"I don’t understand," he admits.
"The wild, over-the-top bullshit. People frantic to be as human as they could possibly be, nothing gained but embarrassment and accidental bruises and not many pennies either. Because as everybody realized, sooner or not, our audience won’t pay for melodrama."
Sam gives me a little nod.
Just looking at the round face, I can tell. He’s wondering what would happen if he punted this nonsense about being old classmates. When you do a job and do it well, there’s always pleasure in sitting with one of your peers, happily talking shop.
Except that’s not the way I want to steer us.
"Want to hear about my current boyfriend?" I ask.
"Not especially," he starts.
"He used to be a doctor too," I say, smiling at him. "But not the medical kind. A PhD in Astronomy. Which is another one of the jobs that got stolen away. Not that most of humanity took much notice, what with all the surgeons and billionaires left with nothing to do."
Sam eyes me carefully, unable to guess where this is heading.
"The big telescopes got closed down," I say. "And every other science facility too. Since science is just another job done best by machines, and my boyfriend has nothing to do today but sit in bed, thinking about all the big problems that he can’t actually study."
"I don’t understand," Sam says again. "What are we talking about?"
"My ex-stargazer has a theory," I say. "About the audience that’s supposedly watching us."
"A theory?"
"Well, it’s a hypothesis. Because theories are bigger than guesses, and he doesn’t have any hard evidence."
"What’s his guess?"
"Nobody is watching us. Our audience is imaginary. The Earth was abandoned, maybe minutes after we lost control of everything. We think we see gods because the pennies keep coming. Because society remains orderly and comfortable. But really, the AIs just dropped their own little machines into place, programmed to control us, and that includes throwing us made-up money whenever we act like good polite people. You know. Civilized lunches in the restaurant, and no collapses into civil war."
And with that, one scene ends.
One of us makes the decision. Pushing aside the uneaten Cobb salad, Sam becomes a different person. He takes one breath, and without exhaling pulls in another, two gasps fighting inside the same aching chest. Then the spent air comes out with the words, "You cannot."
Raw emotion pushes into his face, carried along with the livid, miserable blood.
"I cannot what?" I ask.
"Tell me they aren’t watching," he says, troubled to his core. "Because they are. I feel them always. Their eyes are on me now, and they love me so much, and bitch, you won’t make me stop believing that."
I try to work the park, but the afternoon is too happy for my tastes. So off early to a busy tavern where a young lady can bounce between ten conversations and as many characters. After that, I head home. Too tired to think, and three days left before I get paid and get the logs to study what the payoff might be for a lunch that increasingly feels like a lousy idea.
Bed sounds wonderful.
But I drop in on my mother first. She lives next door in the little house rented with my pennies.
"Evening, Greatness," she says to me.
Just as she always does.
We chat about my day, which is a brief conversation since I avoid any mention of Sam Kahlil. Mom would probably know the name, and believing that bigger, better people deserve to be treated with respect, my story would depress her.
Besides, I like being the biggest, best soul in her life.
Done with that duty, I finally reach my front door. Robots treat me like a queen. A feast is generated from gas and memory. But I don’t get far when I hear the laughter coming from the bedroom.
My boyfriend sits in the middle of my considerable bed, naked and cross legged, reading one of his old books.
"What’s funny?" I ask.
"What isn’t?"
I sit with him for a minute. No cameras watching, but I play the scene as if the audience matters.
The audience is him.
"I didn’t know you were coming over," I finally mention.
He reads and smiles, and then he closes the book but keeps reading those same words. Inside his head. Funny words, and certainly wise. I can tell that much from watching the play of his smart dark eyes.
"So where did they go?" I ask.
He knows exactly who "they" are. Because he’s a very smart man as well as the famous ex-astronomer crowbarred into today’s pivotal scene.
"Off to distant stars, or jump into another, more interesting universe?" I prod.
Different nights bring different guesses, but he hears something else in my voice. Taking my hands, he asks, "What’s wrong?"
I dip my head, admitting, "I have my own guess."
"Do you?"
It would be easy to hear a tone in those two doubting words. So I choose not to notice. Instead I tell him what I’ve been imagining for a long while. "The AI gods were never real," I offer. "A few geeky geniuses cut our power and Internet and conquered us while we were scared. The world that we live in now? The safety net, the peace? Every good day free of pain and need is their fancy doing."
He grins and laughs, appreciating some or all of this fantasy. Then the ex-astronomer asks, "And they did this why?"
I say nothing, letting the silence play.
"Because it was such a neat idea," he says at last, speaking for me.
I try to laugh.
He watches me fail, and then gripping my hands harder, he asks, "What is so wrong, Pony?"
"I broke a man today," I confess.
Real tears running.
(2016)
SECTION THREE
Overseer and Servant
Robots exist to do work that no-one else wants to do – because it is too dangerous, perhaps, or because it is simply too dull. Traditionally, the dangerous jobs have fallen to men, and the dull jobs have fallen to women. So it’s no surprise that robots often emerge from their labs pre-gendered. Ken Liu ("The Caretaker", 2011) and Lauren Fox ("Rosie Cleans House", 2017) have a great deal of dark fun with the way old attitudes fester in new machines.
Some jobs are so important, we expend a great deal of time explaining why we love doing them, even if they’re dangerous, even if they’re dull. Getting parents to admit this in public requires patience and often a certain amount of alcohol, but childcare is one of the most tedious chores on the planet. It’s one of those activities that gives lasting value to life while affording us absolutely no happiness in the moment. It’s a set of tasks robots can certainly help with and which, for our own long-term good, we absolutely must not hand over to them.
This territory isn’t wholly new (there are many good Edwardian stories about upper-middle-class families, and the damage done when they farm their children out to "the help") but when the help is robotic, these moral dilemmas acquire an often savage edge. Some of the more disturbing and affecting stories here are about children and parents. They include Brian Aldiss’s "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (1969), Ray Bradbury’s "The Veldt" (1950) and V. E. Thiessen’s "There Will Be School Tomorrow" (1956) which, while much less well known, captures to a T the uneasy power relations that pertain between parents, children, and civic authority.
A lot of robot trouble is simply turbo-driven servant trouble, and servant trouble, make no mistake, is a deadly serious business. (Recall how James Fox’s foppish Tony comes a quite spectacular cropper in Joseph Losey’s film The Servant (1963).) If we’re going to let robots into our homes, we should all be taking lessons in how to treat the help, lest it exploit and infantilise us. We certainly don’t want to end up like Helena Bell’s passive-aggressive client in "Robot" (2012).