The representative Diane Arlington at Doppel-Bot told me my therapy would not be easy. “Many people think that they may overhaul their personality patterns, their habits, and their responses to stimuli on a whim, or simply by making a resolution.”
“But sometimes resolutions do work,” I protested. “Do you mean we can never change? For the better?”
“I hesitate to say never, Cassy. We may change superficially and within strict limits. But few delusions frustrate us more than free will. We are all running programs. Fighting our genetic personality wiring brings about guilt, frustration, and anxiety. We are told to adapt, but in some cases, we must adapt, not to our environment, but to ourselves. To do that you must know yourself as well as you would if you could see yourself from the outside. Our emo-units can help you with that. Are you ready?”
I nodded.
The lady walked over to a closet, removed a key card from her coat pocket, unlocked the metal door, and swung it open. “You may come out,” she said to whatever was inside. I heard a whir of movement, then a rattling sound.
The silver colored robot clattered out of the closet. Its coquettish yellow skirt stopped at the knobs of its knees to reveal spindly metal legs and bare slabs of claw-like feet. It had an hour glass torso covered with a lacy sleeveless white blouse. The head was crowned with a shaggy, tilted, short blond wig.
“Meet Cassy Bot,” Ms. Arlington said. She moved toward the robot and wobbled the wig a bit to straighten it, and pressed it flat onto the head, but as soon as the lady moved back, the wig flopped to the side again.
“You named her after me?” I said. “She looks nothing like me. Where did you get this old hunk of metal? A used car lot?”
The representative Mrs. Arlington laughed. “Humble, yes, but humble by design.” She pressed her fingertips together. “Our goal is to de-emphasize physical appearance so that you can focus exclusively on her behavior. Using your personality tests and brain scans to form a profile, we have created a program that will make your twin approximate your behavior and responses to an astonishing degree. Would you like to say hello to her? Your other self?”
“Um, hi,” I said.
Cassie Bot bent her legs and made a jerky flourish with her arms. “Thank you,” she said in a tinny voice. She took a few mincing steps forward and held out a shy upturned palm.
I turned to Ms. Arlington. “Thank you? I think you need to adjust her etiquette algorithms.”
The lady only shrugged. Cassy recaptured my attention with a musical burble so I reached forward to take the artificial hand. Cassy Bot did not actually shake my hand but lightly clasped it. Although her “skin” looked like metal, it felt strangely rubbery and yielding.
When I stepped back, Diane said, “Say whatever else you want to say to her now. You will not get to talk to her anymore. Awareness of your presence will alter her behavior. You may wake her at eight in the morning, but she will not shake your hand. I have arranged that she will be unable to see you or hear anything you say. Meanwhile, stay out of her way and take notes on what she does. The goal is to gain insights into yourself. Any final words to her before I clear her mind of you?”
I shrugged.
“Very well then. Oh yes, some of her actions may upset you, especially if you see your less flattering side in them, so you will be unable to turn her off for at least 24 hours. This safeguard is meant to keep you from giving up too easily.
“And remember: Cassy Bot will believe anything you have ever done or written on your social media websites is her doing and will act accordingly,” the lady said. “She honestly thinks she is you: a 22 year old college grad who works as a waitress.”
I agreed to give the experiment 24 hours beginning at eight on the following morning. My excitement mounted. For a day a robot was going to live my life for me. She would be my mirror, and I was to observe.
The representative added. “There is a failsafe, a bright red button beneath her wig, which controls her awareness module. Use it only in an emergency. Our robots feel emotions just as we do. They do not know they are running programs but believe they are acting of their own free will. For her to find out otherwise would be…unsettling.”
The next day, as instructed, I went into my living room where Cassy Bot was and stuffed my phone in the wide front pocket of her skirt. I lifted her blouse and pressed the power button on her chest. As her blouse slid unevenly back down her torso, her head began swiveling and she took her first faltering steps.
I got out of her way and took a seat at the dining table. I figured I would be there for a while so I removed my sneakers and socks and sat Indian style on my chair as I watched Cassy Bot bustle around the kitchen.
My nervous cat Snookers looked at her in terror, clawing the floor as he scampered away, and leapt into my lap, ears flung back. I pulled him in closer to me as he continued to take furtive cautious glances at Cassy Bot.
For the next few minutes, I learned that robots are excruciatingly boring. Cassy Bot clomped and clattered around the kitchen, her metallic head swiveling, her bug eyes contracting or extending with a whir.
Cautiously curious, Snookers jumped down and peaked around the lower cabinet at her, tail thrashing. Spotting him, Cassy Bot reached into an upper cabinet and withdrew a package of tuna treats. It was shocking how quickly my cat warmed up to Cassy Bot after that. Purring loudly, he went to her and orbited her ankles and meowed, forgetting all about me and his fears as he trotted after her to his dish. I felt a little insulted about how quickly I had been forgotten. I would have thought, if nothing else, that my scent would mean something to Snookers.
As the day dragged on, I began having misgivings. The experiment was supposed to be therapeutic.
I was desperate for therapy. The U.K. based website Squawk Roster had become the focal point of every neurotic tendency I have ever had. Insomnia, guilt, distractedness, obsessive sharing of statuses, absent-mindedness, and a pathological need to have my comments fancied.
On Squawk Roster you can either fancy a squawk, re-squawk it, or “chatter” a response, and I had become just as addicted to being resquawked and “fancied” as my cat was to his tuna treats. Like all addictions, Squawk Roster was becoming emotionally costly and impairing my ability to function in the real world. Conventional psychiatrists had failed me; that is, they all advised me to quit Squawk Roster, which was unthinkable.
I needed the website to sell my hand-made puppy collars crafted from bread wrappers. They are constructed with a patentable weave I invented myself, making my puppy collars an entrepreneurial juggernaut that is certain to make me rich. When it does, I will immediately quit my thankless waitressing job with its rude customers, screaming supervisors, and flimsy tips and buy my own island where I will own a monkey.
Cassy Bot was supposed to show me where I was going wrong, but all I saw was a technological marvel performing the most predictable and menial tasks possible. As she microwaved a frozen pizza, I yawned into my fist, and I desperately wished I had not turned over all my social media devices to Cassy Bot.
I was dying to see if anyone had responded to my last squawk. As I said, I love being resquawked. It makes me feel validated as a human being. Popular. Famous. Happy. Loved.
My smart phone bleeped and Cassy Bot drew the device from her pocket, held it close to her face, and stared at it intensely. My heartbeat quickened. Someone must have responded to my squawk about coffee being addictive.
But I remembered that Cassy Bot thought she had written my squawk. I felt reassured when she burbled with pleasure and smiled. Someone must have fancied my squawk. For a moment Cassy Bot was standing so still I was afraid she had not been charged properly and had run out of battery power.
Finally she did unfreeze, the smile still on her face. With her projecting bug eyes she spotted one of the socks on the floor near my seat, clomped toward it, bent from the waist, picked it up and proceeded to the garbage can at the far corner of the room, whistling as she went. Once there she lifted the lid, dropped the sock inside, and sighed happily.
I would like to blame her action on faulty programming, but I must admit: I have thrown socks in the garbage can before, meaning instead to take them to the laundry hamper. It always happens when my mind is on other things.
After saying “thank you” to the waste basket for accepting the sock, Cassy Bot drew out my phone again and tried to type on it, but her claw-like fingers were apparently too large and clunky for the task. She frowned.
She turned and glided to my desk against one of the living room walls where my computer was. She sat down and pressed her long hinged metal finger against the power button on the side. I looked over her shoulder, and saw that she was calling up her Squawk “stationery” to write a new squawk, as I often do.
I squawk daily, not just about my bread wrapper puppy collars but about my life, philosophy, and innermost feelings, and I could see the signs. Cassy Bot was staring obsessively at the screen and I saw her spindly metal fingers going to work, tapping and dancing on the keyboard.
She stared at the screen for far too long, fussing over her work, her metal eyelids clinking. After a moment, she sighed happily, got up, and paced in a circle before returning to her desk with a hopeful coo.
She sat down and scanned the screen and lost her smile. She propped her chin in her claw-like hand, then sat up and leaned toward the computer and touched her forehead to the screen. Slowly at first, then faster, she began to tap her head against the computer monitor, before leaning back and staring at the screen again, and clawing at it lightly.
I suspected from my own experience what was happening. She had squawked something and gotten no response. For a moment she seemed to relax, and her eyelids clinked shut.
I never guessed what was coming next. Suddenly she buried her head into the metal claws and the madness began. Have you ever heard a robot cry? It is not a pretty sound. Imagine thousands of bats banging into a thousand rusty church bells.
Somehow I had to make the cacophony stop but I was not sure what to do. I covered my ears and regretted that I had agreed to let Cassy Bot be oblivious to me. Despite the unpleasant clamor, I found myself feeling sorry for her.
I looked over her shoulder at the computer screen to have my suspicion confirmed: no one had resquawked her message. I read the message, which she had painstakingly revised, and thought I understood why. “I like cookies”?
Cassy Bot made a sniffling sound.
“Okay Other Me,” I said, “I get it. I know how you feel. But you know, your thought was not exactly profound. Do you have to take the lack of applause so personally?”
Despite my words, I had a sudden urge to defend Cassy Bot to the world. Cassy Bot was fine the way she was and somebody out there could have validated her love for cookies. With a resigned flick of her long hinged metal finger she deleted her squawk and bowed her head in resignation. A barely audible metallic whimper followed.
I wanted to comfort her. I wanted to tell her everything was okay, plus I could no longer tolerate her marching around with full control over my smart phone, which I wanted back so I could verify that someone had fancied my coffee squawk.
“No, no, please stop crying, Cassy Bot, please stop,” I said. With a frantic motion I lifted her wig, flung it on the desktop, and pressed the button on her scalp.
She jerked her head upright and looked around as if seeing the world for the first time. At first she looked at her surroundings slowly. She looked up, down, and to the sides.
“Cassy Bot?” I said.
She turned her head and her eyes telescoped toward me. Her pupils widened. I put a hand on her shoulder. “You can stop crying, okay?”
She continued to stare at me in apparent confusion, I said, “Look. I was not supposed to turn your awareness module on but I had to do something. I saw how upset you were. I wanted to let you know that if you like cookies, that is worth sharing, because there are so many things not to like in this world, and if you really like something enough to squawk about it, well…the entire universe should know.”
With a tilt of her head, she regarded me cross-eyed. “Thank you,” she said with a barely audible metallic echo.
I gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze, and marveled at how the metallic-looking substance felt so yielding, like real skin. All at once Cassy Boy had begun trembling and trained her gaze on me. “Who are you?” she said. “How…how did you…get in?”
Remembering the warning, I knew I could not tell her the truth. “A friend,” I said, “And as a friend, would you mind if I sit where you are sitting for a moment? I need to check something on my computer.”
“Your computer? Negative. Not your computer. Mine. My computer.”
My shoulders shook with my effort to restrain myself from asserting my identity. “What about our computer?”
“Who are you?” Her trembling led to a soft metal clattering of her neck and shoulder joints. She looked down at her claw-like hands. “My hands are wrong. Not like yours. Who am I? What am I?” Her tinny voice warbled.
“Please, calm down,” I said.
“What name do you call yourself?” she asked.
Many years of responding automatically to that question took over, and it was out before I knew it. “Cassy,” I said.
“Negative. You cannot be Cassy. I am Cassy. Who are you? Who am I?” There was a frantic note in her voice as she called up my Squawk Roster feed. “This is my feed, my page, my followers. I resquawk and I fancy.” To demonstrate, Cassy Bot resquawked and fancied a couple of random ad links.
I try never to spam anyone, except to advertise my hand-made dog collars, and that is not really spam because my collars are so awesome. “Hey,” I said, “be careful what you resquawk.”
The fork tines of her fingers got busy, and my heart nearly stopped when I realized what she was doing. Cassy Bot was resquawking the vilest content imaginable. I saw eye-assaulting photographs. I saw profanity. I saw offensive racial epithets. Cassy Bot was re-squawking and fancying everything she saw, everything from nude photos to religious platitudes. Under my name, using my account, apparently in an effort to prove her identity to me.
“No, no, no, for the love of God, stop!” I tried to shove Cassy Bot off the seat. She would not budge. I was yelling now. “We are not scientologists. We are not a dominatrix,” I said. Unfortunately Cassy Bot was far stronger and heavier than I am. In desperation I tried to turn off the computer but Cassy Bot shoved my arm aside, this time blocking me with her elbow.
With a defiant lift of her chin she gave me a haughty look of triumph.
I did not think I would ever act as Cassy Bot was acting, but I remembered what the Doppel Bot rep had said and I knew my metal “twin” had gone over the edge.
I am the sort of person who is terrified of offending, and Cassy Bot had just made me look like a pervert. I was certain that the reputation of my social media self was ruined. I felt the heat fill my flushed face and I wondered what was the most painless and convenient way to die.
Worse, I saw a message pop up on the screen informing me that a man calling himself “Lady Hog” said he liked my “arousing” style of squawking and asked me if I would care to squawk at his Cuckoo. I did not know what he meant and did not ask, but to my horror I saw Cassy Bot type “Thank you” and hit “send.”
At that point I drew back my hand prepared to hit Cassy Bot, but I stopped myself. I had signed an agreement saying that if I damaged her, I would underwrite the cost of repairs, and my pocket book was bordering on empty already from the one day rental.
I was physically incapable of removing the heavy robot from my computer chair, and there would be no way to turn her off until 24 hours had passed. I tried anyway, but Cassy Bot would not even let me get close to the panel on her stomach, blocking me with her elbows.
Desperate to stop the horror, I called the company and demanded that they remove Cassy Bot from my computer chair and my home but they recited a section of the contract that stated I must wait a full day.
Exasperated I returned to Cassy Bot. “Do you not see what you just did? You have just thoroughly ruined our reputation,” I told her. “Do you know what people are going to think of me? Of us? Of you?”
Cassy Bot stared at me for a long moment. Her pupils became large. A full blush flashed on both sides of her face, and I saw a look of horror in her eyes, and I realized that the part of her that was me was active now.
I had kind of wanted an apology, a show of remorse perhaps. Instead, Cassy Bot seemed on her way to catatonia. Her movements slowed. She seemed to get sleepy. Her eyelids clinked shut as she powered down. Her mouth formed a rectangular rictus and she finally froze that way, still sitting at my computer. She had wound down early, perhaps to escape the shame. I sorely regretted I did not have that option.
But at least she had stopped resquawking. That was some relief even though everyone now thought I was a rabid Scientologist and racist with a fetish for Yo-yos. Unfortunately there was no way to delete resquawks.
Exhausted, I called Doppel Bot to send a vehicle to pick her up. I was glad to see the two burly men carry her away by the arms, the rictus still frozen on her face, yet I felt unsatisfied and I regretted the whole experiment terribly.
I wondered how could I ever squawk again, knowing that the entire community of Squawk Roster followers now thought I was a Thetan obsessed yo-yo pervert.
The air felt too heavy to breathe and I began shivering and aching all over like I had the flu. Sometimes journaling eases my anxiety, so I sat down and penned a synopsis of my observations of Cassy Bot in my flip top note pad. “Subject appeared calm before checking Squawk Roster on smart phone, at which point she became distracted and threw a sock away. When writing a squawk of her own, she took an inordinate amount of time typing out a three word sentence, then became agitated when no one fancied her squawk, and banged her head against the monitor and wailed uncontrollably. When I tried to comfort her, she began re-squawking porn, and when she realized what she had done, she literally shut down in apparent shame.”
Then I asked myself the crucial question. Was Cassy Bot me? On any level? And if she was, how should I adapt to her? To myself? Put chains on the trash can to keep myself from throwing all my socks away? Meditate my way to enlightenment so that I no longer care about not being resquawked or the fact that my virtual reputation was ruined?
I sighed and clamped my hands over my forehead. I had seen myself from the outside in the form of Cassy Bot; had heard myself in her voice when she cried; had felt her despair when she had slumped her shoulders in her chair; had seen her obsession with the meaningless movements of pixels on the screen, and I knew that part of her was in me, and that something had to change.
I closed my Squawk Roster account.
Do you know how it feels when you suddenly rip a Band-Aid off a sore? Well imagine if you had a thousand Band-Aids stuck to you and someone ripped them off all at once. That is how I felt afterward, and not just because I would have to look for a new way to sell my bread wrapper puppy collars.
Over a week has passed since I detached myself from the global community. I am more focused now and whenever I get the urge to squawk, I read instead. Or look out the window to admire the autumn day. Or draw a picture.
I miss squawking terribly but at least I am stable, and maybe I would even be content except for the looming lawsuit. The Doppel Bot Corporation called me with complaints about Cassy Bot being damaged. Though I never harmed her directly, apparently Squawk Roster had been devastatingly traumatic for her.
Even after they erased her memory and assigned her different personality programs, her social media induced neurosis was rendering her unable to function properly. Moreover, she kept throwing items of value away and thanking the receptacles.
The company asked me to pay for repairs, as I never bought the pricey Doppel Bot rental insurance. I have refused to pay, and now The Doppel Bot Corporation is threatening to sue me if I do not agree to a payment plan that will leave me subsisting on Ramen noodles for the next few years.
I called the head of the Corporation to argue my case, but he would not budge. “It may not be my role to judge you,” he said, “but perhaps this never would have happened if you had had a life.”
“What?” I said. “Who do you think you are? I am a waitress at the Macaroni Shoppe.” I realized I was not making a good case and added, “And…and…have you ever tried selling mail order puppy collars? It is hard work, mister. Maybe you would know that if you ever got a real job.”
“I have heard quite enough. Produce the amount we have requested or you will be hearing from our attorney soon. Good day, Cassy,” he said.
Considering the heat of my fury, the words that came out of my mouth stunned me. “Thank you,” I said into the dead receiver, and winced. Did I really just say that? Maybe I need to get my own etiquette algorithms adjusted.
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