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 was 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 needed 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 it 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. 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 overextended 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 know 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? 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 it was worth it.
Jesus Loves Me (Just Not In That Way)
I’ve struggled with myself most of my life. I grew up in a Christian home, with a good Christian mother. I grew up believing in Christian ideals: equality, and justice, freedom and compassion. And I grew up confused, because I wasn’t the way I was told I should be. Girls- or women, I should add- have never been fascinating to me. Their stereotyped banalities were already stacked against them, and I never found a reason to seek an interest in their physicalities.
Which is not to say that as a boy I always knew, either. I was more comfortable with men, and boys, but what boy isn’t? It wasn’t until one year in church camp, before I was old enough for erections but not before I’d heard jokes and rumors. I was staying up late, sitting at the camp fire with another boy, Aaron, and the night was cold and the fire perhaps built too weakly for fear it would break out of our inexperienced control. Aaron curled against me in the cold, and my heart beat like horses’ hooves at play. I was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the crush of his body against mine, and I knew that was right- that was me.
Of course, it was years before I understood what that meant. My good Christian mother wasn’t exactly campaigning for grandchildren at that age, so her admonitions of chastity worked easily against my growing desire. I won’t bore you with the trivialities of my self-discovery, my coming out and its resulting backlash. I won’t even bother to explain why I’ve tried to
toe the line I have, save to say I believe in the God of my mother.
Her solution, or rather our minister’s, was conversion therapy- designed to convert me into a heterosexual. At first I laughed: I was supposed to avoid doing “gay” things like hanging out at art museums, operas, symphonies or discotechs, and was instead instructed to participate in sports. I told my mother, “They’ve got it- I’m attracted to men precisely because I haven’t played with enough balls in my life.” She didn’t laugh.
But I tried the therapy. I dated women from the church- even brought a handful of them home- though I was never able to really enjoy it. And at eighteen months, I slipped. I woke up cold, shivering, in fact. I got in a hot shower, but no matter how much I turned the handle, I couldn’t get warm. I bundled myself like it was winter in Michigan (even though it was spring in Colorado) and went outside, for a walk. I stopped in a bar, thirsty, and perhaps convinced that a shot or two of bourbon could be enough to warm me. I ended up drinking with a man with a mustache that made him look old enough to be my father; he said he was having a fight with his wife, and that there were just things she couldn’t