Shine Shine Shine

“Les,” said Maxon, “the timing of the mission is dependent on the orbital path of the moon, which affects everything about the launch.”

This was bullshit, Sunny knew. She felt her heart thump in her chest.

“The slightest variation in timing could cause a differential in gravitational pull that would throw off the telemetry significantly. You know, for example, the variations in Earth’s gravity. Everyone knows Kansas has nine- tenths the gravity of Virginia. In some parts of Oklahoma, it’s even less.”

“Oh,” said Les Weathers. “I guess I didn’t know that.”

Maxon produced the facial expression that communicated, “I am letting you in on a secret.” Then he winked, right at the camera, where he wasn’t even supposed to look.

“I’m not worried about my delivery,” said Sunny. “I’m not worried about Maxon’s either. He’ll get his robots to the moon, and when he comes back, there will be a new baby here to welcome him back.”

“Do you know what you’re having, a girl or a boy?”

Sunny laughed mildly. “Les, we’ve been so busy preparing for Maxon’s trip, I have not even had time to find out if this baby is human.”

6

“There are three things that robots cannot do,” wrote Maxon. Then beneath that on the page he wrote three dots, indented. Beside the first dot he wrote “Show preference without reason (LOVE)” and then “Doubt rational decisions (REGRET)” and finally “Trust data from a previously unreliable source (FORGIVE).”

Love, regret, forgive. He underscored each word with three dark lines and tapped his pen on each eyebrow three times. He hadn’t noticed that his mouth was sagging open. He was not quite thirty, the youngest astronaut at NASA by a mile.

I do what robots can’t do, he thought. But why do I do these things?

The spaceship traveled toward the moon. Maxon wrote with his astronaut pen. In his notebook there were hundreds of lists, thousands of bulleted points, miles of underscoring. It was a manner of thinking. He was standing in his sleeping closet, upright and belted into his bunk. The other four astronauts were in the command pod, running procedures. No one liked spending time in the sleeping closets except Maxon. He kind of enjoyed it. It was not time for the lights to go out, but the rocket to the moon was nearing the end of its first day in space.

Maxon’s list of things a robot can’t do was a short one now, pared down from a much longer list that included tough nuts like “manifest meaningful but irrational color preference” and “grieve the death of a coworker.” Maxon made his robots work better and last longer by making them as similar to humans as possible. Humans are, after all, the product of a lot of evolution. Logically and biologically, nothing works better than a human. Maxon’s premise had been that every seeming flaw, every eccentricity must express some necessary function. Maxon’s rapid blinking. Sunny’s catlike yawn. Even the sensation of freezing to death. It all matters, and makes the body work, both in singularity and in collusion with other bodies, all working together.

Why does a man, clapping in a theater, need the woman next to him to also be clapping? Why does a woman, rising from her seat at a baseball game, expect the man on her left to jump to his feet? Why do they do things all at once, every person in every seat, rising, clapping, cheering? Maxon had no idea. But he knew that it didn’t matter why. They do it, and there must be a reason. A failure to clap in a theater can result in odd looks, furrowed foreheads, nudged elbows. So Maxon would write:

Let anyone in any theater contradict it.

“Whatcha doin’, Genius?” asked Fred Phillips. He stuck his head into Maxon’s sleeping closet, gripping both sides of the doors as his body floated out behind.

“I’m working, Phillips,” Maxon returned.

“You’re not working. You’re dreaming.” Phillips smiled cheerfully, glancing at Maxon’s paper. “Dreaming of making sweet, sweet love to your robots. But you just can’t make them love you back.”

“First of all,” said Maxon, “I’ve seen your medical. Your IQ is in the genius range. So your nickname for me, ‘Genius,’ is not sensible. Secondly, I am not dreaming of a robot who can love. Anyone could program a robot to do that. All you’d have to do is arrange an illogical preference. Making a robot love you over anyone else would be like making a robot love the color orange over any other color. I could have done it years ago. But it’s a pointless behavior. And I won’t.” How was loving Sunny different from loving orange? Phillips would not understand.

“Whatever, Genius,” said Phillips. “Houston wants us to run a sim of the docking procedure. You want to watch? Or, are you too busy? We all know you have nothing to do until we hook up with your girlfriends in orbit.”

Phillips swung free of Maxon’s closet, brought his foot up and wedged it into a handle, and propelled himself back through the tube into the command module. Their sleeping closets were arranged around the wall of the rocket, with an empty cylinder in the center where they could get in and out, one at a time. Maxon was not claustrophobic. He was suited for space travel, and he was wearing his space suit for astronauting.

“Robots can’t cry, Genius!” said Phillips, retreating. “Ito’s Laws of Robotics: Robots can’t cry, robots can’t laugh, robots can’t dream.”

Maxon sighed. He knew this was bait. But he was already unbuckling his straps. The hook was in his brain. Maxon had made robots that did all three of these things. James Ito was a hack, some AI putz working for a car company. His book was a farce. Pop culture, not science. When Maxon met Ito he hadn’t liked the guy’s face. A humanist. The kind of guy who would paint the future bright by predicting that the transformation offered by robots was really recidivism to a world gone by. A robot wife would be a pre-feminist wife. A robot worker would be a pre-socialism worker. The guy had no idea what was actually just around the corner. A different world, not better, not worse, but full of change.

Robots could laugh, and cry, and dream, and everything else. For example, there was a robot named Hera. Six iterations of it waited for him now, in an orbit around the moon, in the cargo bay of the rocket that had been fired last week, which they would soon be docking up with. Hera laughed at nonsensical juxtapositions, like a fat man in a little coat or a wheelbarrow full of whipped cream. Its laughter was not a sound delivered to human ears through a speaker, meant for human appreciation and approval. The laughter was an internal, systemic reaction, a clenching of joints, a shaking of components, a temporary loss of function. It could be shared with other Hera models, could spread like a contagion throughout a group of them.

“Incorrect,” said Maxon, following him. “Hera laughs. It’s what makes Hera so reliable.”

“I don’t believe in it,” said Phillips. “It’s pointless. A robot that laughs. What the hell?”

When he was strapped into his seat, Phillips said, “Go ahead, Houston. Aeneid rocket is ready to run the sim. All crew present.”

Maxon was familiar with the language of naysayers. They were afraid. Sometimes their faces showed that, the same thing as confusion, with the eyebrows down and chin raised. When Hera’s software was first coded, some people said it was a kind of abomination. Other people said it was a gimmick. They were interested in torque and tensile strength, in the size of robots and what they were composed of. An article in the International Journal of Robotics Research called him “a gearshrinker,” with scorn. He didn’t read the article, because he had determined from the title that he wouldn’t like it. For Maxon it was not a question of good or bad, or even why, but just a question of what’s next, and then ultimately, not even a question, but just a history. A history of humanity, in all the ways they were alive.

Then there was the Juno model, who experienced a similar jostling of gears and clenching of hydraulics when she was left alone, away from other Juno models, for a specified amount of time. Juno’s crying was a lot like Hera’s laughing, except there was no viral spread. Her visual sensors became impaired and had to be cleared, by her or another Juno who was moved to participate, or not, by her own if/then clauses. An article in Wired magazine called “The Lonely Robot” had described one Juno meeting another, and how they shook when they were separated. This was before the Juno code was wired into a construction frame, made so rectangular. Magazines are only interested in the humanoid functions of humanoid robots. Make them look like bulldozers and you can get away with anything.