1
Two red orbs from the black. Sometimes this is all you get. At night, if all the lights are off, this is all you get, glaring back: two red orbs from deep black.
These are its eyes. Scarlet, but bloodless. It makes them strange. Eyes with no blood, no whites, are strange. No irises, no change, strange.
And they do not blink. Homebots have no need to blink. Specks of dust in their eyes won’t bother them. No sties. And they do not cry. There are no tear ducts, and anyway, what would they have to cry about?
At night. Lights off. Two red orbs from the black.
Robots have yet to become sentient beings, though they may be on their way. Susie Sakamoto doesn’t think too much about this. Instead what she thinks about is her husband and son, who are most probably dead, and these days she wants to be quite dead herself. She spends most evenings balled-up on the couch, dishevelled, angry, hurting, hungry without ever really wanting to eat, pondering the best way to go about putting an end to it all. A final solution. Is there? Is there really any way out of this?
The silver, one-metre-tall homebot (Model SH.XL8) is hoovering the living room floor, sucking up dust through the soles of its feet, almost silently, hovering like it is weightless, like it has no body at all and is not a compact, complex mass of wires and circuits encased in plastics, chrome, metals, whatever the hard actual stuff of it is called—Susie does not know the names of such materials, nor does she particularly care; she has enough to be dealing with. The dirt gets collected in filters in its lower section and gets compressed, and those filters can be later removed, emptied out into the rubbish bin by the ’bot itself. That’s right. It is able to remove its own filters. It knows what to do. It can clean itself out without any apparent fuss. It can go about its business without any discernible hitch. All menial tasks are done in this way. Fuss-less. Homebots have become rather adept.
Susie tries not to think too much about its efficiency, but lately, yes to be honest, lately she has started to think more about it, because she is alone with it all the time, and because she seethes. Yes, Susie hates being alone and she is full of animosity towards this machine. This feeling has never really popped up in her life until now. A concept she has ever only really encountered in gritty late-night dramas, and the news that fills her screens.
Hate? Never before. Not until terror and missiles. Until no son. Until no husband. Smoke in the sky. Until the confusion of existence.
Until homebots.
She could do it all herself, of course. Susie could open up the machine, remove the dust and clean it inside and out . . . if she wanted to. She can cook too. She can do lots of things. She is able. She is not incompetent. She could look after herself just fine if push came to . . . but push never does. So she just lays there, in the womb of her room. In her condition. Her deep despair. Her piteous and addle-egged mind. What a world it is that has become pregnant with this troubled thirty-five-year-old, and her lying there foetus-like. Gravity pinning her right down. Gravity seems so much heavier these days; her bones, now leaden and so hard to move. She is rooted. Rooted to this spot. So firmly, so horribly stuck.
She is getting annoyed too, right at this minute, watching the homebot move with such purpose. It almost taunts her. Does it know it taunts her with its light movements? Its ceaseless airiness of motion and its bombination. These are the things a woman is supposed to be doing in her own home: cleaning, tidying, not lollygagging the way she does. A woman should be up and at ’em. Should be house-proud. Ebulliently so. She should be tearing around the house with rag and cloth and pan and broom and
duster—the Japanese women in all the other houses are like this, without hesitation, full throttle, as it is fully expected of them—but she just can’t seem to face it. She can’t face any of it. Her eyes are closed tight. But the darkness provides no balm at all.
Music plays loudly. If the neighbours hear it, they never complain. They know she is a foreigner and she might not understand them. Even if they speak very slowly, raising their voices like she is either deaf or downright dim, she might not get it. They are harsh like this, harsh in their summations, their quick conclusions. They are like this because they know all about what she has been through—neighbourhoods like hers are small and gossipy, it is best to leave her alone, leave her at it, whatever it is she does in the midst of that aural commotion, leave her alone, for the time being at least. Foreigners, especially the contrary kind, are best left to their own devices. This might be the general consensus. The people of the neighbourhood can be kind and courteous, helpful when called upon, but really, they would much rather not get involved. Much rather steer clear. They never get too near. They tend to veer.
She often sees them peek out behind their curtains, shiftily, and disappear again, swiftly—one of them was at it just the other day, a tall silhouette, peeping out. Actually it didn’t seem like a nosey woman at all, seemed more like a tall man, a large frame; what on Earth was he staring at, his eyes on her house as she entered it? But she does not care much one way or another what they do, or what they happen to think. They surely have their own petty lives to be getting on with. Let them peep all they want. Let them ogle. The loud music is enough for her right now. Loud, earache-inducing, and enveloping her in her womb-room, or it is a tomb? Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s what. Womb. Tomb. The rhyme might be enough, simple but evocative words, to go along with the sounds she immerses herself in. It is the kind of drone music that she has recently begun to favour, though most would be hard pushed to call it “music” at all. It emerges from speakers all over the house. From the walls. From the ceilings. The bass vibes even rise up through the floor and can have you trembling in your socks, massaging your vulnerable toes. Susie has it set that way. That is one thing she does actually want. She imagines the heavy drone to be the March of Death itself, through some dark dungeon it comes, on its way for her, ominous, scythe-wielding. Susie listens to the noise from the speakers and accepts all that, embraces it even, imagines the worst. Its main function however—that obscenely loud industrial thrum—is for it to drown out the noise of her thoughts, the constant idle inner chatter, and drown out the sear of her grief. It isn’t working though. Not this evening. Not any evening. It isn’t enough. It just isn’t good enough at all.
She gazes out from
the captive couch, her features blank, listless, lifeless. Her eyes are wide open, but they are not really seeing anything. Susie was once a strong and vital woman, once full of jokes—bawdy jokes she remembered from the pubs of home. Once she was lustful for days and all the days contained. That has all disintegrated however. Masa is gone. Zen is gone. The life force seems to have been sucked right out of her.
And the homebot continues vacuuming.
It stops intermittently to look at the human lying there and Susie returns the look, though instead of blank innocence hers is sheer disdain. This has become a face of hers. You’d never guess that once she was lustful for days and all they proposed. Once she was adventurous, seeking, a seeker, yes, up for it . . .
“Music off,” she grunts.
The music immediately stops.
“I thought you liked that music, Miss Susie.”
Susie shoots another look at the homebot. A look of white-hot contempt now. So quickly she can summon wrath from the pit of her. What is it that annoys her so much about this machine? What is it exactly?
Everything.
It’s bloody everything about it.
“Would you like me to play a different selection?”
The homebot’s wide oval face turns again to its controller as if awaiting instruction. This was the way Masa and his team wanted it to be seen: naïve, blank, almost foolish, the face of a foundling in a basket stuck in the rushes.
The body of this machine is rigid, yet poised. It is always like that.
Rigid.
Poised.
A small, red strip of light flashes to a luminous blue at the side of its head. The kind of light that has been on machines for years, simple, letting humans know that something is occurring. This basic functioning lets Susie know that it has got some details to work out, that there are some neural mechanics at work. In truth, Susie understands very little of its construction, its design, its operation—that was Masa’s field—but it does let her know that she must be on her game, and must be ever wary, vigilant. For some reason she cannot yet bring herself to trust the bloody thing. It is as simple as that. These may be the first domestic robots on the planet that are fully operational, officially sanctioned, yet to treat them like a family pet . . .
Stories abound about these things, and not just in the Japanese language that she can hardly follow, but all over the world, in other countries that are also beginning to experiment with mechanical domestic servants. Every developed modern society these days has its tale of usurping factory machines, automatons suddenly
and surprisingly alive and hell-bent on human harm, and while Susie usually gives short shrift to such apocrypha—TV networks simply keen on boosting ratings with scare stories—she still knows enough to be careful with any semi-thinking thing in her house. That’s the way it is these days. Been building for years. Experimentation. In the name of progress, convenience, enhancement. There is little anyone can do or say against it. There never is. Progress. That’s what they call it. The posters are everywhere. The video images on the streets and on the trains and wherever you care to look. Progress is. Sometimes it stops at that. The sentence lingering there and seemingly incomplete, only of course it is complete. Progress is.
And Sunny lives in her house.
Yes, a domestic service robot lives in her house. Its name is Sunny.
And she has to keep her blue, melancholy eyes on its red, glaring ones. Ever wary.
“No, thanks, Sunny.”
Susie practically spits out the name. Where has all this venom come from? So quick to revile, so quick to emotionally flame these days. When she was young she wore light summer dresses and a light blue cardigan on soft summer days and walked with her grandfather along country lanes and skipped and whistled and sang in high notes as a girl, high notes of high feelings, marvellous moods, summers of honey and autumns of blackberries and winters where she skated on the lake when it miraculously froze over and was full of hope for some kind of future, was once full of hope for the way things would turn out; but now only these constant feelings of revulsion. For the missiles that come with increasing regularity, for the ever-threat of war, for her husband and son vanished and gone, for this machine that moves around her living space, and that she has to put up with, this thing, the airiness of its every motion, day in day out.
This hate stuff. It rises from within, erupts from the core of her, and now she stinks to high hell of it.
The homebot remains motionless for another moment and then it begins to vacuum again, the dust collecting inside it, being stored, compacted, and its body hoovering there, hovering there, a few centimetres off the floor, as if it carries no weight at all, as if it could suddenly fly like a crane over the rice fields, as comfortable airborne as it is stalking through wet land. Sunny weightless. Sunny light as a crane.
Susie feels nothing but weight, the weight of her body, the weight of her thoughts, the weight of her sadness; each cell of her is lumpen, burdened, she practically chokes on the very weight of each breath.
“I shall empty these bags of dust, Miss Susie. Then resume vacuuming. What room do you want me to do next, Miss Susie?”
Susie Sakamoto shrugs.
Couldn’t give a shit.
“Was that a shrug, Miss Susie? Does that mean that you are not sure or that you are allowing me to make the decision. Miss Susie . . . ?”
The voice is nasally, sometimes almost shrill. Why had Masa programed it that way? The endless Miss Susies. Couldn’t it have been given a deeper voice, something a little easier on the ear? There must have been millions to choose from. Was it a rushed decision? Just to get the thing up and running? Surely, they could’ve put a bit more thought into the voice, surely there were options? It seemed like a cruel joke on her now.
Susie shrugs again to the echo of Sunny’s questions. She sometimes toys with it. Just to see how much it can understand. How much it can deduce off its own bat, without instruction, without set codes. She tests it. Every day provoking a little. Keeps it on its toes. Or is it to keep herself on her toes?
The blue light flickers fast on the side of Sunny’s head, but its body is as stiff and inflexible as ever.
“Is that what you want me to do, Miss Susie?”
It is also damnably persistent. Annoying. Always interfering when she seeks rest. Upsetting the calm with its inquiries as to her well-being. And to her horror she can hardly remember a time pre-Sunny. What was that like, before the reliance, or the over-reliance? It seemed so long ago, when city folk actually did things for themselves, by themselves. Their own chores in their own households. Seems like another age entirely. Another era. Sunny hasn’t been there that long—is it a couple of years already? She can no longer keep track of time. Perhaps the homebots were always meant to be here. Destined. Yes, perhaps their destiny was always to be here in this city, on this land; the world has always been awaiting their arrival—is that it? Giddy was Man with the promise that the machines would save us. Save us? Save us from what? From ourselves? From the chore of hoovering?
Susie closes her eyes. In her own head there are no lights flickering at all, just the sound of crashing ocean waves: water against rocks, again and again, which is somehow soothing and terrifying at the same time. Is that what death is really going to be like? Terrifying, knowing that it is the end, but maybe, ultimately, assuaging, not a scythe-wielder at all then, nothing so outlandish, nothing so . . .
She tries breathing deeply, tries meditation. In, out. Deeply. She tries to calm herself down. Tries to expunge the bad thoughts, let them evaporate, away, away . . .
In. Out.
Deep meditation—but that never seems to work either.
“Are you waiting for me to take the initiative? It is not beyond my capabilities, Miss Susie.”
The homebot is still standing there. They have patience, endless patience. It is disconcerting to see just how much of it they have. Standing there. They can do this for hours. Awaiting instruction. They do not have the tiredness in their bones, the lagging of exhausted legs, the drowsiness of spirit, the headaches, the heaviness.
“Just do the damn tatami room, then, if you want to; I really don’t give a shit.”
The homebot understands her every word. Congratulations, Masa. It hardly ever fails with her speech, her accent, even her deliberate mumblings.
How astute. How marvellously well-made.
“Yes, Miss Susie.”
Sunny is about to move away but it can sense that Susie is not quite finished.
It senses correctly.
With its back to its controller it stops and waits.
“The house looks clean enough to me. I don’t mind if there is a speck of fucking dust floating around in front of my face every now and again. It’s something to watch, isn’t it?”
Sunny remains suspended. Its head turns a full 360 degrees to face Susie, and its blue strip of light flickers again.
“Is that a rhetorical question, Miss Susie? I suspect that I do not need to answer it.”
And the vocabulary on the fucking thing! And the sense of all-encompassing knowledge. It’s the swot at the front of the class—the annoying nerd you were dying to punch, or at least “accidentally” step on their glasses when they were “accidentally” knocked off. Susie had never been a violent child—where was all this coming from? She looks at it with as much scorn as she can muster. Sometimes she thinks she could go all out and take a baseball bat to it . . . just be done with it, destroy it, annihilate, for good. How enjoyable would that be? It would certainly give the neighbours something to natter about—the mad Irishwoman swinging a baseball bat in the middle of some quiet afternoon, interrupting their green tea and biscuit break to look at her, battering the silver home robot till it was nothing but loose bits and scraps. Look at her go! Debris. Nuts and bolts. Wires. All over the floor. Flying out the windows. Windows that are also shattered by the bat-wielding wild woman, batshit-mad bitch. Circuit boards and smoking silicon, everywhere, everywhere! Some spectacle that would be. Sunny scattered all over the place. Sunny no longer. Sunny no more. Silenced. No more Miss Susies. Progress halted. Science stilled for a minute, enough to get your breath back. Progress is . . . not. She’ll keep all that in mind.
The homebot turns its body fully, and holds its position like a gunslinger in an old western, arms away from its body, as if about to draw.
“Continue your chores,” says Susie Sakamoto.
Sunny takes stock of the room, its red orb eyes revolving around, surveying every nook and cranny, deciding what needs to be done. Analysing. Yes. It can.
“I could turn on the screen entertainment for you, Miss Susie. Would that be something that would please you?”
Susie closes her eyes and sighs deeply.
“It is late, Miss Susie. It is time for you to go to bed.”
She no longer keeps track of time. It is all meaningless to her. Hours amorphous.
“Would you like any herbal tea before retiring?”
You see, “retiring”! The fucking words! Was it Masa’s idea to have it mimic the manners of some British period drama, some Victorian novel? Is it a butler, a valet? For fuck’s sake.
Ignoring the homebot, irritated by the homebot now, Susie breathes deeply again. Sometimes it takes all her energy just to converse with the bloody thing.
“Mr. Masa always recommends you take herbal tea before bedtime.”
Susie keeps her eyes shut tight. The extra lines on her forehead, the crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes are more pronounced than ever, over the last few months they have etched into deeper ravines and become longer, making longer courses through her skin—they make her look older than her thirty-five years, or just very tired, maybe she just looks so oh-so-very tired. After all she has been through. And all she has yet to go through. There is always more. She knows that. Thirty-five years on the planet has taught her that much at least. It is never quite over. Or just when you think it is . . . there will be more shit headed your way. She whispers “fuck off” under her breath. She whispers it, but makes sure it is loud enough for the homebot to engage. She has at least fire enough to still play games, and she does so enjoy these little tests.
“I’m sorry, Miss Susie. I didn’t quite catch your instructions.”
She opens her eyes and does everything she can to make her features convey utter derision.
“I said: no thanks. I’m fine. I’m going to bed now. ...
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