Angelina grew up fast. At four
she’d already pretty much been socialized, having had scheduled play dates with
various neighboring kids for a year. She was precocious, naturally bossy, and
some would say a bully. She tolerated me, but more often than not, found me a
drag, something cramping her style, as if she were already a teenager with boys
hanging around.
On the eve of her graduation into
institutionalized life, i.e., kindergarten, she tried to talk Chit into letting
her ditch me.
“Why does Avey have to come with me
to school?” she asked.
“Because otherwise you’ll get
picked up by a pedophile, taken into the woods, and cut into a million pieces,”
Chit answered.
“Uh uh!” Angelina went crying out
of the room in search of Dal. Chit then instructed me in child protection.
“Avey, please be aware of
conveyances following you slowly along. Do not deposit Angelina until you are
at the front door of the school. Did you download directions?”
“Yes,” I answered, squarely. “They
have been retrieved and stored.”
“You have our pager connections in
case of a problem?”
“Yes, it is stored in quick
memory.”
“I see that on your readout. The
school is aware of your contact coordinates?”
“Yes, I linked with their mainframe
last week. I shared my coordinates, synched to their time unit, and retrieved
Angelina’s morning schedule. She will not be late.”
“Are you caught up on your PMs?”
“My hydro fluids were changed
yesterday. My joints were greased. Hoses and o-rings checked and changed as
needed. Solar panels rotated, sockets cleaned, and chips dusted. My emergency
flares have been refilled. I’ll recharge my batteries this evening. I replaced
the emergency granola bar that Angelina keeps eating.”
“She’ll probably eat it on the way
to school tomorrow.”
“I hid it.”
“Where?”
“You’re looking at it.”
“Wow! Good camouflage. Your mag
lite is working?”
I opened the flap in back,
extracted the flashlight and switched it on. Once she was satisfied, I returned
it to the glove box.
“If I had to I could change a
tire,” I said. You’d think I’d had a sense of humor. Of course I didn’t yet.
“What’s a tire?” Chit asked.
“An artifact from when conveyances
had tires. It’s those circular objects the retrofit automobiles sit on.” You
see how square I actually was.
“Oh,” Chit said and then gave a
quick laugh in the manner that human domestics do when they need to respond in
ways that they don’t quite buy into. In other words, it was fake, designed to
let me know that she appreciated the joke. As if I had really said something
funny.
So off we went to school the next
morning. There were no incidents in spite of the thick crack traffic on most
corners of Dal and Chit’s neighborhood. The burnt out buildings with no panes
in the windows, some with mattresses hanging half-in, half-out or old
water-stained curtains in Jetsons motifs left on a single nail and so flapping
in the breeze, housed shops with three balls on the first floor. Tear gas cans
rolled in the streets, and rabid dogs came gruffing up out of the roiling sewer
streams. The aforementioned pedophiles standing with their hands in their
pockets, watched Angelina and the other tykes on their merry way.
Nothing happened to any of the pink
and shiny munchkins levitating to school on the backs of government subsidized
AV-1s such as myself, however. The kiddies blithely moved along. Purple packs
carrying lunches and Barbie Dolls rested stoutly on their little backs. They
eyed each other curiously, staring as only children can, as they began negotiating
their place in the pecking order. Once out in the neighborhood milieu and
despite having been warned about monsters that would cut them into thousands of
pieces to be fed to the birds, they had eyes only for their own kind. They
worked hard to find friends amongst potential foes.
When we got to the door, Angelina
seemed reluctant to let me go. She clung to my end extender, refusing to let it
retract.
“Come in with me,” she pleaded.
“I am programmed to deposit you at
the 131 Gard Street entrance portal. The locking devices on the school doors
prevent unlicensed robots from entering. I am unlicensed. I have been
instructed to levitate to the roof and wait there for your exit at 12:15. We
shall return to the domicile of your parents at that time.”
She bawled through my entire
speech, uninterested in the particulars and knowing that it only meant one
thing: she was on her own in the terrifying first day of school. A human
domestic hired for the purpose of easing separation anxiety in the
four-year-olds retrieved Angelina. She cooed at the crying child, and despite
being kicked and having her hair pulled, she turned to me, smiled, and thanked
me. As if that mattered.
I levitated up to the roof and
waited there with the 34 other AV-1s. At 12:15 we floated down. The front
school doors flew open, and out ran 35 curly-headed, shiny-faced,
brown-skinned, pink-garmented, four-year-olds. They screamed, laughed, chased,
sang, held hands, ran in circles, spit wads of paper, threw nerf balls, and
avoided their AV-1s like teenagers just discovering cigarettes and needing to
hide from Mom.
One by one, we separated out,
nabbed our charges, and headed for our respective homes.
“Avey, Avey!” Angelina squealed.
“You can’t believe how much fun I had. We had cookies and played Numbkers and I
hit Brenda and made her cry.” I had been programmed for bully detection and
correction. Hitting other children counts as bully behavior, but I didn’t have
enough information from that statement to form a proper response. Ascertaining
what response to give Angelina took most of the trip home.
“Why did you hit Brenda?” I asked.
“Because she lifted her dress at
me.”
“Did that hurt you?”
Angelina laughed. “No, how could it
hurt me?”
“Why did you hit her if it did not
hurt you?”
“Because it was naughty!”
“Why was it naughty?”
“She’s not supposed to lift her
dress at people.”
“Did your instructor tell her not
to lift her dress at people?”
“What?”
“Did your instructor tell her not
to lift her dress at people?”
“What is ‘urine strucktoar’?”
“Your teacher.”
“Oh, my teacher?”
“Did your teacher tell her not to
lift her dress at people?”
“No, she didn’t see it.”
“Then how do you know she’s not
supposed to lift her dress at people?”
“Everyone knows that.”
“How do you know that?”
“Mommy told me.”
“I mean, how do you know that
everyone knows that?”
Angelina laughed. She had no idea
how everyone knew that.
“Because,” she said long and drawn
out, thinking of an answer. “Because I hit her.”
So now I knew it was bullying
behavior, but I had lost the connection. I couldn’t find the logic and thus
didn’t know the correct correcting response. I used default mode as per
protocol.
“How can you have any pudding if
you don’t eat your meat?”
It was the best that I could do.
Angelina did not notice the deficiency. Ever ready to eat her pudding she had
an answer.
“Well,” she said, drawing it out
again. “If the meat is poi, poisdend, you could feed it to the dog and then the
dog would eat and, and then the snot would come out of its mouse and then he
would die, and, and then you could eat all your pudding because the dog is
dead.”
Thankfully we had made it to Dal
and Chit’s apartment building by then, and Angelina raced up the stairs on her
own, completely ignoring the drunk in the corner, the broken glass on the
landing, the crying baby on floor four—all items that would have taken hours of
her attention any other day, but were ignored today so she could fly in to tell
Mommy and Daddy of her adventures at morning school.
oOo
An ebook version (pdf, mobi, lit, lrf,html) of We, Robots is available from Book View Cafe.
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.
