“Have you done any of these for real? These are really cool.”
“Yeah, I did the lizard on Bryony for her birthday.”
“Do you ever get art?”
“No.” She laughs. “No one else draws well enough to be up to my standards, and it’s too hard to draw on myself. When I’m grown up, I want a tattoo, though.”
“What do you want?”
“I want a dragon that goes across my back, with its neck wrapping around my left arm and its head in my elbow, and its tail wrapping around my right arm. Red and gold. Although I’ll probably get a small tattoo first, when I turn eighteen, because that’ll be a lot cheaper and easier to hide from my parents and also I’ll know what I’m getting into before I try to get a giant tattoo done because maybe I’ll decide it hurts too much. Do you want a tattoo?”
“Maybe,” I say.
“Like of a bat?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Probably. Like a picture on my shoulder of bats hunting for moths near a streetlight.”
“That sounds cool.”
“Do you actually think it sounds cool, or are you being polite? I thought you didn’t like bats.”
“Just because I don’t like actual bats doesn’t mean I don’t think they’d make a cool tattoo. I probably wouldn’t want to get up close and personal with a real live dragon, if I ever met one.”
The rain is slacking off, so Rachel carefully puts her sketchbook in the backseat, and we run into the school through a side door.
It would probably be a good time to hack the robot, but I’ve decided I want to stay at New Coburg High for as long as I can, no matter how bad the classes are, so I don’t say anything about it.
The first class with the robot is later that day.
The Robono Adept 6500 avoids the “uncanny valley” problem (which makes humanlike robots seem really creepy) by not trying to look human. It’s designed to be sort of cute; there’s a head with a kind of face, with a hinged jaw and light-up eyes. The jaw moves in time with the speech, and the head swivels so the eyes are looking at you if it calls on you. The eyes don’t actually see; I can spot the cameras farther up on the head, and they are evenly spaced around the head so it can see to the sides and behind it. I’m pretty sure the light-up eyes are entirely decorative.
It rolls around on wheels, like a Dalek, and has little grasping tools at the end of tiny useless T. rex arms. In the commercials, they always have a pointer or a dry-erase marker in their hands, but this one doesn’t have anything.
“Welcome, young men and women,” the robot says. The jaw is synced up pretty well to the speech. It’s weird how much more alive robots look when they have that synced-up mouth movement. “Please attend quietly to this instruction. There will be a period for questions and answers in the last ten minutes of the class.” It delivers a lecture on the reproductive system, sticking strictly to baby-making with a brief detour into menstruation and wet dreams. There’s an aide here to keep an eye on us and make sure we don’t vandalize the robot, but our usual health teacher apparently spends this month doing mental-health screenings of ninth graders.
“The lining of the uterus is called the endometrium,” the robot says. If I had a human teacher this boring, I might call them robotic. That’s entirely redundant when it’s an actual robot, of course. Rachel is drawing a picture of a girl battling a giant ocean wave. Partway through the class, she gets out a red pen to make it a red ocean wave. If the aide notices, she doesn’t care.
With exactly ten minutes to go, the robot announces, “I will now take questions.”
“Will there be a question box this year?” someone asks.
“If you wish to ask a question anonymously, you may submit it through an internet form you will find on your school’s website.”
“That’s not actually anonymous if they want to know who submitted it,” someone else mutters.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand that question,” the robot says.
“Mr. Robot Teacher, please tell us about robot fetishists,” one of the boys calls out. “Would you date one?” That results in a whole lot of giggling, followed by the robot saying, “I am afraid you will have to ask your parents if you have questions about robot fetishists.”
This sets off a whole flurry of questions as my classmates try to figure out exactly what the parameters are of the questions the robot won’t answer. It can tell us that a typical menstrual cycle is twenty-eight days but that they can be as long as thirty-five days or as short as twenty-one days. It cannot tell us anything about gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or trans people, nor can it answer questions about condoms, contraception generally, or what constitutes “heavy petting” or “third base.” It can, however, explain that a “French kiss” is one in which the two people “penetrate one another’s mouths with their tongues,” which makes us all cringe. The fact that it can’t tell us anything about masturbation is the thing that makes Rachel so mad she just about flips over her desk.
“Have you figured out how to hack this thing?” Rachel asks furiously after the bell rings. “Imagine this for a month.”
“Yes, but…” I try to think of how to tell her that if I do this and get caught, I’ll have to leave. Immediately, probably. Maybe I can just try not to get caught. It won’t be a problem if I can just avoid getting caught … “But I’ll need a distraction so the aide doesn’t see.”
It’s sitting right there—the robot, I mean—so there isn’t really a question of how to get to it. Rachel holds up one finger, to say wait, and sits back down. I stand there awkwardly as the room empties
