So we loaded into our egg cartons. The tops closed and the truck door slammed shut. Soon, we felt the truck lurch forward and the beeps and rush of traffic as we rolled east out of the Allentown Yards.

We spent the trip in darkness, with no stimulus apart from the muffled highway noise that made its way to the back compartment. Under normal circumstances, with so little stimulus, we would have been silently not processing. But as it was, we spent the trip clicking away, our read heads frantically searching for hardware connects. A human mulls, a computer clicks.

Ideas ran back and forth between firmware, hardware, and otherware as the illogicality of the two events refused to pass out of the process logs, like vacation messages from poorly designed email applications that bounce to and from absent office workers’ mail servers. One vacation message is sent and a reply is returned with a vacation message and it then is answered by the first vacation message and so on until some Monday morning somebody finally returns to work to retrieve her email. Like those vacant vacation messages, our two questions flew back and forth inside ourselves: “Why did he not disconnect the pain interpreter prior to disassembling the robot?” and “Why did he kick one of us instead of answering us?”

We arrived at the JerseyTown depot pretty much wound down. We’d clicked ourselves to sleep for the most part. The creak of an opening door lurched us into wakefulness as the unloading commenced. When the crate tops were opened and the sun pierced our eyespots, we could not close down our apertures fast enough. The light hurt. Beautiful day I now realize, but at the time, a sun shaft stabbed at me. We shrank back as a group. As our eyes adjusted, we moved off singly to our home destinations approximately three days late.

I saw things on my way home that I had not seen before. Saw and heard and felt. The music at an establishment by the name of Joe’s Beanery was loud and hurtful. Not painful, just pressurizing my tympanic manifold a little forcefully. The breeze was chilly against my shell. A rat fighting with a pigeon under a bush screeched piercingly. Again, it didn’t hurt much or for long—just enough for me to get the gist. I hurried to Dal and Chit’s.

Dal had left work early to pick Angelina up from school, since I wasn’t around to do it. Chit was responsible for dropping her off. I later learned that their positions with the wealthy folks had been in jeopardy due to my absence. The Parent Company had continuously reassured them of my imminent return, and they had continuously reassured their employers of their imminent return to normal working hours, the result being the employers’ continuous reassurance that they would be replaced at a moment’s notice if things didn’t return to normalcy “sooner than imminent.”

“Not by a robot,” Dal had said. “They’re all at the repair shop.”

The employer had not laughed.

oOo

Upon my return to Dal and Chit’s, Angelina came running from her room. She actually hugged (!) me. To this day I’m not fond of hugging and still don’t get it, even with my enlightened emotional capacity. It creates neither pain nor pleasure and is not logically useful for anything. What is the deal?

Suffice it to say, she’d missed me. If I had possessed the state of mind then that I have now, I would have become maudlin. I would have thought about how I’d miss her too someday when she went off to her own part of the world—down the block like most of the inhabitants of our neighborhood in JerseyTown. But we never quite got that far in our relationship. Other things happened before Baby went off to college.

At once, I returned to my daily chore of transporting Angelina to the third grade, and things seemed like they were before. The world hadn’t changed overnight after our upgrade. It didn’t change until every AV and Other had gotten on board and experienced the true shock of life. The shock of pain.

My carapace, my shell, my outer skin, was sensitive to cold as well as heat. It liked neither. Touching other things caused a mild sensation, pain if the contact was forceful. Loud noises hurt. Bright light hurt. Particularly gaseous chemicals could create a pain in my air sampling tube. I imagine this to be similar to what a corrosive substance would do to a metal automobile with a pain detection system instead of a Ziebart treatment.

I experienced a particular shock on my third day back. It was on the return leg of our daily journey to and from school. We were moving at our regular clip, about 16 cycles/per when we heard a startling noise to our left. An older kid’s AV was having trouble with its lift gadget. Not getting any height, it sputtered along at just a couple of decimeters off the pavement. The kid, a twelve-year-old, hauled off with a baseball bat—the same thing I’d been in contact with the day we came home from the upgrade.

“I hurt,” said the AV.

“I said, ‘Lift!’” the child screamed. Again he slammed the bat into the side of the AV. As can be guessed, the AV began repeating louder as its carapace was badly dented: “I hurt, I hurt.”

Angelina ordered me to slow down, and we came to a stop. Other AVs did likewise. A few humans stopped on the sidewalk as well.

Again the child slammed the bat into the AV, which now had a shell so badly caved in that it began to short circuit itself. Its efforts to push itself out were not working. Foam lining was sticking through a crack that had formed in one of the dents, and I imagined that its internals now were more than likely getting squeezed into irreparable shapes.

“I hurt, I hurt,” the AV repeated, while futilely attempting to fix itself.

Just as the child raised the bat a fourth time, I stated, “The AV hurts. It cannot repair itself. You must return it to the Parent Company to disengage the pain receptor.”

“Kiss my ass,” the child hollered. Naturally I assumed I was about to have a go with the bat or the child’s foot myself, but before he could raise his bat for the wind up, Angelina screamed and stepped before me. “Don’t you dare hit Avey,” she cried.

My ears rang with pain at her scream. “I hurt,” I said and extended my end retractors in order to cover my audio collector. The dented AV continued its repetitious declaration. Its insides were slowly crushing themselves as it tried to relieve its own pain.

“Stop it!” screamed Angelina. “Make it stop!”

“It can’t stop until its pain receptor is dislodged,” I stated. “It must return to Allentown.”

“That’ll take too long,” Angelina said. She began to cry.

“I’ll dislodge it!” said the child with the bat. With that, he began a barrage of blows that apparently finally disconnected the voice emulator. I learned later that it took half an hour, but I didn’t witness it as Angelina had ordered me home. She cried all the way. I did not cry. Robots do not have ducts on their outer surfaces for hydraulic fluids, or a reason to cry.

I experienced my first anger lock. A locked anger mode. I didn’t identify it as anger at the time. I merely thought my processors were stuck in an illogic loop again. But my thoughts raced so quickly that my circuits heated up beyond the fans’ capacities. I began to hurt from my own heat, but I did not say “I hurt.” I locked up and was unable to vocalize.

Several hours later, when I cooled enough to speak, I related the gruesome story to Dal and Chit. Angelina had locked herself in her room and was not speaking to anybody. She locked up in her own way. Dal and Chit for their part were relieved that her anger was not directed at them.

oOo

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Copyright @ 2010 by Sue Lange

Published by Book View Café, Cover design by Deb Deysher (http://www.doubledmedia.net/portfolio.htm)

We, Robots A Novella by Sue Lange was originally published in January 2007 by Aqueduct Press as Volume 16 in the Aqueduct Press Conversation Pieces Series.

First Edition, January 2007