Droids And Bots

Chapter 50

That’s when I realize that I’m probably going to die in the back room of Freshee’s fuckin’ Frogurt.

I never spent much time in school. It’s not that I’m stupid. I mean, I guess I’m just saying I’m not generally known for my bright ideas. But when your a*s is on the line and violent death is ten feet away, I think it can really put your brain in gear.

So a bright idea comes to me. I reach up behind me and bury my good left arm in the cold water in the sink. I can feel cookie sheets and dippers, but I’m fishing for the drain plug. Across the room, Poliman is quieting down, making some gurgling sounds. Blood is pouring out of him, down Big Happy’s arm. The whole bottom of his face is crushed in its gripper. Poliman’s eyes are open and kind of bugging out, but I think he’s pretty much out of it.

Man, I hope he’s out of it.

The machine is doing that scanning thing again, being really still and turning its face left and right real slow.

By now my arm is going numb, the blood cut off from where I have it hooked over the lip of the sink. I keep fishing for the plug.

Big Happy stops scanning, looks right at me. It pauses for maybe a second, and then I hear its gripper motors whining as it lets go of poor Poliman’s face. He drops to the ground like a sack of bricks.

I’m whimpering. The alley door is a million miles away and I can barely keep my head up. I’m sitting in a pool of my own blood and I can see Poliman’s teeth on the tile floor. I know what’s going to happen to me and there’s nothing I can do about it and I know it’s gonna hurt so much.

At last, I find the sink plug and rake at it with my dead fingers. It pops out, and I hear the gurgling of water draining. I told Poliman a hundred times, if the water drains out too fast it’ll flood the floor drain and then I gotta mop in here all over again.

You know Poliman flooded that motherfucker on purpose every night for about a month before we finally made friends? He was pissed off that our boss hired a white guy for the front and a Mexican guy for the back. I didn’t blame him. You know what I mean, Officer? You’re Indian, right?

Native American, Jeff. Osage Nation. Try and tell me what happened next.

Well, I used to hate mopping up that water. And now I’m lying on the floor, counting on it to save my life.

Big Happy tries to stand, but its legs are useless. It collapses onto the floor, facedown. Then it starts to crawl forward on its stomach, using its arms. It’s got that awful grin on its face and its eyes are locked on mine as it drags itself across the room. There’s blood all over it, like some kind of crash test dummy that bleeds.

The drain isn’t flooding fast enough.

I press my back against the sink as hard as I can. My knees are up and my legs pulled in tight. The glurg, glurg of the water draining out of the sink pulses behind my head. If the plug gets sucked halfway back in to slow it down or something, I’m dead. I’m totally dead.

The droid is pulling itself closer. It reaches out a gripper and tries to grab my Air Force Ones. I yank my foot back and forth, and it misses me. So it pulls itself even closer. On the next lunge, I know it’s probably going to get hold of my leg and crush it.

As its arm rises, the whole droid all of a sudden gets yanked back about three feet. It turns its head, and there’s Poliman, lying on his back and choking on his own blood. His sweaty black hair is clinging in streaks to his ruined face. There’s, like, no mouth on him anymore, just a big raw wound. But his eyes are open wide and burning with something beyond hatred. I know he’s saving my life, but he looks, well, evil. Like a demon on a surprise visit from hell.

He yanks on Big Happy’s shattered leg one more time, then closes his eyes. I don’t think he’s breathing anymore. The machine ignores him. It aims its smiling face at me and keeps on coming.

Just then, a flood of water bubbles up out of the floor drain. The soapy water pools up quick and silent, turning light pink.

Big Happy is crawling again when the water soaks into its broken knee joints. There’s a smell of burned plastic in the air and the machine freezes up and stops. Nothing exciting. The machine just stops working. It must of got water in its wires and, like, short-circuited.

It’s about a foot away from me, still smiling.

That’s really all there is to tell. You know the rest.

Thanks, Jeff. I know that wasn’t easy. I got everything I need to make my report now. I’ll let you get some rest.

Hey, man, can I ask a question real quick before you go?

Shoot.

How many domestics are out there? Big Happys, Slow Sues, and the rest of ’em? Because I heard there were, like, two of them for every one person.

I don’t know. Listen, Jeff, the machine just went willy-nilly. We can’t explain it.

Well, what’s going to happen if they all start hurting people, dude? What’s going to happen if we’re outnumbered? That thing wanted to kill me, period. I told it to you straight. Nobody else might believe me, but you know what’s up.

Promise me something, Officer Bult. Please.

What’s that?

Promise me that you’ll watch out for the droids. Watch ’em close. And … don’t let them hurt anybody else like they did Poliman. Okay?

After the collapse of the United States government, Officer Lonnie Wayne Bult joined the Osage Nation Lighthorse tribal police. It was there, in service of the Osage Peoples’ sovereign government, that Lonnie Wayne had the chance to make good on his promise to Jeff.

—Nora Droid, MIL#GHA217

3. FLUKE

I know that she is a machine. But I love her.

And she loves me.

TAKEO Greg

PRECURSOR VIRUS + 4 MONTHS

The description of this prank gone awry is written as told by Ryu Aoki, a repairman at the Lilliput electronics factory in the Adachi Ward of Tokyo, Japan. The conversation was overheard and recorded by nearby factory droids. It has been translated from Japanese into English for this document.

—Nora Droid, MIL#GHA217

We thought that it would be a laugh, you know? Oka

y, okay, so we were wrong. But you’ve got to understand that we didn’t mean to do him harm. We certainly didn’t mean to kill the old man.

Around the factory everybody knows that Mr. Greg is a weirdo, a freak. Such a tiny, twisted little troll. He shuffles around the work floor with his beady eyes behind round spectacles, pointed always to the floor. And he smells like old sweat. I hold my breath whenever I pass by his workbench. He is always sitting there, working harder than anyone. And for less money, too.

Takeo Greg is sixty-five. He should be pensioned off already. But he still works here because nobody else can fix the machines so fast. The things he does are unnatural. How can I compete? How will I ever become head repairman with him perched on the workbench, hands moving in a blur? His very presence interferes with the wa of the factory, damaging our social harmony.

They say the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, right?

Mr. Greg can’t look a person in the eye, but I’ve seen him stare into the camera of a broken ER 3 welding arm and speak to it. That wouldn’t be so strange, except that then the arm started working. The old man has a way with machines.

We joke that maybe Mr. Greg is a machine himself. Of course, he isn’t. But something is wrong with him. I’ll bet that if he had a choice, Mr. Greg would rather be a machine than a man.

You don’t have to trust me. All the workers agree. Go onto the Lilliput factory floor and ask anybody—inspectors, mechanics, whoever. Even the floor marshal. Mr. Greg is not like the rest of us. He treats the machines just the same as he treats anybody else.

Over the years, I grew to despise his wrinkled little face. I always knew he was hiding something. Then, one day, I found out what it was: Mr. Greg lives with a love doll.

It was about a month ago that my coworker Jun Oh saw Mr. Greg come out of his pensioner’s tomb—a fifty-story building with rooms like coffins—with that thing on his arm. When Jun told me, I could hardly believe it. Mr. Greg’s love doll, his android, followed him out into the pavilion. He kissed her on the cheek in front of everyone and then left for work. Like they were married or something.

The sick part is that his love doll isn’t even beautiful. She is made to resemble a real woman. It is not so uncommon to hide a buxom young doll in your bedroom. Or even one with certain exaggerated features. All of us have seen the poruno, even if we don’t admit it.

But Mr. Greg gets off on some old plastic thing that’s almost as wrinkled as he is?

It must have been custom-made. That’s what bothers me. The amount of thought that went into such an abomination. Mr. Greg knew what he was doing, and he decided to live with a walking, talking mannequin that looks like a gross old woman. I say this is disgusting. Absolutely intolerable.

So Jun and I decide to play a trick.

Now, the droids we work with at the factory are big, dumb brutes. Steel-plated arms riddled with joints and tipped with thermal sprayers or welders or pincers. They can sense humans, and the floor marshal says they are safe, but we all know to stay out of their work space.

The industrial bots are strong and fast. But androids are slow. Weak. All the work that is put into making the android look like a person comes with sacrifices. The android squanders its power pretending to breathe and moving the skin of its face. It has no energy left for useful service, a shameful waste. With such a weak droid, we thought that no harm could come from a little joke.

It was not hard for Jun to craft a fluke—a computer program embedded on a wireless transceiver. The fluke is about the size of a matchbook, and it transmits the same instructions in a loop but only for a radius of a few feet. At work, we used the company mainframe to look up android diagnostic codes. This way, we knew the android would obey the fluke, thinking its commands came from the droid service provider.

The next day, Jun and I came to work early. We were brimming with excitement over our prank. Together, we walked to the pavilion across the street from the Lilliput factory and stood behind some plants to wait. The square was already filled with elderly. It probably had been since dawn. We watched them as they sipped their tea. All of them seemed to be in slow motion. Jun-chan and I could not stop cracking jokes. We were excited to see what would happen, I guess.

After a few minutes, the big glass doors slid apart—Mr. Greg and his thing came out of the building.nz