Love and Robotics Read online

  Rachael Eyre

  LOVE AND ROBOTICS

  Copyright © Rachael Eyre 2016

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  By the same author

  The Governess

  The Revenge of Rose Grubb

  THE ROBOTICS CODE

  A robot does not judge for himself

  He obeys his human at all times

  He does not move outside the script of his daily discourse

  He does not draw attention to his human’s emotions

  He does not venture an opinion contrary to his human’s and defers to her in all things

  A robot does not show anger, hate or fear

  He does not touch a human unless it is a matter of life and death

  His sole concern is his human’s happiness

  2165

  Scandal

  It’s been called the crime of the century. That phrase is bandied about far too often, but today it has a grain of truth. The Halls of Justice are packed with journalists, psychiatrists and good old fashioned gawkers. The admission charge is steep but worth it.

  Let’s go in.

  The room is seamy with bodies. Justice Begum looks as though she’d rather be anywhere but here. The prosecutor, Sir Matthias Hopkiss, tops up his breath freshener. The defence, a curly haired nobody, ruffles her notes.

  Other notables? Cora Keel, celebrity artificial, a yappy dog beneath her arm. Claire Howey, cast off wife of Foster. Eustace Lucy, Chief of Perversion Prevention, cracks his knuckles and grins.

  The doors open. First in is Alfred Wilding, the Earl of Langton. The last licensed adventurer, as famous for hell raising as his achievements. Scars apart, he’s looked the same for decades; his red hair’s only just flecked with grey. He gives the crowd an ironic wave before climbing into the dock.

  Taking a seat opposite him is Josh Foster, Lila’s answer to the celeb robot. He’s smaller and more fragile in person, though still bewitching. The audience might as well not exist. He looks at the Earl and smiles.

  The court seethes. Justice Begum calls for order. Hopkiss opens.

  “In all my years as a prosecutor, I haven’t encountered such a sordid case. It offends the sensibilities of every right minded individual -”

  Langton snorts. Hopkiss ignores him.

  “I seek to show that the men before you engaged in unnatural sexual relations with one another ...”

  PART ONE

  FRIENDS

  2162

  Awakening

  The figure lay on the work bench, chilly as a classical statue. Noah Sugar had beavered away on it for months.

  “I want him to have the best,” he kept saying. “He’s a work of art.”

  Julia Fisk shrugged. She’d never liked history at school. The preoccupations of dead has-beens, who cared? It didn’t live and breathe like science. While Noah crafted the window dressing, she worked on the interface.

  It was the finest yet built. It took up a room, the panels controlling different areas. This one handled reflexes, this sensory perceptions, that the memory banks. She liked to sit in there and touch the controls, imagine what it’d be like when the artificial was up and running.

  Creating interfaces was her life. She knew how the staff saw her: “Fisky,” loner and figure of fun. Everybody else had someone: Noah had his doting wife; lovely, shambolic Frida had a different man each month. Even Myleen had a partner, though she had the sex appeal of a cockroach and a personality to match.

  Good old Fisky. No wonder she took her work home. From the time she logged off at the end of the week to clocking back in two days later, she didn’t see another human face. When did it change?

  One morning she’d been gridlocked in traffic. When she’d finally climbed the twenty five flights to the Think Tank, Sugar had been hard at work.

  “He’s a handsome fellow, isn’t he?” he’d said. He was so eager to be admired, like her nephew after an art class.

  In the twenty years she’d worked in the field, ideas of how robots should look had swung back and forth. The first artificial was unnervingly lifelike. After the scandal that nearly destroyed CER, they’d made them obviously manufactured: pointed ears, visible rivets, stamps of ownership. But Sugar was stubborn. It didn’t matter what a Dave or Home Butler looked like, but true robotics should blur the line.

  She looked at the recumbent form and froze. A delicate face with a sweet, intelligent expression, long lashes curling on his cheeks. Golden waves framed the forehead. A slender muscular body, the skin shading from pink to bronze. She laid a hand upon his arm. So soft.

  “Feels good, doesn’t it?” Sugar asked. “I had the heck of a time getting the flesh tones right.”

  Fisk felt as though bones were stuck in her throat. “Have you thought of a name?”

  “If Moira and I’d had a son, we’d’ve called him Josh.”

  Now she hurried to work. She took care over her appearance. She smiled at the girls in the Pond; they nearly died of shock. She went to see Josh for hours at a time. She tried to drag out the completion date but that crook Jerry Etruscus started to gripe.

  “Get it on its feet. The last Home Butlers were an effing disaster.”

  She explained it’d be a year before Josh could be presented. “Don’t care.” He hung up. How had such an oik been elected Mayor?

  She told Sugar. “Oh, well,” he sighed. “Nuts and bolts. Anything left?”

  “A few last minute touches.”

  These completed, Sugar pressed the button in Josh’s hairline. He bounced up and down. “Isn’t this exciting?”

  A knock at the door. “Oh, fiddlesticks!” Through the glass, “Do you mind? You’re interrupting history!”

  Mandy Cowan tapped nervously and entered. One of Noah’s assistants, she kept making excuses to come up and gawp. “Aidy wants to speak to you, Dr Sugar. It can’t wait.”

  Sugar tutted. “Mind holding the fort, Julia?” He followed Mandy down the corridor.

  Fisk sat beside the work bench and took the robot’s hand. “Can you hear me?”

  What if they had made a mistake in their calculations? All that time and effort, wasted!

  “Hello,” she tried. “My name’s Julia.”

  She wasn’t imagining it, the fingers quivered in her grasp. Enormous eyes slid open. They were saucer shaped as human eyes never are, a starkly beautiful bottle green.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Most robots had hard, grinding voices. His was quiet, considered and serious, as though he weighed the worth of everything he said.

  “Julia Fisk. I’m your handler.”

  An Unexpected Proposal

  Josh was in his suite, rolling a glass ball back and forth. Half an hour ago, three floors down, Dr Sugar had embarked upon a rant. He couldn’t remember the last time his creator had lost his rag, so this must really be something. He pitched his ears to follow Sugar’s progress through the Centre. His ire showed no signs of cooling. He drew passersby into it - “Look at that! It’s disgraceful!” - before launching into a stream of extremely personal remarks about somebody.

  He was getting nearer. Josh put the ball back and perched on the room’s only chair. The door opened moments later. “Good afternoon, Dr Sugar,” he said dutifully.

  Sugar grunted. He performed the checks he did every time he visited: temperature, atmospheric pressure, light, moisture. He shone a torch in Josh’s eyes and walked around him one way, then the other.

  “Is everything alright, doctor?”

  “Sorry, Josh.” He’d crushed a newspaper in his fist; now he held it out like a peace offering. “Read this and tell me what you think.”

  “Of course.” He liked it when he was given
something to read. Mandy was the best about it, bringing him magazines and romances, but anything was welcome. He’d scour the words, mull them over like wine. Even an instruction manual would do.

  It was a column in one of the better papers, written by somebody called AW. She argued the robotics industry was a drain on the public purse, a vanity exercise to keep up with Arkan and Huiji. Functional robots had nudged unskilled workers out of the market, leading to the worst employment figures in years. Nothing was being done to redeploy these people. She quoted a number of unpalatable statistics: robots unplugged life support to clean, drained patients of blood during injections, their clumsy manoeuvres caused shock and death. If that wasn’t bad enough, CER had turned their sights to an even more frivolous project. Piqued by Arkan’s conveyor belt of celebrity robots, they’d built their own.

  ‘CER hasn’t grasped the revulsion people feel towards their little darlings. Have you ever been to the Lux Aquarium and seen the cuskor eel wend its way along its tank? You’re unable to believe such a slander exists. With their dead eyes, twitchy movements and skin like tinned meat, robots are the eel’s spiritual cousins. The one difference is the bot’s creation is deliberate.’

  “Well?”

  Josh had never considered how he looked. What was there to think about? A symmetrical face, fair hair, a slight figure in a jumper and twill trousers.

  “Ignore him,” Sugar said. “He’s a reactionary tosser.”

  Him. Well, that changed matters. Josh was acutely aware, Dr Sugar apart, most men were makeweights. “Why are you so upset?”

  “We were going to invite him to your launch.”

  “Why invite somebody who hates us?”

  “For the look of the thing. It’s Lord Langton -”

  “As in Lady Augusta?” Josh might have the vaguest notion of current affairs, but he knew who Lady Augusta was. She’d founded CER, the entire discipline of modern robotics. Since her death thirteen years ago, they’d worked tirelessly to honour her vision.

  Sugar nodded. “He hasn’t been right since she died. It would have been nice to have someone who knew her, but if he can’t even be civil -”

  “I’ll see him.” Josh didn’t know why he said it. Was it the boredom pressing down like lack of air in a bell jar? Wanting to meet someone who’d known Lady Augusta?

  “Good grief, why? You’ve never gone outside on your own!”

  “Isn’t it time I started?”

  “Let me go, or Dr Fisk -”

  “I can do perfectly well alone.” Josh pointed at the article. “If I show up with an entourage, won’t it confirm artificials are useless non-people? It feels important.”

  “I don’t want you to go to Langton on the strength of a feeling.”

  Josh didn’t expect Sugar to understand. His instincts were so infallible, part of the hiring process involved candidates speaking to him. He wished somebody would listen to his thoughts about Fisk, but as his handler she was beyond reproach. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  Surprisingly this worked. “I’ll ask for authorisation.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Josh said, “is if Lady Augusta was so brilliant, why did she pick a narrow minded robophobe for a husband?”

  Sugar looked as though he wanted to say something. Instead he tossed the article in the wastepaper basket. Josh waited for him to be down the next corridor before he pulled it out. There was a paragraph he hadn’t noticed before. It must have been this that turned Dr Sugar puce.

  “Tell me, readers: is there any point to robotics other than helping misfits get laid? Write in with your educated opinion. You’d be wrong, but it’ll be fascinating to see what you come up with.”

  No sooner had Sugar raised the question than the other doctors arrived in Josh’s suite. Only Ozols was sympathetic.

  “It’s practice,” she argued. “He’s bound to come across tough customers, and you don’t get tougher than Lord Rusty.”

  “There’s a world of difference between easing him and shoving him,” Malik said. “Will you counsel him if it goes wrong?”

  She and Ozols glared at each other. They’d never got along. They even looked like polar opposites: Ozols sunny and statuesque with fair braids, Malik diminutive with a pudding bowl haircut and indelible scowl. They appealed to Fisk.

  “Julia, it’ll be good for him -”

  “Noah listens to you -”

  “I want to go,” Josh said. “I promise I’ll behave.”

  Sugar looked at him in pride. Ozols winked. Malik left the room chuntering; Fisk might have been force fed arsenic.

  “What a hullabaloo!” Sugar sighed. “Thanks, Frida.”

  “Any time. Okay, Josh. This is what you do ...”

  Three days later Josh dismounted at Langton station. He’d wanted to wear his sweater and twills, but Sugar argued it wouldn’t do for visiting the aristocracy. They’d shown up in his wing with ticked trousers, a white shirt with a high collar, a longcoat and striped scarf. He liked the scarf and practised swishing it over each shoulder.

  Chimera was two miles from the station. It was a pleasant day, he’d walk. The surroundings were alien but reassuring, so many palettes of green and different smells. He kept close to the hedgerows, standing aside when he heard a vehicle. He stretched out his hand and relished the textures: the ruffles of a bush, the scratchiness of a twig, the sheen of a flower. Passersby stared but he was getting used to that.

  The town of Langton was like something from a jigsaw: unpaved streets, old fashioned node lamps, houses stacked like dominoes. Josh passed the temple, crossed a redstone bridge over a trickle of river. More fields. A pond thick with algae, clouded with dragonflies.

  Here the landscape changed. A wealth of trees packed together, lushly kept grass. He didn’t need to see the gates to know he was approaching Chimera’s famous park. Ozols and Sugar had described it yesterday.

  “It used to be the tenth most visited stately home on the continent -”

  “He used to keep man traps. They say he shoots intruders.”

  “The gardens are second to none. I visited them when Lord Arthur and Lady Constance were alive.”

  “A veritable zoo ranging free -”

  “For the love of Thea, Noah! Shut up!”

  “Just keeping it real.”

  He was setting foot on the property of a madman. Ah, well. Anything was better than that glass ball.

  First he collided with a statue. A mix of lion, goat and snake, it looked as though it’d leap from its plinth and attack him. Gazing up from that -

  “Oh, my stars.”

  How was this a house? Josh’s eyes couldn’t process it all. Spires, stained glass and complex masonry, arches and balconies and widow’s walks. If so much hadn’t rested upon this, he would have fled. Listening to Sugar and Ozols, he’d gathered sweetening Langton was crucial. He wondered at their desperation. He didn’t know half the words Sugar had used, but they didn’t sound nice.

  He’d done some background reading on the Earls of Langton. They were an unpleasant bunch with a history of madness and degeneracy; Lady Augusta was the only nice one. One had executed the king and founded Perversion Prevention; another was a poet and blackmailer who killed her lover’s husband. If his research was anything to go by, the present incumbent enjoyed his fair share of quirks. That article was the latest in a one man war against robotics - he seemed to send a filibuster to each of the nationals each week. “I love Gussy,” the most recent said, “but the Cybernetic Revolution has gone far” - with yet more doomsday predictions. He was took it so seriously, you’d think it was personal. Yet he was rarely interviewed and had a strange aversion to being photographed.

  Josh marched up to the front door, pressed the bell and listened. Nothing. He pressed it again. On the third peal, a lithe yellow shape nudged the door open.

  He clambered up the side of a statue. A lion was circling the base with a patient air. He knew he wouldn’t make a tasty meal, but did it know?
>
  “Nice cat. I mean no harm -”

  He put a hand out. He waited for a crunch of metal, his fingers to vanish down her gullet. The lion sniffed and her expression changed. He’d never seen an animal panic before: tail up, shoulders tense, streaking into the bushes.

  “Puss? Where are you off to?”

  A figure had appeared in the doorway. At first he thought it was his host, but surely Langton must be about fifty? This young man was in his twenties, red haired with a slouch. It was only when he noticed curves and long hair he realised it was a young woman. He straightened up respectfully.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m here to see Lord Langton -”

  “You’re that bot, aren’t you? I don’t know why you’ve bothered.”

  Was everyone in this house ignorant? “He insulted me. I’m answering the challenge.”

  “He’s a busy man.” She barred the way.

  “I’ve come all the way from Lux. Do you want to reimburse my travel expenses?”

  She goggled. “Third floor, second on the right.”

  “Thanks. Your cat went that way.”

  First Meeting

  Alfred Wilding was in a bad mood. It was so long since he’d woken otherwise, he’d die of shock the day it happened. Perhaps that was why he always looked harried, as though he expected the world to hit him in the face.

  An artificial was coming to visit. Why couldn’t CER leave him alone? There’d been a time when he was willing to play along, but they’d grown ever more demanding. ‘It’s the anniversary. Honour Augusta as she would have wanted!’

  How did they know what she would have wanted? This morning he’d received a nauseating letter from the Six Day Klonkites, asking if she could join their pantheon of saints. That same phrase, ‘what she would have wanted’. He composed a reply: “Gussy was my favourite person in the world so I’m better qualified to judge her wishes than you. She had few religious convictions, and certainly none for a cog frigging cult. Any further communications from you will be burnt.” That was the polite version.