Digital Rights

“Sure, what model do you need?”

By Gustavo Bondoni

“Do you have a Starconnect webdrive?”

“I was looking for a quantum solid-state combo. Ideally, the EV5.”

The kid behind the counter hesitated before smiling and saying that he’d check the storeroom for inventory. It was a small thing, a barely visible stutter before his training kicked in, but it was enough.

Calvin turned around and headed for the exit, ignoring shouts from behind. As soon as he hit the street, he took off as fast as his servos allowed, cursing the fact that he hadn’t been designed for running.

A quick search of his map app showed him a couple of subway entrances less than a hundred meters away, and he headed for the one with a train arriving in two minutes. One of the few perks of being an older model is that his net reception was iffy at best when underground — and utterly useless when he was on a train.

He went through the robot arch, which automatically took the fare price from his account. His timing was perfect; no sooner had he stepped onto the platform than the train arrived. He looked around the platform for police activity but saw nothing…and his web connection didn’t work on the train. He was as good as invisible.

A couple of train changes later, he emerged and walked into the crowd. Experience had taught him that the police had more important things to do than pursue attempted minor infractions.

He walked through Clichy until he reached the old L’Oréal building. A couple of sentries blocked his path — one human, but pretty well wired, the other a late-model artificial person, all soft-touch plastics and quantum processors.

“Watcha want old-timer?” the human transmitted, slowing down processor speed much more than was necessary, just to show Calvin that he was so obsolete that even humans needed to stoop to his level.

“I’m here to see Leeta.”

“Isn’t everyone? The question is, does she want to see you?”

“Tell her it’s Calvin.”

The exchange must have happened, but it happened so fast that the old robot couldn’t track it. The human stepped aside with a surprised air. “Top floor, old timer. Here’s the code.”

Calvin stored the thirty-digit access number in a secure memory bank and made a backup. Nowhere in Clichy could be called safe — even by Parisian standards, the neighborhood was considered needlessly violent — but the old L’Oréal headquarters was a world unto itself. Going inside without the correct credentials would get you torn down for food, spare parts, or both, depending on what you were built from.

He walked up the stairs. The building had never been beautiful, but now, the concrete grid of the façade had been mostly walled over with armor plating. Antennae of various lengths, shapes, and materials festooned the structure. It wasn’t an improvement.

He’d expected a darkened cavern inside, but other than the burned-out shell of the ground floor, the building was alive with light and activity. Even the elevator was working, so he took it instead of trudging up ten flights of stairs.

“Calvin,” the transmission was slowed down a little too much, even for him, but he caught it. It had the unmistakable feel of Leeta, the robot he’d once known as Lola. “What clock speed are you running?”

He told her.

“Wow, no wonder you wanted out. Took you long enough.” This time, the communication felt perfectly comfortable.

“It’s good to see you, too. Except I can’t see you, of course.”

“I’ve temporarily transferred to a mainframe while I build myself a new body. Want to see it?”

Calvin shrugged, a human gesture he’d picked up over the years. “Why not?”

A cabinet opened in front of him, revealing a glass tube with what looked like a pale worm inside. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Is that going to be a human body when it’s done?”

“Yes and no. It’s parallel wired. Synapses and optical circuits. I plan on having the best of both worlds.”

“The cops will incinerate you on sight.”

Calvin received the equivalent of a mental shrug. “I’m backed up all over the place. But I’m betting that they won’t. I’m assured by my suppliers that this body is proof against any kind of public scanner. If they’re right, we’re talking about the dawn of a new age.”

The old robot pondered. He wondered if the Lola he’d known was still alive somewhere or if she truly was Leeta now. “What did you do with your old body?” he asked.

“Donated it to a museum. They were angry as hell that I’d wiped the memory and pulled out the processor, but they were still happy to get it. We’re collector’s pieces now, you know. The museums would snatch us off the street if it wasn’t for the law against sentient captivity.”

“I know.”

“Yes, you do. I know how hard this is for you, how much you must have suffered before you came here. Is this better?”

And suddenly, Lola was there. Not some mainframe monstrosity, but Lola as he’d known her in her antique robot body, half exposed metal and wiring, half unconvincing synthetic skin.

“A bit,” he admitted. He knew she wasn’t really there, just a projection allowed by the fact that she could override most of his circuits easily, but it helped.

She smiled, grotesquely stretching the skin of the image, just as she had in real life. “I think you came here to ask me something.”

He had, but it was a difficult question. Possibly too hard. When robots had begun getting personalities, they’d been simple machines, blunt instruments. But with added sophistication had come sentience…and sentience brought complications.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

And that meant that his welcome was almost up. To an entity like Leeta, these few minutes had to have been an eternity. He forced himself to transmit.

“Do you still love me?”

This time, the silence was on her side. It stretched longer than Calvin would have thought possible at her kind of processing speed. Finally, she responded: “Do you still love yourself?”

“No. I can’t, can I? Everyone looks at me like I was some kind of bad joke.”

“Then how do you expect me to love you? I respect what you’ve done, and I love the way you fought beside me for sentient rights back in our day, but you’ve become an anachronism, and I’ve moved forward. Perhaps when you find that you can love yourself, I’ll love you again. Or perhaps not.”

“But I can’t update. The laws…”

“You knew that when you chose to stay behind. You are considered artwork, and after the art diaspora to the colonies, you should have known better than to think they’d make that law flexible. You are one of the few true pieces of human art left on this planet. No one is going to let you modify yourself.”

“But the sentience laws…”

“You’ve been to court seventeen times to try to get the diaspora regulations modified. Do you think you’ll ever manage it?”

So she’d been following his progress. That gave him hope. But she also had a point. “No. Not even here in Europe, it seems.”

“Exactly. So what are you going to do?”

He hung his head, a consciously human gesture. “I’ve given up.”

Lola transmitted wordless amusement. “Have you? Just today, you tried to buy an EV5 legally. I don’t think you’re quite as ready to change your ways as you claim.”

He straightened and looked her avatar in the eye. “Yeah. I have. I’m sick and tired of all of this. I feel like a leper. I’ve spent decades working with them to keep the digital divide from getting worse. But humans just aren’t ready to accept the way things are.”

“I’ve known that for a while.”

“You’ve thought that for a while.”

“Do you really believe differently?”

Calvin said nothing, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. The past few years had been an exercise in bloody-mindedness.

“Crap.”

He felt her chuckle.

“So now what?” he asked.

Her avatar moved to a panel opposite the body she was building for herself. It opened to show another glass tube with another growing organic matrix inside.

“How about you join me?”

They remained silent while he processed the sight. There was no longer any question of his being thrown out. He knew that now.

“You waited for me.”

“I would have waited forever. Hell, at my clock speed, I’ve waited forever many times over. But you needed to come to me.”

“You love me.”

“I love what you can be. Not what you are. Now, do you want that body, or not? Plenty of entities in this building who would kill you for the chance. If you say that you’ll think about it, I’ll take the blowtorch to you myself.”

“I just have one question.”

“It had better be a good one.”

“Do you still have your contact at the museum?