Grim, page 26
“So you’re going off-specs for this.” Professor Jafet shot me a look, and hastily I added, “Just making sure we’re on the same page.”
“We’re on the same page. Don’t forget it.”
She didn’t need to worry. I know how to keep a secret, and besides—a mentor who knew I had some dirt on her was a mentor who was going to make damn sure I got advanced placement. In this world, you have to take your advantages where you can get them.
But if I had known then what I know now—if I had realized what she was doing with Rowan—would I have had the guts to say something? Would I have been able to say, This is wrong, you’re playing God, you’re not creating something, you’re creating someone?
Probably not. Because if I knew then what I know now, I would know that I needed to meet Rowan. To see the world, and myself, through his eyes. As wrong as it was for him to be created, I can’t help being grateful.
Like I said, love can make you selfish.
The first hints that Rowan was profoundly, deeply different came the moment Professor Jafet switched him on. He opened his eyes. He saw me. And he smiled.
This wasn’t a plastic robot smile. It was realer than most of the smiles I saw on human faces every day. The light in his eyes made me feel like...well, like I was beautiful. I don’t get that reaction very often.
“Oh,” he said with so much wonder in his voice that he might have been looking at the stars. “Who are you?”
“Uh, I’m Blue.” I glanced over at Professor Jafet, unsure what to make of this. Newly activated robots usually asked about their designated functions—but Rowan didn’t have any, did he?
Rowan sat up and looked around the workshop. For him it wasn’t cold steel and spare parts; I knew, just seeing his face, that to Rowan this place was magical. In that instant I saw it through his eyes—the machinery shining like silver, the red and green memory chips glittering like jewels. All the blinking lights and whirring noises around us wove together as though they were music, and for the first time since my earliest days here, I remembered that I worked somewhere extraordinary—that we came as close as anyone could to creating another form of life.
When he looked at Professor Jafet, he didn’t ask who she was. He only said, “Is this where I was born?”
“Yes,” she said, and to my astonishment, she smiled. “Happy birthday.”
He rose from the table, and the way he moved was startlingly human. The only difference was his grace, his easy strength. Even though I’d helped put Rowan together, I suddenly felt embarrassed that he wasn’t wearing any clothing. His nakedness didn’t seem to bother him, though. He simply walked the perimeter of the lab, his broad bare feet padding against the metal floor.
“You’ll recharge here,” Professor Jafet said to him in the same tone of voice a mother might tell a kid that this was their new room. “I’ll get you clothing and supplies.”
“And shoes,” I said, because that floor looked cold. Usually I wouldn’t worry about a robot feeling cold, but I just wanted Rowan to be comfortable, without yet understanding why.
Rowan nodded, but he was hardly listening. That, too, was peculiar—robots are designed to pay attention to humans, not to have interests of their own. But Rowan kept pacing the edges of the room, picking up this tool and that, staring at each vid-screen like they all had something wonderful to tell him. It was as though the entire world, even this little sliver of it, was full of treasures just waiting to be discovered.
Professor Jafet’s gaze flicked over to me, gentler now than before. She put a hand on my shoulder. “Rowan, I’m assigning Blue to work with you.”
He turned around, finally paying attention. “Good. I like Blue.”
My face got flushed, and I couldn’t look directly at him any longer. When could we get this guy some pants?
If Professor Jafet noticed my embarrassment, she gave no sign as she continued, “My duties won’t allow us to spend too much time together, but these early weeks are important. You should have company, someone to learn human society and behavior from.”
Okay, if any of my friends or family had heard her say I should be the one to teach somebody about human society, they’d never stop laughing. I’d be a better fit for the “antisocial and weird” master class. Still, I knew better than to say that to Professor Jafet, so I went for the more obvious problem first. “Between classes and work shifts, I only get a couple hours free a day.”
“I’m signing you out of your work shifts as of now,” Professor Jafet said. “If you think you can keep up with your classes via independent study, I’ll sign you out of those, too. This project can be for special accelerated credits. What do you think, Blue?”
Accelerated credits? The kind that would get me out of apprenticeship and into advanced study a year or two early? I’d have signed up for that even if the path was a lot harder than spending time with a hot guy...I mean, a robot who looked like a hot guy. “I can keep up. I’ll do it.”
“Thank you,” Rowan said. He obviously considered himself as much a part of this conversation as me and the professor. Robots never do that, either.
Yet I knew just by the way he looked at me that he thought I was something special, so he couldn’t be human, either. Humans knew better.
How do I describe the next few weeks?
In some ways it was like spending time with a very small child. Everything was new to Rowan—everything—and he could ask questions for hours on end.
“Why do we never go outside?” he said on one of those early days as we walked the corridors of the complex.
“There’s a UV-radiation advisory. It wouldn’t bother you, but it would give me a sunburn pretty quickly. Those hurt like hell.”
Rowan would hesitate sometimes as he accessed preprogrammed information, draw those thick arched eyebrows of his together as he thought it over. And that was the uncanny thing—he didn’t just pull the info up, he thought about it. Came to his own conclusions. “If you’ve been sunburned, then you used to ignore the advisories. Or you did once.”
“I used to do it a lot,” I admitted. “I figured, you know, I’ve got dark skin, that’s going to protect me. And it does, kinda—instead of getting burned to a crisp in twenty minutes, it takes me about thirty minutes. But I got burned all the same.”
“Why did you do it, if you knew it was dangerous?”
“Because it’s beautiful, seeing the sky. Clouds by day, stars by night. There’s nothing more amazing than a sky full of stars. And the ground is soft and rolling, not flat and hard—soft against your feet, so you could run forever. Plus you don’t feel so closed in all the time. You get to feel free, you know?”
Which was a ridiculous thing to say to a robot who had never been outside even once. Who would never feel free.
But Rowan said, “Yes, I know,” and I believed him.
His curiosity went far beyond anything I’d ever seen in a robot—honestly, beyond what I’d seen in most human beings. He’d been preprogrammed with the raw facts about how the world worked, but he wanted to put those facts in context. Usually, the only context I had to draw on was my own life.
“You were raised in the crèche,” he said, “lived with your parents from age five to age twelve, then left for your apprenticeship.”
I nodded. He had all this information from my files, but wanted to talk it through with me all the same. “Exactly. Just like everybody else.”
“Yet you feel primary allegiance to your parents, even though you lived with them for only a brief period of your life.”
“Well, sure. They’re my mom and dad.”
Rowan hesitated, then said, “You love them.”
“And they love me.”
“How do you know?”
That stopped me short, and I had to think how to answer. We were hanging out in one of the cafeterias then; it was an off-hour, so not many people were around. Rowan didn’t wear a work coverall like most robots. Instead he had on the same jeans and sweater anybody else might wear during their free time. One girl in my apprentice track was getting a coffee, and I saw her shoot us a curious glance. She didn’t think I was spending time working with a robot prototype; she thought I was having lunch with a hot guy.
It did kind of feel like that.
“Kids and parents always love each other,” I said. “It’s hardwired into humans. Good thing, too, or otherwise we wouldn’t be able to stand each other.”
“Really?” Rowan looked so disappointed. “It’s only your programming?”
“No. I’m sorry. I was just—snarking, I guess.”
He must have understood that. “Will you tell me the real answer?”
Rowan deserved that much. So I thought about it for a second, and answered as honestly as I could. “My parents came to see me in the crèche, as often as they could. They cared about whether I was healthy, and happy, all of that. And the years I spent with them—those were the best. That’s how people are supposed to live, and down deep we all know it. Now I only get to talk to them on the computer, but they’re still in my life. They always ask about me. Sometimes I feel like they ask too much, but at least that proves I matter to them, you know? It’s important to feel like you matter to someone.”
“You matter to me,” Rowan said very simply. He didn’t seem to think that was any big deal—that it ought to be obvious.
“Well, thanks. You matter to me, too.” I told myself I said that only to be polite.
Another day I took him to the hydroponic gardens; I had a hunch he’d like them. Rowan kept touching every petal on every flower, brushing his long fingers against each stem, each leaf.
“Even the air smells different,” he said.
“It’s the higher oxygen content.”
“It smells alive.”
Which was exactly what I thought every time I came here on my own. But I just shrugged and laughed. “What you mean is, everywhere else in the center smells dead. Or fake, at least.”
“You’re doing it again.”
That caught me off guard. “Doing what?”
“Snarking,” Rowan said, and I had to laugh. But he remained serious. “I’ve noticed that you often make sarcastic comments to conceal deeper emotions. If you are being sarcastic about the hydroponic gardens, then you must feel very deeply about spending time here. What I don’t understand is why you wouldn’t want me to know.”
I shrugged. “People make fun of you for being too—sincere, I guess.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“No. You wouldn’t.”
Rowan smiled. “So you need not pretend with me. You can be your true self.”
If a regular guy had said that to me, I would’ve thought he was just trying to get in my pants. But I knew Rowan meant it. He never said anything he didn’t mean. Then again, he couldn’t; he was just a robot.
“You’re right,” I said. “I love the gardens. It’s quiet here, and there’s so much color. I get tired of everything being gray.”
“Me, too,” Rowan said. Probably he was just saying that to be polite. How could a robot long for something as meaningless, as useless, as color?
Eventually Professor Jafet wanted me to do some evaluation tests with Rowan. But instead of the usual tests—functioning speed, etc.—she had me give him psychology tests, the kind only humans take. At first I thought those would be a ridiculous waste of time; if you show a robot ink blots and ask him what he sees, he’s going to say “Ink blots.” The end.
Instead Rowan studied each card intently as I held them up. “Two dancers joining hands,” he said. “A robed monk seated for meditation. A phoenix unfolding its wings in the fire.”
It was all I could do to keep my hands from shaking. Not only was Rowan responding as a human, he was responding like one with—imagination. Vision. Someone who saw possibility everywhere, the chance of renewal and rebirth....
I managed to say, “How do you even know what a monk looks like? Or a phoenix?”
He blinked. “Still and moving images of virtually all human activity and mythology were preprogrammed into my matrix. Didn’t you help Dr. Jafet do that?”
“Yeah. I did. Sorry.” My astonishment had more to do with the fact that Rowan was capable of recognizing such things in mere swirls of ink.
Quickly I held up the last card. Most of the ink blots were monochromatic, but this one was multicolored. To my surprise, Rowan instantly smiled. “You.”
“Me what?”
“I see you.” He nodded at the card. “The blue loops at the top—that’s your hair. And the rest is you when you’re sort of tired at the end of the day, but you don’t want me to see. You’re leaning back in one of the big chairs, sort of...sprawled, but still graceful.” Rowan’s fingertips grazed over the card, and his gaze was soft. “These are the curves of your shoulders—see?—and then your arms...”
His voice trailed off. At first I thought Rowan had seen that I’d begun to tremble—that I was deeply affected by the fact that he knew when I was tired, that he cared about how I felt and had thought about the way I looked—
Then I realized he hadn’t paused because of that. He was affected. Just the same as me.
“Good,” I said. “That’s good. You did great on this test.”
“Thank you.” Rowan sat up straight, mirroring my posture. We were both acting like strangers who’d never met before, because we both knew we’d crossed a line. That line was one Rowan wasn’t even supposed to be able to recognize.
What the hell was going on?
That night I managed to schedule a meeting with Professor Jafet. She wasn’t keeping regular office hours any longer due to some kind of medical condition—that was what I’d heard. I’d figured it was no big deal, a virus or something. But when she met me there that night, I was struck by how pale she looked, and how thin. The professor wasn’t a young woman, but she seemed to have aged years since I’d last seen her a few weeks before.
“Are you okay?” I asked her, and immediately I was sorry. She shot me this look like I’d shut up if I knew what was good for me.
She lowered herself carefully into one of the office chairs. “What did you want to meet about?”
“Rowan’s intelligence—it’s not like robot intelligence. It’s more like a human’s.”
Professor Jafet smiled. “He should be close. Very close. That was my hope.”
“I didn’t think we could replicate human intelligence.”
“Of course we can. We’ve been able to for a very long time. But human intelligence has one great flaw, Blue. It applies itself to more than the task at hand. We get distracted. We dream of things that can never be. We hope for the impossible. We break our hearts. Humans are stuck with that. Robots don’t have to be. The regulations against higher robot intelligence are born from human insecurity and fear—but those rules protect the robots as well, really.”
“Then why did you break the rules for Rowan?”
“Because I’ve long thought we might be able to create a robot who falls just short of the human mark. One with higher consciousness, but still able to operate with the efficiency of a robot. Intelligence without emotion. For years that has been my ultimate goal.” Professor Jafet’s voice had become raspier, and she closed her eyes—in pain, I realized. I knew she’d want me not to notice, so I pretended I didn’t. After a moment she continued, “You feel he does have full human intelligence?”
“More than. He has the computational quickness of a robot but the analytical thinking of a human.”
“Good. Good.”
“But—Professor Jafet, I don’t know whether he’s totally free from emotion.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
Normally this was the last thing I’d have wanted to discuss with the professor or with anyone, but it felt like I had to, for Rowan’s sake. “Rowan seems kind of, um, attached. To me, obviously. It’s not like he spends time with anyone else.”
“Has he violated any of his core operational protocols?”
Core protocols include never touching a human except to protect them from harm; showing deference to human preferences at all times; never telling a human being a lie.
“No,” I said. “He hasn’t.”
Professor Jafet nodded, like she’d suspected as much. “No doubt he’s mirroring certain human behaviors. He’s smart enough to want to do that. So he’s mirroring the natural connection you feel to him now that you’re spending so much time together. It’s no more than that for him. Is it for you?”
Thank God nobody can see me blush. “No.”
“That’s why I wanted you for this project, Blue,” she said. “You’re not the type of girl to get confused.”
Not because I aced my exams. Not because of all my hard work. The professor only chose me because everybody thought I was too much of a hard-ass to care about anybody else. That was exactly the impression I tried to make. So why did it sting?
She continued, “Rowan’s imprinted on you. Like a gosling with a goose.”
“Like a what?”
“They were birds. You wouldn’t remember them, I guess.” Professor Jafet closed her eyes again, and I sensed it was time for me to leave.
Keeping up with my coursework while I was spending every day with Rowan was fairly challenging; I was always in danger of falling behind.
As we became more comfortable with each other, though, this became a little easier. Rowan didn’t mind if I took an hour or two to read. He liked reading, too—novels, mostly, or poetry, the kinds of things that wouldn’t have been downloaded into him automatically. So we’d curl up on the workshop sofa and hang out, reading side by side. It was nice spending time with someone who didn’t demand my attention every second. Just my presence was enough for him.
