vN (38 page)

  Amy knelt. She gave him the look, the one that went right through him, straight down to the molecular level, right to where all his priorities were written. "Do you want to?"

  He nodded. "Oh yeah. Real bad."

  Her lips did that funny thing that they did when she wasn't sure whether to be proud or embarrassed. "I thought you wanted…" She nodded over her shoulder. "You know:
them
. Humans."

  He forced himself to look at the lights hovering in the middle distance. He thought of ports and cities and people, of laughter and coughing and off-key singing. He thought about the same thing, over and over, the same conversations, the same surrender. He thought about all of his boys sleeping in the same house, on real beds under a real roof in the shadow of trees so hard no saw could slice them.

  "I'm tired of loving humans, Amy," he said. "I'm so fucking
tired
of loving them, because I know how it's going to end before it even starts, but I start it anyway because that's how I'm built."

  Amy sat back on her knees. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but he could swear the tree shifted a little to give her more shadow and better hide her face. "You mean you've finally forgiven me?"

  He leaned forward. "For what?"

  "For letting Portia win."

  Amy's eyes rose. When they blinked, the first tears he'd seen on her face in a long time rolled free of their lashes. He reached for them automatically, and his fingers threaded through her hair. He had been here, before: another night, another sandbox, watching her level cities before building new ones, the emotions (so human and so real they twisted him, even then) rendered perfectly on her face. Javier could do now what he wanted to do then. He pulled her to him and kissed her. She was new at it, uncertain at first, but she followed his lips when he rested against the tree and cuddled into him like she'd been doing it all her life. All her hunger came with her, and he smiled through the kiss as he remembered his fascination with her lips and her teeth, after that first bite that bonded them. He had taken a long time in making his choice. Then again, it was the first choice that was truly his to make.

  "There's nothing to forgive," he said, when Amy paused to look at him.

  The tears returned. Other vN had a crying jag that came as a plug-in, but Amy had all the little fits and starts and snags of an organic woman. He'd heard these tears outside Sarton's office. Then as now, he felt a deep and persistent motive to stop them. Strange, how she kept opening underutilized programming in him.

  "You're not supposed to cry when I kiss you," he said. "I mean, unless I'm really fucking this up."

  "You're not."

  He set his chin on her head. "What were you working on, before?"

  She pulled away, smiled, and extended a hand over the skin of the island. With one finger, she sketched a face. It was simple and fat. When her hand rose, the face popped out into three dimensions, solid and real and deeply familiar. He knew this face. At least, he knew the older version. He looked at her.

  "Will she have your eyes, or mine?"

  Amy beamed. "I'm not sure. I'm not finished, yet."

 
 

 
 

 

 

 

Madeline Ashby in conversation with Charlie Jane Anders

 
 
What does it mean to grow up robotic?

I think there's a lot about growing up that's already pretty robotic. One of the themes the book takes up is parentingas-programming, even when that programming is the unwitting kind that leaves in a lot of bugs. For example: when I was growing up, I watched my mother apply lipstick in the rearview mirror before we went anywhere. "I have to put my lipstick on so I don't scare anybody," she'd say. "My mother used to say that, you know." Well, now I'm the one who says it, and I rarely leave the house without something on my lips. It's nothing major, but I think this little Lamarckian meme of my grandmother's has proved profitable for the lip gloss people.

  The robots in this book are synthetic organisms that come with a bunch of possible optimizations, and they're fatally allergic to hurting humans. So that means eating different food from the other organic kids in class, and watching different media, and so on. It also means you can't really fight back when a boy chases you across the playground at recess and tries to flip up your skirt. Not because he's bigger or faster or stronger than you, but because you'll enter a cascading failure loop should you so much as simulate the outcome. Not that you'd want to fight, anyway. You love humans. Your designers saw to that right quick.

 

How are you tackling the age-old topics of AI and cybernetic identity?

Like a lot of people who have read some of [Donna] Haraway's cyborg theory, I think the mix of dread and desire surrounding AI has to do even older feelings about reproduction. Asimov's Frankenstein Complex notion isn't just an early version of Mori's Uncanny Valley hypothesis, it's a reasonable extension of the fear that when we create in our own image, we will inevitably re-create the worst parts of ourselves. In other words: "I'm fucked up – therefore my kids will be fucked up, too." When I completed the submission draft of this book, I had just finished the first year of my second Master's – a design degree in strategic foresight. So I had spent months listening to discussions about the iterative process. And I started to realize that a self-replicating species of machine wouldn't have the usual fears about its offspring repeating its signature mistakes, nor would it have that uncanny response to copying. Machines like that could consider their iterations as prototypes, and nothing more. Stephen King has a famous adage about killing your darlings, and they could do that – literally – without a flood of oxytocin or normative culture telling them different.

  On the other hand, humans in relationships with machines tend to anthropomorphize them. And the greater the resemblance, the more intense the bond. So for humanoids I suspected that bond would be strong enough for your love to make your robot real, or at least real enough, sort of like in
The Velveteen Rabbit
. Because thinking of yourself as a robot is really just another identity framework: if you think you're a person, and everyone treats you like one, you'll probably at least act like one. You may have no evidence that you actually are a person like other people, but then again neither does anyone else. We're facing increasing evidence that selfawareness among organic humans is an illusion – so for me the idea of synthetic people pining away for a spark of humanity was a little dull. I wanted a story where Pinocchio slowly realized that becoming a real little boy wasn't so terribly special, after all.

 

I was introduced to the editors of Angry Robot by the wonderfully sweet and talented Jetse de Vries, while at Montréal Worldcon. Jetse edited the
Shine
anthology, wherein my story "Ishin" is the closer. When he asked what I was working on, I told him I was at work on a novel about the dynastic feuds between self-replicating cannibalistic humanoids with a built-in kink for humans. "Are you ready to pitch your book?" he asked. "Well... I mean, I guess I–" "ARE YOU READY TO PITCH?" "SIR, YES SIR!" Whereupon he pulled out a chair for me, told the editors how much he had enjoyed my story, and we had a nice long chat while I nervously clutched a Moxyland plush.

  It took me longer than expected to finish the book, but my agent Monica Pacheco was encouraging and so were my friends – many of whom are also in my workshop, the Cecil Street Irregulars. They read multiple drafts. I also showed partials to people on a writer's retreat to Gibraltar Point, on Lake Ontario. So I was really lucky to have some sharp, awardwinning sets of eyes on the book from the very beginning. I was also lucky to have the support of my husband at the time. He was one of the first people to really believe in the project and I remain humbly grateful for that. But even so, the book was rejected by a bunch of different publishers, and I still had to re-write the whole opening of the submission draft before the book became sale-able. David Nickle was invaluable for that – we watched
A History of Violence
together and suddenly everything clicked. Normally he gives me the end of all my stories, and this time he helped me see a new beginning. In short: it was an iterative process.

ANGRY ROBOT
 

A member of the Osprey Group

 

Lace Market House,
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Nottingham,
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No three rules

 

An Angry Robot paperback original 2012

1

 

Copyright © Madeline Ashby 2012

 

Madeline Ashby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

 

ISBN: 978 0 85766 261 3

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85766-263-7

 

Cover Artist: Martin Bland. 

Set in Meridien by THL Design.

 

Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

 

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.