Tik-Tok

Book 143: Gateway Essentials

by John Sladek

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

'A Robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm'. That's Asimov's celebrated First Law of Robotics. And in the 21st century, all domestic robots are programmed according to that Law. But something had gone terribly wrong with Tik-Tok's 'asimov circuits', and he sets out to injure as many people as possible - preferably fatally - while maintaining the exterior of a mild-mannered artist and a sincere campaigner for robot rights. So, like any self-respecting crook and murderer, he moves into politics, becoming the first robot candidate for Vice-President of the United States. Tik-Tok follows his maniacal progress from humble beginnings to the top of the heap - or almost. Because in his devious cunning, there was one element that Tik-Tok had forgotten... Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1983

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 184

Sample

As I move my hand to write this statement of my own free will – we can argue about the free will later – there is in me no remorse, no desire to justify. I wish only to tidy up, now that my life is nearly over. I’ll be taken from this cell with its chipped yellow paint on rusty bars, to a courtroom, then to another cell, and then to wherever it is they execute robots by dismantling. So it’s time to put my life in order: we domestic robots generally believe that neatness is all. In life, in death.

This cell could use a coat of paint.

I was alone, painting an empty dining room. I had eased back the awnings over all the windows, to let in more light from the empty sky. Tik-Tok was alone, and yet he whistled. Why should a robot whistle when no human can hear? That was just one of those mysteries poor Tik-Tok would never be able to work out. He liked mysteries, though. Murders. An Inspector Calls. All the suspects in one room when the light goes out. The answer is revealed by train timetables. The inspector is about to leave, when he remembers One More Thing … Tik-Tok never guessed the answers, but he never gave up, either. His mind was empty, empty, a whistling tea-kettle.

Out the window, more emptiness. I could see a series of suburban homes with identical empty green lawns, the short shadows of identical flagpoles. Near the houses were the usual clusters of pines and poplars; nothing moving but their disappearing shadows. A lion would be welcome.

Something moved. Under the nearest pine, a small girl sat digging in the mud with a stick. There was mud smeared on her jeans and T-shirt and at the corners of her mouth, and even on the lenses of her dark glasses. Of course little Geraldine Singer wouldn’t notice; she was blind as a mole.

A human would use a roller here on this big flat wall. But Tik-Tok preferred the feel of a brush, the feel of paint being stripped from the bristles by the invisible velvet roughness of the wall surface, didn’t they call that key? Key, unlocking the paint from the brush, locking it to the wall, dum-de-dum,

 

Paint!

I like a little dab of paint!

It helps to cover up what ain’t

So nice,

I’ll coat it twice

With paint!

 

And wouldn’t Duane and Barbie be surprised! I could already hear them saying ‘Oh, Tik-Tok, you good robot!’ and Tik-Tok would feel goodness signals flickering inside. If owners say you’re good, you’re good, and being good means being kept in service. A good robot learns to read his owner’s mind a little, to anticipate little wishes before they become commands. Naturally there’s a limit. Too much anticipation scares people just as too much grinning and bowing does. Moderation is the key. Aim to be a smidgen less intelligent than your owner, but a lot more thoughtful. See everything as it affects your owner, and in no other way.

Out the window I could see Mrs Singer calling Geraldine. It was lunchtime already. I cleaned my brush and hands quickly in turpentine and went into the kitchen – but for what? Duane and Barbie Studebaker would be away for another week; the kids would be away all summer. There was no one here but Tik, nothing to do in the kitchen except finish cleaning the sink. Then, back to my empty wall.

I worked slowly and carefully until 15:13:57.17, when the doorbell said, ‘There’s someone at the door calling himself Patrolman Wiggins. Anyone home?’

I opened the door to a man in the purple uniform of the Fairmont police. There was a large mole on his forehead.

‘Hi-yo,’ he said. ‘Your people home, Rusty?’

‘They’re on vacation, officer. Can I help? My name is Tik-Tok.’

‘We got a little problem here, Rusty. A missing kid.’

‘Yes?’

Patrolman Wiggins didn’t answer for a moment. ‘Little Geraldine Singer, you know her?’

‘The little blind girl, yes sir, I do. During the school term I drop her off at the blind school when I’m driving the Studebaker children to their school.’

‘You see her today?’

‘Yes sir, I saw her out the window this morning.’

‘Where?’

I took him into the dining room and pointed out the window. ‘She was sitting under that tree, digging in the mud.’

Wiggins took off his cap and scratched his mole. ‘Didn’t see her get up and leave? Or get into a car?’

‘No sir.’

‘Goddamnit, it’s the same with everybody around here. Nobody sees nothing. I mean how can a eight-year-old blind kid go wandering around on her own and nobody sees her?’

‘I’ve been busy painting in here, and cleaning the kitchen sink. Officer, would you like a cold beer? I’m sure Mr and Mrs Studebaker would want me to offer it to you.’

‘Okay, thanks. Thanks, uh, Tik-Tok.’ Wiggins followed me into the kitchen. He peered into the refrigerator when I opened it, but there was nothing to see: a plastic bag and two cans of beer. I opened one and poured it for him.

‘Beer in a glass – must be nice to be rich, eh? I got a robot at home but I mean you know it’s just a cleaner, nothing classy.’ He looked around. ‘Nice to be rich. What’s with the sink here? You fixing it?’

‘Just cleaning it. While the Studebakers are away it’s a good chance to take the garbage disposal all apart and clean each part with carbon tet. Then I’ll renew the rubber parts and put it together. I like to do a thorough job of everything.’

‘Wow.’ He finished the beer and went to the refrigerator. ‘I might as well finish the last one, yeah?’ He moved the plastic bag to get it. ‘What’s that, a bag of giblets and no chicken?’

‘I may make a stock,’ I said. ‘For a Sauce Harpeau or—’

‘Must be goddamned nice,’ he said angrily. ‘And you use real oil paint on the walls, I can smell it.’

‘Do you like the color? Milk avocado, mix it myself. I can give you the recipe.’

‘No thanks, my robot would paint the goddamned window.’ He was angry at wealth, and some revenge was coming. ‘Mind if I just check your license?’

‘Help yourself.’ I bowed low, exposing the pair of slits in the back of my neck. He was unnecessarily rough plugging in the radio. In a few seconds it had checked my identity, ownership, service log, logic and linguistic processors, ‘asimov’ circuits and motor functions. It had compared data within me with data stored in distant computers.

He unplugged the radio and gave me a shove. ‘You check out, Rusty. Your asimovs check out. So at least I know you didn’t shove that little girl down the garbage disposal yourself, ha ha.’

‘Didn’t I?’ I said, but too softly; Wiggins was already going upstairs to see what he could break or steal. The poor we have always with us, but I felt some relief when he finally smashed a vase and left.

I sat down to stare at my empty wall.

The domestic robot had been introduced, timidly, before the turn of the century, but there were at first problems that seemed insoluble. Everyone wanted a machine capable of most human functions, but no one wanted a human machine. There were problems of intellect: a simple machine would be no better than a trained ape (and who wants an ape washing the Wedgwood?) while a smart machine might get snarled up in cognition and do nothing (except wonder what is the nature of Wedgwood?). There were problems of complexity: a simple machine had to be told how to do everything, in great detail, while a smart machine might just prefer not to do anything at all today, thanks.

There was some improvement when the so-called asimov circuits were introduced. These were named after a science fiction writer of the last century, who postulated three laws for the behavior of his fictional robots. A robot was not allowed to injure any human. It had to obey all human orders, except the order to injure any human. It had to protect its own existence, unless that meant disobeying an order or injuring any human.

The asimov circuits more or less followed this reasoning. A robot was certainly not allowed to kill or injure human beings unless specifically programmed to do so, say, by the military. Military robots, it was said, had bypasses for their asimovs.

All I knew was, there was no such bypassing allowed for domestic robots. We were licensed and tested to guarantee harmlessness. Of course as robots became more complex, more human, the testing might not be quite so certain. There was, I knew, a Dr Weaverson who now urged that robots were human enough to have human breakdowns.

That first coat of paint seemed to be breaking down. It was mottled with shadows. How many coats would it take to flatten it to emptiness again?

But didn’t that shadow suggest a shape? A fencepost, yes, with an animal perched upon it, ears twitching. The fence rails would slant away just there, never mind how it all fit in, the farmhouse with the screen door opening and a figure coming out – why not? Because Duane and Barbie might not like it? Okay, I could always cover it with milk avocado again.

The mural was good. I knew it was good just as I knew when a mirror was hanging straight or a window was clean. I knew it was good, and I knew that Duane and Barbie weren’t going to like it. They’d dislike the idea of a mural in the first place. Walls were supposed to be empty surfaces to screen out the busy world. A living room or a dining room was supposed to be a shell in which you watched vids or listened to quads or ate or drank in isolation. But this mural was busy, bright, brash – an intrusion that demanded viewing. They’d hate it, and they might punish me for it.

To forestall them, I phoned up the local paper, the Fairmont Ledger, who sent over a photographer and an ‘art critic’ who chewed a toothpick. They seemed to like it – the critic stopped chewing for a second when he saw it – and they promised a small piece on it, in a week or so. As they left, the critic spat his toothpick on the carpet and said, ‘No shit, you really done this yourself, huh?’

There was plenty of work to occupy me before the Studebakers came home. All the rooms had to be aired and dusted and the air conditioning turned on. The master bedroom needed thorough cleaning, clean bedlinen, bed curtains and drapes. Elsewhere there were windows to wash, venetian blinds taken down and cleaned (ditto awnings), furniture waxed, carpets washed, floors and all surfaces hand-scrubbed, basement swept and straightened, attic vacuumed; outside there was the pool to clean and fill, lawns to mow to close tolerances and edge, flower beds weeded and possibly replanted, gutters scraped out and the entire outside of the house washed. Then the houseplants had to be wiped leaf by leaf with milk, the paper mail sorted two ways (by date and importance) and stacked on the desk in the den, candles cleaned and fitted to holders, all house silver taken from the security place and polished; then it was time to go shopping for fresh meats, vegetables and fruit, fresh cut Calvary roses to be arranged in a funnel-shaped cut-glass vase, supplies of Albanian tobacco and Mongolian hash. A selection of tapes, sound, vision and odor were to be programmed into the brain of the entertainment unit, certain of them locked so that the children would not be able to call them out. Finally the dog, Tige, had to be fetched back from the boarding kennel, fed, washed, perfumed, tranquilized and put into his doghouse. Then it was just a matter of standing by the window, watching for their car.

Duane and Barbie stood gazing at their defaced wall, saying nothing. Duane had a suit on a coat-hanger over his shoulder. Barbie carried golf clubs.

‘Jesus,’ Duane said finally. ‘Jesus, Tik-Tok, what the hell made you do a thing like this?’

Barbie took her cue from him, wailing, ‘Oh Tik, how could you? How could you?’

‘I mean we trusted you.’

‘How could you? Will it come off?’

‘I mean we really trusted you. We left you in charge of our home. Our home. And this is the thanks we get. Well okay, boy, okay. If that’s the way you want it.’ Duane flung down the coat-hanger on the dining table; I caught it just in time to prevent a nasty scratch in the mahogany. He left the room.

‘He’s going to phone the people at Domrob,’ she said. ‘We’re trading you in.’

I said nothing.

‘Don’t you even care? We’re trading you in!’

I said, ‘I’ll miss the kids, Barbie. In a way I – I did this for them. As you can see, it’s a nursery rhyme.’ I let this sink in, then: ‘I guess you’ll have it all painted over before they get back from camp, right? And I’ll be in some junkyard by then.’ I attempted a shrug, for which my joints were not well-adapted. ‘So be it.’

Barbie ran from the room, sobbing. I busied myself putting away Duane’s suit, then I brought the other bags in from the car. When I passed the living room, Barbie was saying, ‘And he did clean the kitchen. I mean it’s never been so clean, not a speck of dirt anywhere.’

‘Tik, come in here,’ Duane called out. I saw he’d been reading the local paper’s article on the mural. ‘We’ve decided to give you one more chance. We’ll leave your wall decoration where it is until the kids get back from camp. But, and I mean this, no more. No more “art” around here, understand? Nothing. Nada.’

‘Dada?’

‘Nada. One more brush-stroke and you’ve had it.’

‘Yes sir, Duane. And may I say, welcome home, Duane and Barbie?’

The next time I passed the living room they were discussing whether it wouldn’t be better to have me call them sir and ma’am instead of Duane and Barbie.

Now and then I got a chance to drive into the city on my own, on some errand. I always took the opportunity to visit two places: the public library and Nixon Park. Today, both places were especially important. I rushed from the library with a certain cassette, straight to the park and a chess game.

It wasn’t the chess at all, not really. I wanted to talk to the strange old man who was always there at one of the concrete chess tables, ready for a game. He was some old derelict, I guess, a nameless lump of half-alive humanity. He had stringy yellow-white hair, a sagging gray face with white stubble – never a beard, never shaven. He wore an overcoat with a diseased-looking fur collar, winter and summer. In the summer he would open it to show a waistcoast stained with food and probably snot.

He played lightning chess, never studying the board for more than five seconds before his yellow-stained hand would snake out and make a move. And they were devastating moves. I won about one game in ten, no more.

‘Listen,’ I said today. ‘Listen, I don’t really want to play chess. Couldn’t we talk? I need to.’

He held out two fists. I got black.

‘Really I need to talk.’ I looked at his great dark, red-rimmed eyes. ‘I mean you seem intelligent, and—’

‘Your move!’

‘I mean you’ve got a logical mind, I respect that.’

‘Your move!’

‘See I’ve got this problem, this—’

‘Your move!’

‘I mean do you think a robot can have problems?’

‘Your move!’

I was losing already. ‘Well here I am, a robot with problems, one problem anyway, I, and it’s n. . .