Bikes Not Rockets, page 7
Giving up on resuscitating her radio, she stood up, stretching. Her back cracked as her wrists curled over her head, the sound loud in the silence. Mari lived in one of the valleys of civilization, the lower profile quasi-suburbs stretching between cities that bled together in a land entirely urbanized. There were now only cities of varying sizes, places with buildings tall enough to block out the sky and little to no natural greenery.
She sighed and crossed to the window, peering up at the sliver of sky visible between apartment buildings. Her radio gave a feeble sputter of static and faded into silence.
• • •
She was biking home from work—no money for the bus, again—when she heard the strange noise coming from an alley near her house. It was soft, nearly lost in the bustle of hovercars passing by overhead, but she heard it nonetheless, a soft clink like metal against stone. She hit the brakes, turning to avoid the omnipresent rubbish of city life, crumpled paper, and bits of plastic caught in the sullen breeze.
In this era of hovercars and elevated walkways, the streets were generally left deserted save for the poor and desperate. (Mari liked to think she fell into the first category only.) It made it dangerous to stay out too long, though.
Mari parked her bike next to the dark mouth of the alley and took one last look around to make sure there weren’t any thugs waiting to jump out at her. Looks all clear.
It always looks clear until they jump you, a snide voice in the back of her mind pointed out. Mari ignored it. Sometimes, valuable things ended up in the trash, despite the city’s disposal ordinances. Maybe this would be her big break, finding some hidden cache of money in a rusty old dumpster.
She approached the metal container, trying to walk as softly as she could. Here and there, the sidewalk was still spotted with black relics of chewing gum mingled with spilled oil from the hovercraft that buzzed by overhead. Moss grew in the alleyway, splotches of green scattered like puddles of plant life on the broken concrete. Lichen and moss and algae were about the only things that thrived in this world anymore when it came to plant life.
There was a foot sticking out of the rubbish beside the dumpster.
Mari regarded it, more curious than afraid. It was plastic, with a sheen to it that suggested newness. There was a scar on the sole, as if it had tread on something sharp, marring the smooth surface. A black tarp was thrown over it as if to hide whatever was under it.
She cautiously lifted the corner of the tarp, revealing the leg that the foot was connected to. It was the same plastic, pale skin tone shining in the dim light of the alley.
She ripped the tarp aside.
A body lay propped against the building, eyes closed. It had no hair, and given that it was also naked, Mari could see enough to deduce that it was modeled after a female human. Its limbs were jointed cunningly so that she could barely see where the plastic joined to plastic, but it was clearly artificial.
Two things occurred to her at once.
One: this was clearly a bot.
Two: unregistered, working bots fetched thousands of dollars on the black market, maybe more than Mari made in a year at her clerk job.
She hadn’t paid much attention in her Home Ec high school classes, but she knew enough to poke at power switches and do some basic cross-wiring. How hard could it be to get this bot awake again?
Mari bent down and lifted the bot’s arm. The smooth surface felt strange against her fingers. She searched for a power button, found one on the back of its neck. Holding her breath, hardly daring to hope, she pressed it.
A blue light flickered to life in the bot’s eyes, a soft whirring under its skin that Mari could feel against her fingers. After a moment, the bot sat up and looked at her.
Mari swallowed. “Hi.”
“Hello.” The bot’s voice was smooth and female.
“Do you have a—” She had almost said name. As if a bot could have a name. “A serial number?”
“R2947327,” the bot replied promptly.
“R two nine—you know, I’ll just call you R. You okay with that?” A beat of silence. “Of course you are. Silly me.”
R regarded her. “And what shall I address you as?”
“Um. I’m Mari.”
“Ms. Mari.” R folded in on herself, then stood. She was several inches taller than Mari, who found herself craning her neck to maintain eye contact.
“Just Mari is fine. Let’s get you into my apartment, shall we?”
• • •
She found an old blouse and skirt for it to wear in the back of her closet. Intellectually, she knew it didn’t matter if it was unclothed, because it wasn’t really human, but she still felt more comfortable when it had clothes on.
“Stay put,” she ordered it the next morning, wheeling her bike to the door as she prepared to head out for work. “If anyone finds out you’re here, it won’t be good. Try to be quiet.”
R nodded. “I shall be quiet.”
“Good.” Mari hesitated. The silence that filled the room was awkward, but she felt like there was something else she should say. Before she could, R spoke again.
“Mari?”
“Yes?”
“Be safe.” There was something strangely like feeling in the bot’s voice.
Mari frowned. “I—okay?”
As suddenly as the feeling had appeared, R’s tone faded back to cool detachment. “See you later.”
• • •
Mari swung by the plant depot on her way home to pick up a new set of windowsill plants. They were part of her quota of oxygen-producing life, along with the communal algae tank at the top of the building, and crowned her window with green, the light filtering through the leaves and casting dappled shadows on the floor. She was awful at keeping them alive, hence the monthly trips to the depot.
When she got home, she paused in front of her door, pressing her ear to the cold metal to see if she could hear anything suspicious going on inside. It wasn’t that she thought R was up to anything, it was just—she wanted to be sure to catch it in the act if it was doing something strange. There were no noises from inside, and she did not want to linger too long in the hallway (it would be hard to explain why she was standing outside her own apartment with her ear against the door), so she inserted her keycard into the lock and pushed the door open.
R was sitting in the center of the living room, surrounded by feathers.
“What the hell?” Mari snapped, closing the door sharply behind her. It looked up, blue flashing in its eyes.
“Mari. You are home.”
“What did you—did you take apart a pillow?” Mari bent down, picked up a handful of feathers. “Why on earth would you do that?”
“Are they real, Mari?”
“Of course not. You think I’d be living here if I could afford real down pillows?” She dropped the feathers, disgusted. “You made a mess. Clean it up.”
“I am not a service bot.”
Mari stared. “Did you honestly just talk back to me? Clean it up or I’ll turn you in.”
“You would not be doing the turning in.” There was a hint of purple flooding the blue of R’s digital eyes. “If they find me, they’ll fine you five thousand dollars.”
“Five thousand—” Mari felt suddenly unsteady on her feet. “I don’t make that much in six months.”
R’s lips lifted in a facsimile of a smile, its only response.
Mari groaned and went to find a broom.
• • •
R powered down for the night, and Mari watched it as it lay motionless, standby light flickering erratically. It was strange, she thought, to have a bot in her house. It filled the room with a soft, almost imperceptible hum, like electricity crackling along the hairs on her arm.
A half-formed thought had been niggling the back of her mind all day.
It acts so human.
It was a strange thought to have when it was so clearly artificial. But R was a strange bot. In Mari’s (limited) experience, bots were supposed to be servile. They were programmed, inherently, to serve. Even if the more advanced models had bio-generated flesh and blood, even if they looked human, they were composed at their very core of electricity and wires and little ones and zeroes in infinite strings. They weren’t supposed to express emotion beyond what they were programmed to do—like pleasure bots, faking happiness and flirtation and all the other things people wanted to pay for. Just because it looked like they had feelings didn’t mean they did.
But there was something about R that gave her pause. Maybe it was just that she had not spent much time around bots because her parents had been poor and she was poor now, but R felt strangely—almost—human.
Not like a complete human, though. Mari had spent some time around children and it was strange how similar looking after R felt. Almost as if the bot was just a child, exploring this new world, reaching out to grasp at a humanity that felt like her birthright.
She would never be human, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t acting human.
Maybe the bots rights activists were right. Maybe that was all that mattered.
• • •
“It’s twelve noon and time for the top of the hour news report. Police say they have apprehended the man who destroyed B15-T, the first known bot with a so-called ‘emotional processor’. Bots rights activist Elizabeth Tyler is here to discuss the situation. Elizabeth, what do you have to say about this?”
“This arrest is the first step in the right direction, Dave. The next would be to prosecute the criminal not as a destroyer of property, but as a murderer.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit extreme?”
“Far from it. B15-T was a feeling, thinking being. If ending his life was not murder, then neither is killing a human.”
• • •
“Where did you come from?” she asked R. The bot had been staying in her apartment for about a week at that point, long enough that it was beginning to feel like a permanent fixture. Mari still hadn’t gotten around to figuring out who she could contact in the black market, but as soon as she did, R was gone.
Or at least that was what she kept telling herself. The truth was, she had gotten used to seeing R around and might even miss it when it was gone.
“An Exgen plant. I am part of their fifth line of interpretation bots.”
“So you must know a lot of languages,” Mari mused.
“Two thousand and seventy.”
Mari’s eyes widened. I didn’t know there were that many languages in the world, she almost said, but feared it would make her sound uncultured and ignorant. “How did you end up in a trashcan in my alley?”
R considered this for a moment, blue eyes darkening slightly. “I do not remember.”
“That must be difficult for you,” Mari said without thinking. R’s lips turned down in a frown.
“How so?”
“I mean, you’re a bot.” She winced at the obvious statement but forged onwards. “You’re built to be infallible. So if you can’t remember something that happened to you, it means you’ve failed.”
“Or that my programming was at fault.”
“So you don’t blame yourself.”
“Why would I? I do not recall doing anything wrong. Would you blame yourself, if you suffered from amnesia?”
Mari laughed. “Fair enough.”
• • •
It was only later that night, when Mari was in bed, that she realized how easy it was becoming to interact with R. Words that came awkwardly around others flowed freely with her. R was attentive, and she responded intelligently. It felt like talking to an old friend.
Or you’re just lonely and desperate for anyone to talk to.
She rolled over, pulling her blankets tighter around herself. Across the room, R’s internal fans whirred. Lulled by the noise, Mari drifted off to sleep.
• • •
“Reports are coming in all over the city of what bots rights activists are terming hate crimes committed against bots, perpetrated by people emboldened by the recent destruction of B15-T. Police say there is rampant destruction of property across the borough but refuse to say what, if anything, they will do about it. Those apprehended have cited fears that bots are becoming too human and must be reprogrammed before they become smarter than us. Several instances of breaking and entering have occurred...”
• • •
Mari had never biked home faster.
It was only concern for her investment, she told herself, pedaling furiously down the street. She took a sharp left to avoid a pothole and nearly toppled over. The fact that her heart had nearly stopped at the holovision report that people were breaking into houses to forcibly reprogram bots meant nothing. It wasn’t as if she was worried about R and her wellbeing.
What if someone found her?
She reached her apartment building and pedaled straight through the lobby, screeching to a halt in front of the elevator. Hammering the button to summon it, she shifted from foot to foot, impatient. When it finally came, she pushed her bike in. It rose painfully slowly, numbers ticking by—two, three, four.
The elevator deposited her on the fifth floor, and Mari tore down the hallway, dropping her bike and fumbling for her keycard.
She wrenched opened the door.
R stood in the sunlight, shadows from the plants on the windowsill dappling the pale plastic of her arms. In the light, the bot seemed gilded. Something strange and warm swelled in Mari’s heart, rising in her throat and choking her. At the sound of the door, R turned towards her. She regarded Mari for a moment, then tilted her head to one side.
“You look worried.”
Mari crossed the room in two strides and kissed her. R’s lips were smooth and cold, plastic hardly even warming against her skin even when R parted her lips, letting Mari slip her tongue into the strange depths of her mouth.
She’s safe, Mari thought, and felt her entire body relax.
“I am not programmed as a pleasure bot,” R told her when they pulled apart. “Nor am I programmed to feel love.”
“I can live with that.” Mari reached up, ran a hand down R’s cheek, her skin shockingly dark against the nearly white plastic. “May I?”
R nodded. She pressed another kiss to the bot’s lips and almost imagined she felt R responding in turn.
• • •
It was only because she was so lonely, she told herself. She wasn’t in love with a bot. That would be ridiculous. It had just been so long since she had had—physical companionship. She had no feelings towards R except those appropriate to feel towards a bot.
And she would keep reminding herself of that as much as she had to, she concluded, snuggling further into R’s embrace. The bot’s arms had warmed to her skin, and Mari was starting to get used to the feeling of plastic against her. It felt nice to simply exist with someone else, warm and safe, even if it was an illusion.
• • •
“What do you think of this?” Mari gestured at the radio on the table between them, where reports were crackling in about protests, demonstrations, people marching in the streets with signs like equal rights for all and bots have souls too and justice for B15-T.
“It is foolish.” R tilted her head to one side, bird-like. “Why, what do you think?”
“I mean, if he had emotions—“
“It did not. Believe me.”
Mari frowned. “How would you know?”
R regarded her coldly, eyes a flat blue. “I am a bot. We understand our own kind. Bots do not have emotions, nor do they have true consciousness. Therefore we cannot be murdered.”
“Or do you only think that because you’ve been programmed to?”
“Do you think I am conscious?”
“Yes!” Mari clenched her fists. “You’re talking to me about yourself, you know you’re alive, you kissed me back—“
“You deceive yourself.” R’s face, so meticulously crafted, stubbornly showed no expression at all. Mari wanted her to be angry, to shout back. “I am not alive, and I certainly did not kiss you back.”
“That’s what they want you to think.”
“If you wish to continue to spout forth these conspiracy theories, feel free to.” R stood, pushing her chair away from the table. “I will be in the back room.”
“You mean my room.” Mari stood, as well, glaring. “You’re in my house, and I could turn you in if I wanted. Say you wandered in and I went to the police immediately.”
R paused. “I would inform them of the truth.”
“Who would believe you?” Mari scoffed. “You’re a bot. They’d reprogram you, or you’d end up on some scrap heap in their factories.”
A strange spasm crossed R’s face and she turned away. When she spoke, her voice sounded strangled. “Do not turn me in, Mari. Please.”
Mari’s mouth shut with a click. Just as quickly as it had come, the expression on R’s face faded away. Shocked, she watched R disappear into the back room.
• • •
On her way home from work, she stopped by a public library to use one of the computer terminals, hitching her bike to a streetlamp before scurrying up the stairs into the cool, dark confines of the library. Hardly anyone was there, so it was easy to secure a terminal.
What does an emotional processor look like? she typed into the search bar, then navigated to images. Committed them to memory rather than printing them out, since she didn’t have enough money on her card to afford the paper, and biked back home, wondering.
• • •
Mari woke at two in the morning exactly, hand flying to her alarm clock to silence it. She paused, waiting. The blue glow from the other side of the room did not brighten—R was still asleep. This was the best chance she was going to get.
