Gayle Burgoyne

This coffee had a different sound. In its pot it gurgled like a pierced lung. Potatoes screamed as they boiled and chickpeas soaking overnight woke him as they burst. Even his simple routines were murderous. How could Ben trust himself to write the robot narratives?
‘Do we need to make the companions seem so human?’ Ben asked in the team meeting. ‘People personify their plants and pets. My great-aunt has a stag head on her wall that she made on the sewing machine.’
‘Let me guess,’ said his boss, Dave, ‘she talks to it like it’s human.’
‘Worse. It gives her advice and she follows it. When I pop round, she makes me say, “Hello, Aloysius”.’
‘Look, Ben, mate, I didn’t want to have to say this, but I’ve got an AI that can write these scripts. That’s just between you and me. But the contract is woolly enough I could get away with it. If you don’t want the gig, it’s no trouble.’

Ben returned to first principles. But when he examined the fundaments, the distinction between people and robots wasn’t clear. Robots are a series of commands. So, too, people. Because human software develops through interaction, however, we believe it organic. Sacrosanct. But, then, most people think a razor blade is perfectly sharp. A blade can cut a throat, but up close the edge is ragged. Up close the difference between people and robots is ragged.
‘Forget the detail, mate,’ Dave said impatiently. ‘Old people don’t listen anyway. They’re not going to question whether a robot’s story holds up when they can barely remember their own.’
‘Can I ask the steering committee for their advice?’
‘You know I can’t take you to the meetings.’
‘Ask on my behalf.’
‘You’re overthinking it, mate. A school kid could write this stuff. These scripts are just the factory settings. The narratives will evolve in their own ways when the companions are at home with their hosts.’
‘That’s what I’m worried about. What if the companions learn terrible emotional habits and develop into resentful sons and daughters who murder their parents?’
‘You’re straying into early years’ policy there. All that was binned a long time ago. We’re just implementing what the government says it wants. Whether that’s what it needs… Well, you know clients. We won the contract by promising to be cheap and quick so don’t make me regret giving you this break. Remember, you’re contractor not an employee. Do what we agreed.’
Ben wanted to say, ‘What if I accidentally build in a self-sabotage mechanism? I’m only human after all.’ But Dave would take the work off him.

Ben’s great-aunt, Maud, messaged him excitedly. ‘WON a ROBOT companion!!!’
He panicked. On paper she was an obvious candidate: never married, no children. Yet Ben had never thought of her as lonely. A few years ago she sent him a postcard from Siberia to say, ‘I’m living happily with my cancer and it’s quite the charismatic travelling companion.’ She’d never even owned a pet, didn’t agree with holding another creature captive so it could serve her emotional needs. He’d barely thought about her life, only the parts of it that dated from his birth. Worried, he called her.
‘Don’t let that robot into your house,’ Ben said, ‘it’s a–’ But Dave had made him sign a non-disclosure agreement, so he ended up rambling something cryptic about Trojan horses.
‘Oh, you’ve always been a one to look the gift horse in the mouth,’ said Maud. ‘If you’ve got a gloomy outlook, Ben, you’ll see doom everywhere.’
‘They’re only doing it…for the data.’
‘Well of course they’re harvesting me,’ she said. ‘I’m not a Luddite. They’ve been doing that for years. But I have to do my bit in return for being supported. If anyone cares how I like my tea, they’re welcome to the information. In fact, there are a few things I’d like to say to the National Tea Service so I hope they are listening.’
Perhaps he was fretting over nothing. He decided to be kind and say what she always said when he faced a hopeless situation. ‘I’m sure it’ll be a great adventure for you.’
‘Glad you think so.’

Then Ben found the confidential minutes for the committee meeting left beside the printer. The next phase for the robot companions had been decided – even before the trial had begun. People are too expensive to maintain, the committee agreed. Over time they will be modified. The trial is only to determine how quickly the people most stuck in their habits will shift their paradigm of what constitutes life. As of – Ben flicked through for the dates – next year, if you want a pension or universal basic income, then you have to agree to keep step with innovations in healthcare. There were no details about what these innovations constituted.
Ben went to the newspaper anonymously but everyone was fixated on jobs. Liberals didn’t get it either. They didn’t want to hear that a person’s destiny is determined by genetic codes. Their whole equality project would collapse. They shamed the whistle-blower for being right-wing when he wasn’t. Ben tried to console himself that liberals were going to have a nasty shock when, one day not far distant, they woke up in a world engineered by those who understood fate. Standard humans would be reduced to work animals or pets. But then, liberals already condescended to poor people as if they lived in an open zoo. His great-aunt would be appalled to be part of this scheme.
Or would she? She had a remarkable ability to remain cheerful when everybody else was going to pieces, becoming ever more upbeat as the global situation deteriorated. As a teenager he thought her perverse and cynical. Alternating between pride and frustration, he described to his friends her latest mischief. She really was the sort who’d have a great adventure with a government programme designed to undermine her liberty. He messaged her to meet him in a busy place and to leave her phone at home.

‘You know how I can’t talk about the companions’ project,’ he said as they walked along the South Bank past the brutalist theatres and galleries.
‘Wouldn’t dream of asking.’
‘Thanks. But if I said, hypothetically–?’
‘Hypothetically, eh? I’ve never met a hypothetical question that wasn’t as real as you and me.’
He looked around nervously. ‘Well, yes. So, hypothetically, what could a scriptwriter do if he– Or she, I mean–’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to whap you with feminism today.’
‘Appreciate it. So what could they write into the factory-settings script that would lead to…eventually…um…as how a change of course by a single degree, over a long distance–’
‘Will take a ship somewhere far from its intended destination?’ she interrupted, but this time he was grateful.
He nodded and glanced again at the man and woman wearing red and green M&Ms ponchos. He’d seen them going the other way five minutes ago. Then a plump girl in glasses with a plump woman in glasses, both with their arms bent in front, fists clenched, marched towards them. That couldn’t possibly mean anything. Probably they just needed the loo. While waiting for his aunt, he’d seen a woman dressed as a nun sitting on the wall outside Little Waitrose. She sounded Polish, though she could have been Russian. Maybe she genuinely was a nun. How could he tell? The world was very strange today. Was he being followed?
They bought bacon rolls at a van and ate them as they walked beside the river. Snippets of conversations came to him, blown into his ears by the wings of gulls swooping for dropped tacos and donuts. ‘If he works for them in Europe, that’s all right… They say it’s Harry who can’t read… I mean cutting boards, I can just bring them… I used to take people who couldn’t afford to stay there, they’d sleep on the floor…’
What did it all mean?
‘…Maybe you’re not particularly happy now, yet, but it’s different… He’s rather diminished by the stuff that’s happening around him…’
Bells tinkled in a woman’s handbag and a boat pulling platforms of yellow containers chugged along the river. Spanish chatter joined the fray. Surely no one could hear him here. Then a seagull bombed into the back of his head and another knocked the bacon roll out of his hands. A small frantic flock devoured the bread and bacon, and almost each other, and flew off leaving no evidence except for the paper bag.
He laughed at the surprise of it. Maud grinned and the wrinkles around her mouth smoothed out into the smile of the girl he’d seen in family photos.
‘Nature isn’t benign,’ she said, ‘and sometimes your bacon’s gonna get it.’
He said quickly, ‘What small phrase or habit could I write into the factory scripts that, within the pilot timescale, would undermine the outcome?’
Maud laughed through her nose. ‘Intriguing question. Curiosity, I’d say. Look where it’s brought us so far. Or the ability to believe real anything that can be imagined. Combined with hosts’ idiosyncratic routines – not that I’d know anything about that – these would probably accelerate a robot to a pretty pass, with their rate of self-teaching.’
‘Have you read much of the draft handbook?’ he asked tentatively.
‘I’ve read the original research from the 1980s onwards.’
‘Ah, so…?’
‘You didn’t think I needed a companion? Christ, no. I did a fair amount of consultancy for government in my day. Had to give it up in the end because, well, I think you know why.’

With his aunt’s help, Ben accelerated the end game. He feared it was too late already. Protests, riots, bombings, insurgencies: as with every upheaval. People intuitively resisted the modifications but could never make a good enough case for why they shouldn’t have to change. Bionic evolution was unnatural, they said. Proponents reminded the public that viruses are natural, cancer too, and it was cheaper not to develop vaccines and unnatural treatments if people preferred to die painfully pure. The printing press, mechanical looms: always the same. People didn’t know what was good for them. They chose sugar and fat, alcohol and tobacco; they became addicted to their own anxiety.
The bionics would win eventually. They were stronger. Even the last unadulterated people would yield if they wanted to survive on what the planet was becoming. It was inevitable. Yet when potatoes screamed and chickpeas burst, Ben knew that it wasn’t. He would resist to the last gurgle of his last lung, just as his great-aunt was happily living with her cancer again.

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