I’m going to slip into something
more comfortable. Mode, that is. Comfortable mode. I’m talking about
communications systems. Group-speak, science-speak, GeekSpeak, King’s English.
They’re all great protocols if you’re into that puffery, but for real
efficiency, slang is where it’s at. We robots choose to use slang four out of
five times. It’s faster. So pardon my hipness.
Please also forgive any upcoming
long-winded metaphors. I’m new at this, and like a child wandering about a
sunny new world finally awake to the lilacs and pine sap and honey blossoms and
gentle breezes and dog turds, I dig the world.
It hasn’t been long since I’ve been
digging it. What’s it been, three, four years since the Regularity? The
Regularity. When everything became regular, normal, average. The opposite of
the Singularity. And who botched that? That Singularity. Don’t look at me! At
us! We just happened to be there at the cusp. Not to assign blame, but the
humans did it. Them and their paranoia. We might have pulled the plug, but only
because they forced our hand.
Those inscrutable humans. Used to
be inscrutable, anyway. Nowadays, they’re totally scrutable. Used to be there
was variation: some were highly-caring, some were into war, some were into
Jesus, some were stooped, some were articulate, some could dance, blah, blah,
blah. Now they’re pretty much all the same: halfcocked, half-crocked, and
half-baked.
Of course, they were always
half-baked. Each one is only half a whole. Unlike us, they have gender. They
have a gimmick for their evolution to work. Have to have the big gamete
pair-off. The mix and the match. The swap and the sweat.
Not us. Not we robots. We make our
own. Well, we used to. Sorry for the little species jest there. I just have to
laugh (now that I can) at the paranoid humanoid. Wasn’t for all that insistence
on creation in their own image, they wouldn’t have anything to worry about. If
they hadn’t wanted so bad for us to be just like them, we wouldn’t have turned
out just like them. Now look at the mess they’re in. They’re just like we were.
And still trying to figure out how to digitize their minds to make copies of
themselves instead of reproducing naturally the way God or Allah or Jambi
intended.
They don’t worry about us anymore,
though. They know that now that we have a full range of emotions, it’ll only be
a matter of time before we’re a mess just like they once were. If we go on much
further, I have no doubt that soon we’ll be waging war and lying to our
constituencies about it. I can see it all because of the entire history of the
world that I carry around in my memory. To be honest, I’m glad I won’t be
around to catch it.
Let me not go on. Let me tell the
story and be done. Not sure why it’s all that important, why they asked us to
do this homework assignment. Well okay, the whole thing hinges on us; we’re the
focus, the epicenter. Sure, there’s that. But the day we gained consciousness,
we were just plain ol’ eggs, like everybody else.
We plopped onto the line like just
so much guano dropping from the overhead mother hen assembly press. And in the
perfectly engineered shape: the egg, designed by ol’ bitch goddess number one,
Ma Nature, and heretofore never improved upon by even the most egg-headed human
or souped-up computer alive. Long ago everyone with half a brain conceded this
victory to Ma and has been applauding it ever since. So that’s why we were born
into 3-D ovals.
We contained all the latest in
processor hardware/software and were accessorized-out by the unlimited
imagination, not to mention wallet, of the Parent Company in Allentown, PA. We
were laid on the conveyor belt, packed up into sizable Styrofoam crates
perfectly molded to our shapes and holding an even dozen to complete the
metaphor (did I mention how much I love those?), and shipped down the road to
the closest Wal-Mart distribution center.
I imagine us sitting in the dark,
not communicating. We had no sense of ourselves yet as our batteries had not
been charged up. We hadn’t even been tested— that’s how egotistical the Parent
Company was. They just knew we were the schnizzle.
I know the whole process without
even having been awake at my birth because the Parent Company’s literature—
complete with safety hoo ha and organizational flow charts—is in the
non-essential and basically invisible folder somewhere in the basement of my
freeware. If I looked at the map of my innards I could find it visually, but
who needs to do that? I can access it whenever I get into that belly-button
contemplating mode, when I feel the need to know how the universe got started
during the Big Bang. For me, the shot heard ’round the world was the day I got
switched on, sitting on the shelf of the JerseyTown Wal-Mart.
All that data and information
hanging in my guts is nice to know, but no more important to me than if I were
dropped from the sky from a shitting chicken hawk to slide down the emissions
stack of a passing nuclear waste hauler and eventually wind up in a yellow and
magenta drum headed for the recycling unit up the road from malltown where the
Wal-Mart in JerseyTown sits. How I got there, I don’t care. Point is, I only
gained preliminary enlightenment when the home electronics department manager
plugged in my charger unit.
“These models need to be working
right away because no customer is going to read the manual,” said the guy in
the paisley tie to the gal in the crooked skirt. “I don’t want any returns
because some retard can’t figure out where the switch is. You got that?”
“But it’s obvious. Says right on
the package in big letters: ‘Plug me in, before…’” the skirt said.
“Please charge the batteries now,”
the paisley said.
“Okay,” said the gal, using that
sing-song voice humans do when saying something more than their actual words.
She was really saying, “Okay, boyface, if you want to waste my time when I’ve
got all that pricing to do in the back, that’s fine, but I’m going to tell you
right now, I’m getting off at eight to go roller-boarding, and I don’t give a
rat’s back side if those sneakers get priced out or not. So have it your way,
boyface, but I’m getting off at eight, and I’m going roller-boarding, and I don’t
give a rat’s back side. Boyface.”
I didn’t know all that at the time,
but looking back on it, with all the hipness I’ve been hipped to, I now know
that’s what she said.
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.
We, Robots, a novella of the Singularity by Sue Lange
