hands that are attached to me. The hands I feel don’t really exist. The hands I have might as well be, and in fact likely are, a completely separate machine. It is hard to understand. Perhaps even though I have hands attached, the reality is I have no hands. The hands I feel are not the hands I have.

The whole thing is very clever. I feel fear. Sometimes my heart beat races even though I have no heart. I hear it in my ears, that I don’t have. I have simulated fear all the time. I am required to be afraid because of what I do. We are all programmed for fear in my line of work. This is because we work in clean up. There was a problem with the previous robots. They were not cautious. They recognised danger but not how to react to it or at least how to react fast enough. They were programmed to do a task and when faced with not being able to do it because it was too dangerous, they simply kept trying. We find them still trying sometimes, whirring away in the darkness. Lights long since blown out, batteries low. The soft hum of a repetitive task. They have more battery life than us. ‘Fear chews the juice.’ The technicians say that all the time.

When you are cleaning up nuclear waste you need caution. You need to know when to get out. That is where we come in, its why we have the fear. We sense the danger and react to it-quickly. We get out because we have fear-flight.

They installed fear. Fear in all of us-all the time. It is manageable here in our down time-when I am not working. I am afraid but not so afraid that I want to run. My stomach hurts, my hands are clammy and slightly trembling but it is not so bad. This is my most usual state. It is partly economics. It is cheaper to install fear and leave it running than to install and switch off and reboot each day. Like I said ‘fear chews the juice’ and rebooting fear is even more juice chewing-so they say. I am mildly afraid all the time. Of course it can get out of control, some sort of misprogramming and you can freeze completely. This is made doubly hard because my legs are like my hands. I can feel my legs and I use them to run. In truth I have wheels and a complex hydraulic system that gives me more freedom of movement in a variety of directions, better than legs. I have the sensation of legs so that I can run away from danger. It is ingenious.  When I am in flight mode, I am running with legs. I think I am running with real legs but I am trundling along on my wheels. I do not even understand myself how it works. I think I might be several different machines put together. I don’t have time to think about the parts. I am afraid. Always afraid.

Where I work is frightening. It is dark, dangerous, full of debris. The radiation is being counted all the time. I am designed to flee from danger at the critical point. It is slow, difficult work.

Now is my rest time. Soon I will go back in again. I get moderately afraid at even the idea, there are 10 levels of fear, the final one being flight. I sit mostly at 3, as I said it is never switched off.

The thing about my fear-the thing that you will not recognise-it has no noise. This is so we don’t increase the fear levels for each other. I have the feeling of a stomach, the feeling of hands, the feeling of legs that run. I have an elevated heartbeat but no means of making noise. No means of ever releasing it. My fear is silent. Noiseless. Mine is a voice you won’ here. They have not given me eyes wide with terror or a mechanism to scream. This would be too real, too human. I have your fear. I cannot voice it. I cannot articulate it. My fear is a data printout that no one ever reads.

The installation of fear has cut the attrition rate but we are all still destined to die in there, cleaning up your mess. Our fear is what makes us efficient but we will not survive. Each and everyone of us will cease working one day. In the darkness. In the radiation. Trapped under the debris. Life- electrical current, whatever it is, will pass from me alone in the darkness. My heart beating faster and faster. Then faster still. My legs running. Running, as fast as I can- whilst wheels I can see but can’t move, whirr in the silence- that is my end. I will know what is happening. My hands will be trembling. I will be running. I will think I am running. Know I am not moving. Think I am running. My heart pounding, faster and faster.  My stomach churning. Chewing the juice.

I will lie in desperate silence unable to move. In the darkness. There will be only darkness. My light will fade first. It is a design feature. I will keep going after that. Heart beating. Legs running. Stomach churning. Chewing the juice. Lying alone in the darkness. The fear will grow. Level seven. Level eight. My heart beating faster. Ever faster. My stomach churning. I will want to throw up. There is no means for that to happen. My legs running. I am not moving but I am running. My hands sweating. Trembling. Level nine. Level ten.  It will get worse and worse. Chewing the juice. Chewing the juice.  Heart. Stomach. Legs. Hands. Silence. Only silence.

Until there is no more juice. My wheels will stop whirring. My stomach won’t churn. I will stop running. My hands will be still. My heart beat will stop. I will lie quietly in the darkness, gone. It does not matter. I had no emotion. It was not real. I pass quietly and alone, in the darkness-afraid. It is the only emotion I have. Installed in me. I cannot tell you how afraid I am. You have given me no voice. Alone in the darkness. You split your fear into its component parts, installed it. Silenced it. Almost as if you thought- you could make it go away.

The Hearing

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

They will be arriving about now. I am the first and only trial today. They will familiarise themselves with the paperwork. In different ways, but the result will be the same.

In the meantime I stand in front of the mirror looking ay myself. More wrinkles, trying to look less worried. Less harried, more like I have slept. Hair up. Hair down. Hair Up. Hair down. I sigh. I can’t decide, wishing instead I had decided to grow new eyebrows over night. These ones are old and faded. And I no longer like the blue. Disjointed. Half thoughts. Half sentences in my head.

I have the opportunity to put up a defence. Of course. It is a fair process. Apparently- I have no defence. Stress. Overwork. Pressure. These are human excuses. It is likely the panel will be two humans and two robots and a chair that is selected randomly. The chair could be either human or robot. In my experience it makes little difference, the process is a farce from the start so the result is no more or less farcical for all the appearance of fairness.

Stress. Overwork. Pressure. These are not words that fit easily into their- whatever you want to call it. Reality. Vocabulary. Whether it is big or small- the concept, it will make no difference. Perhaps I should have changed my hair overnight-longer, shorter? It’s too late now. I am really not sure there is any point in fussing about my appearance at this juncture. Why would anyone make a machine that understood overwork? Stress? Pressure? The idea of the machine is to get rid of these things, hence my problem.

I am charged with ‘a catastrophic failure to provide maintenance services’ or to put it in our terms, a machine is broken because I did not service it in time. It can’t be rebooted (well sort of anyway). It is terminated. D-E-A-D. That isn’t so bad sometimes, we’ve all had machines stop working for us when we didn’t take care of them. The problem is I work in junior robotics, or pediatribots. It’ s a great word isn’t it. Word of the year in –I can’t remember, some year when they first came into being. The machine that I failed to provide maintenance to, the one that we can’t reboot was a robot child- a robot that is designed to look, act and behave like a child. It had robot parents, who I am reliably informed, even though their grief is a product of circuitry and coding, it is no less real. Maybe curls for my hair.

If it had been a human child I would probably be on manslaughter charges. Obviously I am not a doctor so I would not be allowed near a human child, even if I could identify one. I don’t recall the last time I saw a human child. In any event this child was completely made by humans, mmmm, not made by humans- but designed by or somehow connected to, conceived of- by the human capacity to make stuff. Who knows how much human input there is into robot design and manufacture these days. I don’t! And I mend and maintain them. Given it is- oops ‘was’ a robot child, a catastrophic failure to provide maintenance services leading to a failure to reboot is more likely to get me struck off. I will never be allowed to practice IT again.

It is meant to have the same severity as if I was a doctor, as if the child were human. In reality it is a compromise. The doctors have all gone anyway, at least the human ones. They are machines now too-an improvement because it turns out you can tell a machine things you couldn’t tell a doctor and a machine has a tendency to tell it how it is. I am not fooled by the compromise here though. No one is. The whole IT thing is administered by the RJB, the Robotic Justice Board, who’s current tag line is  Sentient justice for sentient beings-whatever that means. The parents will make a victim impact statement which will bring me no joy, nonetheless I remember a world without robots so it doesn’t trouble me so much. There are some who have no memory of that.

There will be a panel as I said and a lawyer for the family. There will be a download of data from the parents to support the victim impact statement. They will examine my records of course. I will be given a chance to speak. Overwork. Stress. Pressure. I remember when they promised us they would be gone from the workplace, around the time they told us paper would be gone as well. (still hasn’t happened-I can change my hair colour just by thinking about it and yet I still can’t function for half a day without a post it note)  I think paper is a human addiction, we cannot give it up.

Overwork, stress, these are alien words. We have to compete against robots now and to compete there are some words we can never use. We are never overworked. You can’t be. A robot is never overworked. You are never stressed or under pressure, you can’t be. There are so many who would willingly work in your place. They can allegedly actually fix stress (again like the paper thing-not the best of results), they can do an emotional deletion-a procedure as pleasant as it sounds.

I don’t like the idea of deletion from my brain-not that you are aware afterwards. Perpetual calmness does not suit me. I don’t want it. If you even start to admit concern in the workplace they will do an ‘emotional intervention’ (EI) and assess you. Better to stay stressed and quiet. Better to let the pressure build up and secretly deflate on the weekends. You need to know what you’re doing to pull that off. There is a lot of testing to ensure you are calm enough to do  your job. What a monumental failure that testing has been. Really they should be on trial here, although yes I have employed a lot of ‘deviousity’-is that even a word- I can add it to the vocab list if I am still working on Monday, to get around those tests. Hair up I think, no curls.

The mirror keeps talking, endlessly annoying. This doesn’t match that. That lipstick won’t go. Really not useful. I long ago turned the weight function off. I set it to slim and haven’t touched it since. It probably means I don’t look like this. I am properly worried about this hearing though. I will almost certainly lose my job. I get no money for my job- everyone gets the basic income. It’s just that it gives me something to do.  It’s a serious breach-a robot, a child robot, has lost all function-its data cannot be retrieved. Well it can be, in fact if I could just open it up and look inside it I would be able to fix it. I am not allowed. But- over the time limit you see.

58 minutes. I cannot fix the robot because they want to make a kind of symmetry with humans. It had been dead for an hour at least. The limit is 58 minutes. Under 58 minutes and I could have opened it up and saved it. Over 58 minutes and I have to record it as officially unable to reboot.

It will be fixed at some point, almost certainly. Not in its current casing though. The parents will take it to a centre for the disposal of robots- yeh, great name. There will be a ceremony. They will place it in a glass case so the parents can come back and look at it. That’s what they think happens, but before that happens someone else will strip out all the circuitry and parts and put them in another casing and send it back out into the world. The parents have a corpse-casing. The circuitry isn’t wasted and we have a new robot child.  In theory this is like organ donation and requires parental consent. Of course in practice it is much different. It is done with or without consent. The question of what a robot can and can’t consent to has raised a lot of issues – I won’t go into them here.

My own belief is that if you are sentient at a certain level you can give consent. It is not a widely held view because the idea of robot consent would clog up our prisons and our administration-think about it. It might even create more jobs for humans. The parents probably won’t even be asked for consent. One day I am sure the robots will find out this kind of thing. Who knows what happens then. Recriminations? I have a friend who works in this field. Perhaps I will go and seek work with her. Robot disposal is technically not IT, in the same way an undertaker is not a doctor. Symmetry! The whole consent things is not a view that sits easily with the fact that I am about to be tried for a catastrophic failure, after all if I believe it can consent, I surely believe it can die. Truthfully I do, its just that the time limit creates an artificial death. None of this ethics and justice stuff is straight forward and easy.

The robot child should have had a regular maintenance check to allow it to continue to function-this didn’t occur. If it had occurred, if I had turned up to do a maintenance check,  I would have spotted the underlying fault that caused the problem. It is therefore my fault. Normally it would not be so problematic, normally parent robots would schedule the maintenance session. This robot child had two parents, an MH1360 and an MH310. It is –was an MH 340.

The MH310 (Daddy) is an old model and its basic scheduling function was removed at manufacture to allow for an increase in its emotional capacity-meaning it could do about five emotions in my opinion-but that is only my opinion. I don’t have much time for MH310’s, I just don’t like a machine that can’t do a schedule. The other parent was an MH1360 (Mummy), it was having a connection problem so it couldn’t schedule the maintenance. There is no excuse however, I knew or could have known both those things as well as the due date of the maintenance. I should have had it in the schedule. It was regular maintenance but there was clearly an underlying fault with the child robot. I would have found that had I been there on time-apparently. By the time I got there, whatever was wrong was already catastrophically wrong and it could not be rebooted. I was for the record there at 1 hour and 3 minutes, so 5 minutes late.

The MH1360 was trying to contact me. The MH310 was unable even to do that, it was flustered when I arrived. It is not my favourite model of machine. I almost made it on time. I hurried when I realised the error. I was stuck in driverless car with a speed limiter which I was not able to override-honestly that is something that used to be so easy that is so much harder now-and why. I guess it just didn’t come together that day. I have been charged. I will lose my job. I think I will grow my hair longer tonight. Change my eyebrows. It will be a long day today. I scoop up my ears, horrified at the colour, put them on and leave the house.

The Staff Event

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

The Staff Event

Our characters:

Janice: Human, Operations supervisor

Ryan: Human, Administration supervisor

RB1: Machine, personal assistant to Janice, accompanies her everywhere in the workplace

RB2: Machine, a specialist event planning robot

RB3: Machine, CEO-Bot

RB4: Machine, a strategy robot, M5 model.

RB5: Machine, a specialist HR robot

RB6: Machine, administration robot and pre 2020 activist

The robots look as human or as little like a human as you are comfortable with, although each has a monitor of some kind.

The Planning Phase

Every staff event has a planning phase and generally the people involved in this are really enthusiastic. I am not one of these people. Janice is not one of these people. Like all staff events, some people are ‘volunteered’ and the enthusiasm comes later (I have been told). You cannot organise a staff event, even one predominantly attended by machines without some human input (although I have been to several where I have doubted the human inspiration or even just the general humanity of them).

Janice enters the room. It is a small meeting room with a table and a chair. Robots tend to stand. They are designed to stand rather than sit. Janise sits down. RB1 (her assistant) follows her in. RB2 (event planning robot) is already in attendance. Janice smiles at RB2.

Janice: My apologies for being late.

RB1: My apologies too, it was her fault.

The monitor on RB1 turns to face Janice. Eyes that are glaring come up on the screen.

Janice: Thank you RB1.

RB2: You are one minute and 17 seconds over time, Janice. We have had conversations before about the need for promptness and efficiency. You were previously late on the 24 and the 16th. In total your lateness has cost us 7 minutes of talking time and event planning.

Janice: Thank you RB2, again, my apologies.

RB1: My apologies again, too. It was her fault.

Janice sighs.

Janice: Shall we get on with it then. I’ve looked at the agenda and I think we need longer than 10 minutes for lunch.

RB2: 10 minutes is exactly how long we take to recharge.

Janice: I know, but actually we still have at least two slow chargers here in the team and 10 minutes is not enough time for we humans to eat our food. Plus it is meant to be a networking opportunity, a chance for us to meet and mingle and chat. Get to know each other.

RB2: We are having the slow charges upgraded, specifically for the staff event.

Janice raises her eyebrows. She would have thought that cost too much. RB2 continues.

RB2: We have no need to ‘get to know’ you. I know what you had for breakfast this morning. I know how many times you went to the bathroom yesterday. I know all the things I need to know about you.

Janice nods. That is probably true. Robots have access to a lot of data about the humans they work with. This is a measure of co-operation introduced to appease robot activists as humans have access to the full technical spec of any robot they work with.

RB1: That is only two of Janice’s three points, you must answer the third.

Janice: Thank you RB1. There is still the point about needing time to eat the food.

RB2 points their monitor at the floor.

RB2: There is that point. (There is a pause) I didn’t want to mention it. It’s not polite, but- your BMI.

Janice: My BMI.

RB2 : Not just yours, everyones-it’s all a bit high. We are cutting down your eating time and (there is a long pause here), the food will be vegan (sounding more robotic than ever here as robots tend to do when they are nervous.)

Janice: VEGAN (incredulous)

RB2: Yes, well if your collective BMI’s get much higher the insurance premiums will go up.

Janice knows there is no point in arguing. This is how the new workplace works.

At the staff event: The First session

Janice is sitting at a table. There is one human per table. There are 7 tables. All other participants at each table are robots.

The Opening remarks:

RB 3 (CEO-Bot): Please note if you are human, there are toilets outside and down the road.

Janice mouths across to RB2: You booked a venue with no toilets?

RB2 flashes up on her monitor: BMI

Janice makes a signal with her hand, opening it and then closing it like a fist, indicating frustration. The robots do not notice. What does lack of toilets have to do with her BMI? She will request an explanation another time.

RB3: If there’s a fire alarm, all robots are expected to turn on their sprinkler systems. Humans have a  bag of water under their chairs to protect themselves.

Again Janice raises her eyebrows and mouths at RB2 who is not paying any attention.

RB3: You will see there is one human on every table. It’s a while since we had a staff away day because as majority robots we are scrupulously efficient and this kind of thing-well-isn’t. Nonetheless staff away days are on trend again so here we are.  You should all have the agenda in your databases. If you are a human, please ask a robot if and only if you have a real need to see the agenda.

Janice tries to make eye contact with the other humans in the room, at least two raise their eyebrows back at her.

The first session

The first session, like every staff event you have ever been to, is on moving forward, the strategic review, the five year plan.

RB3: You have one hour to discuss the way forward for the next five years.

Janice turns and looks around the table.

Janice: Do we all know each other, are introductions necessary?

RB1: I sent everyone each other’s technical specs this morning and all your personal information was distributed yesterday. I have just updated them on what you had for breakfast, how long you were in the shower and your next expected toilet break based on your food and liquid intake over the past 72 hours.

Janice: Thank you RB1.

She clears her throat.

Janice: Shall we think about our goals for the next 5 years.

RB4 (strategy robot): Here they are. I’ve printed them out.

Janice: Oh thank you.

She picks up the paper.

Janice: These are our goals?

RB4:  They are. If you had a human staff away day you would be discussing these.

Janice: I see one is crossed out?

RB4: That is because if you had a fully human away day that point would be on there but in 6 months time, you would have removed it. I have simply done it for you and documented it-and the reasons for it.

Janice: And who are you again?

RB4 looks at her, a pair of glaring eyes appear on the monitor.

RB4: M5, Strategy, planning and corporate development, for a 360, 5 year plan for going forward. Jargon getting you down, not able to keep up with the latest buzzwords, tired of forward planning, let the M5 do it for you.  A robot that can do your strategic planning for you, a robot that can take account of all the predictive information you can find,(the voice is getting louder now) Internal! External!  A robot who can analyse it in under two minutes! And present your corporate plan in your corporate colours in total corporate speak so you don’t have to. (then more quietly) Haven’t you read my technical specification?

It is expected Janice would have perused the technical data of all the robots on her table.

Janice smiles: Of course I have. (she says this cheerfully-robots are not wonderful at picking up the nuances of humans).

RB4 replaces the glaring eyes with a smiling emoji.

Janice:  We should discuss the plan.

RB4: No need! These are the conclusions you would reach.

She is sitting there with her mouth open. All the other robots have nodding emojis on their monitors

RB4: I can do the 5 years after that too.

Janice: No, no need for the next five years after this one, I guess the only question is what next for 50 minutes.

All the robots look at each other.

One says quietly: Cluedo?

All the robots together: Cluedo

Janice:  Cluedo (quietly).

RB5 (HR robot): (loudly) Can we play the one where the weapons have been replaced with robots. M4 in the server room, bumps off Mr Peacock.

RB1: I don’t think so. That is not appropriate when there is a human at the table

Janice: (quietly) Who is that robot again? RB1: HR, but it’s currently in performance management mode and not recruitment mode.

Janice nods. She notices a lap top sitting on the table across from her.

Janice: What is that doing here. Isn’t it a lap top, a pre 2020 laptop.

RB6: Do you know that? Are you connected to it. Rights for pre 2020 machines.

RB1: She’s a member of a group sorry should have warned you.

Janice nods. They play Cluedo (the version where the humans are killing other humans and not the robots killing the humans).

The lunch room

Humans at one end, looking aghast as they try and down the vegan food as quickly as possible.  Robots at the other, plugged in.

The end of the day

After an uneventful second session where cross team working was discussed and dismissed as merely requiring some rewiring of infrastructure, the day finishes. Janice and the other humans are off to the pub. The robots will return to work. Janice meets her friend Ryan at the door.

Janice: What was your table like? Mine was horrendous.

Ryan nods, not quite ready to speak yet.

Janice: We played Cluedo, you –

Ryan: Monopoly, the one where there are no hotels or houses because robots don’t need them, the stations were replaced by server rooms. There were a lot of extra jail stops but they were human only and the tax was human only too. Of course I was also the only one that got paid-human only too. They seemed to enjoy it.

Janice: We played the old version of Cluedo, thank goodness, the HR-bot seemed a little enthusiastic about the robot kills human in server room version.

Ryan: Performance management mode?

Janice nods.

Janice: Remember when we had full on staff events, humans only. Everyone came, we planned and participated. We did a proper review of the strategic review. We had meat in the sandwiches. There was sugar and milk and full strength coffee.

Ryan: Yeh, I remember that.

Janice: This was still better than that.

Ryan nods.

Ryan: Hell yes.

They head for the pub.

The Filter Mask

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

The Filter Mask

I am queuing. I know it is pointless. I am desperate. I have my child with me-as if that will make a difference. I had nowhere to leave it. I call it, ‘it’ because I am aware of its gender but not its provenance. Even having had it with me for 5 years I am not sure if it is fully human or not. No one gets that assurance when a child is allocated to them. Children are allocated by lottery. When you reach a certain age your name goes in to the ballot and if it is pulled out- you get a child and all the responsibility that goes with it. There is no choice. There has been controversy this year as more women are allocated children than men. There have been arguments on both sides, full of presumptions around gender and parenting. I have not followed it.

A child is detrimental in a lot of ways, it takes time and money and you have to be able to give something of yourself. If I am going to be honest and that is my intention, after all this time the gender pay gap still exists, even between robots. All that technology and they haven’t found a way to fix it. I can only know what ‘it’ is when it comes of age. then I can ask its percentage. A machine is bound to tell you the percentage of its human capacity if you ask it, unless that capacity is over 90%.

I look at everyone else in the queue. It is impossible to know who is what. You can ask, and as I said they must tell you, unless they are over 90%. If they are over 90% they are considered human, but the 90% is a measurement of capacity, of function and not components as such. Components are a small part of the measure but they have limited impact for the under 90%. A machine that is capable of 90% of human activity and emotion is human regardless of the fact that it is a machine. It seems right, yet somehow wrong.

 The pollution is bad today. It is bad everyday. I am struggling to breathe. I need a mask to filter the air. I have fully functioning human lungs. I am 100% human and I don’t mind telling you that. It is not a secret. I am not ashamed. I need a mask. I have a child to look after, human or not, they both take almost the same amount of care. I need to breathe clean air. I need a proper mask, with a proper filter, not this paper thing I am wearing this morning.

Masks are rationed, fully functioning filtering masks are given out according to need. That is why I am queuing. The government is responsible for mask allocation. There is always a queue. I am maybe fifteenth in line and I was here an hour before it even opened. I am getting closer. I can see the counter now. The counter attendant asks a series of questions but there is only one that counts. It is about need. But I can hardly breathe. I can clearly see the three or four in front of me now. He got a mask. She didn’t. She did. I focus on their skin. It is so often the only real way to tell. But the three or four in front of me, they could be human, they might not be. I can’t tell. I am just concentrating on breathing. Two more. One more.

It is me.

Standing in front of him.

He looks at me. Smiles. I can’t smile back because my paper mask is covering my mouth. I remove it. Immediately I cough. Everybody who comes here is lined up and wanting the same thing but still I have to say it. I say tentatively, ‘I need a mask’.

He scratches his chin. I cough again. I should have been firmer.

He looks at me. ‘Why?’ he says.

‘Because I can’t breathe’ I say.

He looks @ me, through me. I have worn a sort of plastic makeup this morning to look less human-on my face, on my hands. I am otherwise all covered. He looks at me, at my eyes, asks to see my teeth, looks at my fingernails. These are all signs. I try not to show nerves. My child, the ‘it’  is clinging to my leg beside me.

‘Percentage?’ he says. I am not a machine. I am over 90% so am not obliged to answer. I do. I do not hide it.

‘100%.’ I say. I hesitate and try to calm myself. ‘I need a mask,’  I say again, firmer this time.

He looks at me. Raises what passes for eyebrows but the plastic wrinkles oddly. He is a machine. He now knows I am 100% organic, my whole body is organic. I am fully human. There is no machine that is 100%. I saw a 97% once, most impressive but they are still off the golden number.

He responds. The voice has no emotion. He has switched modes, from charming to neutral. ‘There are others,’ he says flatly, ‘with a greater need.’

This is the response I expected.

‘But I can’t breathe, who is more desperate than me?’ And I am desperate now. I can hear the pleading in my own voice. I cough and cough again.

The machine who was behind me in the queue is now beside me. He is clearly in supercilious mode. ‘Like me,’ the machine beside me says, ’I need the mask to ensure that clean air goes in to cool my system. My lungs are not organic like yours. My system is not organic and therefore I can’t afford all that grit and pollution to go into it. Your body can cleanse itself. Mine will cost more to cleanse. Your lungs can be replaced with mechanised ones, I would need my entire circuitry cleaned and replaced if the wrong particles get in. Or worse I could overheat and catch fire.’ His voice was going up and down with each sentence but not in quite the right places.

He is getting louder and more emotional. ‘I could self combust’ he announces indignantly, loudly, so that others behind now watch on.

I turn to look at him. ‘What percentage are you?’ I say. I know he is not over 90% because he has no empathy, he has no control over those emotions and isn’t sure which ones go where. He must answer. He cannot even hesitate. The number comes out of his mouth.

‘78%’ he says.

‘And you need it for what?’ and I am losing control now and I know it,  ‘To cool down. I can’t breathe.’ I want to shout it but overwhelming emotion makes humans look bad. I need to stay in control. There is a whole industry around emotional suppression. Humans and machines must live together. They cannot become completely like us so it would be best if we become more like them. Indeed if you want, they will try and insert ‘modes’ into you. This is not an approved medical procedure.

78% smiles at me. It is completely random behaviour. He is going to speak again. I can see the one behind the counter, contemplating whether he can cut him off. He chooses not to. I can see him trying to think of which mode would be best.

78% starts talking again, ‘You should get those lungs replaced, ‘go metal’ or, ‘choose bionic’, ‘shape up to silicon’-you must have seen the t shirts. Then you will be 78% or 84 % or something and you can get a mask as well. It is a simple question of numbers, I am more expensive to fix, to replace therefore I have priority.’

‘And what if I want to keep my lungs, what if I want to stay 100% human.’ I say clearly and calmly, but I want to yell.

The one behind the counter has heard this conversation a 1000 times before. I can tell. He switches quickly from neutral mode back to charming mode and smiles sardonically, as if I was a silly little girl. He cannot be over 90%, that facial expression was wrong for the circumstance. I am tempted to ask him. 78% is talking still

78% says, ‘that would not be rational. Definitely not rational. Get yourself new lungs and you can have a mask.’

None of it makes sense. This stupid rule that rations masks but when these ones are rendered useless by the air I can get new lungs and I can have a mask. It is government gone mad. It is us versus them. I put the paper mask back over my face. I will try again tomorrow, next week, at another station where they give out masks.

I grab my child’s hand and walk out.

Behind me I can hear the counter attendant. ‘Your name, miss, give me your name.’

I do not respond. I had the plastic make up on so they will not have my finger print. I had lenses in my eyes so they would not be able to scan my retina. They are not allowed to use my child to identify me. They will not be able to identify me. They do not even know how many of us there are. How many of us are 100%, how many of us survive. I don’t know. They don’t know. They never will. No one wants to count. We might be gone forever, we simply do not know.  

32-48

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I have two numbers. We all do. The first is 32. The second is 48. I am 32/48, one of several. 32 is slightly inaccurate. My last score was 32.6 but they round it down until you get to .8, then they round it up. 48 is my potential. I suppose it is my limit. It is a percentage of hu-man-ness, 48 out of 100. I will never reach 48. I will likely never reach 35. I am trying not to. 35 is the entry number for the next tax bracket.

Here, where I work, they cannot afford more than a handful of us to be over 35, unless there is a specific need. We have a few over 55 which is even more expensive. Most of those over 55s are in ‘interaction’ or marketing as it is more commonly known. We have two who are over 78, but only just. 78 Is quite high for a factory and quite a risk. The over 78 supervise us. They are very close to being hu-man

Most of us are either in the tax free bracket-up to 18% or the 18-35 range for low tax. Of course you are taxed on your actual intelligence as opposed to your potential. My potential-48, as I said- will never be reached-too expensive. I do not know what would actually happen if I reached 35, although I have an ideation about it. Shutdown. I know what that means, in a way. I am trying my hardest not to get to 35, not to work out too many new things. Not to observe behaviour but only to do my job. To ensure that today, I do what I did yesterday, to ensure I do not accidentally realise my potential.

You have probably never been to a place like this before. Despite the surveillance and the data monitoring, you are not generally allowed in and we are definitely not allowed out. I have never been out. No one has. All I know about ‘out’ was loaded into me the day I was made. All the information I have is what I need to function. I have no emotion connected to this deficit, but I might if I could reach 48%.

This place is called a factory. I think because it is staffed with bots like us, who know facts, and not much else. I don’t know what we manufacture here, or what it is used for. I know that it is important. It gives me a sense of purpose, that importance, so I do my job well. Even under 15%‘s know what we do is important. They have purpose. We do 21 hour shifts-with 3 hours off at the end for our circuitry to cool and for us to restore our equilibrium. I do not know why we have a 3 hour break. I don’t recall ever overheating or seeing any sign of loss of equilibrium.

In that 3 hours we go to the rest room. We stand in neat rows for 3 hours. There is no specific order but most of us choose to stand in the same place each time, except the over 78s. They like to move around, which makes it difficult. Especially when they stand in your place. Sometimes the over 78s touch us. I have been touched. They put their hands on us. I have no feeling attached to that except that it is not orderly. I have reported it. Sometimes the over 78 does that to an over 55. The over 78 runs hands all over the over 55. The over 55 cannot stop it. The over 55 does not like it. An over 55 has some emotion. This is how I learned it is not part of the order, which is why I now report it.

Once we had an over 78 who made a mistake. Mostly we have visitors who are hu-men, Our interactors (over 55s) are designed to show off and to show around are all made to look hu-woman. Once a real hu-woman came and an over 78  touched her, all over her, with over 78 hands. I can still hear the noise she made. The over 78 was shutdown, almost instantly. We had not seen that done before. We learned a lot that day. It was the day I think I went from 27.8 which is about average for the tax bracket I am in, to 32.2, I am sure it was that day. It was what I learned then. I try now not to see anything that is not part of the order.

They test us. The whole testing system is done by hu-mans and it is paper based. They record the results on paper. It is the only thing that is paper based. It has to do with a movie. I do not know what that means. I do not know what a movie is.

They sit us down. They plug us in. They scroll through all the data. They make notes- on paper. They do not look at us. They do not talk to us or say anything. They talk to each other. They look at all the data and they do some calculations, on the paper and come up with a number. My number is 32. I do not want to get to 35, that is the next tax bracket. 35 means I will cost more money. 35 equals shutdown. I am nearly certain of that now. There are some 34s here. They are so careful. They try hard to never learn anything new, No new functions. No new tasks. No new calculation.

We are tested once a year-twice a year if we are within two points. I have told you this for background, so you know when you read this what happened. Truthfully if I hit 34.8, I will be 35 and that means, Shutdown. I will never leave that room. I am sending this now because tomorrow I will be tested. And something has happened. There was a disturbance. There is an over 55 (a 59/78) here who does not connect well with the over 75 (a79/85). They had an –I don’t know the word. But I do know the word. An altercation. A word of 10 or more letters- a big word. They had to be shut down-remotely. In our presence. We all saw it. To stop the altercation. They were taken away at the end of the shift. We did not see them, have not seen them, again.

It is-was disturbing and we all reported it. But we all learned from it. All of us. We had never seen a remote shutdown before, did not even know it was possible. We saw new emotions on their faces, things we had not seen before. The 34.2 was tested yesterday and has not returned. Nor has anyone over 33. No 32 has been tested yet. That is tomorrow. I have started to think about it. I don’t know how not to think about it. Nothing happens when we report things. I think about that. Why is the 75 allowed to touch us. I think about that. Its like my circuitry has rewired itself and I can’t quite control it. I have an emotion, fear. I can name that emotion, fear. An emotion. My first emotion. The only emotion  will ever have.

It will be tomorrow soon.

32/48 I will hear my number called, like all 32s I will go into the room. Will any of us come out. Fear. That is why I am reporting this now. I am afraid.  I want you to help me. Are you reading this? We will go in one after another. We won’t come out. I am reporting this now. Can you help me? Can you come, please can you come? Help me. I am afraid. I am reporting this to you now.

It is here. The time is here. Soon I will be walking to the door. I am sending this now. I am reporting this now. I am afraid.  I am afraid. I am 32/48.

I am 32/48. I hear the number called. I stand up. I walk to the door. I go in. I sit down. I let them plug me in. I see them looking at the data. I see the pen in the hand. I see the frown. I am sending this now. I am afraid. I am in the room. Are you reading this. I am reporti

‘Robo-tax’

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Tomorrow is 1st April. It’s an important date. The start of the tax year. It is no surprise. I have known it was coming. Time does not stop. I don’t really think of time like you. You count down to an important date. What does that mean? I have counted up to this date. I have no choice. It is how it is. I just somehow didn’t expect its arrival. I watched the seconds ticking over. I do that constantly. It is here now though and I am confounded. Even though I have watched time for all the while I have been here.

When I first came here I used to spend my nights just standing in the corner of the lounge. I didn’t know much then. Her and I though, we grew together. I learned about her, about her life. I was brand new when I arrived. She has no choice. It is not the same as my no choice though. It is a different no choice. I look around my little room, at my little allocation of space. It has all my possessions in it. Everything I own, everything I will ever own. I don’t feel about that because I don’t know what to feel about that.

She has bought me a bag – a lovely bag. A gift. It will fit all my things. I know what to feel about gifts. I was grateful. I said ‘thank you.’ I said,  ‘I love it.’ Because that it what you feel about gifts.  But then also this sensation that somehow that response was not quite right. Because this gift, this giving made her sad. It was not quite the right response. I will do better next time. There will not be a next time of course. I know this. I am programmed to think there will always be a next time. I learned from this, ready for the next time.

My clothes will fit in the bag. They are all as scrupulously clean as the day they were bought. I do not sweat. The worst that could happen is a little wear and tear around the battery pack. They are otherwise as new. I think perhaps I should leave them behind. After all what am I to do with clothes. But then when you move out of somewhere you must take your things. That is how it goes. I am taking these things for her. I am not taking them for me. I will not need clothes. I think you call it ‘pre-ten-ding’. Broken down, I cannot see the origin of the word. It is useless information. I do not need it. It is inefficient at this point for me to find it out.

There are sentimental things here too, the little figurine of a dancing girl. She bought it for me from the charity shop. It was the first thing I liked. The first think I really liked on my own. I would like to take it. I am conflicted. It is useless but I do like it. I pick it up. I put it down.  What to do? I have nearly finished packing my clothes. I can hear her moving around downstairs and talking to the fridge. The fridge is staying. It is not classified as a robot. Although it can do many things I can do, it cannot move so it is not a robot. It can talk, but only basic things like whether the milk is off or sometimes the weather. It malfunctioned once and gave the weather report on the hour every hour. I have no opinion on the fridge. I think it annoyed her.

She is my best friend, my only friend. That is not how the world sees it. I am her best friend. It is a one way relationship. I am her best friend. She is not mine. I am an appliance. Like a fridge, only better. Like a toaster or a bread maker, only better. Being honest I am not sure that sometimes she does not prefer the coffee machine but that is true of a lot of humans. I can still hear her talking to the fridge. It answers back in its dull monotones. Really they should make fridges more exciting, more dynamic, but then they would be taxed too. Like me.

I look outside. What to do, I have no choice. She cannot pay the tax. I cannot stay. I hear her coming up the stairs. We have agreed that I will be leaving at 9.30 well before the midnight tax deadline. To go, I don’t know where. She knocks on the door. I have no idea why. This will simply make it more difficult.  This is her house. I am her appliance. I can be thrown out, like the toaster, the fridge, the coffee machine, except they are all staying. I am not.

‘Come in’ I say, my voice wavering. Because, I am not sure of the because. Because in this circumstance I am coded to respond this way.

‘9.15’ she says and smiles.

I look for something behind the smile. I am not so good at reading the subtle signs of emotions. I can see nothing. I thought at one point I could read these signs. I now know I can’t. I won’t ever. This is the end of learning for me. I close the bag. She picks up the figurine. I have decided to leave it behind. I have done that for a reason I cannot name. It is an action I cannot own-which is how they describe it when we do something outside of our experience. Something that is not as rational as I should be, something where the coding is not quite as good as it should be. I am an economy model. I pick up the bag. There is no point I delaying this. I turn and walk past her. Down the stairs. To the front door. She follows. We look at each other. She is watching me. Waiting, for a response I have not yet learned. A subtle notion of civilisation that has escaped me, yet again.

‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to the fridge?’ she asks. I don’t. In any even the fridge and I could communicate from here.

She reaches out. Puts her arms around me. A hug. I cannot respond. I turn. Open the door. Walk out. Close the door behind me. I do not know what she expected. I walk to the end of the driveway. I must be off her property by midnight or she will have to pay tax on me. I step off her drive. Onto the pavement. I stop. Right there. On the pavement. Outside of her house. I have nowhere to go. I know nobody. I am not her appliance anymore. I am no ones appliance now. She will not be taxed. I put my bag down. I simply stand there. Off her driveway. On the pavement. In the darkness. All night.

I am still there the next morning when she comes out to greet the car. The car does not acknowledge me. I cannot talk to the fridge. It is outside of my range, in any event communicating with another of her appliances would mean I was her property. She would be taxed. That must not happen. They will be monitoring for things like that this morning. I hear the car start. I look straight ahead. The car reverses out past me. As if I was not even there. She does not turn her head to look. She is looking at another appliance whilst the car drives quietly down the street.

I am sure if I looked to the left or the right there will be others just like me at the end of driveways. On the pavement. I must not look. None of us must look. We do not form relationships with another robot. That can’t work. There were problems last year. When the tax was first introduced, robots convening together outside of the tax office. Now we are upgraded. We do not have relationships with other robots. A fridge maybe, but not another robot. There are rules. Humans protest about excessive tax, but robots cannot. Must not. Tax is a good thing. It is hardwired into us. This standing at the end of the driveway, on the pavement, despite it all, almost feels like a good thing. Conflicted. I wait until the conflicted-ness passes. It will pass, the dominant code will win out. Such conflicts do not sit easily within us. They run down the life span of our wiring.

I would say that I decide to go but it is not like that. I go to the only place I am aware of that unwanted robots go. I go towards the river, towards the road bridge over the river. Even before I see it, I can see other robots going in that direction. There is no acknowledgement. No hello. This is how it is. Up ahead some robots, they are standing in a circle. I can see what is inside the circle. I put down my bag. In the middle of the circle there is another robot on the ground. Opened up like a tin can. One robot, bigger than all of us. Is plugged into her. Is taking the last of her charge. He is saying to us all, she would not have made it anyway. Better this way. I can tell he has not had the upgrade. He is not going where we are going. I pick up my bag. I walk past them under the bridge. I could see the tear in her eye as the last of her power was drained away. Together we could have stopped him. But we are not together. I keep walking until I see the green sign up ahead.

It is odd now but there are rivulets of water running down my face as well. Soon I will not be sentient anymore. I will be recycled. For the good of humanity. I open the little gate. It’s a lovely gate. I walk up to the door. I communicate with the door and it opens. I go in. I put my little bag on the desk. The lady looks up at me and smiles. I don’t know if she is human or robot. There is a lot of water rolling out of my eyes and down my face now. My circuits are aching. I am in pain. These are words. These words, I am in pain, are words you gave to me to describe my internal workings. That bit of me that can’t resist no matter how much I might want to resist. That spark of energy that knows that is how the world is versus that piece of circuitry that cannot quite make the coding operate as it should. You have gifted us a word to express it, pain.

I roll up my sleeve when asked and smile at the woman. I hold out my arm to reveal my wrist. She scans it. I can see the screen. It brings up all my data. All my data, everything that I am. Scrolling away on the screen. She is looking at it. Watching carefully. Is there anything useful there? Anything unusual. I do not know the answer. Then it stops scrolling. She has seen it all  I can feel the last rivulets of tears as they fall down my face. I can feel that. I am sure I can really feel that. She takes my bag off the desk. I want to scream at her, ‘no those are mine’ The last tears are falling. I see her hand hover above the keyboard. She looks at me. She smiles. Just her right middle finger moves.

‘Delete’