I Heart Robot (2 page)

“Good afternoon, Tyri. Would you like some refreshments?” Miles whirs out of the kitchen into the hallway. He’s nothing like Nana, just a bipedal mass of electronics and metal with assorted appendages capable of mundane tasks. He doesn’t even have eyes, only a flashing array of lights. Despite Mom designing a new generation of androids for M-Tech, we can’t afford the new model housebot. Maybe it’s better this way. I don’t feel much for our bot, but I dubbed him Miles. It seemed to fit.

“Would you like some refreshments?” he repeats.

“Tea and a sandwich.” I carry Glitch into my bedroom at the back of the house. Glitch leaps from my arms, landing on the bed where she curls up in a knot of black, white, and tan fur amongst my pillows.

Still in my black lace skirt and corset, I stretch and flex my fingers. Twisting the cricks from my neck and rolling my shoulders, I ease out the graveyard tension. My violin lies in a bed of blue velvet, waiting for my touch. With the strings in tune and the bow sufficiently taut, the instrument nestles against my jaw as if I was born with a gap there just for the violin. It completes me.

I warm-up my fingers, letting them trip over the strings as my bow arcs and glides. Then I’m ready to play: Beethoven’s Kreutzer violin sonata in A major, Nana’s favorite. Glitch’s ears twitch back and forth. She raises her head to howl but thinks better of it, yawning and curling back into sleep.

The frenzied opening of the sonata segues into a melancholy tune and in the brief moment of calm, my moby warbles at me. I have mail. I try to ignore the distraction and play through the screeching reminder of an unread message, but it might be the one I’ve been anticipating.

Vibrating in my hand, the moby blinks at me: One unread email. Subject: BPO audition.

“This is it, Glitchy.”

She raises her head as I sit beside her. One hand buried in her fur, I open the email. The words blur together, pixelate and run like wet ink across the screen. Disbelief makes my vision swim. I have to read the message several times over to make sure I haven’t misunderstood.

“Codes! I got in.” Blood warms my cheeks as I whisk Glitch into my arms, spinning her around before squeezing her to my chest. She does not approve and scratches at me until I drop her back on the bed. Miles enters with a tray of tea and neat triangular sandwiches.

“Miles, I got in! I’m going to play for the junior BPO. This is amazing.” I’m jumping up and down.

Miles flashes orange. “Could not compute. Please restate.”

“I’m going to play for the best junior orchestra in the country. This could be my chance to break into the scene, to meet all the right people, and make an impression!” My one chance to escape the life already planned for me by Mom. The last thing I want to be is a robot technician.

Miles keeps flashing orange. “Apologies, Tyri. Could not compute, but registering joy.” His visual array flashes green. “Happy birthday!” He says in his clipped metallic voice before leaving the room.

I clutch the moby and read the email another ten times before calling Mom. I reach her voicemail, and my joy tones down a notch. I don’t want to talk to another machine, so I hang up and call Rurik instead.

“Hey, Tyri. Now’s not a good time. Can I call you back later?”

“I got in,” I say.

“To the orchestra?”

“Yes!”

“That’s great.” He doesn’t sound half as happy as I am.

“Thanks, I’m so excited, but kind of scared too—”

“T, I’m just in the middle of something. I’ll call you back in a bit, okay?” He hangs up, leaving me babbling into silence.

Deflated, I slump onto the floor and rest my head on the bed. Glitch shuffles over to give me another ear wash, delicately nibbling around my earrings. I should’ve known Rurik would be busy getting ready to go to Osholm University. Getting a scholarship to the most prestigious school in all of Skandia is way more impressive than scoring a desk in the Baldur Junior Orchestra. Still, I received better acknowledgment from the housebot than my boyfriend. I call Asrid.

“Hey T, what’s up?” Asrid answers with Sara’s high-pitched giggle in the background.

“I got in!”

“That’s awesome, except I guess that means more practicing and less time with your friends, huh?” Asrid sounds genuinely put out, as if she’d even notice my absence when Sara’s around. Codes, isn’t there someone who could just be happy for me? Maybe Mom’s right, and I am being selfish wanting the “Bohemian non-existence” when I could have a “sensible and society-assisting” career in robotics.

“Sorry, I . . . thought you’d like to know.”

“I’m happy for you, Tyri. I know it’s a big deal to you. Congrats. Seriously, you deserve this considering how hard you practice,” Asrid says, and Sara shouts congratulations in the background.

“Thanks, Sassa.”

“Hey, our food arrived. Chat later?”

“Sure.” I hang up and reach for my violin. Nana would’ve understood. She would’ve danced around the living room with me. She probably would’ve baked me a cake and thrown a party. Determined not to cry, I skip the second movement of Beethoven’s sonata and barrel straight into the jaunty third. The notes warp under my fingers, and the tune slides into b-flat minor.

Two days until the first rehearsal. Maybe I’ll be able to do something different with my life; something that makes me happy instead of just useful.

If anyone cared to ask my opinion on the human condition, I’d say humans are the never-ending wait. They’re waiting for something better, something different, something that makes them feel more alive.

I feel almost human; I’ve been waiting nineteen days, sixteen hours, and twenty-three minutes for just one thing, one word, eight letters: accepted. My entire existence hinges on another person’s subjective opinion of my ability.

Walking helps, it makes the minutes flow liquid, passing by in a single ribbon of time. I’d sleep if I could; I hear it makes time flow even faster. There’s a tingle of anticipation in my circuit, a simultaneous dread and thrill that makes waiting an agony and a pleasure.

That would be my second opinion on the human condition: it’s a paradox. It’s never black and white with them, but a kaleidoscopic swirl of grays, mixed emotions, and complications. Robots are simpler. Binary. On or off. Even us convoluted androids can be reduced to ones and zeros.

–Transmission received.

The email pings behind my eyes, and I pause mid step on a corner in lower Baldur. The few humans out on the windy street cast me sideways glances and nothing more, dismissing my presence. I’m just another kid with his hoodie up against the chill. I don’t wear the orange patch we’re supposed to, declaring make, model, and human owners. Anonymity is my only protection now. There’s only so far you can run from your past before the towns become villages, and there aren’t any more hydrogen stations. Itching to read the mail, I head into an unkempt park, home to vagrants and squirrels, in search of privacy.

–Transmission active.

My vision blurs with a scrawl of text. The pinprick letters scan across my cybernetic eyeballs. I smile, a reflexive reaction to the good news. The emotion module upgrade is working. The complex code packages unraveling emotions in my core and throughout my circuits make me feel even more human.

Accepted. Rehearsal Saturday: two o’clock at the Baldur Opera House.

–Transmission deleted.

A red exclamation mark blinks in my peripheral vision. My tank’s almost empty. I’ve got less than six hours till I’m incapacitated unless I can pilfer some hydrogen. Still smiling, I jog past the sleeping nightclubs and comatose bars of downtown Baldur to the dilapidated warehouse district. A hydrogen station, its yellow and green paint peeling away in thin ribbons, sports a new sign tacked beneath the company logo: Strictly No Unauthorized Robots.

I wait and watch. A cluster of junkies huddles around a barrel fire far away enough not to notice my crime; their bloodshot eyes focus on the flames, their addled thoughts lost in oblivion. In fifteen minutes, no humans approach the station. I saunter, hands in pockets, toward the pumps and complete one last scan of the surroundings. Still no humans or approaching hoverbugs.

I thumb through my wallet and jam the fake transaction card into the slot; there’s nothing the black market doesn’t have for those with enough cash. I wait as the card confuses the machine, making it think I’m a human customer instead of a desperate, thieving android.

Shucking my hoodie, I lift up my shirt and depress my fourth rib. The haptic sensor unseals a slab of skin revealing the valve to my fuel tank where my intercostal muscles should be. I dismount the hose from its docking bay and jam the nozzle into my side. It takes a full minute to fill up my tank. A full minute of vulnerability.

Done. I disengage the pump and my skin reseals as my body makes the necessary pressure adjustments. Card in hand, I turn to leave, but a metal pipe collides with my head and constellations of black dots clot my vision. My knees hit asphalt as nanytes race to repair the damage done to my skull. Cruor drips from the gash above my eye, and pain ignites every synthetic nerve ending.

Three droids dressed in ratty sweaters and faded jeans, leer at me with wicked grins.

“Give us the card.”

They can have it. Their hands rifle through my pockets. Fingers find the card then slip beneath my shirt. They’ve got a canister ready to drain me of fuel. Not today. I roll and kick, knocking one android on his back. The other still wields the pipe and strikes me repeatedly across the shoulders until I’m face down, cheek scraped by tar. More pain overwhelms my circuit and again their fingers fumble with my clothes.

“Please,” I say, but the android chuckles and increases the pressure holding me down. I’m poked and prodded as they search my ribs for the sensor. Before they can jam the canister into my side, a fourth pair of footsteps smack across the asphalt.

I squirm beneath my assailant as another android, black as midnight, sends his titanium-reinforced fist into the attacker’s jaw.

The second assailant brandishes the pipe.

“Kit, behind you,” I hiss through clenched teeth.

Kit delivers a kick to the android and sends him sprawling.

“Come on, Quinn.” Kit grabs my arm and drags me away before the others have time to recover. They don’t pursue us as we sprint down narrow alleys heading further away from the city center. We slow to a jog when we reach the train depot splashed with graffiti and littered with trash.

“Were you following me?” I turn on Kit once we’re relatively safe.

“Thanks Kit for saving my bionic ass. What a happy coincidence you just happened to go in search of some H yourself.” He grins.

“So, you were following me.”

“What are friends for?” He shrugs, and we cross the tracks into robot squatterville: Fragheim. The settlement lies in a sprawl of scrap metal and barbed wire.

“You still haven’t thanked me.” He pouts.

“Thank you, Kit.” Him following me is still of concern.

“They looked like Z-class droids.”

“Felt like it.” I rub the spot above my eye, the injury another memory of pain.

“You all right?” Kit brushes his thumb across the ghost of a graze on my cheek.

“Fine.” I pull away.

“Told you, you need to install a martial arts module.” He tucks his hands into his pockets.

“My processor’s almost overloaded as is.”

“Because you insist on installing those stupid emotion patches. What are you going to do?
Feel
your way out of fights?”

Kit fails to grasp the importance of emotion in music. If I’m ever going to not only pass for human but also actually
be
human, emotion—not martial arts—modules are going to get me there.

“I need them.”

“Like you need fish-balls and coffee at an afternoon
fika
.” Kit might’ve made that throaty sound of disapproval unique to human physiology if his voice box had been programmed to harrumph with disdain.

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Good.”

We leave it at that and make our way through mud and scrap toward the clump of huts we call home. Since escaping my owners, I’ve been camping out here, living amongst the other unwanted robotic detritus. It’s survival of the most fuel efficient and well coded.

I head straight for Sal’s to celebrate my musical achievement. She understands, to a certain degree, what Kit does not. We weave our way through the geometry of our scrap-metal sanctuary, past kidbots scraping out Sudoku puzzles in the dirt and androids gathered around salvaged furniture discussing mathematics and quantum theory. Some talk economy and politics, berating the government that saw fit to bring them into being, mass-produce them, and then abandon them.

Simulated voices rise in anger; a fist shakes in the air.

“The Robot Revolution.” A Saga-droid stabs a finger at his friend. “Don’t think it’s not going to happen. We’re on a precipice here. If government doesn’t pass this amendment—”

“You think the amendment’s our problem?” Lex, a Quasar companion-droid like me, interjects. He folds his arms and leans against the precarious wall of a hut. “If this virus thing is true, we’ve got much bigger problems.”

“What virus thing?” I ask.

Kit rolls his eyes. “Tune into the Botnet once in a while and maybe you’d know.”

I don’t even tune into the newsfeeds any more. It’s always the same: the People Against Robot Autonomy arguing why robots should never be granted rights and robots arguing even more aggressively why they should. I’ve seen nothing about a virus, though.

“Please, Kit.”

“Fine,” he relents. “Some Saga hackers got wind of an AI virus apparently being developed by M-Tech.”

“What kind of virus?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugs. “But Lex figures it’s probably designed to hurt us.”

“Of course he does.” We pause in the mud as Lex continues to rant about humans.

“It’s time for revolution. Look at human history! They want us to wear armbands like Hitler made the Jews wear yellow stars. And you all know what came next.” His words sink into my core. Would the humans really go so far as to exterminate us like that? Maybe the real question is what’s taking them so long to do it?