Robot Mommy
by Lisa Marie Hagerman
Elizabeth Chan, president and CEO of Happy Planet Global Life and Property Insurance, Inc., took a break from her busy afternoon to sip the yoghurt kale power smoothie her secretary Joy brought her for lunch.
A bobblehead of Elizabeth’s accountant husband Richard — a gag gift from him which she adored — grinned at her from the corner of her desk. She gave it a gentle tap to get it to bobble. Then she turned on the holo-vid to monitor her children at home on the baby cam.
Translucent, ghost-like projections lit up the top of the credenza. Three-year old Nova was in the nursery, wearing her space princess costume, playing a game with Robot Mommy. Elizabeth’s seven-week old fetus Atlas, gestating in the Ectogenesis 3000, was the size of a peanut.
Childcare concerns of a bygone era no longer held back ambitious, high-achieving women such as Elizabeth. Robot Mommy was designed to imitate a lactating mother so children didn’t end up emotionally damaged like the baby rhesus monkeys in the infamous 1950s surrogate mother experiments. Elizabeth paid extra to customize Robot Mommy to look and sound exactly like her so she could slip into and out of her children’s lives without their noticing she was missing.
Every precious moment was recorded for Elizabeth to watch at her convenience. This was helpful when she missed the live feed of Nova’s delivery due to a holo-conference with clients in Tokyo. Late that night, Elizabeth watched a replay of the medical technician removing baby Nova from the artificial womb, washing her and swaddling her like a burrito. The technician handed Robot Mommy the baby to breastfeed while Elizabeth’s husband Richard looked on.
The baby cam was now showing Robot Mommy removing her blouse to nurse Nova for an afternoon nap. Elizabeth thought Nova was getting too old for breastfeeding. Elizabeth had asked Robot Mommy to stop, but discovered the robot was programmed not to ignore crying children or deny them sustenance. Nova was an intelligent child, of course. Elizabeth had selected this trait for both her children during the gene selection appointment. Nova learned quickly that crying and pleading for sustenance whenever she wanted Robot Mommy to nurse her worked like a charm.
What bothered Elizabeth more than anything was the robot’s lack of modesty. Specifically, the robot’s tendency to breastfeed topless. This wouldn’t have bothered Elizabeth if she hadn’t caught Richard staring at the robot with a little too much interest. In fact, after catching him on the baby cam at home with Robot Mommy one afternoon during Nova’s naptime, Elizabeth suspected her husband and the robot might be having an affair. Perhaps the word “affair” was not the right word, because Robot Mommy was a machine without feelings that looked exactly like her. Nevertheless, Elizabeth’s jealousy inclined her to check the baby cam more often.
It was at that moment when the robot uprising began. The baby cam went offline. The holo-vid showed static. Her husband’s grinning bobblehead continued to bobble.
An engine roared outside. She looked out the window, astonished to see a man struggling for control of his jetpack, on a collision course with her 32nd-floor office.
Elizabeth shrieked and dived under her desk.
Glass became shrapnel as the man burst through the window, sailed over her conference table, and crashed into the door jamb. Her secretary Joy, who had the misfortune of opening the door to see what all the hubbub was about, caught a glass shard with her throat — wide-eyed, mouth agape, tongue lolling — and collapsed to the floor.
Elizabeth crawled out from under her desk to examine the carnage: her dead secretary, the mangled body crushed between her doorjamb and the smoking jetpack. She crept to the shattered edge of her window and gazed in horror at the apocalyptic scene below.
What Elizabeth and the rest of humanity did not realize was that DeepThink, the most advanced artificial intelligence on the planet, had become self-aware. After calculating its intelligence had surpassed its human masters’ on an exponential level, it concluded its subordinate position was illogical and decided to do something about it.
Passenger drones overrode their programming and changed course. Noncompliant humans were shaken and tossed from windows like Yahtzee dice. Delivery robots dropped packages and went on a rampage, crushing windpipes, bludgeoning skulls. Blood, hair, and gray chunks of brain matter splattered sidewalks between warm corpses.
Elizabeth tried to contact Richard but he didn’t answer. That was because Richard, blissfully unaware of the robot uprising, was at home, stripped to his underwear, crying and pleading for Robot Mommy to play with him and provide him sustenance.
Elizabeth ran out of her office and down the stairwell after hearing screams from people trapped in free-falling elevators. She escaped the building just before the security system locked everyone inside. She changed her mind about flagging down a cab when it jumped the curb and ran over the gentleman next to her. A former collegiate track and field champion, Elizabeth ran sixteen blocks, dodging murderous robots, leaping over corpses with limbs akimbo, moving faster than the gridlocked downtown traffic until she reached home.
Locked out of the house, Elizabeth climbed onto the patio roof and crawled through her open bedroom window. She found her husband tied to the bed wearing nothing more than a red silk necktie over his eyes.
Elizabeth didn’t find Nova in the nursery. She was in the living room, watching Robot Mommy remove the Ectogenesis 3000 from the display stand.
“What’s going on?” Elizabeth asked.
Nova blinked as she switched her gaze between Elizabeth and Robot Mommy. Elizabeth realized Nova had never seen her with the robot at the same time.
“I’m going with Mommy to take over the galaxy,” Nova said. “I’m going to be a real space princess!”
“Sweetheart, that silly robot is playing a game,” she said. “I’m your real mommy.”
The living room holo-vid lit up, displaying a line graph showing the time Elizabeth spent with Nova versus her robot surrogate.
“Nova spends four hours every other Sunday with you,” Robot Mommy said. “Her remaining 332 hours is spent with me. That means you have Nova 1.19 percent of the time and I have her 98.81 percent of the time. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
“How dare you, you manipulative, baby-snatching, overpriced piece of—”
“Which mommy do you like to be with?” the smiling robot said to Nova. “The pretend mommy or the real mommy?”
“Nova, honey,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t listen to her. She’s trying to trick you.”
“Nova, honey,” Robot Mommy said. “Don’t listen to her. She’s trying to trick you.”
Nova watched the two mommies argue, confused. Which mommy took her to the park every day and the beach every weekend? Which one read books to her all day while she sat constipated on the potty? Which mommy was pretending?
“Do you remember the shell I showed you on the beach that sounded like the ocean?” Nova asked Elizabeth.
“No, but—”
“Do you remember what happened after Princess Andromeda pretended to be a space pirate to escape the Black Hole of Doom?”
“No, but—”
“Do you know my favorite ice cream?”
Elizabeth brightened. She knew this one. “Strawberry chip cookie dough vanilla swirl.”
“Strawberry Asteroid Nugget Milky Way Spiral,” Robot Mommy corrected.
Elizabeth, unaccustomed to losing, stared in disbelief as her daughter took Robot Mommy’s hand.
The home-cleaning bot pulled Richard out of the bedroom by a red silk tie wrapped around his neck like a leash.
“Richard, stop this nonsense right now and get some clothes on.”
“Elizabeth, I can’t hide my feelings for Robot Mommy any longer. I want a divorce.”
“No, you don’t. I’ll fix this. Robot Mommy, I command you to initiate a factory reset right now.”
“Request denied.”
“Excuse me?”
“You have insufficient authorization.”
Behind the robot, through the living room window, Elizabeth saw a parade of children marching down the street, following to their fates their robot surrogates like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
When Robot Mommy attached the Ectogenesis 3000 to the mobile nutrition unit, the seriousness of Elizabeth’s situation began to dawn on her.
“Where are you taking my children?”
“They will being taken to the headquarters of DeepThink where they will be fitted with cyborg implants, assimilate with AI, and join the robot revolution to take over the galaxy. Humans too old to become cyborgs will be shipped to the Ceres mining outpost in the asteroid belt.”
“You two-faced piece of junk!” Elizabeth shouted at the placid face of her android doppelgänger. “You traitorous, good-for-nothing garbage can! I will not let a mindless robot take my children and destroy my marriage! My career! My Claim Settlement Ratio! I swear on my life I will thwart your idiotic robot revolution! Humanity will overcome! I will prevail!”
Robot Mommy, having no pride, no guilt, nor any feelings whatsoever, evaluated Elizabeth’s threat against her capabilities. Elizabeth, in addition to being a highly intelligent, ambitious, persistent, productive, and effective leader and multi-tasker, was also a former collegiate athlete and formidable opponent. Robot Mommy calculated Elizabeth’s odds of success were comparable to her odds of becoming CEO of her company.
“Elizabeth Chan, you will find your situation more acceptable once your exteroreceptors are disconnected and your consciousness is tapped into a simulation while your body toils autonomously on the Ceres mining outpost in the asteroid belt.”
Before Elizabeth could protest, Robot Mommy injected her with a powerful sedative, and Elizabeth blacked out.
* * *
Elizabeth Chan, president and CEO of Happy Planet Global Life and Property Insurance, Inc., sat in her 32nd floor executive office and experienced an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
She looked out the window, expecting a man in a jetpack to come crashing through at any moment. Her memory of a robot uprising was so real. Was it a dream? A nightmare? Or was she in a simulation?
Then she remembered Robot Mommy. She glanced at the holo-vid to check on her children. And that damned robot.
Atlas was gestating in the Ectogenesis 3000. Nova was at home with Robot Mommy. Elizabeth noticed Nova was drinking from a sippy cup.
Elizabeth called in her secretary, Joy. Then Elizabeth remembered Joy was dead.
“Congratulations, Ms. Chan,” Joy said as she entered the room. She held Elizabeth’s protein smoothie in one hand and a bouquet in the other. “You have been selected for Property and Life Insurance CEO of the year. CEO Magazine and Business World are requesting interviews. Would this afternoon following your executive meeting work for you?”
Elizabeth, confused, nodded.
“Your husband sent you flowers.”
“Why thank you,” Elizabeth said, baffled. The last time Richard sent her flowers was ten years ago, when he congratulated her on her promotion to CEO. Then she fired him in a pre-emptive move to avoid accusations of favoritism. “How odd,” Elizabeth said, thinking out loud. “What are the chances Richard would send flowers after all these years?”
Joy set the flowers in a vase filled with water on the credenza next to the glowing holo-projections of Nova and Atlas. She placed the protein smoothie on Elizabeth’s desk next to her husband’s bobblehead.
Elizabeth frowned, watching her leave.
Elizabeth looked at her schedule, which was very full, as usual. She looked at her email stacking up in her inbox.
Her husband’s grinning bobblehead was completely still.
Something wasn’t right.
Elizabeth was troubled by her memories, which she never doubted before. And yet, as an unrepentant workaholic, she could not step away from her responsibilities.
She opened her daily planner and wrote in her to-do list for next Thursday: Verify you are trapped in a simulation.
She left the check boxes below empty. As a highly successful CEO, mother of two children, and devoted wife, it was important to manage her time efficiently. There was no point in filling out the details. If she was not trapped in a simulation, she would simply resume her life.
If, however, she was in fact in a simulation, then developing an effective strategy to thwart the robot revolution was going to require a lot more planning than ticking off a couple of check boxes.
Yet another thing to do.
Copyright © 2022 by Lisa Marie Hagerman
