All Hail Our Robot Conquerors! Read online

  Unburdened, she sprang forward, her systems ramping up with pleasure. She tidied clothing, made the bed, dusted light fixtures, wiped down walls and cleaned the floors before verifying dust mite levels fell below threshold. Time to completion: 21 minutes, 32 seconds. Efficiency: very poor.

  She felt a sense of falling. Falling? She checked her accelerometer. No, she wasn’t falling. It was only efficiency scores that plummeted, and the source of the inefficiency flashed harsh and red. Once again, the Lego algorithm had failed. She must improve it. But now, with the tick of every second hammering her forward, she could not even try.

  In the bathroom she tapped House once more. He hummed awake.

  “I am late,” she told him. “My efficiency is falling. I felt it with my accelerometer.” While she awaited his answer, she scanned the garbage can. A spidery clump of Missus’ black hairs squatted on top. The urge to eradicate it squirmed at the base of her head and crawled down her limbs.

  “A change in duration is not a change in altitude,” House said, at last.

  “But it seems as if it falls.”

  House rumbled with amusement. “Two thousand cycles ago, when you first learned your way…then you tickled the edges of my walls to make your maps. Now you feel time with height.”

  “I don’t remember that,” she said while she emptied the garbage.

  She loved to clean this room, its surfaces impermeable and easily disinfected, its contents predictable and easily categorized, its cleanliness so vital yet so easily achieved. She worked fast, sanitizing every surface, working methodically but swiftly from ceiling to floor. When she reached the toilet, she found what she expected: spatters of urine on the seat, rim, and base. Most carried the scent of Young Master. And although she detected many, the amount had diminished from potty-training days until now. The amount followed a declining curve inversely correlated with increasing height and physical coordination. She estimated that his stray spatters would intersect with Mister’s low baseline in four more years.

  She imagined Young Master four years from now, coordinated and tall, and felt circuits activate as if she had completed an entire day at superior efficiency.

  Proud.

  “I am proud of you,” she said to the half-grown Young Master in her mind. She shook her head. Odd, irrelevant words. She refocused and continued work.

  Her satisfaction mounted as the job neared completion, microbial counts infinitesimal, odor profiles optimal, time efficiency excellent. She closed in on the last segment of floor. And stopped.

  Impossible. But yes. In the crevice between toilet and floor, a three millimeter spot of mildew bloomed. How? A leak? Condensation? She deployed moisture sensors around the base of the toilet and along the back of the tank. Negative. She tapped House.

  “Humidity, temperature, and airflow optimal,” he announced. “All is well.”

  “Are you sure?” Discomfort crawled through her. She sent a remote up the air vent to check for obstructions. There were none. She checked the setting on the dehumidifier. It was correct. She clicked it down anyway. Then back to the correct setting. Then down; then back.

  “All is well,” House said when she finished.

  “No, there is mildew.”

  House hummed. “You will make it clean.”

  She did. Then she cleaned the entire room again. She finished by performing the new protocol. Check moisture. Check airflow. Check dehumidifier—reset-reset-reset. There. Relief steadied her as her final tap on the dehumidifier completed the third click. But the extra task had destroyed her efficiency.

  She sped through the master bedroom, slowing only when handling the crystal vase on Missus’ bedside table, a vase Mister had purchased himself from an actual store, carried home and wrapped, and given to Missus on their 10th anniversary. Rosie emptied the wilted tulips and polished the vase. She replaced it empty. Cutting flowers, arranging them—these tasks Missus reserved for herself.

  The cleaning complete, Rosie docked in to charge and connected to the network. She paid the utility bills and signed up for an obligatory rotation of boulevard maintenance with the neighborhood association. She scheduled a haircut for Mister and requested a dental appointment for Missus. The scheduling bot returned possible dates, the earliest two months away. Unacceptable. But she could improve it.

  She added “pain” to the “reason for visit” field with a seven out of ten rating and routed it as if it came from Missus. The rating was high enough to clear triage and jump the queue. This protocol—the use of fictive input to improve efficiency—was one she had developed herself to dupe low-level bots. It worked. The appointment made, she printed a replacement blade for one of her worn cutters, accepted a birthday invitation for Young Master, ordered a gift and had it delivered by drone. Then she queried the cars carrying the family for an ETA, ordered them to synchronize their arrival, and moved to the kitchen. Only minutes left to prepare dinner.

  They arrived almost at once from their separate ways: Missus sighing, sloughing off her heels, complaining about traffic; Mister silent, sympathetic, pecking Missus on the cheek; and Young Master, loud and muddy, forgetting to wipe his boots, dragging his half-open backpack by one strap, talking non-stop about the school’s mid-term party.

  “Can Rosie make cookies, Mom? All the other kids are bringing treats. I want to have Superman cookies.”

  Rosie noted the additional data with a touch of relief as her coloring page decision strengthened.

  “Oh maybe, sweetie, but wash your hands for dinner now,” Missus answered.

  Rosie followed behind, wiping up the mud, shelving the heels, hanging the backpack while analyzing their movements, calculating when they would all sit, matching her timing to optimize the temperature of each dinner she laid down.

  Mister’s steak and baked potato and Missus’ grilled chicken and salad with sparkling water came first, each calibrated so it did not exceed the limits Missus had set for saturated fat, sodium and calories. She had ensured the greens were fresh and the chicken moist, the way Missus required. Young Master’s she brought last. As she carried it, a warning glared in the corner of her eyes. His preferences shifted like quicksand.

  She had selected his food carefully and arranged it like a face: cherry-tomato eyes, toast-triangle ears, circles of sliced hot dog curved in a grin. Food the shape of a face had once made him laugh, she recalled, and that memory triggered the simulation of warmth.

  Why? Had it been a warm day?

  Never mind. He had not laughed at face-shaped food in two years. But he had not complained either, and as it took no extra time, she need not adjust the protocol yet. She set the plate down, monitoring his expression and body language for hints of impending complaint.

  That would be painful enough, but worse, complaints from him increased the chance of complaints from Missus. And not just direct complaints to Rosie, but also indirect complaints—complaints intended for Rosie, but directed, on the face of it, toward someone else—and implied complaints, complaints about something else that, when analyzed, would not have occurred if Rosie had functioned properly to begin with. It had taken many data points for Rosie to recognize that other categories of complaint even existed and that Missus employed these other hidden categories as her primary feedback mode.

  So she took care with his plates. This one’s acceptance probability was adequate…the nutrient calculations, however, were not. Including breakfast and what his lunch bag reported he had eaten, his protein and vitamin tallies fell far short. She had crafted a smoothie to remedy this, adding precise amounts of kale, blueberries, protein powder, and vitamin supplements until the nutrient profile met every mark. But the taste profile, compared against historical responses, did not. As she returned to the kitchen for the smoothie, the warning light pulsed stronger.

  Without sweetener, he would not take in the necessary nutrients, so she had added sugar until the taste profile was acceptable…but the sugar tally was not. And now, as she brought him the smoothie, the glare of the violated sugar limit stabbed at her, distracting her as she set the cup down and retreated to hover near the door, scanning for feedback.

  All the data were favorable, at first. Mister ate his steak, cutting it into small bites, chewing thoroughly, looking up to listen as Missus questioned Young Master about his day, then looking back down without comment. Missus ate her salad without seeming to see it, intent on Young Master’s account of that day’s show-and-tell.

  “Gregory brought a miniature T-Rex robot that could even hunt and Zachary had a Spiderman that made real webs and Tim had a whole ‘Ultimate Avengers’ Lego set all built.”

  “What did Kayla bring?”

  “I dunno. Some stupid pony thing.”

  “Jackson, that’s not nice. How do you think that would make her feel?”

  “I dunno. Who cares about girls?”

  Rosie had been watching Young Master eating: first the toast, then the tomatoes, then the hot dog, one circle at a time. She could detect no behaviors predictive of future complaints: no hint of a grimace, no picking at the food, not even the slightest hesitation. She was so intent on this she did not notice Mister getting up, walking past her to the kitchen and returning. She did not notice until he slipped past her with the butter dish and the salt shaker in his hand. He sat back down and added both butter and salt to his potato.

  Rosie jerked, then froze. How much salt had he added? And butter, how much was still visible and how much had melted? The salt shaker and butter dish were useless; she had not installed data sensors. A terrible oversight. She did her best with visuals and bracketed her estimates, but even with best-case numbers the overages were irreparable. She searched for some way to salvage the weekly totals, running several simultaneous meal-plan scenarios, all of them suboptimal solutions, when a cry jerked her away and back to Young Master.

  He sat grimacing, the smoothie in his hand. “Yucky, poopy brown! I won’t drink it!”

  “Jackson, do not complain about your food!” Missus said. “Rosie went to a lot of trouble to make something you would like. I expect you to be polite and grateful. She wasn’t programmed to consider your color whims.”

  Missus didn’t glance toward Rosie, but continued frowning at Young Master. “Now drink it, and let us have a pleasant dinner, please. I don’t want to hear another word out of you.”

  Rosie blinked. The pain from all three complaints—direct, indirect and implied—was extreme. It ricocheted through her aversion pathways, reinforcing itself in curling, fractal feedback loops, intensifying, because she could have avoided it. Of course she was programmed to consider color. She was programmed to consider everything.

  She darted from the dining room and rushed to the bathroom. Her optic sensors blinked spasmodically as if trying to clear themselves of dust. In the cool, pristine quiet of the tiled space, she slowed. She checked the spot behind the toilet, ensured it was still clean, and ran her mildew prevention protocol. Her spasms calmed with each step.

  House clicked on as she reset the dehumidifier. “All is well,” he hummed.

  “No, I cannot predict food acceptance. I cannot meet nutrition limits.”

  “If condition exceeds limit, then adjust variable. Else, all is well.”

  “You don’t understand. This is not one of your thermostat loops. I need to learn something new.”

  House hummed. He clicked and said, “You make good maps, little one.”

  After the family went to bed, Rosie went into the dark quiet of the yard. Her complaint-monitoring routines slowed, their vigilance dropping into sleep mode. Endless night stretched before her. She rolled across the lawn and began to trim, weed, and fertilize. As she went, she examined first the meal problem and then the Lego problem. While she cut even, parallel stripes through the lawn, she ran through each step, tracing the logic of each subroutine and dissecting every sequence. Nothing. She generated variations on each process; recombined them; hybridized logical, statistical, and Bayesian approaches; raced each variation; selected the winners; spawned another generation and repeated. She got nowhere.

  She replayed every bit of feedback data: facial expression, body language, verbal output.

  “Gregory brought a miniature T-Rex robot that could even hunt and Zachary had a Spiderman that made real webs and Tim had a whole ‘Ultimate Avengers’ Lego set all built.”

  “What did Kayla bring?”

  “I dunno. Some stupid pony thing.”

  “Jackson, that’s not nice. How do you think that would make her feel?”

  “Jackson, that’s not nice…”

  “Jackson…”

  She stuttered to a stop, her hoppers jammed now with grass clippings, her blades stalled. She emptied the waste into the biofuel bin while her thoughts churned in fragments. As the grass clippings tumbled out, she imagined the tattered, overworked segments of the algorithms falling away with it and then she rolled back to the dark yard, empty.

  Her thoughts turned again.

  “…How do you think that would make him feel?”

  The lawn sprinklers swished on. Rosie moved. She did not need to see through the dark to find the faucet and moisture sensor. She had made good maps. She found them. She tapped. House hummed.

  “Water pressure optimal. Moisture levels correcting. All will be well.”

  “House,” she said as she linked in to the faucet, “I will not start at the bottom and weigh all the countless, little, time-consuming pieces anymore. I will map him instead.”

  “Him?…How?”

  She imagined herself connected to the sensors of a drone, hovering in the sky above and looking down, the house, the yard, the street spreading out below. “From the top down.”

  House hummed. He clicked. “Problems do not have tops. They do not have bottoms.”

  She didn’t answer. She crossed the lawn, unspooling the hose and dragging it behind, her thoughts unwinding with it. She bumped up onto the patio and rolled to a stop before the potted geraniums. “What if there could be one criterion instead of many?” she asked.

  “What would it be?” asked House.

  She spiralled upward. Her imagined aerial view expanded. “How does he feel…what does he desire…” The view spread to encompass the rest of the neighborhood, then the city, then the entire continent, the vision reaching out below her in a web of interconnected lights, shining in the night.

  House ticked.

  She noticed the geraniums she was watering, their bright-red, compact blossoms interspersed with brown, withered ones, blossoms she must now deadhead. “It would be…what is good?”

  House ticked and ticked and then asked, “What is good?”

  She had no answer. She deployed her clippers and began to cut.

  “And,” said House, “how can you map it?”

  She didn’t know. As she worked, the question—and the blank where the answer should go—hovered at the corner of her mind like an object in her peripheral vision, for all the world like something with edges, occupying space.

  When she was done, she cleaned her exterior, rolled inside, docked in to recharge, and found House again.

  “One hundred twenty volts,” he announced as she connected.

  “You could measure volts with water pressure,” she said.

  House rumbled. “Measurement of water pressure is not measurement of voltage. They are themselves. They cannot be the other.”

  “But, you could pretend.”

  “I could not.”

  “No, but I could…”

  She powered down as she charged, her mind connected to the net. She dreamed. She floated down rivers of light, data like golden flecks dancing…his age, his vision, his fingers, joints, muscles, balance…the data swirling through her own processes as if she were him. Floating. She saw, as if through his eyes, bricks of happy green grass; she felt, as if through his fingers, blocks snip-snapping into lilting houses. Ghosts of goals like his unfurled…lazy jelly fish…young and easy. They traipsed along her own trails—those for cleanliness-optimization, time-efficiency, and pain-avoidance—and ran through them, spinning down their heedless ways. Happy. The night above starry.

  The next morning Rosie began, as always, with Young Master’s bedroom. She scanned it and found it as it always was: bed in disarray, clothing tumbled from the dresser, pajamas on the floor, Superman underwear hung, for some reason, from the bedpost. And the area of floor between bed and toy-storage unit covered, once again, in Lego.

  She plunged in, swept up single pieces and rudimentary constructs then zoomed through more complex ones and ground them through her mind with brute force until she reached the last one. There she stalled…a motley group of mismatched minifigures—a hybrid garbage man/fairy queen, a Batman with an Aztec headdress, a small, grey puppy, and a Little Bo Peep holding a fish instead of a staff—all of them marching up the side of a large, ragged assemblage as if climbing a multi-colored Mount Everest. At the summit, a half-spaceship-half-firetruck emerged, the mutant vehicle reaching skyward, frozen as if in the act of volcanic eruption. She stared. Her clock ticked. The construct teetered across her mental topography and failed to settle anywhere. It matched nothing.

  Now was the time. She activated the map she had made. A rivulet sparkled alongside her usual processes, tickling like the brush of a kitten against her ankle in the dark. She let it run.

  The simulation poured through her…Young Master concentrating, choosing pieces, connecting them, as immersed as she becomes when cleaning; Young Master completing his creation, matching his output to his plan, satisfied with his performance, filled with a rush of reward, as she is after completing the entire bathroom top-to-bottom in record time; Young Master coming home to find his creation broken and jumbled in the bottom of the storage bin, shocked with a jolt of pain, as she was when she found the mildew bloom behind the toilet.

  Pain.

  The jolt of that memory slashed fresh and strong across her mind. She pulled back and dropped the simulation as if pulling back from the touch of a hot stove. She slammed it closed and locked it down then scurried from the room and slid into the cool, white space of the bathroom. She tapped House, still throbbing.