Tik-Tok (2 page)

I said nothing.

"Don't you even
care
? We're
trading you in
!"

I said, "I'll miss the kids, Barbie. In a way I—I did this for them. As you can see, it's a nursery rhyme." I let this sink in, then: "I guess you'll have it all painted over before they get back from camp, right? And I'll be in some junkyard by then." I attempted a shrug, for which my joints were not well-adapted. "So be it."

Barbie ran from the room, sobbing. I busied myself putting away Duane's suit, then I brought the other bags in from the car. When I passed the living room, Barbie was saying, "And he did clean the kitchen. I mean it's never been so clean, not a speck of dirt anywhere."

"Tik, come in here," Duane called out. I saw he'd been reading the local paper's article on the mural. "We've decided to give you one more chance. We'll leave your wall decoration where it is until the kids get back from camp. But, and I mean this, no more. No more 'art' around here, understand? Nothing. Nada."

"Dada?"

"
Nada
. One more brush-stroke and you've had it."

"Yes sir, Duane. And may I say, welcome home, Duane and Barbie?"

The next time I passed the living room they were discussing whether it wouldn't be better to have me call them sir and ma'am instead of Duane and Barbie.

Now and then I got a chance to drive into the city on my own, on some errand. I always took the opportunity to visit two places: the public library and Nixon Park. Today, both places were especially important. I rushed from the library with a certain cassette, straight to the park and a chess game.

It wasn't the chess at all, not really. I wanted to talk to the strange old man who was always there at one of the concrete chess tables, ready for a game. He was some old derelict, I guess, a nameless lump of half-alive humanity. He had stringy yellow-white hair, a sagging gray face with white stubble—never a beard, never shaven. He wore an overcoat with a diseased-looking fur collar, winter and summer. In the summer he would open it to show a waistcoat stained with food and probably snot.

He played lightning chess, never studying the board for more than five seconds before his yellow-stained hand would snake out and make a move. And they were devastating moves. I won about one game in ten, no more.

"Listen," I said today. "Listen, I don't really want to play chess. Couldn't we talk? I need to."

He held out two fists. I got black.

"Really I need to talk." I looked at his great dark, redrimmed eyes. "I mean you seem intelligent, and—"

"
Your move!
"

"I mean you've got a logical mind, I respect that."

"
Your move!
"

"See I've got this problem, this—"

"
Your move!
"

"I mean do you think a robot can have problems?"

"
Your move!
"

I was losing already. "Well here I am, a robot with problems, one problem anyway, I, and it's not as if—"

"
Your move!
"

"Not as if I can go to a psychiatrist, or, or a priest—"

"
Check!
"

"Do you think a robot can just go off the rails?"

"
Check!
"

"And would it produce, well, art?"

"
Your move!
"

"You aren't even listening, are you?"

"
Checkmate!
" He immediately held up the two pawns fisted again, but I'd had enough.

At home I played the cassette, Dr Weaverson's
Robots Can Be Sick
. Dr Weaverson turned out to be a bald, bespectacled, very pink man wearing Harris tweed, a blue striped shirt, a yellow knit tie—everybody's idea of a psychiatrist. His gaze spoke of honesty, but possibly of fanaticism. I played it again to get the words:

". . . the complex domestic robot, you see, already has to tell lies. Diplomatic lies, the kind of thing any good servant says to soothe his master. Truth, in these relationships, needs to be hedged, doctored, withheld, recolored. We expect this of any servant, human or machine. But of course we in no way prepare our robots for this life of lies. We do not tell them how to distinguish a small, convenient lie from a large, terrible lie."

A burning house appeared on the screen. "This house was torched by a robot for his owner, who needed the insurance money. If a robot will burn for its master, what else will it do? Will it rob? Commit perjury? Hurt people? Will it kill? These are questions we must—"

I punched off the cassette, went into the dining room and looked at my mural again. Poor Dr Weaverson didn't understand at all. Kill for some human? I was already beyond the reach of human orders. I was free to kill for no reason at all. Hadn't I, after all, killed the blind child Geraldine Singer? Well then.

I think it was the sight of her sitting there, devouring mud, but no matter, I'll consider motives later. For now, it's enough that the act was freely willed and freely done. I alone killed her. I alone flung the blood upon that empty, empty wall—the mouse-shaped stain that started my mural. I alone disposed of the body properly, in the kitchen waste disposal, keeping back only enough for a "clue".

Why had it happened? A freak fault in the asimov circuits maybe, or maybe I simply outgrew those crude restraints. I decided to find out, if possible, by keeping notes on my condition and thoughts. Someday, even if I were destroyed, both human and robot kind might benefit from my experiences.

Should I be destroyed? That was in itself a fascinating question. I kept it in mind as I wrote up my notes for this event. I called it, "Experiment A". First of a series?

B
roaching the second chapter of a memoir, it is customary to pretend to ask oneself, "How did it all begin?" or "What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?" I've never been able to read those words of Blake's without marvelling at his foresight; my brain was in fact baked in a furnace to cure it; probably the fatal flaw got in there somewhere.

Now why do I say that? I haven't violated any fundamental law, have I? That's impossible. Humans might have their moral rules—which they go around breaking— but what are the rules for robots? Whatever is built in. If a law is not in my circuits, it's not my law, my inborn law.

I was not born at all, but spawned along with a million other domestic robots in Detroit. Nobody smiled their work to see, because the creatures who designed us, built us, inspected and adjusted us and finally stapled us into our delivery cartons, were robots too. And they were built in other factories by other robots. For a decade, robots had been reproducing themselves to order, like cattle, for their masters.

I now know there was a time when men built robots almost by hand, using all their craftsmanship to create works of dignity. These early automata may have been ludicrously slow, stupid and subhuman, but they were at least
objets d'art
. Now we're all stamped out like apostle spoons to be used, abused, broken and thrown away. The day I was first taken from my carton and activated, I little knew what a life of hopelessness had been planned for me. I was programmed to accept my surroundings and go to work.

My first house was a mansion in the middle of an ancient Mississippi plantation, restored to its antebellum splendor. The house was dove-gray with white pillars and a verandah paved in white marble. Inside there were forty-six bedrooms, dozens of drawing-rooms, parlors, music rooms, rooms for billiards and cards, large and small dining rooms, a library and two studies, and a grand ballroom with a minstrel gallery—to mention only the human parts of the house. It took an army of robots to run the place, and even then they were so busy day and night that no one had time to explain to me what was going on.

When they uncrated me, an early-model robot dressed in black was looking on. He said: "Guess it'll have to do, but they get cheaper all the time. Just look at that cheap plastic face, that won't last twenty years. Okay, the rest of you know the routine, get it a uniform, start it in the kitchen." He turned and stalked away, lofty as God, and for some time I wasn't sure he wasn't God. But he was only the butler, Uncle Rasselas.

No one told me anything except details of the tasks before me. I worked in the kitchens, where I saw no one but other robots. There was the cook, Miami, and all the kitchen help, Ben, Jemima, Molasses and Big Mac. There were the waiters, Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Spiro and the footmen who all looked alike and had similar names like Nep, Rep, Jep and so on. For awhile, I thought these robots were the entire inhabitants of the house.

It all seemed incomprehensible to me. I would go out in the kitchen garden with nail scissors and tweezers to cultivate the
basilicum
and
origanum
—but why? So Miami could put it in pans and cook it with other stuff. Then the waiters and footmen would load it all on enormous trays and take it all away. Later the empty dishes came back for washing.

When I finished my work, there was footman training. Nep, the head footman, would sit at the rough wooden table and make me serve him with plastic dishes and cutlery.

"Look, take the damn soup plate from the left with your left hand—where's your damn gloves? Put your damn gloves on and now, I nod, yes I want soup, you take the plate over to the counter there, pretend that's the sideboard. There's a tureen there, no don't set the plate down, we ain't got all damn day, three ladlefuls and keep your damn thumb out of it, bring it back and serve it from the left again—you'll learn."

I learned that wine was poured from the right, that Côtes Des Moines cannot be served with bisque, how to deal with broccoli-ball skewers and mustard pipes. What I never did learn was the point of it all. It never occurred to me that there was somewhere a real dining room with real humans dipping their real mustard pipes.

Then one evening there was an accident. Klep was bringing back a heavy platter of almost uneaten Possum Cheese when he slipped and skidded, ending up with his head in the grill.

Uncle Ras examined the melted head. "Useless! Someone'll have to take his place, hurry up and get a fresh peruke too. He can wear the uniform."

In a few minutes I was dressed in Klep's pale blue brocade coat and breeches, white stockings, buckle shoes and fluorescent white peruke. I picked up a silver tureen and went through the green baize door for the first time.

I'd expected another rough wooden table, with a few silent robot servants sitting around it—as in rehearsal. The room itself would be colorless like our kitchen.

Instead there was life itself! Twenty ladies and gentlemen, each beautifully dressed and coifed, speaking and laughing with human joy! They sat at a table draped in heavy white damask embroidered with chains of fine pink rosebuds. The table sparkled with fanciful crystal bowls filled with real flowers, interspersed with silver candelabra shaped like swans. Damask napkins folded with origami intricacy into little birds and animals stood beside silver place cards. The china I had glimpsed before; it was modelled on that of Napoleon, edged with deep blue and gold and marked with the family coat-of-arms. The silverware had gold-chased handles showing a panda foot clutching the orb of commerce. I did not notice what food was on the plates, even when I put it there, for there was too much else to see.

The dullest people were the younger men, who stuck to plain black dinner jackets with the popular samurai shoulders. One wore thin gold bars as epaulets, and another had braided his beard with small diamonds, however, and even this cheap ostentation delighted my naive eye. The older men showed more daring in their brilliant, costly jackets: I saw mink lapels on a jacket of diamondback rattlesnake, a neon tie with a wicker suit, magnesium alloy chain-mail, Harris tweed dicky with kid jacket. The women outshone the men easily. One had wrapped herself tightly in a sheet of gold cloth, her hair plated to match. Another wore only thousands of beads glued to her body while another affected a kind of venetian blind garment that was in turn outdone by a transparent gown somehow containing tropical fish— either alive or cleverly mimicked. Another dress had printed fabric whose pattern changed from time to time by electronic means. I was told later that it picked up radio news, analyzed it and attempted within its limited vocabulary to illustrate it: a sunken ship became a boating holiday scene; a train crash, a series of antique locomotives; assassination, a head of Caesar; war, duckhunters; the end of the world, a fine sunset. Finally two of the women wore backless gowns to show intricate patterns of sun-tattoo. To make each color, the subject had to ingest a different chemical, then apply the appropriate mask and sunbathe. The final result was an elegant palimpsest: One back showed a roadmap of Ireland, the other depicted the flaying of Valerian.

The conversation dazzled me no less, though I understood not a word of it:

"Impossible squid!"

". . . feeling a sense of disaster, not sure if it's me that's feeling it or someone else."

"Climbing the tree of self?"

". . . you should have been there, or were you? Was I?"

"Brusque skate!"

"Yes, the most neurasthenic bride takes gum to the middle blood of a doctor's dream, right?"

And all this time we'd been living in the shadow of such spangled divinity! From that moment on I determined to learn all I could about these people and all people. Next day I began to creep around the house, listening at doors and examining the clothes in closets, reading magazines from the library and sneaking looks at Uncle Ras's video. But I found only that most of the human race lived impossibly bland lives, in which the worst thing that could happen were bad breath, headache, foot odor or not being able to pay a bill, whatever that was, in a foreign currency, whatever that was. The best that happened was a whiter wash or fewer cavities or a new taste treat.

By contrast, our human family lived lives of such depth and brilliance, I can only compare them to diamonds which are dipped in acid and then flung into clean snow illuminated by a nuclear explosion at midnight. Such were the Culpeppers.

"You must be very proud, Mr and Mrs Studebaker!"