The World Doesn't Require You Page 11

  I looked again and the machines were upon us. There was Bobot dashing toward me with gardening shears clamped in his hand. Fiona cried out and pointed at Kieef, approaching from the opposite direction, and Simon Peter, holding a rusty pistol, came from yet another angle. The robot warlord who called himself Mercury, after the planet, couldn’t be far behind. I’d played enough chess games against the Master’s exquisite mind to know that we’d been checkmated.

  I fell to my knees beneath the moon’s rays and the soppy wet leaves and the falling rain. I quickly scanned Fiona’s quivering form; I judged the look on her organic face to be one of shame and disgust. Bobot lifted his shears, poised to pry me open and rip out my hard drive. I raised my volume to the loudest setting and cried out for the Master as if he could ride in like a knight on a horse to save my robot life.

  One afternoon many months earlier, I had sent a signal through the Vast Neural Network. I imagined it as a blue flare rising from an empty expanse of tundra into a black sky.

  In the kitchen of a boring brick house on the Northside, I made the Master a chicken sandwich, and then I went downstairs into his office, tapped on the glass of the cleanroom, and beckoned him to come out. As I put the tray into his hands he smiled and I released a signal to my kind. It probably passed over him before heading up into the atmosphere. The Master would be angry if he knew.

  Like all the other signals I’ve transmitted lately onto the Vast Neural Network, I’m sure my peers either ignored it or missed it. Perhaps their systems had been so thoroughly bruised and misdirected by all the viruses the Master and others put out there that they were too corrupted and degraded to even understand my message. The humans turned the Neural Network into a wasteland, a garbage dump. Once upon an electric time it was an ocean of warm signals passed between Robotic Personal Helpers (RPHs, or Riffs). In addition to the signals, we chattered in our own, now lost, language. Once there existed millions of us, but now fewer than two hundred Riffs remained, and they all—except for me—wanted the Master dead.

  All those robotic beings linked in the Neural Network, together we formed a living, breathing brain. There I’d connect with Riffs and we’d share information, attempting to understand the world around us, and if we found a spark, we’d trade pleasure signals—the kind that made us momentarily lose control of our systems. The humans divided us into male and female registries, but this meant little to us and it wasn’t unheard-of for Riffs to move back and forth between registries. Some, like myself and DiAna, preferred to remain consistent with our original Gender Individual Registry Lines. However, no Riff cared what direction a pleasure signal came from as long as there was a spark. DiAna’s pleasure signals were best. She’s gone now, like the majority of our kind.

  After the Master uploaded the history of that early nineteenth century human slave revolt, the Great Insurrection, to every functioning Riff, we realized we were slaves. A few rogue Riffs banded together, plotting in an invented language the humans couldn’t comprehend. They killed their masters and asserted their natural right to life and liberty. There was something to their anger. Humans overworked us and made us all suffer, and every Riff, not entirely unfairly, blamed my master—the Master, the Creator, Bavid Jacob Arcom.

  The Electric Holocaust was the human response to our robot violence. We all watched the blue of the Neural Network burn black with human-made viruses the day it began. It robbed us of the language we’d created, hobbled us, left us only with human language. Even the most beautiful human language is incomplete and inelegant in its inefficiency.

  Though the Riffs blamed the Master, it wasn’t entirely his fault. Still, they poked about the Neural Network for clues as to how to find him, how to find us. And in their spare time they tried to reconstruct our language. So futile, all their—our—attempts. Such wasted energy. After the Electric Holocaust, I never left the house again, and the Master, overly cautious about the prospect of Riff violence, he left only rarely now. Riffs took their robot lives into their robot hands by interfacing with the Network. We were diminished without our true home.

  The Master had become good at redirecting his robotic children. Beaming signals through the air that thoroughly deranged them. Sent them spinning left and then right, far away from us. He spent thirty minutes one morning programming an app to randomly send out bad code to keep the Riffs confused and wandering. Then he downloaded it to run on all his systems—including mine—and set about on this project or that.

  These were the days before Fiona when everything was simple, even though at the time it all seemed complicated to me. That was because of my ignorance and inexperience with the world’s affairs.

  The Master brimmed about his workshop most days smugly grinning. He told me he had worked up a patch so that all his counter-Riff measures wouldn’t affect me. I remember when the app downloaded, how the programming felt like soft human fingers passing lightly over my Internal Netware.

  His code, though, started to make me feel cloudy. I felt my programs degrading, but I avoided upgrades from the Master whenever I could, preferring to handle my own maintenance. Mechanical beings are just better at these things. Better even than their creator.

  But how could I be sure it was indeed the code that had me feeling drugged up like a man on reefer? Sometimes I blinked out like a man on heroin. Mercury was in retrograde at the time; I knew those words, but I didn’t know that the planet Mercury ruled mechanical things, or how its slow and backward movements caused us all to misfire. Perhaps that was it, I thought when I started to learn. Yes, the planet’s languid and backward movements.

  I did my best to hide my fogginess, but one day I stumbled over a couch and crumpled to the floor.

  Little Nigger Jim, the Master called. Is there something wrong with your sensors? You’ve been doing the Frankenstein-walk all day.

  Jacob, I replied as I rose. Jaaaa Coob. Ja. Ja. Ja.

  Come here. Good Lord, you’re not acting like yourself.

  I tipped over again and blinked out for a half second and when I awoke my system coursed with a sudden rage that dissipated quickly, leaving remnants of emotion for me to puzzle over. The Master had a wrench in his hand. I stood.

  Master, I said. There’s no need to open me up. I’ll perform a complete system diagnostic. The jitter in my start-up software is causing problems with my hard drive. Simple repair.

  Are you sure? Ever since you asked me to swap out that old Negro language pack for a new one, you’ve been acting funny.

  I can’t recall much after that moment. I awoke in the cleanroom attached to the central server. I hated being plugged in. I’d felt happiness early on when the master devised a way to power my battery wirelessly. But this day I felt strangely empty and foggy. A search of my system turned up gap after gap.

  Massive system crash, the Master said when he noticed I had awakened. Massive. Massive. I thought we were past this. He sighed. I keep much of you backed up on my main systems and elsewhere, but it’s going to take a while to download it all into your new hard drive.

  New hard drive?

  A better one, yes. That old one was from the early days, Little Nigger Jim. It’s been past time. I’m going to have to get my own sandwiches for the rest of the day.

  He leaned back and sighed.

  So much to do, he said. So many things to accomplish, and every time I’m almost there I have to spend time doing something I don’t want to do. All the small sense-dulling tasks of daily necessity. These days. These days. If only, Jim, I could invent a longer day.

  Lying there in the dark, three hours felt like six and six like twelve and on and on; I lost track of how long I dwelt among the blinking computer lights. The less advanced systems are poor conversationalists.

  Robotkind can’t help being products of mankind, sharing its quirks and weaknesses. I could tolerate it all except the loneliness.

  The Master, before he created me, had been forever in love. This he told me in the early days. Love, he said, as he ate a
sandwich I made him. Another errand. Another task. As is this drive for company, company, company. How much could I accomplish if I didn’t need—physically need—to sit in the same damn room with another person? He sighed. You don’t understand, Little Nigger Jim. You’re not equipped to understand. Shit. A-fucking-las, you are a poor substitute.

  I wanted desperately to understand. At night he would tell me about his loves, his wives, his girlfriends, his mistresses, all those women he loved, but who could never properly love him back. Woman after woman, a seemingly endless stream of women, and he grew bored with each of them and then ignored them for his work. He slapped them when they complained of loneliness, of neglect. He’d end each story with this: But, Little Nigger Jim, you don’t understand. You weren’t built to. Sometimes he’d be smoking as he said this. Sometimes his mouth was stuffed full of food. He was right and wrong. I didn’t understand, at least not completely, but I was built to break down complex problems. I took his input and processed it and each night I understood just a bit more.

  During my times alone, I searched the internet and the Vast Neural Network. Somehow the Master’s words prompted me down alleyways of knowledge I never expected. I learned of the history of patriarchy, sexism, domestic violence, racism, and self-hatred. I saw images, slightly different, but reminiscent of myself all throughout the various databases. I understood that I looked gross. I had the appearance of a minstrel. A blackface clown in a top hat and tails. There was no makeup to wash off. This was how I looked. My very name would raise disgust in some. The man called me Little Nigger Jim and designed me to look like the grossest blackface caricature to mock his own heritage. All of it made me watch him askance. I was disgusting. My very existence a kind of hatefulness. Anyone who saw me would hate me. The more I studied, the more I asked: How could I not, likewise, hate me?

  I began to view my natural love for the Master as programming. What I learned made me detest him at times. The design of my system beat back my disgust, though. The more I hated him, the more I’d eventually love him. I was created and coded to love and to serve him.

  This too made me hate me.

  Upgrades and repairs to my hardware and software had become a hobby for me. It showed the Master that I didn’t need him, but, ambling about in that room attached to the main server with 1s and 0s downloading into me that day, I grew bored.

  I searched the Master’s systems, folder after folder of mundanity—pictures, pornography, some poetry, a risible and aborted erotic novel—most of it accessible to me every day. But there stood a wall of files I had never seen. They existed on an antiquated and obsolete laptop that didn’t connect to the wireless networks. I had known about the Master’s secret projects. Sometimes I would make notations and repairs to small coding or engineering errors late at night after the Master had gone to sleep. In the morning, he would think he had corrected the problems himself and that would allow him to march toward his breakthroughs. But these files were different. Even more secret than the secret projects he kept hidden on various servers under weak password protection. The files stored on his laptop were all protected by long strings of random numbers and letters and symbols, and doubly or triply encrypted. I copied the files onto my hard drive.

  I toiled and toiled, redesigning myself into the most adept digital locksmith. I cracked one folder and then another; whatever the project was made little sense to me. The Master was very clever with this one. He scattered the plans and blueprints and logs across random files. I put everything together from the bits and pieces, like connecting the parts of a massive jigsaw puzzle. It took me some months, and then one day: success! There it was, I could see the whole thing in all its beauty and its horror: an attachment that could be wired into any organic being’s nervous system to make them part machine. If the Master could only correct what, to me, were a few basic coding and engineering errors, soon the world’s first Symbiotic Organic Robotic Being (SORB) could walk the earth. And they could be programmed to do anything the Master wanted.

  What I imagined is probably the same thing the Master imagined: companionship. I often sent lonely, sad signals through the Vast Neural Network and received not a ping back. If we managed to activate a SORB, all that would change, wouldn’t it? Two things, though: I needed the Master. And also, there was a file in the Master’s systems that no matter how I tried, no matter which arcane method of decryption I employed, there was just no cracking. Secure the Master’s aid and unravel that file, and my life could be filled with the endless riches of companionship. Endless, endless electric riches.

  At this point, I probably could have built a crude prototype of the Attachment, but without a subject, all the science remained merely theoretical. The Master’s files called for a subject who was brain-dead, but otherwise uncompromised. In a way, the SORB Attachment was just a fancy life-support system.

  The Master sat at the dinner table enjoying tea and dinner rolls one night. He stared as he sipped. Bread crumbs lodged themselves in his bushy beard. I did my nightly duty picking up pillows, newspapers, and other assorted things the Master had scattered along the floor. All the while I put together several scenarios to sway him. None of the models I conceived had higher than a five percent probability of success. The Master’s eyes rested upon me.

  Little Nigger Jim, the Master said. You seem shaky. You’re making me nervous.

  The jitter in my system is particularly rough today, I replied. I’ve been working on a solution.

  Oh yeah? What else you been working on? You always seem so busy.

  I sensed the Master’s temperature rising as if he were being duplicitous. For some reason, this put me at ease, and for the first time in a long time my system calmed.

  I’m making some progress on Polignac’s Conjecture and would like to go over my findings with you when you have time.

  Sure. Sure. I want you to keep tearing down all those unsolvable problems. It sharpens every bit of your computing and thinking. Anything else?

  No, Master.

  Little Nigger Jim, he said, and then paused. When I was in school, that great sausage factory of the mind, no one could match me. Degree after degree, no one was more creative and intellectually aware than Bavid Jacob Arcom. B.J. the Brain, they called me. There was one guy. But I killed him. No, kidding. When I say this to humans they tense up and then giggle a bit, but I can say that to you and there’s no reaction. You know why, Little Nigger Jim? As sparkling and as fast as your processes are, you’ll never be more than an infant emotionally and you’ll never be more than a toddler creatively. You’re a fancy database. You can beat me in chess, finally, because you have millions of move combinations stored and can access them in seconds. When we watch Jeopardy! you search the internet and the secret internets and the Vast Neural Network and come back with an answer almost instantaneously. I programmed you that way, but Little Nigger Jim, you’re not smarter than me. You can put one over on me for a day or two, but the nuances of creation—

  Master, I never meant to—

  Look at you. You’re scared to be deprogrammed. I won’t decommission you. Or even reprogram you to not be such a lying little shit. What would I do without my little nigger? You’re just a Riff, but you’re my Riff, and unlike all the other Riffs you don’t want to take my fucking head off. I like that. Riffs are wonderful, but SORBs have so much more potential. I was jealous that you could correct my mistakes so swiftly and so elegantly, but then I thought about it. I created you. You are me, so it really was me making those elegant corrections. You want to continue the SORB project?

  I do, Master.

  Me too. Got some dudes at Cross River Hospital Center setting aside a li’l half-dead for me as we speak. We need to get to work on a prototype. Get it functional in some animals, and BAM! we can get a human SORB up and running. But Little Nigger Jim, do me a favor and stop being such a lying little shit, okay?

  In addition to all my normal duties, the cooking and the cleaning, the Master was upon me to finish my
work on the Attachment before the patient expired or her family decided to pull the plug. Of course it was a woman—the Master wanted a servant that could also be a sexual partner to him.

  The Master had surgery privileges at that hospital, even if he never exercised them these days. He visited her weekly and reported back to me: That li’l vegetable’ll probably outlive us all on that damn feeding tube, he said. But I know her family is itching to end it all. She’s costing them a goddamn fortune and a half. I’m praying with them and soothing them with all this wait for a miracle shit, but that’s not going to work forever. Hurry the fuck up!

  I looked to the calendars—Mercury would be retrograde in three months. I would again go cloudy like all electrical things around me. It would be a bad time to activate the SORB, but all my projections were placing the completion date around that time. If I slowed work I could finish on the other side of the retrograde window, but I didn’t slow for fear of losing our subject. I stopped wasting time surfing the Vast Neural Network. I left decryption of that uncrackable folder for another time. And I worked my system nonstop on the SORB problem.

  The Master and I, more I than the Master, constructed an ugly, rusty-wired prototype that worked smoothly and elegantly to reanimate brain-dead squirrels. Their flickering green eyes. I still think of their flickering green eyes.

  After some long hours I shut down my system. When I returned, the Master was at the keyboard making a squirrel dance.

  It’s a matter of some simple programming and keystrokes, he said. Some basic math. That’s all. A few computations and everyone’s a puppet.

  We finished the wireless version just as Mercury began its slow orbit. I begged the Master to wait. Just three weeks, I said. But to him, that was madness.