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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Uncanny Valley
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The people who live here, at least the ones who don’t have their consciousness shoved up a computer’s ass, call it the Uncanny Valley, but it’s actually “Ankeny,” after Paul Kelvin Ankeny. You’ve probably never heard of him, because he’s the definition of an underground figure. But in the robotics industry he’s basically Christ, or maybe Steve Jobs if he deserved the hype- and without the corporate whoredom- you know, if you’re old enough to remember Jobs. The “uncanny valley” is a term coined by Masahiro Mori, bouncing off of Jentsch’s ideas of the uncanny, who also influenced Freud. The idea is that something can be familiar, yet unsettling. In robots, and later in virtual reality, the uncanny valley was considered the space in time where technology could create near-human replicas that appeared to be organic, but would still disturb a human being.
Of course, the term fell out of favor, because robophobia was more widespread than anybody would have guessed. The Valley’s more tolerant, if only because we’ve been living with robots longer. It’s not quite right to say robotics was born here, but, at least in the U.S., this is where our robots finally got their sea legs, where they went from tech demo to household staple. For years people called this Silicon Valley, though its name on maps was always St. Clara. They changed it to Ankeny because of rumors that the Saint had prostituted herself rather than beg alms in the streets of Assisi for St. Francis. It was probably bullshit, and most people thought Ankeny and his cult of techies were behind the rumors’ sudden appearance hundreds of years later, but it gave the state legislature enough of an excuse to change the name. Which brings us to me. I have a condition called electromagnetic hypersensitivity, sometimes rendered EHS. I don’t really give a shit that scientists have had trouble testing its existence, and even my current doctors think I’m faking it, but digital tech too near to my body gives me seizures; I also seem to be allergic to most inorganic materials, too. I wish there were more of a story as to how I ended up in the tech capital of the country, but I was dating someone with wanderlust, and by the time she left me it felt enough like home that I couldn’t go back to Washington. I share my apartment with two living things. One’s a gene-modded apricot tree, stunted so it’s only three feet tall. The other’s Dog; the ex named him Dogmeat after a character from a video game, but he always liked me more. So when she left, she left him, and took “my” cat; maybe he was our cat, but it never really mattered, since he seemed to like her better. I haven’t been sleeping well. Dog finally figured out that apricots are food; unfortunately for me, he figured that out while I was away, and by the time I got home he’d already painted the carpets with colorful shit splatters (one of the walls, too, where I assume the dam initially burst). Since then I’ve been about as vigilant as I can about picking the apricots, but for whatever reason his bowels still haven’t entirely righted themselves, so at the slightest noise that could be a dog expelling fruit from an orifice I’m bolt upright (you’d be amazed how many modern background noises actually fit that description). This is all complicated by my apartment’s white carpet. In a normal apartment, or at least with a normal tenant, carpet nanites would clean up after the dog. I tried that once, because a doctor told me their electromagnetic aura would be so small that I’d never notice- and on that at least he was right. But, as happens with nanites, I inhaled a cloud of them; I had a tonic-clonic seizure, and spent the next month hacking up chunks of lung, coagulated blood and little robots. So I’ve been spending a lot of time kneeling, scrubbing feces and fruit smoothies out of the carpet. Dog’s sitting at my feet looking droopily sad, and I feel bad for him even if its his own gluttonous fault. The tree belonged to the ex (and I don’t for the life of me know why she didn’t take it with her), but it’s alive, and I’m used to it, and I’d feel bad just throwing it out simply because it shouldn’t be my responsibility (and causing me inconvenience). I’m writing this for a slew of reasons. Vanity comes into play somewhere, I imagine. But mostly I’d like to think it’s because there are people out there like me who are left out of this society, and perhaps that society will change so much in twenty years that none of us will even remember what now was like. That, and I’m bored. I can’t plug my head into VR the way most people do, and VR has essentially killed television aside from programming for the Luddite elderly, so I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands. I tried reading Moby Dick, since I figured I had the time, but television and the internet have shattered my attention span for anything longer than a short story (and no, not a Melville “short” story). I have a kitchen you’d recognize if you’d seen any old “HD” movies, with honest to god separate appliances (none of those fancy nanite wall phalluses for me). But there’s one thing I don’t make in my kitchen anymore: coffee. There’s a coffee shop down the street; I hate the concept of going to a coffee shop, because spending that much money for something my kitchen appliances can make for pennies feels wrong, but the barista is beautiful. Kerry. Dark hair, brown but almost black, dark eyes, silver and blue that almost look purple, caramel skin like the color of the mochas she makes me- which are genuinely delicious (not delicious in the “she gets points for being pretty” way). I’d been avoiding the shop the last week, after a run-in with another customer. She had ear implants- not one of those hearing aids or even augments, but she actually had speakers built into her ears so that other people could listen to her music with her as she walked- the kind of retro grunge-tech that’s popular with the counterculture at the moment. Well I didn’t know how much tech she might have in her head, or whether or not she might be electrified enough to make me pass out and wet myself in front of Kerry, so I kept my distance. Now it’s possible that while being leery of her some ounce of my disdain for people who surgically modify themselves to be cool leaked out, but she turned around and called me a biofascist. I made no attempt to respond, since the depth of my witty rejoinder would have been “Nuh uh.” I meekly collected my coffee; Kerry knows my order and always starts it as soon as she sees me. She gave me a pained smile and a shrug; I couldn’t tell if she was being sympathetic, or if the gesture implied I’d gotten what I probably deserved. I’m not intolerant; sure, some body modders are freaks, but tolerance doesn’t mean I relinquish my right to be skeeved by skeevy people. The other day I was walking Dog in the park when a man in a trenchcoat flashed me. He had his genitals gene-mod sculpted to look like Vegas-era Elvis being mounted by a raping porpoise, and he had nanotech imbeds that made the porpoise’s eyes follow you and blink while Elvis’ face contorted in various shades of abominable pain. I kicked him in the King; what else should he have expected? I’m sure the rant isn’t helping. Technology trying to kill me as a boy made me wary of its application later in life, even when organic computing became all the rage, and it was possible for me to finally be standing at least near the cutting edge with everybody else (of course, that didn’t really last, either, because the cost of biocomp upgrades and the toll it took on the human body made VR more attractive, so that’s where the research dollars went). Post-humanity never really took off; the fetishists and the occasionally lagged trendchaser still implant and carve and grow or decay parts at whim, but most of humanity moved on. The only gene-modding that’s really still “in” is additional womb generation, lovingly known in the medical industries as “AWG,” roughly the sound a woman buying one won’t have to make during childbirth. Basically, in the week or so before a pregnancy terms, doctors grow a second, king-sized birth canal directly in the abdominal wall, big enough a doctor can stick his whole head in there if he feels so inclined- though these days they usually just use a robotic arm. I wasn’t sure if the statute of limitations on my public shaming had passed, so I was still avoiding the coffee shop. I’d run out of Dog food, since I can’t rely on a kitchen computer to keep food inventories up, so I was on foot running to the local distributor to pick up a container, but I was thinking about some problem at work, and was on autopilot, and walked right up to the open air coffee shop’s counter. Kerry smiled at me, and immediately started on my mocha; that sealed that, no escaping with my dignity intact now. I bellied up to the counter. I usually tried not to stare, because Kerry and I seemed to have a romantic détente, and I didn’t want to make her think I was planning an invasion- but hell, this could very well be the last moment I was going to be able to pretend she didn’t think I was an asshole, so I watched her make my mocha. The coffee stand has a sophisticated nanotech kitchen, the kind where all the appliances were synthesized in real-time by nanites that receded into the walls when they were done. I’d never worked in such a place, but I’d read that the best brew relied on human intervention- that cooking was closer to playing music- since little things like freshness of the beans and the ambient temperature could make the difference between an okay cup of coffee and a work of java art. Kerry’s fingers danced across the display, playing across a nonexistent keyboard like a concert pianists’, but she took the time to smile and nod at customers or passersby, and once I caught her eye, and I thought she smiled. Since I had never watched her work so intently, I didn’t realize until she was pouring the mix into cups that she’d made two of them. “Joan, I’m taking a break,” she said, and the nanite gate receded into the wall enough that she could slip through. She handed me one of the mochas and led me down the street. I flashed for an instant to another time, another girl, this same walk, being led away with twin mochas, and the heartbreak that ended in, but before I had the chance to lay that template over this moment and worry she spoke. “She was being a bitch. Seriously, people don’t get speaker-implants unless they want to be noticed. She’s just one of those people who gets off on making the attention she gets negative. I felt really bad for you- but people usually get mic pick-ups with their stereo install, so I couldn’t say anything until she was way out of earshot, and by then you’d disappeared.” I hadn’t been prepared for that kind of an infodump, and it took me a moment to react. “So… it’s too late for me to save face by lying about working extra hours?” She smiled. “I don’t know, I’m pretty gullible, you can always try it out.” “Thanks,” I said, and she blushed. “For the mocha, I meant. And the whole not assuming the absolute worst about me, I guess.” “Sure.” She hesitated. “I get off at six. And I’m usually hungry.” “That’s a coincidence, because I usually eat around that time. I suppose we could eat together.” “And here I thought I was going to have to lead you the whole way to the water.” She sipped her mocha. “I should probably get back.” We ate at Leo’s, an old low-tech Italian restaurant I know downtown. The proprietor’s practically Amish, and refuses to have anything more high tech than his antique, analog register in the restaurant. So of course we get along swimmingly- he reminds me of Woody Allen, an old neurotic movie comedian who- just use a search engine. The whole time I couldn’t place it, but there was something off. I don’t think it was the sudden realization that this woman I’d stared at for months was a person with thoughts, ideas and feelings independent of my imaginings, she was just different, subtly. And not just because she was wearing a low-cut dress that showed off her collar bone or her exquisite neck. She was wonderful. Smarter than I’d dared hope, charming, funny. Then suddenly I realized it was late and we were almost alone in the restaurant, with only an older couple making eyes at each other in the corner booth behind us. Kerry yawned. “I’m tired. You should take me home.” The abruptness of it made my heart sink, then it began to race as she stroked my knee beneath the table, and I realized it wasn’t her bed she was planning to sleep in. As if he’d read our minds, Leo was there with the check. I have no idea how much of a tip I left, I was scrawling so fast; Leo’s is one of the few places you can actually still sign a paper receipt in town (most clerks stare at me sideways when I ask them to swipe a card for me). I don’t want to be salacious, but when I was going down on her everything was right, no, perfect, but something made me uneasy. I’m not one of those people who assumes they don’t deserve to be happy and then distrusts every mildly good thing to come their way- I just didn’t trust this thing. I couldn’t put my finger on it (please, no little man in the boat jokes), but there was something off; perhaps it was that absolutely nothing was off at all, not a moment’s awkwardness, not even one of those weird little body farts that happen when two people writhe together. When we were done she fell asleep in my arms; I’m 90-95% sure she’s a robot and I’m smack dab in the middle of the uncanny valley. But it didn’t make any sense. When I get within a few feet of a robot I get faint, but we’d been as close as two people can get, and all I felt was vague anxiety- easily enough explained by how gorgeous she is and the fact that, well, I’ve been over this moment in my head before without ever thinking it a possibility. And biocomputing has never been sophisticated enough for a full on human synthetic. That actually brings up a slew of follow-up questions. If Kerry is now a robot, but I’m pretty sure she wasn’t previously, where is human Kerry? Are all robots horny, or is Kerry just experimenting? Or is robot Kerry just into me? If Kerry is part of a pod-people robot takeover plan, but the humans are all replaced by robots that seem to be more alive than the humans they replace, is that a bad thing? I guess it would have to be a little bad. We’re not talking robots creating a new, hedonistic community- it’s a hostile takeover. I think my judgment was (temporarily) muddied by thoughts of robot orgy. But even if the hostile takeover thing is true, could Kerry possibly be to blame? If her robot was walking around blank, then took over Kerry’s life of its own volition, then yeah, kind of, but a blank robot sticks out like a swollen testicle in bike shorts, so more likely than not it was another robot that abducted Kerry (I know, I know, abduct is probably being optimistic). Perhaps more to the point: was this seduction a way to get close enough to me to bot me? Was I going to wake up tomorrow with a new robot body? And I’ll be honest, I was more concerned if, when I woke up, would she’d still be there? Kerry, or her robot replacement or whatever, stirred, and noticed I was awake. “Is something wrong?” “Not at all,” I said, and kissed her, and her lips were soft, and warm, and inviting. Maybe I was wrong; maybe I was just paranoid. But what if I wasn’t? |
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