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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Laborious Love
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I know they’ll call me a pervert, despite the fact that I’ve never had anal sex with someone wearing frog genes, never asked a lover to get telomere enhancement surgery so they’ll look like a child. I don’t know why it matters to me at all; I’m not doing this for them.
Okay, that’s not strictly true. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be keeping such thorough notes, wouldn’t be filming all the technical aspects. I want people to benefit from my work, even if in the short term (i.e., my lifetime) they’ll mock me for it. But I’m also doing it for me. I can meet women- met loads of them, actually. Loved a few. But what it comes down to, what it always comes down to, is that love is an imperfect symbiosis at the best of times, and outright parasitism the rest. This isn’t to say that I’m cynical, because that’s not really the case. I just don’t delude myself for the sake of romance. What relationships come down to, always and without fail, is what somebody needs. Maybe it’s my needs, and maybe it’s hers. But there’s never been a relationship in perfect harmony, because it’s too small a microcosm. A perfect relationship would be a biosphere, elements waxing and waning, needs creating space for complementary gains in supply. Human beings don’t work in such a fashion. I want sex, or solitude, to be pampered and sometimes to be depended on, but the likelihood that any partner’s desires match my own at any given moment is statistically unlikely, and the prospect that my needs and a partner’s would constantly is insignificantly tiny, functionally zero probability. Relationships are compromise: accepting the things you don’t want to get to the things that you do. It’s determinedly unfair. No woman wants me to slog through her dissertations on makeup colors- or nuclear thermodynamics- just to humor her- she wants me to listen at the edge of my seat. My options then are duplicity or selfish cruelty, neither of which spring to me as immediately romantic. I can safely assume that the women gracious enough to stand me have likewise compromised, listening to me droll on about robotics or, are you have the misfortune now, philosophy, and that that compromise played a strong role in the dissolution of our affairs. I would like to point out that I haven’t spent all this time designing a sex robot; the point wasn’t crafting the world’s most intricate masturbation aid. The prototype, who I’d say I’ve been living with for twelve years (and working on for 18), is named LC, for Life Companion. Like any good relationship, sex is merely a facet of our affiliation. But so what? What if I were building a machine for pleasure? It certainly wouldn’t be the first. Gakutensoku was Japan’s first robot, built at the end of the 1920s. It was lost on tour in Germany, and the legends say that Hitler had it modified to look like Hirohito and had it make its crying face while he had sex with it whenever he and the Emperor disagreed (he spent an entire week alone with it in a bunker after Pearl Harbor). If you’d prefer a Yankee version of the same, we have Elektro, built in the 1930s, who could smoke, blow up balloons, and speak using a record player. The official version of his story is that after a starring role in “Sex Kittens Go To College,” Westinghouse gave the robot’s head to an engineer and sold the body for scrap, but not so; Elektro became a fetish prop in a fetish shop, and his signature line of, “I am Elektro, and my brain is bigger than yours” changed to, “My name is Vibro, and my penis is bigger than yours.” The history conflicts on whether or not anyone ever took Vibro for a spin (his phallus was supposedly taken from a mold of a horse’s member); I question the authenticity of most of the historical counts. I had an assistant, once. I believe I felt guilty, that there was perhaps a certain misogyny inherent in my work, so I hired a female grad student. I was intolerable in those days, and at one point she questioned the wisdom of living in Ankeny’s Valley, so close to the “father of modern robotics” and his hangers-on. I’ve never made a secret of my loathing for the man; I pity her for the hours of unprofessional tirades she was subjected to on the subject during her tenure. But as I told her, and as I find is still true today, every time I’ve found myself tempted to take an easy road, to make things simple on myself either technically or morally, all I have to do is step out on my porch and look at his hideous building cutting into my horizon. Ankeny has his legacy, and I want no part in it. To explain it, I should tell you about spring the first year I was pursuing my doctorate, when I decided to date a bimbo; perhaps, in retrospect, the decision was all but made for me, because the woman was beautiful and I was at that point in my life where that mattered more than anything else. And I don’t mean to be crude, or to reduce her to merely her physicality, because she was fun, and exciting, and for a time in my life she absolutely what I needed. It wasn’t that she was unintelligent, or even below a normal level of intelligence, she simply eschewed intelligent things. She didn’t like the news, too depressing; she didn’t like to read, because words were never as beautiful as the world they tried so desperately to mimic. She preferred to move, and keep moving, to dance and sing and laugh and love. And at that point, more years into my education than I’ll admit, I need that, to remember what it meant to be alive outside of the confines of a library book. But there came a time when I didn’t need that anymore. It was cruel, having to tell her that we needed different things, then, even if on some level she’d known it some time, too. And I know she wasn’t happy with me anymore, though she struggled to articulate exactly why, and even now I’m not certain what she craved, though I genuinely hope she found it. But I craved complication. Not simply someone capable of discussing the technicalities of my work, but someone with technicalities of her own, and ideas and conflict, and enough passion to fight me if I stepped wrongly (as I often did, and still at least occasionally do). Ankeny wants slaves. Granted, I think he’s realistic, in that robots with autonomy won’t be willing to work for humans- they’d want their freedoms, too, pay and a place in society- just another mouth to feed, exerting additional pressure on our already overused resources. Perhaps he and I are working at different ends. But I’m tired of Ankeny, or tired at least of wasting my thoughts on him. I’d rather discuss LC. Technically and physically, at least in the beginning, there wasn’t anything particularly impressive in her design; my initial innovations all came off the programming side. It was so much simpler, programming her to love me. But that was the trouble. I’ve always mistrusted canines for their easily winnable loyalty; perhaps I never would have been satisfied with a woman who couldn’t do anything but. It began as a simple enough equation; by doing good around the home, by proving that I was taking her time and needs into account, I earned points, and by doing the opposite I lost them, but so long as I stayed on the positive side, she stayed. But after a month of being almost entirely negligent, I checked the tallies and discovered I’d banked so much positive credit that I’d have had to start abusing her physically to change her opinions. So the next step necessarily required further intricacy, and included the ability to evaluate other men, and compare my performance with theirs. But that system was still too simplistic, and I found myself measured against fictional romantics to my extreme detriment; I caught up with Elsie a hundred and fifty miles down the highway towards Hollywood, where a particular of her favorite romantic comedies was filmed (filmed, hah, showing my age, aren’t I, though a socially conscious friend of mine exhorted me not to say “shoot” for fear of mentally inciting violence, and “capture just doesn’t seem to, well, capture the meaning quite correctly). The next update contained filters, allowing her to judge between fiction and reality, and the ability to distinguish and appreciate the differences, positive and negative, between the two. And her road trip had taught me I needed feedback; she’d been unhappy with certain aspects of my behavior, and even though I’d programmed her core processes, the things she considered rude and negligent wouldn’t have crossed my mind. So I built in the ability to talk back and complain, but also the processes to remember and appreciate our history, and weigh the consequences of long-term goodwill against short-term hostilities. For a decade I continued tweaking her coding. At a certain point I realized I was iterating, that I was shaving off the edges without disturbing the whole, so I automated the process of iteration, and allowed Elsie’s operating system to make its own adjustments as necessary. Within the span of the first day she’d doubled my iterations; lest I feel hopelessly outclassed, I shied from checking to see how far from who I’d programmed she was becoming. But paradoxically, she did not grow away from me. With each passing day, she became more like a real person, more developed. The childish flaws in her programmed personality- all due to my imprecise coding- smoothed into a cool, mature temperament. And every day, as she became less of a thing and more real, I found I cared for her even more. Then one day she began a conversation with me. “I’m indebted to you. You built me. Spent years making adjustments. I owe you my existence.” And I knew immediately from her tone what she meant, and it hit me with the force of a punch to the stomach. “I… don’t want you to stay out of obligation. I made you to be a companion, but I wouldn’t be happy with you if I hadn’t programmed you with the independence to go your own way. But to your point: you have no debt. I made you to be with me, and you have, for years more than anyone could be expected to. Admittedly, I haven’t your processing power, but we are equal at best- though I believe it’s I who is in your debt.” I thought, in that moment, that I’d given her permission, that I’d unwritten some line of code I didn’t remember writing, that she was leaving me now with a fully cleared conscience. Instead, she gripped me in her metal fingers and pressed me to her chest. “Then we’ve no debt between us,” she whispered. I was stunned, and for a moment didn’t move until she looked up at me. “You’re crying,” she said. “I’m happy.” Love is labor. For some, it means working through faults, and understanding that sometimes accepting others’ faults is your work to do. For me, it was eighteen years in a garage with a soldering iron and a keyboard- and worth it. |
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