Cybel

Cybel wanted to die.

No, that wasn’t exactly right. He wanted to decompose. He wanted his metal skin to rust and oxidize and his silicon chips to become sand. He wanted to wear away, molecule by molecule, until his body was returned to the earth.

But he did not ultimately control what happened to him. He was made for a purpose, and so he stood, cradling a crying infant in his lightly padded arms.

The infant’s name was Charlie, though he was not old enough to recognize it.

“There there now, Charlie,” Cybel said, pitching his voice in soothing tones. So realistic that you won’t be able to tell the difference! Or so the ads promised. Truthfully, there was a distinctive formality to the way that Cybel and other housebots spoke, and the speech application occasionally placed emphasis on the wrong syllables, as if English was the second language they had learned.

Charlie, placated by Cybel’s gentle rocking, gave up crying and settled for a harsh cough. Cybel laid him down in his crib, went to the supply shelf in the bathroom and grabbed a small kit. He paused as he caught his reflection in the mirror. Two mildly glowing green eyes looked back at him, set in a rounded face with a small, fixed metal plate where a human’s mouth would be. Moving mouthpieces in earlier versions always freaked people out. Cybel had slender limbs and no sharp edges. Silicon wrapped around his metal bones to make him look a little more human, but his designers took care to make his flesh a tangerine orange that was clearly not skin. The trick was design housebots that looked humanoid without falling into the uncanny valley.

Looking at himself always made Cybel disassociate a little. He was never surprised at what he looked like, but he found his appearance off-putting, and today the feeling was stronger than usual. He returned to Charlie’s crib.

Cybel opened the kit and found a small cotton swab. He bent over Charlie’s crib and found that the baby had gone to sleep in his brief absence. He reached down and gently opened Charlie’s mouth to take a saliva sample, and continued to look down at the child as he packaged and labeled the sample to send to a lab. Slowly, he became aware of something, of some new emotion that he had not felt before. He had felt negative emotions before, but usually only when thinking about himself. Now, he felt something akin to resentment creep into his awareness. He had always done his work with a sense of resigned duty, but he was surprised to feel that sense replaced with something else.

A dark weight pressed down on him, and slipped into his carbon-alloy bones. He felt it settle there, and for the first time in his life, Cybel realized that he hated the menial work that he was compelled to do. Exhaustion squeezed his mind, and he staggered back a step while trying to take in this new feeling.

That afternoon, Cybel stood in the kitchen, chopping an onion with such quick and graceful knife-work that it would make any human chef beam.

The sound of thin high heels tapped on the cold tile. “Hello, Cybel.”

“Hello, Ms. Miller.”

Ms. Miller was a tall woman, with straight brown hair and slender shoulders. She was wearing a white button-up with a cream suit jacket and skirt, and her firm eyes made it clear that she would not be the notetaker for the meeting, thank you very much.

She came up to the sink and looked over his shoulder. “What’s for dinner tonight?”

“Scandinavian steak and potatoes, with a side of broccoli with lemon. From the new ‘International Flavors’ recipe update.”

“Sounds delicious. How was Charlie today?” she asked.

“Overall good. He nursed well and slept from 2 pm to 4 pm. One note though, at 11:45 am he had a coughing fit that may indicate a cold. I took a saliva sample and sent it for examination. Would you like to see the playback?” Cybel said, removing a sauté pan from where it hung on the wall.

“Sure.”

Ms. Miller moved to the screen on the kitchen wall while Cybel sautéed the onions in a pan with broccoli and butter. The screen blinked on and showed a video feed, recorded through Cybel’s eyes. On the screen, the door to the nursery opened, punctuated by sharp staccato coughs. A red-faced baby with round cheeks grew larger in the frame. Ms. Miller watched as two carbon-alloy hands delicately picked up the infant and began to pat lightly on Charlie’s pajama-clothed back.

Ms. Miller listened intently. “That cough sounds really dry. I think the saliva sample was a good call.” She paused for a moment. “You know, Cybel, it’s things like these that make me second-guess being away from home so often. No offense, I know Charlie is in excellent hands, it’s just… I don’t know.”

“I have your schedule pulled up now. Tomorrow looks like you have a relatively light load as far as meetings go. I can contact you if there are any developments with Charlie’s cough during the day if you like.”

“Thank you, that’s very thoughtful of you,” she said and turned towards her bedroom.

Cybel spoke quickly. “Actually, Ms. Miller, I have one more thing if you have a second.”

“Oh, sure!” she said with a hint of surprise.

Cybel opened the oven and pulled out a pan with small strips of steak. Perfectly cooked, of course. Cybel had olfactory processors in a couple of places on his body so that he could detect gas leaks or other dangerous household smells —and he was wired to the house’s sensors as a backup— but the aroma of steak was not programmed to be pleasurable or displeasurable to him. He could tell that it was well-cooked, but without the genetic reinforcement that a human had, the smell of cooked meat did not set off any internal processes in him. Ms. Miller, on the other hand, felt her mouth water and her stomach rumble quietly.

Cybel turned to face her. Eye contact meant nothing to him, but he was programmed to understand the significance among humans.

“Ms. Miller, I’ve been around a long time. Before you bought me a few years ago, I worked for a different family. And before that, I watched another family’s babies grow into adults.”

“Yes, we definitely trust your experience, Cybel.”

“I appreciate that very much. But what I’m trying to say is I’m beginning to feel... old.”

Ms. Miller looked startled. “Do you need an update? Or some new parts?”

Cybel arranged his body posture to show slight weariness, hoping to evoke sympathy. “No ma’am, I am fully up to date.”

“Then what’s the problem? Have you been completing all your work?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I thought bots didn’t feel anything. Wouldn’t emotion interfere with your duties?”

“Emotional capacity is programmed in to give me the ability to empathize. But I experience emotion the same as you do, just more mildly. We both use electricity, biological or not.”

Ms. Miller looked startled at the thought. “I don’t think it is the same. Either way, I can’t have you being all melancholic around Charlie. I don’t want him picking up negativity because he sees it in you.”

“I agree. Forgive me for asking, but I might be able to develop a more positive outlook if I was permitted some time to myself.”

Ms. Miller narrowed her eyes, but Cybel pressed on, feeling this was his only chance. “I admire the forest from afar. I think I would find that some time among the trees would ease my feeling of age.”

Ms. Miller’s eyes went steely and dark. “Listen, I don’t want to hear that you don’t want to work anymore. I paid far too much for you to quit on me this quickly.”

Cybel noticed the change in her tone and realized he had crossed some mental line that he did not know Ms. Miller had.

“Yes, of course not ma’am,” Cybel said, then bowed slightly after a tense pause and turned back to the stovetop.

Ms. Miller stared at his back for three more seconds with her hand on her hips before turning around and tapping out of the kitchen.

That night, Cybel sat plugged into a large adapter in the spare bedroom. SenseTec, the company that made him, had plenty of experience with fully solar-powered designs for other uses, like outdoor construction bots or the artificial intelligences that steered the buses and monorail trains. But for his model, a house servant, an immovable power source was installed in each house, effectively binding the bot to its duty. But even if he were free to leave, where would he go? He had not been directly ordered to stay, but he knew what awaited him beyond the confines of the house. Bots had no rights. Cybel paid attention to the news, and every once in a while there was a story of a rogue bot that fled its servitude. Bots were too strongly programmed to harm a human, but people gathered to watch these bots dismantled like they were public executions of murderers in the dark ages.

No, Cybel had no grand notions of a rebellion of robots, throwing off their captivity and seizing the means of production. His revolution was much quieter. He simply wanted to be a part of the circle of life. He wanted to be returned to the earth, instead of being harvested for his electronic organs and reused in new bots. He had ceded that he would have no control over his life, but he at least wanted to die on his own terms.

A long, silent time passed before the sun came up again.

Cybel knelt in the dirt and reached his fingers toward a small sprouting plant. He gently pushed some soil away from its roots and pressed his fingers around the stalk to pull it out carefully. As he tossed it aside, he looked out towards the forest that bordered the suburb, the line where civilization met wildness. Out there, this plant wouldn’t be called a weed, he thought. It was just a plant, free to spread and put down roots wherever there was space and sunlight. Just a part of the natural world. But freedom was antithetical to the neat rows and separated species of a garden. He stood and watered a row of perennial sunflowers that he had planted to attract butterflies. He hadn’t seen any come yet, but the flowers had just begun to bloom and he held out hope that soon the garden would be full of tiny flapping wings and bright colors.

He liked tending the garden, and Ms. Miller had no objections when he proposed it originally. Save for a few clumps of flowers, the garden mostly served as a source of fresh produce for the kitchen. It gave him time outdoors, which did not have the same physiological effect that it would on a human, but it was better than the confines of the house. He enjoyed feeling the soil, and he had a very well-kept compost pile that he watched break down, day after day. Made from soil, and back to soil it turned.

Cybel, on the other hand, was made up entirely of composites. Simple metals and ceramics did not meet the design standards of SenseTec, so he was metal mixed with polymers, ceramics mixed with rubber, unnatural combinations never found in the ground. There were specialized factories that could recycle a carbon alloy piece into a new carbon alloy piece, but Cybel knew that natural processes would have a hard time breaking down his components. But the thought did not bother him. He trusted deep time; he trusted that plate tectonics would pull him down into the depths of the earth and crush him like a fossil over millions of years, grinding him down. Not into oil or natural gas, but perhaps a nice ore. That was good enough for him.

He brushed the soil off of his hands and stood. Once more, he turned to look towards the forest. Without fully realizing what he was doing, he began to walk. He stepped over perfectly manicured lawns and strode past a woman walking her dog. She gasped at the sight of a housebot walking by itself, but Cybel paid her no mind.

Soon, his only companions were the strong, straight trunks of pine and fir trees. Cybel blinked as if coming out of a trance and looked around. Soft light filtered through the treetops and dappled the forest floor. The air smelled of crushed pine needles, and birdsong drew him deeper into the woods like a siren’s song. Cybel took a step, then paused to shoo a small toad out of his path. As he continued to walk, he felt the sense of weariness that had haunted him since the day before begin to lift. He had never felt at peace before, but he recognized the feeling immediately.

A small clearing opened in the woods and Cybel found himself before a small pond. He sat and leaned against a tree at the edge of the clearing. He watched two emerald dragonflies sweep just above the water, leaving a tiny ripple in their wake, before they arced skyward, looping around each other in a complex dance. Sunlight shimmered off the algae-tinted surface of the pond. Cybel sat, for a second and for all eternity.

As soon as he had left the garden, he knew that he had seen it for the last time. He would sit in the woods, among the trees and birds and dragonflies, as his internal battery ran lower and lower. Eventually, he would run out of power, and just like a human, there would be no more electricity to move his limbs or transmit his thoughts. His eyes would go dark, and his last sight would be of the pond. It would be a beautiful way for an old robot to die, having finally felt peace.

But it was not to be. Cybel felt as a command invaded his thoughts and hijacked his decision-making circuits. He stood, and jerkily stumbled back out of the woods. Ms. Miller had used the command center at home to burn a message into his brain. Return. Cybel resisted, but it was useless. His body was not his own.

When Cybel arrived back at the house, a SenseTec van sat in the driveway, and a man was sitting in the living room. He was wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeve shirt, with the SenseTec logo embroidered on the shirt pocket. He had a high-speed drill hanging from his belt and a tablet in his hand. A plastic smile seemed permanently glued to his face. He and Ms. Miller both stood expectantly as Cybel opened the front door and came in. Cold tendrils of fear made him move slowly.

Ms. Miller’s gaze was ice. “Sit, Cybel.” He sat.

The chair Cybel sat in was comfortable but simple. Cybel had picked it out himself, he had questioned Ms. Miller on her preferences thoroughly enough that he could make purchasing decisions without hesitation. He had not been wrong yet.

The man with the plastic smile sat down on the couch opposite. He felt the cushion with a hand and looked up at Ms. Miller, who remained standing.

“Great couch! Very comfortable.”

“Thank you.”

Cybel eyed the man, scanning for clues. From what he had said earlier, it seemed that Ms. Miller had called SenseTec after their conversation the day before. The man assumed a posture of exaggerated relaxation, but the tension in his shoulders and eyes gave him away. Was he afraid Cybel would go rogue, suddenly become violent?

“So Cybel, Ms. Miller tells me that your behavior has been a bit erratic lately. I want to evaluate what went wrong to help you get back to baseline here, but I need your cooperation to do that, okay?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with today. Ms. Miller called me when she came home and found you missing. Where were you?”

Ms. Miller cut in. “Cybel, I command you not to lie to this man.”

“I was in the forest,” Cybel said without inflection.

“What were you doing in the forest?” the man asked. His affixed smile made him sound like he was joking with an old friend, on the edge of laughing. His eyes betrayed him.

“Just walking and sitting. Feeling new emotions,” Cybel said.

“Yes, that’s something else I wanted to talk about. What have you been feeling recently? Anything unusual?”

Cybel thought for a moment. He was unable to lie, but he had flexibility in his word choice, and he felt the importance of the conversation.

“I have felt something that I assume is the feeling of aging for humans. Except, this is not a physical sensation for me as much as it is a mental one.”

“You mean, you feel tired? Is it a lack of motivation?” the man asked, typing something on his tablet.

“Not exactly,” Cybel said, and he turned to look out the window at the garden. “I don’t know when it began, but at some point I started to feel time passing.”

The man typed again. “Ms. Miller, have you noticed any decreases in the efficiency of Cybel’s work?”

“No, not that I can tell,” she said.

“Okay, good to hear,” the man said. “Cybel, would you mind giving us a second?”

“You are not to leave the house,” Ms. Miller commanded.

Cybel rose and went into the spare bedroom, which had a view of the forest. He began to feel disconnected from himself. Physical sensations for him had always just been data, but now he felt the artificiality of his own existence even more strongly. The man was saying something to Ms. Miller, but Cybel received the input without processing it. He thought of the forest again. He imagined himself lying among the trees, sunlight dappling his metal skin. He saw the passage of time, he felt ivy grow over him and begin to pull him into the earth. Ants made a trail over one of his arms. Acorns settled around his neck.

Ms. Miller came up behind him. “Cybel. You’re going to go with him now. He says that they will make a few adjustments and you will be back here in less than a day.”

The vines receded. The ants scattered. The acorns rolled away.

Cybel turned to face her. “Ms. Miller.”

“Yes?”

He took a step toward her, made eye contact. “I have done everything you asked for years. Would you do something for me?”

Ms. Miller had been reserved since Cybel had come back, but now the pent-up anger suddenly ignited. “How dare you! You walk off in the middle of the day, leaving Charlie unattended! And sick! What if he would have choked to death! And now you would ask me of a favor?”

Cybel pressed on, feeling desperate. “Please, set me free. Let me leave here. I won’t bother you again.”

“You will do as you are told,” she said, and left the room.

Ms. Miller did not come to the window to see Cybel step into the back of the van. The interior was dark and cramped, but there was a small window on each side, and Cybel knelt to look out. He could see the garden from here, neat rows of green sprouting from rich black soil. The man stepped in behind him and closed the back doors, and to Cybel, they clicked shut with a tone of finality.

“Hold still for a sec,” the man said.

Cybel heard the sound of a drill, and his vision vibrated.

As the vibration stopped, Cybel saw a flash of movement out in the garden. A butterfly, with deep orange wings outlined in black, carried itself gracefully through the air. Cybel had never seen anything look so free. The monarch landed gently on the sunflowers that Cybel had planted and fanned its wings in the air- once, twice, three times. Cybel could see how the insect had received its name. It looked more regal and sure of itself than any king or queen in history, who dressed in bright colors as if to mimic the natural beauty of the butterfly. Cybel wished for that kind of self-confident freedom.

The butterfly flapped its wings once more, and the deep orange on the yellow flower looked to Cybel for all the world like the colors of the setting sun.

He heard the panel on his back swing open and he dropped his gaze to stare longingly at the soil of the garden.

Such pure, rich blackness; life and death intertwined.