HOW TO BECOME A ROBOT IN 12 EASY STEPS
by A. Merc Rustad
How to tell your boyfriend you are in love with a robot:
A full transcript appears under the cut:
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[Intro music]
Intro:
Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode one for April 2nd, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you!
Before we start, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported GlitterShip so far. Our Kickstarter campaign will be finishing up on April 8th, so if you're just hearing about GlitterShip for the first time, you can still check it out. If you're listening to this episode after the 8th, well, hello future person! I hope we have space travel whenever you're listening to this.
Very briefly, here's some publishing news. Our talented cover artist has a queer poem that's going to be coming out in Uncanny Magazine on the 7th of April. That will be called "The Eaters" by M. Sereno.
I'd also like to draw your attention to two other Kickstarter campaigns. There's the Beyond Anthology, which is a queer science fiction and fantasy comics anthology, and there's also Vitality Magazine, which is a queer science fiction and fantasy literary magazine that is seeking to fund its second issue.
This has really been a huge couple of months for queer science fiction and fantasy. The special Lightspeed Magazine issue "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" has recently announced its table of contents, so that'll be out later this year. And if you're a writer, the submissions are currently open for "Queers Destroy Horror."
All of these links are going to be in the transcript on our website at glittership.com. You can check us out there and we also have a Twitter feed @GlitterShipSF.
If you have news or publication notices that may be of interest to the GlitterShip listeners, get in touch with me at publine at GlitterShip dot com.
Our story today is "How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps" by A. Merc Rustad.
Merc is a queer non-binary writer and filmmaker who lives in the Midwest United States. Favorite things include: robots, dinosaurs, monsters, and tea. When not buried in the homework mines or dayjobbery, Merc likes to play video games, read comics, and wear awesome hats.
Merc has several other things published recently: a science fiction short with gay protagonists at Escape Pod, which is available both as text and audio; a longer fantasy story about monsters and dancing and fairy tale tropes that features lesbian protagonists (cis and trans) with a happy ending at Inscription Magazine; and a quieter fantasy short about undersea adventures and multiple trans protagonists forthcoming in Scigentasy in May.
You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or visit their website for a complete bibliography (and links to short films) at http://amercrustad.com.
Alright. I hope you enjoy the story.
HOW TO BECOME A ROBOT IN 12 EASY STEPS
by A. Merc Rustad
Read by Keffy R. M. Kehrli
How to tell your boyfriend you are in love with a robot:
On my to-do list today:
The robot is a J-90 SRM, considered “blocky” and “old-school,” probably refurbished from a scrapper, painted bright purple with the coffee shop logo on the chassis. The robot’s square head has an LED screen that greets customers with unfailing politeness and reflects their orders back to them. The bright blue smiley face never changes in the top corner of the screen.
Everyone knows the J-90 SRMs aren’t upgradable AI. They have basic customer service programming and equipment maintenance protocols.
Everyone knows robots in the service industry are there as cheap labor investments and to improve customer satisfaction scores, which they never do, because customers are never happy.
Everyone knows you can’t be in love with a robot.
I drop my plate into the automatic disposal, which thanks me for recycling. No one else waits to deposit trash, so I focus on it as I brace myself to walk back to the counter. The J-90 SRM smiles blankly at the empty front counter, waiting for the next customer.
The lunch rush is over. The air reeks of espresso and burned milk. I don’t come here because the food is good or the coffee any better. The neon violet décor is best ignored.
I practiced this in front of a wall a sixteen times over the last week. I have my script. It’s simple. “Hello, I’m Tesla. What may I call you?”
And the robot will reply:
I will say, “It’s nice to meet you.”
And the robot will reply:
I will say, “I would like to know if you’d like to go out with me when you’re off-duty, at a time of both our convenience. I’d like to get to know you better, if that’s acceptable to you.”
And the robot will reply:
“Hey, Tesla.”
The imagined conversation shuts down. I blink at the trash receptacle and look up.
My boyfriend smiles hello, his hands shoved in his jeans pockets, his shoulders hunched to make himself look smaller. At six foot five and three hundred pounds, it never helps. He’s as cuddly and mellow as a black bear in hibernation. Today he’s wearing a gray turtleneck and loafers, his windbreaker unzipped.
“Hi, Jonathan.”
I can’t ask the robot out now.
The empty feeling reappears in my chest, where it always sits when I can’t see or hear the robot.
“You still coming to Esteban’s party tonight?” Jonathan asks.
“Yeah.”
Jonathan smiles again. “I’ll pick you up after work, then.”
“Sounds good,” I say. “We’d better go, or I’ll be late.”
He works as an accountant. He wanted to study robotic engineering but his parents would only pay for college if he got a practical degree (his grandfather disapproves of robots). Computers crunched the numbers and he handled the people.
He always staggers his lunch break so he can walk back with me. It’s nice. Jonathan can act as an impenetrable weather shield if it rains and I forget my umbrella.
But Jonathan isn’t the robot.
He offers me his arm, like the gentleman he always is, and we leave the coffee shop. The door wishes us a good day.
I don’t look back at the robot.
A beginner’s guide on how to fake your way through biological social constructs:
Jonathan and I lounge on the plush leather couch in his apartment. He takes up most of it, and I curl against his side. We have a bowl of popcorn and we’re watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
“I have something to tell you,” he says. His shoulders tense.
I keep watching the TV. He knows I pay attention when he tells me things, even if I don’t look at him. “Okay.”
“I’m...” He hesitates. The Borg fire on the Enterprise again. “I’m seeing someone else.”
“Another guy?” I ask, hopeful.
“Yeah. I met him at the gym. His name’s Bernardo.”
I sigh in relief. Secrets are heavy and hurt when you have to carry them around all your life. (I have to make lists to keep track of mine.) “I’m glad. Are you going to tell anyone?”
He relaxes and squeezes my hand. “Just you right now. But from what he’s told me, his family’s pretty accepting.”
“Lucky,” I say.
We scrape extra butter off the bowl with the last kernels of popcorn.
We’ve been pretend-dating for two years now. We’ve never slept together. That’s okay. I like cuddling with him and he likes telling me about crazy customers at his firm, and everyone thinks we’re a perfectly adorable straight couple on the outside.
The empty spot in my chest grows bigger as I watch Data on screen. Data has the entire crew of the Enterprise. Jonathan has Bernardo now. I don’t know if the robot will be interested in me in return. (What if the robot isn’t?)
The room shrinks in on me, the umber-painted walls and football memorabilia suffocating. I jerk to my feet.
Jonathan mutes the TV. “Something wrong?”
“I have to go.”
“Want me to drive you home?”
“It’s four blocks away.” But I appreciate his offer, so I add, “But thanks.”
I find my coat piled by the door while he takes the popcorn bowl into the kitchen.
Jonathan leans against the wall as I carefully lace each boot to the proper tightness. “If you want to talk, Tesla, I’ll listen.”
I know that. He came out to me before we started dating. I told him I wasn’t interested in socially acceptable relationships, either, and he laughed and looked so relieved he almost cried. We made an elaborate plan, a public persona our families wouldn’t hate.
I’m not ready to trust him as much as he trusts me.
“Night, Jonathan.”
“Goodnight, Tesla.”
How to tell your fake boyfriend you would like to become a robot:
I have this nightmare more and more often.
I’m surrounded by robots. Some of them look like the J-90 SRM, some are the newer androids, some are computer cores floating in the air. I’m the only human.
I try to speak, but I have no voice. I try to touch them, but I can’t lift my hands. I try to follow them as they walk over a hill and through two huge doors, like glowing LED screens, but I can’t move.
Soon, all the robots are gone and I’m all alone in the empty landscape.
11 Reasons you want to become a robot:
It’s Saturday, so I head to the Purple Bean early.
The robot isn’t there.
I stare at the polished chrome and plastic K-100, which has a molded face that smiles with humanistic features.
“Welcome to the Purple Bean,” the new robot says in a chirpy voice that has inflection and none of the mechanical monotone I like about the old robot. “I’m Janey. How can I serve you today?”
“Where’s the J-90 SRM?”
Robbie, the barista who works weekends, leans around the espresso machine and sighs. She must have gotten this question a lot. The panic in my chest is winching so tight it might crack my ribs into little pieces. Why did they retire the robot?
“Manager finally got the company to upgrade,” Robbie says. “Like it?”
“Where’s the J-90 SRM?”
“Eh, recycled, I guess.” Robbie shrugs. “You want the usual?”
I can’t look at the new K-100. It isn’t right. It doesn’t belong in the robot’s place, and neither do I. “I have to go.”
“Have a wonderful day,” the door says.
How to rescue a robot from being scrapped: [skill level: intermediate]
Two techs wheel the robot out and load it into Jonathan’s car. The gut-punched feeling doesn’t go away. The robot looks so helpless, shut down and blank in the back seat. I flip open the robot’s chassis, but the power core is gone, along with the programming module.
The robot is just a shell of what the robot once was.
I feel like crying. I don’t want to. It’s uncomfortable and doesn’t solve problems.
“What’s wrong, Tesla?” Jonathan asks.
I shut the chassis. My hands tremble. “They broke the robot.”
“It’ll be okay,” Jonathan says. As if anything can be okay right now. As if there is nothing wrong with me. “You can fix it.”
I squirm back into the passenger seat and grip the dash. He’s right. We were friends because we both liked robots and I spent my social studies classes in school researching robotics and programming.
“I’ve never done anything this complex,” I say. I’ve only dismantled, reverse-engineered, and rebuilt the small household appliances and computers. No one has ever let me build a robot.
“You’ll do fine,” he says. “And if you need help, I know just the guy to ask.”
“Who?”
“Want to meet my boyfriend?”
Necessary questions to ask your boyfriend’s new boyfriend (a former Army engineer of robotics):
Bernardo—six inches shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than Jonathan, tattooed neck to ankles, always smelling of cigarettes—is part robot. He lost his right arm at the shoulder socket in an accident, and now wears the cybernetic prosthetic. It has limited sensory perception, but he says it’s not as good as his old hand.
I like him. I tell Jonathan this, and my boyfriend beams.
“They really gut these things,” Bernardo says when he drops off the power cell.
(I want to ask him how much I owe him. But when he says nothing about repayment, I stay quiet. I can’t afford it. Maybe he knows that.)
We put the robot in the spare bedroom in my apartment, which Jonathan wanted to turn into an office, but never organized himself enough to do so. I liked the empty room, but now it’s the robot’s home. I hid the late payment notices and overdue bills in a drawer before Jonathan saw them.
“Getting a new arm might be tricky, but I have a buddy who works a scrap yard out in Maine,” Bernardo says. “Bet she could dig up the right model parts.”
“Thank you.”
I’m going to reconstruct the old personality and programming pathways. There are subsystems, “nerve clusters,” that serve as redundant processing. Personality modules get routed through functionality programs, and vestiges of the robot’s personality build up in subsystems. Newer models are completely wiped, but they usually don’t bother with old ones.
Bernardo rubs his shaved head. “You realize this won’t be a quick and easy fix, right? Might take weeks. Hell, it might not even work.”
I trace a finger through the air in front of the robot’s dark LED screen. I have not been able to ask the robot if I have permission to touch the robot. It bothers me that I have to handle parts and repairs without the robot’s consent. Does that make it wrong? To fix the robot without knowing if the robot wishes to be fixed?
Will the robot hate me if I succeed?
“I know,” I whisper. “But I need to save the robot.”
How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing:
I work on the robot during my spare time. I have lots of it now. Working on the robot is the only reason I have to wake up.
I need to repair the robot’s destroyed servos and piece together the robot’s memory and function programming from what the computer recovered.
There are subroutine lists in my head that are getting bigger and bigger:
Bernardo and Jonathan are in the kitchen. They laugh and joke while making stir fry. I’m not hungry.
I haven’t been hungry for a few days now.
“You should just buy a new core, Tesla,” Bernardo says. “Would save you a lot of headaches.”
I don’t need a blank, programmable core. What I want is the robot who worked in the Purple Bean. The robot who asked for my order, like the robot did every customer. But the moment I knew I could love this robot was when the robot asked what I would like to be called. “Tesla,” I said, and the blue LED smiley face in the upper corner of the robot’s screen flickered in a shy smile.
Everyone knows robots are not people.
There’s silence in the kitchen. Then Jonathan says, quietly, “Tesla, what’s this?”
I assume he’s found the eviction notice.
Reasons why you want to self-terminate (a partial list):
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jonathan asks, more concerned than angry. “I would’ve helped out.”
I shrug.
The subroutine list boots up:
“I thought I could manage,” I say. The robot’s LED screen is still cracked and dark. I wonder what the robot dreams about.
Bernardo is quiet in the kitchen, giving us privacy.
Jonathan rubs his eyes. “Okay. Look. You’re always welcome to stay with me and Bern. We’ll figure it out, Tesla. Don’t we always?”
I know how small his apartment is. Bernardo has just moved in with him; there’s no space left.
“What about the robot?” I ask.
How to self-destruct: a robot’s guide.
Bernardo’s family owns a rental garage, and he uses one of the units for rebuilding his custom motorcycle. He says I can store the robot there, until another unit opens up.
Jonathan has moved his Budweiser memorabilia collection into storage so the small room he kept it in is now an unofficial bedroom. He shows it to me and says I can move in anytime I want. He and Bernardo are sharing his bedroom.
I don’t know what to do.
I have no operating procedures for accepting help.
I should self-destruct and spare them all. That would be easier, wouldn’t it? Better for them?
But the robot isn’t finished.
I don’t know what to do.
How to have awkward conversations about your relationship with your boyfriend and your boyfriend’s boyfriend:
I write another list.
I write down all the lists. In order. In detail.
Then I print them out and give them to Jonathan and Bernardo.
The cover page has four letters on it: H-E-L-P.
Reasons why you should avoid self-termination (right now):
“Hey, Tesla,” Jonathan says, poking his head around the garage-workshop door. “Bern and I are going over to his parents for dinner. Want to come?”
“Hey, I’ll come for you anytime,” Bernardo calls from the parking lot.
Jonathan rolls his eyes, his goofy smile wider than ever.
I shake my head. The robot is almost finished. “You guys have fun. Say hi for me.”
“You bet.”
The garage is silent. Ready.
I sit by the power grid. I’ve unplugged all the other devices, powered down the phone and the data hub. I carefully hid Bernardo’s bike behind a plastic privacy wall he used to divide the garage so we each have a workspace.
We’re alone, the robot and I.
I rig up a secondary external power core and keep the dedicated computer running the diagnostic.
The robot stands motionless, the LED screen blank. It’s still cracked, but it will function.
“Can you hear me?” I ask. “Are you there?”
The robot:
I power up the robot and key the download sequence, re-installing the rescued memory core.
The robot’s screen flickers. The blue smiley face appears in the center, split with spiderweb cracks.
“Hello,” I say.
“Hello, Tesla,” the robot says.
“How do you feel?”
“I am well,” the robot says. “I believe you saved my life.”
The hole closes in my chest, just a little.
The robot’s clean, symmetrical lines and tarnished purple surface glow. The robot is perfect. I stand up.
“How may I thank you for your help, Tesla?”
“Is there a way I can become a robot too?”
The robot’s pixelated face shifts; now the robot’s expression frowns. “I do not know, Tesla. I am not programmed with such knowledge. I am sorry.”
I think about the speculative technical papers I read, articles Bernardo forwarded to me.
“I have a hypothesis,” I tell the robot. “If I could power myself with enough electricity, my electromagnetic thought patterns might be able to travel into a mechanical apparatus such as the computer hub.”
(Consciousness uploads aren’t feasible yet.)
“I believe such a procedure would be damaging to your current organic shell,” the robot says.
Yes, I understand electrocution’s effects on biological tissue. I have thought about it before. (Many times. All the time.)
The robot says, “May I suggest that you consider the matter before doing anything regrettable, Tesla?”
And I reply:
The robot says: “I should not like to see you deprogrammed and consigned to the scrapping plant for organic tissue.”
And I reply:
The robot says: “I will be sad if you die.”
I look up at the frowning blue pixel face. And I think of Jonathan and Bernardo returning and finding my body stiff and blackened, my fingers plugged into the power grid.
The robot extends one blocky hand. “Perhaps I would be allowed to devise a more reliable solution? I would like to understand you better, if that is acceptable.” The blue lines curve up into a hopeful smile.
The robot is still here. Jonathan and Bernardo are here. Melinda and Kimberly are here. I’m not a robot (yet), but I’m not alone.
“Is this an acceptable solution, Tesla?” the robot asks.
I take the robot’s hand, and the robot’s blocky fingers slowly curl around mine. “Yes. I would like that very much.” Then I ask the robot, “What would you like me to call you?”
How to become a robot:
END
Outro:
"How to Become A Robot in 12 Easy Steps" was first published in Scigentasy in March 2014. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you'd like, but please don't change or sell it. Our theme is "Aurora Borealis" by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.
Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you again on April 9th with a selection of three flash fiction stories.
[Music plays out]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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