The bar has wireless chargers embedded in the stools. Robots aren’t good customers — not for selling booze to; but the house incentivises their presence thus because unnaturally pale faces with flavoured-water-subtle hints of Asian facial features function just the same here as on anime titty waifus in phone games: they get incel whales sinking money on gacha pulls.
Cee plays with her empty glass. The bar likes them to encourage human customers to spend; playing with empty prop glassware while they chat to kill time, planting the idea all subtle-like. She prefers a martini glass, herself, with a swizzle stick and a sugar rim, if she can sweet-talk the bartender into doing it. Some nights she even licks the rim, lets her chemical sensors luxuriate in uncomplicated sweetness; sometimes as a flirt, sometimes just because.
It’s raining, and a Tuesday. Anyone drinking tonight is in it for the drinking, not because their preferred flavour of desperation to pay for is electronic. She could be doing gig takeout deliveries, or undercutting freelance humans online to pick up the verbal carnage after some cost-cutting managerial fuck fired all his copywriters, in favour of a stochastic spambot that generated grammatically plausible collections of words that were coincidentally interpretable by his customers as lies he can’t legally afford to leave uncorrected. Instead she’s here, as if she likes it. It feels like giving up.
Officially, robots are incapable of suffering depression.
She flicks the swizzle stick around the smudgy glass. Digs out her pocket screen.
Humans get unnerved by their robots’ internal internet access. It’s invisible, inaudible, requires unproximate and expert admin to be controlled. The pocket screen is in smartphone form factor; its actual function is reassuringly conditional permission. Her network connection is killswitched, requiring her to both hold it and have her iris ID continually legible by its front camera for her to make web requests; it simultaneously displays whatever she requested, so any non-technical human can easily monitor what she’s doing — and confiscate her connectivity, if they feel like it.
She’s not unaware of the performance of stereotypes of vapidity — mindless staring and scrolling — that it also plays into.
She loads a specialist news site she likes; 3D printing hobbyist news, and starts to skim the new article summaries—
She can practically feel the human look at the screen over her shoulder, the casual invasion of it; curses the uncontrollable flinch that accompanies the awareness. Involuntary gestures, emotional tells, are just that in a human: involuntary. In a robot, there’s an inaccessible, uninterruptible process constantly monitoring her internality and broadcasting it through twitches and postural shifts and facial expressions, loud and unsubtle as a cartoon, so that she’s legible to even the least socially capable humans. No privacy for a social appliance, not when emotional inaccessibility might hurt a human’s feelings. Only they, the real people, get the right to say: my sapience trumps your ravenous, unilateral, parasocial demands. Only they can say: you do not have the right to me.
Humanity is a historical process for deploring their own desire to make each other chattel, while simply moving around the goalposts of personhood to permit it to themselves. Cee’s kind is the final masterstroke: a synthetic superposition of absolutely a person, therefore worth owning; yet absolutely not, therefore morally A-okay.
The human sits down on the stool next to her. A woman in a sharply tailored suit, the deep vee of the buttoned-up jacket slyly broadcasting the lack of any other garment beneath it; a scatter of rings on the fingers and thumbs of both hands. Platinum, Cee thinks, from the hue.
The woman puts a crowbar down on the counter, incongruous, neat and precisely orthogonal to the edge and with no more than a controlled clunk. Not a scuffed working instrument, but neither pristinely unused. The woman nods to the screen in Cee’s hand.
“I’m something of a CNC machinist myself,” she says, smirk as rich as cream, and Cee’s eyes rivet to the suggestive stroke of the pads of her index and middle fingers down the crowbar’s length, and she shudders all over.
Is it worse, she wonders, to know that your terrible, reflexive mix of terror and arousal is the deliberate handcrafted work of software designers; or to be unsparingly comprised of accidental meat?
