Robots Read online

  "Your Mum's a posh git," the children said.

  "And a half," I replied.

  She was also a drug addict. One evening she didn't collect me from Social Class. The consultant tried to reach her-PDA, and couldn't.

  "You have a Home Help, don't you?" the consultant asked.

  She rang BETsi. BETsi said she had no record in her diary of where Miss McCall might be if not collecting me. BETsi sent round a taxi.

  Booker was out for two weeks. She just disappeared. She'd collapsed on the street, and everything was taken—her handbag, her shoes, her PDA, even her contact lenses. She woke up blind and raving from barbiturate withdrawal in an NHS ward, which would have mortified her. She claimed to be Booker McCall and several other people as well. I suppose it was also a kind of breakdown. Nobody knew who she was, nobody told us what had happened.

  BETsi and I just sat alone in the apartment, eating ice cream and Kellogg's Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.

  "Do you suppose Booker will ever come back?" I asked her.

  "I do not know where Booker is, kiddo. I'm afraid something bad must have happened to her."

  I felt guilty because I didn't care. I didn't care if Booker never came back. But I was scared.

  "What happens if you have a disc fault?" I asked BETsi.

  "I've just renewed the service contract," she replied. She whirred closer to me, and put a carpeted arm around me.

  "But how would they know that something was wrong?"

  She gave me a little rousing shake. "I'm monitored, all day so that if there is a problem when your mother isn't here, they come round and repair me."

  "But what if you're broken for a real long time? Hours and hours. Days?"

  "They'll have a replacement."

  "I don't want a replacement."

  "In a few hours, she'll be trained to recognize your voice."

  "What if it doesn't work? What if the contractors don't hear? What do I do then?"

  She printed out a number to call, and a password to enter.

  "It probably won't happen," she said. "So I'm going to ask you to do your exercises."

  She meant calm me down, as if my fears weren't real, as if it couldn't happen that a machine would break down.

  "I don't want to do my exercises. Exercises won't help."

  "Do you want to see Jurassic Park?" she asked.

  "It's old," I said, and thought of my friends at Social Class and of their mothers who were with them.

  There was a whirring sound. A panel came up on the screen, like what happened during a service when the engineers came and checked her programming and reloaded the operational system. CONFIGURATION OVERRIDE the panels said.

  When that was over BETsi asked, "Would you like to learn how to play Bloodlust Demon?"

  "Oh!" I said and nothing else. "Oh! Oh! BETsi! Oh!" And she giggled.

  I remember the light on the beige carpet making a highway towards the screen. I remember the sound of traffic outside, peeping, hooting, the sound of nightfall and loneliness, the time I usually hated the most. But now I was playing Bloodlust Demon.

  I played it very badly. I kept getting blown up.

  "Just keep trying," she said.

  "I have no spatial reasoning," I replied. I was learning that I did not like computer games. But for the time being, I had forgotten everything else.

  After two weeks, I assumed that Booker had gotten bored and had gone away and would never be back. Then one morning, when the hot world seemed to be pouring in through the grimy windows, someone kicked down the front door.

  BETsi made a cage around me with her arms.

  "I am programmed for both laser and bullet defence. Take what you want, but do not harm the child. I cannot take your photograph or video you. You will not be recognized. There is no need to damage me."

  They broke the glass tables, they threw drawers onto the floor. They dropped their trousers and shat in the kitchen. They took silver dresses, Booker's black box, her jewellery. One of the thieves took hold of my Matchbox lorry and I knew the meaning of loss. I was going to lose my truck. Then the thief walked back across the carpet towards me. BETsi's arms closed more tightly around me. The thief chuckled under his ski mask and left the truck nearby on the sofa.

  "There you go, little fella," he said. I never told anyone. It was Tom. Like I said, he wasn't very bright. BETsi was programmed not to recognize him.

  So. I knew then what men were; they could go bad. There was part of them that was only ever caged up. I was frightened of men after that.

  The men left the door open, and the flat was a ruin, smashed and broken, and BETsi's cage of arms was lifted up, and I began to cry, and then I began to scream over and over and over, and finally some neighbours came, and finally the search was on for Booker McCall.

  How could an editor-in-chief disappear for two weeks? "We thought she'd gone off with a new boyfriend," her colleagues said, in the press, to damage her. Politics, wall to wall. It was on TV, the Uncaring Society they called it. No father, no grandparents, neighbours who were oblivious—the deserted child was only found because of a traumatic break in.

  Booker was gone a very long time. Barbiturates are the worst withdrawal of all. I visited her, with one of the consultants from my Class. It got her picture in the papers, and a caption that made it sound as though the consultants were the only people who cared.

  Booker looked awful. Bright yellow with blue circles under her eyes. She smelled of thin stale sweat.

  "Hello, Clancy," she whispered. "I've been in withdrawal."

  So- what? Tell me something I didn't know. I was hardhearted. I had been deserted, she had no call on my respect.

  "Did you miss me?" She looked like a cut flower that had been left in a vase too long, with smelly water.

  I didn't want to hurt her, so all I said was: "I was scared."

  "Poor baby," she whispered. She meant it, but the wave of sympathy exhausted her and she lay back on the pillow. She held out her hand.

  I Took it and I looked at it.

  "Did BETsi take good care of you?" she asked, with her eyes closed.

  "Yes," I replied, and began to think, still looking at her fingers. She really can't help all of this, all of this is hardwired. I bet she'd like to be like BETsi, but can't. Anyway, barbiturates don't work on metal and plastic.

  Suddenly she was crying, and she'd pushed my hand onto her moist cheek. It was sticky and I wanted to get away, and she said, "Tell me a story. Tell me some beautiful stories."

  So I sat and told her the story of Jurassic Park. She lay still, my hand on her cheek. At times I thought she was asleep, other times I found I hoped she loved the story as much as I did, raptors and brachiosaurs and T Rex.

  When I was finished, she murmured, "At least somebody's happy." She meant me. That was what she wanted to think, that I was all right, that she would not have to worry about me. And that too, I realized, would never change.

  She came home. She stayed in bed all day for two more weeks, driving me nuts. “My life is such a mess!” she said, itchy and anxious. She promised me she would spend more time with me, God forbid. She raged against the bastards at BPC. We'd be moving as soon as she was up, she promised me, filling my heart with terror. She succeeded in disrupting my books, my movies, my painting. Finally she threw off the sheets a month early and went back to work. I gathered she still went in for treatment every fortnight. I gathered that booze now took the place of Barbies. The smell of the flat changed. And now that I hated men, there were a lot of them, loose after work.

  "This is my boy," she would say, with a kind of wobbly pride and introduce me to yet another middle-aged man with a ponytail. "Mr. d'Angelo is a designer," she would say, as if she went out with their professions. She started to wear wobbly red lipstick. It got everywhere, on pillows, sheets, walls, and worst of all on my Nutella tumblers.

  The flat had been my real world, against the outside, and now all that had changed. I went to school. I had to say goodbye to
BETsi, every morning, and goodbye to Booker, who left wobbly red lipstick on my collar. I went to school in a taxi.

  "You see," said BETsi, after my first day. "It wasn't bad was it? It works, doesn't it?"

  "Yes, BETsi," I remember saying. "It does." The "it" was me. We both meant my precious self. She had done her job.

  Through my later school days, BETsi would sit unused in my room—most of the time. Sometimes at night, under the covers, I would reboot her, and the screen would open up to all the old things, still there. My childhood was already another world—dinosaurs and space cats and puzzles. BETsi would pick up where we had left off, with no sense of neglect, no sense of time or self.

  "You're older," she would say. "About twelve. Let me look at you." She would mirror my face, and whir to herself. "Are you drawing?"

  "Lots," I would say.

  "Want to mess around with the clip art, kiddo?" she would ask.

  And long into the night, when I should have been learning algebra, we would make collages on her screen. I showed surfers on waves that rose up amid galaxies blue and white in space, and through space there poured streams of roses. A row of identical dancing Buddhas was an audience.

  "Tell me about your friends, and what you do," she asked, as I cut and pasted. And I'd tell her about my friend John and his big black dog, Toro, and how we were caught in his neighbours' garden. I ran and escaped, but John was caught. John lived outside town in the countryside. And I'd tell her about John's grandfather's farm, full of daffodils in rows. People use them to signal spring, to spell the end of winter. Symbol recognition.

  "I've got some daffodils," BETsi said. "In my memory.">,

  And I would put them into the montage for her, though it was not spring any longer.

  I failed at algebra. Like everything else in Booker's life, I was something that did not quite pan out as planned. She was good about it. She never upbraided me for not being a genius. There was something in the way she ground out her cigarette that said it all.

  "Well, there's always art school," she said, and forced out a blast of blue-white smoke.

  It was BETsi I showed my projects to—the A-level exercises in sketching elephants in pencil.

  "From a photo," BETsi said. "You can always tell. So. You can draw as well as a photograph. Now what?"

  "That's what I think," I said. "I need a style of my own."

  "You need to do that for yourself," she said.

  "I know," I said, casually.

  "You won't always have me to help," she said.

  The one thing I will never forgive Booker for is selling BETsi without telling me. I came back from first term at college to fmd the machine gone. I remember that I shouted, probably for the first time ever, "You did what?"

  I remember Booker's eyes widening, blinking. "It's just a machine, Clancy. I mean, it wasn't as if she was a member of the family or anything."

  "How could you do it! Where is she?"

  "I don't know. I didn't think you'd be so upset. You're being awfully babyish about this."

  "What did you do with her?"

  "I sold her back to the contract people, that's all." Booker was genuinely bemused. "Look. You are hardly ever here, it isn't as though you use her for anything. She's a child-development tool, for Chrissakes. Are you still a child?"

  I'd thought Booker had been smart. I'd thought that she had recognized she would not have time to be a mother, and so had brought in BETsi. I thought that meant she understood what BETsi was. She didn't and that meant she had not understood, not even been smart.

  "You," I said, "have sold the only real mother I have ever had." I was no longer shouting. I said it at dictation speed. I'm not sure Booker has ever forgiven me.

  Serial numbers, I thought. They have serial numbers, maybe I could trace her through those. I rang up the contractors. The kid on the phone sighed.

  "You want to trace your BETsi," he said before I'd finished, sounding bored.

  "Yes," I said. "I do."

  He grunted and I heard a flicker of fingertips on a keyboard.

  "She's been placed with another family. Still operational. But," he said, "I. can't tell you where she is." "Why not?"

  "Well, Mr. McCall. Another family is paying for the service, and the developer is now working with another child. Look. You are not unusual, OK? In fact this hap- pens about half the time, and we cannot have customers disturbed by previous charges looking up their machines."

  "Why not?"

  "Well," he chortled; it was so obvious to him. "You might try imagining it from the child's point of view. They have a new developer of their own, and then this other person, a stranger, tries to muscle in."

  "Just. Please. Tell me where she is."

  "Her memory has been wiped," he said, abruptly.

  It took a little while. I remember hearing the hiss on the line.

  "She won't recognize your voice. She won't remember anything about you. She is just a service vehicle. Try to remember that."

  I wanted to sttangle the receiver. I sputtered down the line like a car cold-starting. "Don't ... couldn't you keep a copy! You know this happens, you bastard. Couldn't you warn people, offer them the disc? Something?"

  "I'm sorry sir, but we do, and you turned the offer down."

  "I'm sorry?" I was dazed.

  "That's what your entry says."

  Booker, I thought. Booker, Booker, Booker. And I realized; she couldn't understand, she's just too old. She's just from another world.

  "I'm sorry, sir, but I have other calls on the line."

  "I understand," I replied.

  All my books, all my collages, my own face in the mirror. It had been like a library I could visit whenever I wanted to see something from the past. It was as if my own life had been wiped.

  Then for some reason, I remembered Tom.

  He was fat and 40 and defeated, a bloke. I asked him to break in to the contractor's office and read the files and find who had her.

  "So," he said. "You knew then."

  ` up.

  >,

  He blew out hard through his lips and looked at me askance.

  "Thanks for the lorry," I said, by way of explanation.

  "I always liked you, you know. You were a nice little kid." His fingers were tobacco-stained. "I can see why you want her back. She was all you had."

  He found her all right. I sent him a cheque. Sometimes even now I send him a cheque.

  Booker would have been dismayed—BETsi had ended in a resold council flat. I remember, the lift was broken and the stairs smelled of pee. The door itself was painted fire-engine red and had a non-breakable plaque on the doorway. The Andersons, it said amid. ceramic pansies. I knocked.

  BETsi answered the door. Boom. There she was, arms extended defensively to prevent entry. She'd been cleaned up but there was still rice pudding in her hair. Beyond her, I saw a slumped three-piece suite and beige carpet littered with toys. There was a smell of baby food and damp flannel.

  "BETsi?" I asked, and knelt down in front of her. She scanned me, clicking. I could almost see the wheels turning, and for some reason, I found it funny. "It's OK," I said, "you won't know me, dear."

  "Who is it, Betty?" A little girl came running. To breathe the air that flows in through an open door, to see someone new, to see anyone at all.

  "A caller, Bumps," replied BETsi. Her voice was different, a harsher, East End lilt. "And I think he's just about to be on his way."

  I found that funny too; I still forgave. her. It wasn't her fault. Doughty old BETsi still doing her job, with this doubtful man she didn't know trying to gain entry.

  There might be, though, one thing she could do.

  I talked to her slowly, I tried to imitate an English accent. "You do not take orders from someone with my voice. But I mean no harm, and you may be able to do this. Can you show me my face on your screen?"

  She whirred. Her screen flipped out of sleep. There I was.

  "I am an old charge of yours
," I said—both of us, me and my image, his voice echoing mine. "My name is Clancy. All I ask you to do is remember me. Can you do that?"

  "I understand what you mean," she said. "I don't have a security reason not to."

  "Thank you," I said. "And see if you can program the following further instructions."

  "I cannot take instruction from you."

  "I know. But check if this violates security. Set aside part of your memory. Put Bumps into it. Put me and Bumps in the same place, so that even when they wipe you again you'll remember us."

  She whirred. I began to get excited; I talked like myself.

  "Because they're going to wipe you BETsi, whenever they resell you. They'll wipe you clean. It might be nice for Bumps if you remember her. Because we'll always remember you."

  The little girl's eyes were on me, dark and serious, 200 years old. "Do what he says, Betty," the child said.

  Files opened and closed like mouths. "I can put information in an iced file," said BETsi. "It will not link with any other files, so it will not be usable to gain entry to my systems." Robots and people: these days we all know too much about our inner workings.

  I said thank you and goodbye, and said it silently looking into the eyes of the little girl, and she spun away on her heel as if to say: I did that.

  I still felt happy, running all the way back to the tube station. I just felt joy.

  So that's the story.

  It took me a long time to make friends in school, but they were good ones. I still know them, though they are now middle-aged men, clothiers in Toronto, or hearty freelancers in New York who talk about their men and their cats. Make a long story short. I grew up to be one of the people my mother used to hire and abuse.

  I am a commercial artist, though more for book and CD covers than magazines. I'm about to be a Dad. One of my clients, a very nice woman. We used to see each other and get drunk at shows. In the hotel bedrooms I'd see myself in the mirror—not quite middle-aged, but with a pony tail. Her name is some kind of mistake. Bertha.