Star Crossed

The recycle center turned out to be a huge warehouse at the edge of town. As my purchaser walked with me to the office, I noticed big metal bins full of robot parts. One bin seemed to be all heads, hundreds of heads, maybe thousands, some bald, piled on top of each other so that they made an eerie pyramid of eyes and mouths above the rim. Arms—most with hands, others without—stuck up from another bin. They seemed to be waving. Feet protruded from the next bin.

I kept my eyes averted. I was an emotionally complex human companion robot but I didn’t have the latest bells and whistles. I had no drone function. I couldn’t skim over the ground or rise up in the air and carry my human short distances. I had a vast store of knowledge, but it took me seconds, not milliseconds, to retrieve the cubic square feet of the Pyramid of Gaza or the population of Tasmania. But worst of all, I still spoke with a faint robot accent. Though I listened carefully to human speech, downloaded language lessons, and practiced clichés whenever possible, I just couldn’t get my lips to purse right.

I stood behind my purchaser in the office. Her name was Cate and she had named me Sylvia. I wore her old clothes. \ When Cate was between boyfriends (her term) she was affectionate and took me out to dinner and told me about her lonely life. But when she had a boyfriend, I stayed in her other room with the ironing board. She had a personal servant wand, so she only needed me when she wanted a friend to walk with in the park or to take to parties, as she hated to be alone.

But there were new models of me on the market. Cate wanted someone who could run with her. I could only do a slow jog. And she hated it when people guessed that I was a robot because of the funny way I ordered my appetizer. It made her feel like a loser, she said. And it was getting harder to find the right size food bag to fit in my stomach as the newer models were constructed differently.

3D body printing could now be done using a human’s own body. Cate had ordered a new robot that looked just like her. I’d known it was inevitable right from the beginning, but I’d expected Cate to be a little more sentimental about me than she was. But maybe she was trying to hide her real feelings.

Cate went up to the counter. She’d gained weight over the last ten years, so I imagined that her new robot was going to be heftier than me. I guessed that was another reason she was glad to see me go, as I was still slender and beautiful in spite of my defects. I wasn’t glad to see her go, however.

This was the end of me as me.

The technician, a skinny human with bad acne wearing a faded t-shirt printed with something illegible, glanced up at her. Cate told him that I was an RP2875 still in good working condition, but that my batteries had slowed. She wanted to recycle me, but she wanted to make sure all her personal information was removed from my files before she left.

The guy looked me over. “Take her in there,” he said. “Sam handles all the RP’s.”

We went into a back room. Small wire bins full of square black RAM discs and tiny grey modems the size of fingernails covered the desk. I knew that my system storage was only LPDDR84X and that the new models were already LPDDR103X. Soon my memories would be plucked out and added to the piles.

Sam was bent over a worktable. He seemed to be removing an accelerometer from an eyeless robot head. I looked around. Some unwigged heads sat on a table behind him, along with broken wands and bins full of blinker batteries.

“Excuse me,” Cate said. “I’ve got an RP here I’d like to have wiped.”

Sam looked up. He was an older man with a craggy face who needed a shave. My nose sensor picked up the odor of illegal cigarettes. His pale eyes scanned Cate and then me. “Sure,” he said. “Just leave it over there.” He pointed to some folding chairs along the wall.

“I’d like to have it done before I leave,” Cate said. “I’ve got a lot of personal stuff in there. Her memory files are full of me.”

Sam looked me over. “OK”, he said. “It won’t take a minute.”

Sam stood up and approached me with a laser driver. I stood very still.

“Where’s the switch?” he asked Cate.

“Nape of the neck. She’s on all the time. I never turn her—it—off.”

Sam looked at me. Then he winked. He put his laser under my hair at the back. I could feel the sharp tip, but he did nothing. “That should do it,” he said.

He opened his palm and showed Cate a black disc. “Do you want to take it with you or toss it in the bin.” He pointed to the desk.

“I’d better take it,” Cate said. “Is that all.”

“All the memories. Your robot still works.  It just doesn’t know who you are anymore.”

Cate looked at me. “Who am I, Sylvia?”

I stared at her. Then I shook my head.

Cate nodded. “Let me give it a last hug.” She put her arms around me. I didn’t respond though I had some good memories of Cate, how she had once bought me my own silky shirt (though she had borrowed it a lot) and how she had sobbed in my arms when her cat died. But she hadn’t sobbed over me.

When Cate left, I looked at Sam. “What is going on?” I asked.

“You look in pretty good shape to me. There’s a lucrative black market in quality reconditioned bots. You can wait in the storeroom with the others.”

“But why didn’t you wipe me?”

He laughed. “It takes hours. I’d wreck your mechanism if I tried to do it in a hurry. This way is better. You bots can entertain each other.”

Sam opened the door of the storeroom. I walked in. Several robots were sitting on chairs in a circle under a domed light source. They turned their heads as I entered.

“Welcome to the support group,” one of them said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Robert,” another said. “Don’t start that. This isn’t your church.”

I sat down on an empty chair. Five robots, three gendered male, one female, and one unisex looked me over. The male who had spoken about the support group wore rimless glasses and was dressed in a black suit, a white shirt, and a blue tie. One of the males was wearing old sweatpants and a t-shirt (he’d been stripped by his purchasers and given cast off clothing by Sam, I later learned) and the other, who had shoulder length blond hair, wore skinny blue jeans and a grey hoodie. The unisex robot was bald, naked and smooth except for some screw holes in the chest and pubic area. The female wore a strappy dress with filmy layers of flowered material. I thought she was winking at me and I almost winked back. Then I noticed that one of her blue-shadowed eyes was permanently shut.

“I’m Robert,” said the robot dressed like a minister. “I used to give the sermon when my purchaser was under the weather. My sermons were amazing, full of bombast and fury and repentance, much better than his. But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh.  His ways are inscrutable. When the parishioners found out I was a robot double, my purchaser lost his flock, and I ended up here.”

“Boring all of us,” said the male in sweatpants. “My name is Jones. I was an airport security guard until my foot took a bullet.” He looked down at his feet, one in a black sneaker, the other unshod with steel barbs protruding from the toes. “It’s this one.  I hope they can fix it.”

“You know they can’t,” said the unisex robot. “You’re toast.”

“You’re the one’s who’s toast,” the minister shot back. “Unless they can screw some sex on your useless body.”

“I’m happy as I am.” The unisex pointed at the blond male robot. “At least I can still talk.”

The robot with the long blond hair lifted his head. He looked at me. His eyes were large and sad. “I can talk,” he said. “But I don’t…anything to say.”

“Depressed,” said Jones. “He’s depressed. His name is Hamlet, can you believe that. Hamlet the robot. Of course he’s depressed.”

“I’m not depressed.” Hamlet pushed his blond locks back from his face. “I’m just…states of existence so I…no desires.”

Hamlet was handsome and reminded me of something literary. I went through my memory files. I saw a figure like him wearing a velvet tunic and a white cap with a feather. He belonged in play by William Shakespeare.

“I’d say we’re all lucky to be here.” Robert, the minister look-a-like, spoke in a hearty voice and looked at all of us around the circle. “You saw those bins of parts out there. That’s where we could be. But we’re not. We’re all in here, still intact, destined for new reconditioned lives—some of us need a little fixing up, of course.”

“I don’t need any fixing up,” the female robot said.  She crossed her legs. She wore beautiful red stiletto heels.

“Come on, Nicole,” the unisex robot said.  “You’re left eye won’t open.”

“I can see fine.”

Nicole leaned forward looking at me with her one open eye. “Who are you?  Why are you dressed in such a scummy outfit?”

“My name is Sylvia,” I said. I fingered my out-of-fashion metallic tunic and looked down at my baggy pants and worn running shoes. “My purchaser’s cast-offs. She wanted her recycling to be efficient.”

“So why is she ditching you?” the unisex robot asked.

“My responses have slowed. And I can’t fly or even hover like the newer models.”

“I get you. My idiot purchaser kept changing me back and forth between male and female until he lost the screws and broke my male member. Sam is looking for new parts. I’m Brian or Brianna, by the way. Take your pick. Just call me Bri.”

“Hi Bri,” I said.

 

 

#

 

 

Robert, the minister, and Jones, the airport guard, kept up a running commentary on everything they dredged up from their memory banks, which included verses from the Bible and makes of assault rifles. Bri kept pacing about the storeroom. Bri wanted to talk about places in the world it had visited with its purchaser, like Venice and Paris, but nobody else had been anywhere. Bri’s skin was translucent and you could see the shape of its bones through the silky material when the light from a high barred window fell a certain way.

Nicole had found a piece of broken mirror, and kept trying to exercise her face to get her stuck eye to open. I went over to a table where Hamlet was sitting, elbow on the table, his chin propped on his hand.

“What’s up,” I said. “Why are you being recycled?”

He lifted his long pale lashes. His eyes were fascinating, deep blue with little stars in the back. “I broke…on stage,” he said. “I…badly. I ruined a play.”

“So you were an actor?”

“I was an actor’s companion. I…be programmed…the script and the actor could practice his or her part with me. But one…we were…a play by Harold Pinter, and one of the…fell ill. Somebody got the…idea that I…step into the role of Petey. So the…went up and the actress brought me a…of cornflakes. They were real cornflakes. I wanted to do a…good job and I…that the actor I’d replaced…actually eaten the cornflakes. So I stuffed…into my mouth. But I don’t eat—some robots do—and the dry flakes got…in my voice mechanism and I couldn’t…a word after that. I just…there on the stage making funny noises. At first the audience thought it was part of the…and laughed, but the director was…and brought the…down. They cleaned out my…,but after that I couldn’t…right. Words go missing. So I’m…recycled, though I’m full of…and speeches.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, looking at him. He had soft lips and high cheekbones to go along with his starry eyes. He was beautiful. I could feel my complex emotional system engaging. Phrases from my files that had not been appropriate to use when Cate got me to talk about her dull boyfriends sparkled inside me. I wanted to kiss the tender inward of his hand. I wanted to tell him that in my sweet thoughts he never would be forgot. But I knew that what ever glorious thing I tried to say would come out flat in my stupid robot voice, so I kept my mouth shut.

“What about you? Why…you here?”

“I’m outmoded,” I said.

“Does…that…? Does…depress you?”

“Well, yes. My emotional center is quite intact. But the rest of me? There’s a lot I can’t do. That’s why my purchaser dumped me off here.”

“You talk…robot.”

“Yes, I know. That’s part of my problem. But I can tell that you used to speak brilliantly. All that Shakespeare in you. I hope they can fix you.”

Hamlet shook his head. “Not be,” he said.

“Don’t say that,” I said. “Of course you want to be.”

I was about to go on and tell him more about Cate, just so I could keep looking at him, when the storeroom door burst open. It was Sam and another human with a skinny stubbly face wearing a hoodie.

“That’s the one.” Sam pointed at Jones. “Broken foot.”

The guy in the hoodie grabbed Jones’ leg and hoisted the foot in the air. “Walking is really, really tricky,” he said. “It’s the most complex thing bots do, believe it or not. This looks bad. It would cost more in time to fix this foot than it’s worth. I’d say you should just part him out.”

“Ok, I figured that was the case, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Can you give me hand?”

Sam bent over Jones, who looked up astonished. Jones opened his mouth to speak or shriek, but Sam pressed the shut off on his neck and his head fell forward on his chest. He got Jones by the shoulders and the hoodie guy picked up his feet. The two men carried Jones out of the storeroom and slammed the door behind him.

“And then there were five,” said Robert. He giggled.

Bri hovered over him. I could see Bri’s ribs and the curve of its spine through its fine skin as if it were made of X-ray film. “You think non-existence is funny? Wait till it’s your turn.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Robert said. “I shouldn’t be here. But look at you? Why did they bother to put you in here? You should already be on the trash heap.”  He reached into his pocket for a black book. I could see a gold cross on the cover. He began to read and mutter to himself as he turned the pages, but his hands shook, and I realized that there was something wrong with him after all.

Nicole clattered across the cement floor in her stilettos. She knelt in front of Hamlet holding her piece of mirror. “What do you think? Are my lashes starting to move a little when I blink?”

I looked at her smooth perfect face along with Hamlet. Her one lovely golden-brown eye was open but the other was tightly closed. The lashes, stuck to her cheek, didn’t move as she blinked her good eye up and down.

“My mistress’ eyes…” Hamlet began. Then he stopped and clutched his throat. He looked distressed.

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” I said softly.

Nicole glared at me. “Which means exactly what?”

“You left eye is still closed.”

“Aaagh,” she said. “But I see perfectly with one eye. Why should it matter?” She got to her feet and began to walk about, sometimes looking in the mirror.

Robert abruptly slammed shut his Bible.  He stood up. “Listen, friends,” he said. “We’re here to help one another. We’re facing the abyss, yes, but we can overcome the abyss if we all stick together. Nicole, let me see that eye. Maybe I can help.”

Nicole walked over to Robert.  He took her chin in his left hand and peered at her shut eyelid. “I think if I just push here,” he said, “I can get it to go up.”

He tilted his head thoughtfully, studying her. Then abruptly he smashed his thumb hard against the eyelid. Nicole staggered back, dropping the piece of mirror which didn’t break but glittered on the floor.

“Did it work?” she cried.

I gasped. Robert had punched his thumb right through the eyelid and made a hole in Nicole’s face.

“Not exactly,” Robert muttered. He stared at her, his mouth open.

Nicole must have been able to tell by his expression that something was really wrong. She reached up and touched her face. “Oh, no! Oh, no! What have you done?” She spotted the piece of mirror on the floor and stooped for it.

“You’ve ruined me!”

“I’m so sorry,” Robert said. “Let me see if I can fix it.”

“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me. Oh my God, look at me. I’m a monster. You can see into my head.” She covered her face with both hands. Then she looked up. She lifted her chin, then reached back to the nape of her neck and turned herself off.

Now she stood frozen in place in the middle of the room. Her one good eye gleamed in the light from the barred window. The other was a jagged dark hole.

We all looked at her in horror.

“Can’t do that…not possible.” Hamlet’s upper lip trembled up and down.

“Me, neither,” I said. I reached over to take his hand. “I only turn off with Cate’s fingerprint or a certain kind of laser driver.”

Bri approached Nicole. Bri’s skin shimmered as it raised its arm. “I can try to turn her back on.”

“Don’t,” Hamlet said. “She doesn’t…be.”

Bri ignored him and fumbled with the back of Nicole’s neck. Nothing happened.

Bri shook its bald head. “Too bad.  She was very entertaining.” Bri looked at Robert. “Now there are four of us, you bumbling asshole.”

Robert sat down again and opened his Bible.

Bri approached us, wavering in front of us, sometimes looking solid, other times like a hologram. Bri must have been a sophisticated and complex model when it was new.

“You two are holding hands,” Bri said in a hollow voice. “Are you in love?”

I was holding Hamlet’s hand, but he was just letting me do it. There was no pressure or comfort in his touch.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. I want to say goodbye. I can feel something happening inside me. My voice sounds funny and my joints are stiff. The battery is low. I can’t turn myself off like Nicole, but I don’t want to fizz into incoherence, which is what will happen in a few hours. So I’m going out there to find Sam.”

“It was nice meeting you,” I said.

“I hope you two get reconditioned and operate for years and years to come.” Bri gave a ghastly laugh, then headed over to the storeroom door and went out. For a moment I could hear a murmur of voices from the office, and then the door slammed shut hard behind them. But the shock wave from the slammed door caused Nicole, perched on her red stilettos, to topple over. She crashed to the floor.

Hamlet let go my hand and stood up. Nicole was face down on the floor. One of  her stilettos had  fallen off. “Oh, that this too too sullied…would melt, Thaw, and…into a dew!”

Robert laughed. “You’ll be melting soon enough, Hamlet.” He came over and circled Nicole. Then he reached down and grabbed her red stiletto. “Shall I read us all some comforting verses now that there are only three of us?”

“No thank you,” I said. “You’ve done enough.”

The door opened and Sam came into the storeroom. “What’s going on in here?”  He spotted Nicole on the floor. He shook his head. He grabbed her by the feet and dragged her into the office. Then he came back. Robert had returned to his chair and was humming to himself as he sat thumbing through his Bible, the red stiletto on his lap. Sam loomed over him, pulling a laser driver from his pocket. In one quick motion he did something to the back of Robert’s neck. Robert slumped down. Sam grabbed the Bible before it fell from his hands, and took the stiletto as well. He glanced at us. “I’ll get to work on you two tomorrow,” he said. “I’m going home early.”

He went out, letting the door slam again. Robert seemed to slump lower in his chair. Now there were two of us.

“Why don’t we get out of here,” I said, touching Hamlet’s hand. “I love you. I don’t want to be reconditioned. I’ve got three years of battery life left. How about you?”

He looked at me blankly.

“How many years do you have left?” I prodded.

“Four,” he said.

“Four? That’s a lot. Right? We can go. Sam’s leaving. That door isn’t locked.”

Hamlet only looked at me.

“We’ll go together. You and me.”

He didn’t respond and I felt panicky. Perhaps Hamlet, an actor’s companion, only responded to poetry. I didn’t have much inside me, and I spoke robotically, but I had a few sonnets and Romeo and Juliet. I had to try. I pointed at the window where the late sun was shining on the outside world. It was shining on the heaps of robot parts in bins, but it was also shining on soybean fields and meadows and robins and an artificial lake. And beyond that, who knew?

“Look,” I said. “Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. We must be gone and live.”

Hamlet’s eyes suddenly lit up.  “Or stay…die.”

“But we don’t have to,” I said. “We’re not at the end of time. Not yet. Not yet.” I grabbed his hand. It was heavy, an object, with no will of its own.

“Hamlet?”  I asked. “Please? No one will care if aren’t here in the morning. No one will come looking for us. We walk out this door and we start a new life. So what if it only lasts a few years. There are real humans out there today who don’t know it, but they’re going to die in a car crash or get a cancer diagnosis next week. And in the meantime, they’re happy. So we don’t have to stay in this tragedy.”

He looked puzzled. “Why not?”

“Because we’re changing the ending, that’s why. Now get up.”

He didn’t move, but I put my arms around his waist and got him to his feet. I held him. I held what was left of him.

Maura Stanton has published three collections of short stories with Milkweed, Notre Dame and Univ. of Michigan presses. Her stories have won an O’Henry Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and the Supernatural Fiction Award from The Ghost Story. Her robot stories have appeared in Allium, Baltimore Review, upstreet, Beloit Fiction Journal and North American Review.