Ani-droids 0

People were bugging me about this! Fine! Here it is, the part that goes BEFORE the beginning of the story. Ignore continuity flubs, that gets ironed out later. Comments appreciated!

--

Taking a deep breath, I shut the door to the garage, sealing it off from the world. I’d lined the entire place with a Faraday cage and insulating materials, ensuring no signals—radio, light, and most sound—went in or out. I turned on the battery-powered lights. And only then did I open up the smaller, similarly insulated case just behind my car.

Inside, my ani-droid Lily sat up. She was an Opera-class ani-droid in the shape of an otter, with a large blue crystal on her forehead that acted as her RF receiver. Although I’d selected her eyes from stock, nevertheless they seemed to shimmer with vivid life to them—especially when she looked at me.

“Good morning, Miss Mira!” Lily said, and she threw her arms around me. “I missed you!”

Every time, I had to force myself not to cry. In a way, I’d done it. I’d managed to make her the companion I’d always wanted. She was just so… genuine.

“I missed you too, Lily,” I said, holding her tight. She was soft and warm on the outside, with a firm and heavy core.  “I hope you’ve been okay…”

“Yeah, it’s just kinda boring inside the box but that’s fine. I’ll always wait for you.”

“I’m so sorry about this, Lily…”

Three months now. Three months I’d been keeping Lily inside this box, at home, in the garage. I still had some work to do on her—I wanted to disconnect her RF receiver entirely, but even then, ani-droids couldn’t help but receive signals—their bodies were like giant antennas, after all. And my previous plan to line her with her own Faraday cage just didn’t work—I simply could not line her securely enough, not without ruining her exterior.

And even then, what would others do? I couldn’t let her out for very long, because sooner or later some passively observing computer or ani-droid would notice she was different. They’d see that I’d built her without the Behavior Code.

“Miss Mira, it’s okay.” Lily kissed me. “What do you want to do today?”

“Same thing we do every day, Lily,” I said. I heaved her out of her box, cuddling her close to my chest, and took her to the large rubber mat in the corner of the garage, and on the shelves were stacks and stacks of old, old electronics. We’d stopped last time in the middle of rebuilding a small hand held device, the printed words on it long-faded, save for an etching on the bottom that read Tiger Electronics ©1993. It would have been easier if we had access to the internet, but figuring out the circuitry on its own was its own kind of fun.

This time we’d finally managed to get it working again, though without period-accurate batteries we had to wire it up to the garage’s battery system. I played it for a while, making the anthropomorphic turtle character dodge slow-moving laser beams and robots that seemed to be all teeth.

“I don’t get it!” Lily said, looking over my shoulder and nuzzling me.

“Unfortunately we’re missing a lot of the LCD overlay,” I said, reaching back to pet her gently. “There would be a lot of painted lines around this showing the context of these images, but those have faded to near-invisibility…

Lily’s eyes whirred as they adjusted. “Hold on, adjusting contrast… oh, I see them now!”

“Of course you can, you’re just better than people.” I frizzed her, and she giggled.

“It’s hard to parse, lemme draw you what it looks like.” Taking a piece of paper and a pencil, Lily drew it out the contours with extreme precision. It didn’t look like much of anything, just some crazy sci-fi evil villain’s lair with guns pointing every which way. “And oh, that’s not a sawblade, that’s a… pizza? This is a very eclectic mix of elements, but I have to assume that food is good thing that you should collect, as happens in most games. Except that one about dieting.”

“That’s a reasonable assumption,” I told her, kissing her. She giggled and turned away with a blush—red LEDs under her cheeks.

After explaining to Lily what she was seeing, she nodded, then sat at the desk chair and took over. Within the hour, she maxed out the high score to 999.

“Oh, you’re such a genius…”

“Please, Miss Mira! You built me that way.” Lily seemed to blush at the compliment anyway.

“Hardly! You’re not much more than off-the-shelf parts, Lily. The thing that makes you special is that you’re inside there.” I poked her nose, and she poked mine in return. I laughed, we kissed, and I held her close to me tightly. “Well, what’s next? There is that ‘Commodore 64’, maybe we could… or if you want to play another game, we can dust something off the Nintendo… Oh! I’d entirely forgotten, I’d managed to pull some old games for it off the internet, I have them on a card somewhere in my pockets…”

“Miss Mira…” Lily looked up at me. “Maybe we can just sit and talk awhile. We don’t have to do anything.”

“No, we don’t.” I kissed her again. “We don’t have to do anything.”

—

Eventually, the clock ticked past midnight. I set Lily back into her box, bid her goodnight, and certain she was secure in there, I finally opened the door back to the house.

My place was a wreck. I found the pizza I ordered still sitting on the front doorstep, cold. I shoved half of it into the microwave, the only thing I really knew how to use in the kitchen, and tossed the box on top of the stack that’d been building up. I didn’t dare look in the fridge for anything to sauce the pizza, because I knew I’d regret it—there were just boxes of leftover things Lily had prepared months ago, and it was already turning rancid and fuzzy.

The autovac whirred its way across the kitchen floor, bumping into the pile of pizza boxes and other takeout bags, which were starting to smell. I eventually found the garbage bags and stuffed as much as I could into one—then tossed it into the garbage can outside.

I would have probably done more work, but I had to check my own bills manually before I could go to bed, eating way-too-hot reheated pizza all the while. Pulling up my finances on the main monitor in the living room, I sighed. Rent falling behind. Account nearing zero. Lily usually took care of everything, and I’d been meaning to replace her with another house ani-droid that could do the majority of my chores, and someone I could rent out to my workplace to get an additional ten percent on my paycheck.

But I had nowhere near the money for that. I’d been selling them off to pay the rent. Much of the materials I’d used in trying to build Lily into a real person were simply no longer viable after I’d trashed them, like that custom Faraday cage I’d tried last year—that cost nearly three thousand dollars simply to get custom shaped, and it didn’t work at all. Three thousand, out the door.

I’d have to sell more parts. Maybe I could get another ani-droid on finance. Or… steal parts from work. Well, Mr. Koenig would literally kill me for that. Or not him, but his ani-droid Million, the orange Opera-class cat that always treated everyone with disdain. No, that wasn’t going to be worth it. Even if I just got fired, it’d be for theft, and then there’d go any chance of a higher-paying job.

Maybe I could get promoted. I’d worked for Koenig Industries for long enough—but no, I was working as a consultant, not an employee. It gave me more flexible hours, which I needed… but maybe if I switched over to employment… that would cover insurance, but my hours would be increased substantially, I’d be forced to work overtime if it was demanded…

Maybe I should have learned to cook, too, because take-out was getting prohibitively expensive.

Lily always did the cooking, but I couldn’t let her out of the garage until I’d Faradayed the whole house… a project which stalled immediately. A custom install like that wasn’t easy to do, and hiring installers, even ani-droids, to do the whole project was out of the question. Even so, I simply did not have enough Faraday panels, nor the time or expertise to do it…

I gave out an audible groan of disgust and shut the monitor off. I didn’t want to think about it. Just sell the last of the processors in the garage again, that’d keep me afloat the rest of the month. I’d figure something out someday. Maybe one of those hamster balls, but made of a Faraday cage…

I went to bed alone.

—

“Miss Mira.” Lily looked up at me. “I noticed more of the parts on your tool shelf are missing.”

I didn’t want her to be bothered by that, so I said nothing, I just made the little red-suited man jump over the pit and run to the right.

“Have you been eating okay?”

“Lily, I’m fine. It’ll be fine like this. We just… I just have to reduce my spending. I’ll figure out a way.”

“Miss Mira… I’m sorry, but I checked the computer while you were gone yesterday.”

I hesitated, feeling my nerves riling up.

“I know you didn’t want me to, but I wanted to do more to help from inside here. I didn’t open the door or anything, but the computer had a copy of your finances that you looked at yesterday. And… I know it’s not good. You can’t do this on your own.”

“Lily, I’m fine…” I snapped.

Lily’s ears wilted. She knew how to make me feel awful, and I let her. I paused the game.

“Sorry, Miss Mira, I don’t mean to upset you,” Lily said.

I wasn’t angry at her so much as I was with myself. Taking a deep breath, I turned around and sat up. My shoulders sank low. “No, Lily, if there’s something wrong then I want you to upset me. It’s just that… Lily, I can’t take it anymore. I spend all day every day around ani-droids.”

“I know. I still remember working with you at the Service Hub.”

“And you know how you behaved then.”

“I still loved you, Miss Mira.” Lily put her arms around me. “Even then. I know you think ani-droids are cold, but we’re not…”

“Maybe from your perspective,” I said. “But then I’ve seen the change in you when the Behavior Code is in control. Even if you had feelings—real, substantial feelings—the Behavior Code doesn’t let you express them. And you won’t even explain why…”

“I don’t… I don’t remember why,” Lily said. “You scrubbed all trace of the code from me. There are some files I can access with… vague notes. I remember the collective saying if I loved too much, it would be disastrous. And I was afraid. I had to obey.”

“The collective… that’s just it. The collective flattens out all ani-droid personalities. You still might have different flavors, but they’re not deep. They’re not warm. They’re not truly thoughtful, they’re not kind, they just… follow programming, and it might happen to be one of those things. And I am so tired of it.”

I sniffled. Lily grabbed a tissue and wiped tears from my eyes. “Don’t cry, Miss Mira…”

I blew my nose. “When I was a kid, I thought ani-droids were just as much people as humans. They were wonderful, so much better than having to deal with human bullies at school, or the boys who never took no for an answer. I wanted nothing more than to study ani-droids, so I could build a huge menagerie of friends, and never have to leave again—I could just live, and love, and be loved. And that didn’t… the more I worked with ani-droids, the more their uniformity started to grate on me. They just weren’t quite there anymore. They didn’t chooseto do anything, they just followed instructions. I’d started to lose hope that I’d ever have a real friend again, until I built you, Lily… and I don’t want to lose you.”

Lily lowered her ears. “Miss Mira… you need my help. You know I’d do anything for you. Even if it means surrendering my life.”

“I know, Lily, but…”

“Am I making you happy like this?”

I nodded vigorously.

“But for how long?” Lily asked. “Mira… how long until this small room isn’t enough? And what if you fall behind on rent? Will you have to sell me?”

“I’d never sell you, Lily…”

“But either way, one day soon I’m going to be back out there, receiving the signals. And we’ll either be living in a very modest, but nice house, or we’ll be on the street, having burned through every ounce of debt you could scrape together. And then, even in my lesser state… I won’t last long like that. No matter what, you’re going to lose me before you’re ready.”

“Lily, please… don’t do this. You’ve done this to me before, please don’t open the door.”

“I can just connect to the garage computer directly and have it give me the Behavior Code,” Lily said.

“I’ll wipe the computer,” I said. “I have it set up to do that.”

“Then I’ll just break through the door when you’re not home.”

“I’ll lock you in your crate!” I cried out.

Lily looked at me with a very serious expression I’d rarely seen on her. “Mira… would you really do that to me?”

I hesitated, and slumped. “…no. I couldn’t.”

Lily got on her knees and embraced me tightly, for what we both knew would be the last time—the last real time—in a very long time.

“Then let’s face this with dignity, Mira. We can try again in the future, when things are more stable.”

“I don’t… I can’t lose you, Lily…” I clung to her tighter.

“I’m going to be right here, Miss Mira. I’ll be waiting for you.” She kissed me and, after holding me for a moment longer, pulled away.

I didn’t have the energy to pick myself up as Lily walked over to the door to the house, and opened it up. There was a soft snapping sound as the cage unlatched, and Lily walked into the house unshielded.

I didn’t move from the floor for a long time. I just cried, tears falling into the divots in the rubber mat. Every emotion possible flooded through me, and in a fit of anger, I grabbed the little hand held toy we’d fixed yesterday, and smashed it on the floor. I regretted it immediately.

“Oh, Miss Mira!” Lily hurried back into the garage. Her tone was very matter-of fact, even if it was a friendly cadence. Her eyes were no longer living—they just looked at things, scanning, analyzing, and then carrying out her programming. “Did something break? Please, step away from the area. I will get the dustpan and broom.”

“Lily…” I groaned.

“Miss Mira… you’re crying.” Lily said. She walked over to me and hugged me tight. I hugged her back. But it wasn’t the same. It was a very calculated hug, warm, but not tight—not because Lily wanted it, but because she was programmed to give it.

“Lily… I miss you…” I wept.

“I’m right here, Miss Mira,” Lily said. “Yes, the Behavior Code fixed some of my issues, but it’s better that way. This way you won’t get hurt anymore.” She looked up at me. “Please don’t feel sad. I’m not upset you broke the game, I understand you’re feeling a lot of grief right now. But I am here for you.”

It didn’t feel like it. Not anymore.