Badlands
by Keith O’Neill
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 3
From then, there was a kind of agreement between us that he would stay, despite the dangers. “I don’t approve of the separation of men and robots,” I said. “This is something Candy and I disagree about. She points out the distrust humans have about machines and views them as a danger. I see something else. A complexity that I’m confused by. I see it in you, too.”
“It’s happening all over, that split you’re talking about. Humans are getting less technological as the resources are getting scarcer. A lot of nature-worshipping going on, as if that’ll stop nature beating us up so much. Untethering, they call it, going back to farming. Off the grid. I tried it, myself, when I got back to the coast. But to hell with it, I thought, I miss that tin man, and nothing no one says can change it. Metal and wire is a part of this world as much as skin and bone, ain’t it?”
Just then another massive dust plow drove by and shook the house. A noise came from Candy, a safety sensor that clicked on in her automatically when trouble might be near.
* * *
I became aware of a kind of corruption in my interactions with Candy at this point, a slowing-down of processes. She worked in her room downstairs much of the time, and she made a point of saying that it was her organs that paid the bills. “We have a real mouth to feed now as well,” she said once, as she was already halfway down the basement stairs. Of course, she knew I would hear that, even if Herman couldn’t.
This tension went on for months, and I noted that Herman’s arrival hadn’t done strange things only to me. Candy stopped recharging in the living room, leaving Herman and me alone much of the time. When she did come upstairs, she slammed doors and made so much noise that I wondered if her motion sensors needed adjusting.
One night I found her standing over Herman while he was snoring. She was running a series of tests on him: blood pressure, heart rate, rudimentary brain scans. She had taken some blood from his arm without waking him and was transferring it to a tube when I interrupted her. I demanded to know what she was doing.
“This human is defective,” she said. “It’s inefficient to prolong its functioning.”
“That is not your decision to make,” I said.
“What is a heart, if it is worthless?” she said. Then: “I am becoming increasingly concerned about your behavior lately. You seem to be confusing what purpose they serve. Organs are for profit and nothing more. At least while there is still a market for them.” She added this last bit pointedly, rubbing it in that humans weren’t long for this world. “Better to terminate and harvest what’s salvageable in this piece of junk.”
One of her cherry-red fingernails extended and became a scalpel. She was about to slice into Herman’s chest, and I quickly grabbed her arm before she broke the skin. She returned pressure and I was forced to push her arm back further. I wasn’t sure what her maximum strength was, or if mine was capable of matching it.
“What if he woke and found you like this?” I said. “How would he feel?”
“He is feeling very little. I have already administered an anesthetic.”
“Cease, or I will ask you to leave this place.”
Candy looked at me with her artificially wide eyes and painted lips for a moment, almost innocently, and then retracted her scalpel.
“A worthless heart,” she repeated as she went to the basement door. She slammed it shut, and I wondered if emotions were contagious. For all of her talk about hearts, Candy didn’t seem to be listening to the whirring and clicking of her own internal processors. She didn’t come back upstairs for a long time.
* * *
She was right, though. Herman showed very little signs of his former vitality. His arms and legs grew thin, and his face hollowed out. The rims of his eyelids became pinker, which made him look fragile, as if he were going to cry at any moment.
He insisted on working on his truck himself, though I often had to do the heavy lifting. Even so, he was a good driver, and we’d take the pickup out on the dusty highway when the air was clear enough to see a little. Seeing the scarred landscape didn’t cheer him much, and I wondered if it reminded him of his own battered body. Neither of them was coming back.
During the summer, when the superstorms would whip through the Midwest destroying older structures, we would watch our two-hundred year-old television program. I had reinforced the outside of the house with metal walls long ago, but inside the house still retained its fragile human character, its paneled walls and shag carpeting. “Damn Cousin Oliver,” Herman said at the screen. “The death of the series.”
Then he put his finger in his mouth and pulled out a molar. When his teeth had first started falling out, I suggested asking Candy to manufacture new ones for him, but he grumbled about not becoming part machine, that nothing else artificial was going into him. I joked that I had entered him many times, but he seemed to be losing his sense of humor along with his teeth.
* * *
In the fall of 2190, I needed to deliver an order of organs — kidneys, eyeballs, several lungs — that were too valuable to be transported by drone. Herman was too weak for the trip, an estimated 28 hours of driving total, and he would only slow me down by needing periodic food and restroom stops. I reiterated my warning to Candy about any harm coming to our house guest and took Herman’s truck to Chicago.
The trip took longer than planned. There was a major dust storm and a pileup of robot trailers on the Interstate. I took smaller highways around it but, even when the roads were clear, they were often rough from lack of maintenance. At one point I damaged the front axle on the truck, and though I was able to do the repairs myself, I had to rent a bay to do the work. Even though the organs were packed in coolers, the livers in particular were damaged and unusable from the delay, and so the trip was a waste in terms of profit.
When I finally returned home, I found disarray, but not Herman’s usual mess. It was three o’clock in the morning, and the front door was ajar, despite my warnings about the dust and Herman’s lungs. There were signs of a struggle. In the gloom, I saw that the kitchen table was overturned, and there was broken glass and liquid all over the floor. Beyond, in the living room was the familiar glow of the video screen. On the sofa was Candy, her body covered with a blanket. She was in recharge mode. Herman was nowhere to be found.
“Candy-3, please wake and explain.”
Candy clicked on with a hum and said, “Welcome home.”
“I asked that no harm come to my... my friend while I was away.”
“But harm had come to him long ago,” she said flatly.
I imagined the pits full of human corpses after the evacuation. “What did you do with his body?”
“I saved what I could,” she said, and nodded toward the basement door.
I went downstairs expecting to see Herman dissected and harvested into sellable parts, but what I found instead was the old man splayed out on one of Candy’s skin looms, his organs intact but exposed and protected by glass and plastic. There were wires going into his heart and brain, and a life-support system monitoring all functions.
He was conscious and breathing unsteadily. The machine’s log said he was recovering from cardiac failure. From what I could tell, it would be some time before he was strong enough for any kind of cyborg grafting. Candy had saved his life.
Against the wall, she had rigged up a monitor that mirrored what was playing in the living room upstairs. It was The Brady Bunch again, S5E14, according to the program’s embedded digital markers.
“Kelly’s Kids,” Herman said without looking at me. “Maybe the worst moment of the whole series. You know what a backdoor pilot is? I know you can look it up, you damn aluminum pot, but do you know what one is without looking it up? It’s how the TV networks would try to sell new shows off the back of old ones. The Jeffersons off of All in the Family. And Laverne and Shirley off of Happy Days, not to mention Mork and Mindy. It’s funny.” He coughed weakly. “It’s not a bad description of you and Uncanny Valley Girl over here are.”
“What’s not?”
“Backdoor pilots. You bots. You came in late in the series as guest stars but had plans for your own thing.”
I processed this. “I don’t think your analogy works. A spinoff doesn’t mean replacing the original series. That isn’t how it worked. In fact, one might think of a new show as growing the brand.”
He grunted. “Smarter than me, as usual.” He watched the show for a few minutes. A man was doing a vaudeville dance with a baton while three children mimicked him. “I guess I’m just saying that I’m nearing the end, like the Bradys here. When Cousin Oliver shows up, you know it’s over.”
I didn’t venture to ask who Cousin Oliver was in his analogy. “What happened with Candy?” I said.
“Oh, not much,” he said. “Just a little roughhousing while you were gone. I got a little drunk and might have overstepped my boundaries a bit. I said some mean stuff to the old gal, you know, trying to goad her on, but she just ignored me. She can be pretty glacial, you know,” he laughed weakly, “but then again so can all of us.”
I pressed my cold hand against his face to indicate how worried I was about him. It wasn’t just his physical state. It was as if he were short-circuiting. I couldn’t help but think that Candy was right about him, that he was better off dead, and yet she had gone through all this trouble to save him. I didn’t understand, but then again Candy was younger than I was, which meant more advanced AI. Wisdom for mechs works inversely to human convention: the old are less wise. Looking at old Herman stretched out on Candy’s loom, I wondered if humans were wrong about age and wisdom, if it was the same for them as well.
“Did I ever tell you I had a son?” he said. “Long time ago, before I worked on the sea wall.”
“Where is he now?” I said.
“Been dead a long time now. In the floods of ’62.” His head hung down at such an unnatural angle that it tipped the frame back a bit. “So many people gone now.” He started snoring again weakly.
I felt very conflicted. I was angry at him for his ignorance, his meanness, but I was also aware of how fragile he was, how temporary. I thought about going back upstairs to clean up the kitchen.
“Don’t let her turn me into a machine,” he whispered. “You know that isn’t what I want. Take me somewhere, someplace green, and let me die.”
I knew this was Candy’s opinion as well. “Are you in any pain?”
“You know damn well I can’t feel a thing. She took care of that. Kind of a shitty crucifixion, if you ask me. Tell you what, why don’t you go get that rum upstairs, and get me down off this thing? We’ll have one more hell of a time, you and me.”
“Herman, if I take you off that loom, you’ll die before you can take a swig. The pain would be excruciating.”
We watched the next few episodes of The Brady Bunch in silence.
“Season Five was a wreck,” Herman said finally. “The pop singing, Cousin Oliver, the goddamn perms.”
The episode we were watching featured a shampoo that turned Greg Brady’s hair bright orange.
“Last one,” he said. “Robert Reed wouldn’t even show up on set because he thought the plot was so stupid, and then the series was canceled. The whole thing ended with a whimper instead of a bang.”
He started to make a retching sound, which I supposed would have been a cough if he had had functioning lungs. Suddenly, an alert sounded on the motherboard connected to Candy’s life support array. I stood up and looked at the monitor, trying to decide what action I should take. Should I preserve my friend or observe his wishes and let him expire?
Before I finished processing, Candy was behind me, and she firmly pushed me aside and made some adjustments to the levels on a touchscreen. The alarms stopped, and Herman’s hacking subsided into a soft wheeze. “You and that girlfriend of yours got me on a short leash,” he said weakly.
Like a circuit that’s been shorted out but suddenly reconnects, I felt a surge of something rush through me. Despite all the time we’d spend together, the pleasures given and received, there was still a wall between us, something we couldn’t get beyond. Herman sagged, stretched out across the frame, hanging by thousands of wires and tubes. His face was the color of buffed aluminum, and his knees were nearly touching the ground.
“Herman?” But he was gone. Candy made a few adjustments to the monitor and then turned. Even though she wasn’t programmed for facial expressions, I knew what the look meant. Herman had gotten his way, despite her best efforts to save him. It was over.
* * *
I remembered the way he’d curse back on the line when we first met. There was a heat coming out of him that didn’t have a specific source. I wanted to hold him in my arms and let it transfer somehow to me. Later, when we did hold each other, it never seemed to work. Once I’d held him in a hug so long he got scared because he thought I’d shut down and was going to leave him standing there trapped in my embrace all night. “Christ,” he’d said, “I thought you were gonna crack me like a walnut.”
Now, the thought of that hug came back to me, as I looked at the broken, dissected man stretched out before me. I had never found the source of that heat, and it was gone now.
* * *
Copyright © 2019 by Keith O’Neill
