Аннали Ньюиц: Old Media

“Like that sign.” He pointed over her desk.

“Exactly!” She grinned.

He liked the way she described struggles in the past as if they were still happening, unfolding at some layer of reality just beyond conscious perception. They started talking about what classes they’d be taking next term.

He was about to escalate into flirtation when a man raced into the library, out of breath. He ignored John and put a hand on the librarian’s arm. “Can you find me some videos of people playing games in the twentieth century? I really need them for tomorrow.”

She stiffened and pulled back from his touch. “Do you have a catalog number?”

After he’d made a big show of sighing and pulling out his mobile and searching, the student flicked a number to her tablet.

The librarian walked back to her desk to look up the videos and the man leaned heavily on John’s cubicle, still catching his breath. Finally, he seemed to notice that he wasn’t alone in the universe.

“Oh, hi, sorry to interrupt.” His voice betrayed no hint of apology.

“No worries.” John started to pack up.

The man looked at him more closely, his pale blue eyes like flecks of aluminum-doped glass. “Where you from?”

“Farm outside Lucky Lake.”

The man gave a big-throated laugh that vacuumed geniality out of the air. “No. I mean, where are you from originally ?”

It was a menacing question. John grabbed some videos with a cupping gesture, dumped them onto his mobile, and left without a word.

When he’d first arrived in the Zone, people were constantly asking him where he was from. John and his classmates tried to explain, but nobody could hear anything after the words “Asian Union.” Their words bounced off an invisible, soundproof barrier of sympathy and disgust. Worried-looking officials kept telling the boys that it was illegal for children to be indentured. They never should have found themselves in this situation, sold by their school into contract at the docks. They could rest assured that Vancouver would sponsor them into foster care, with limited franchises that would allow them to work for the city. The Zone would never mistreat them the way the Asian Union had.

Then a caseworker “discovered” that they were over 18. John thought that was pretty amazing detective work, considering that none of the kids actually knew how old they were, and all their identity records were missing. Still, it was probably close enough, give or take a couple of years. Now it was obvious what Vancouver should do with them. They were shipped down to Vegas for auction. Profits would go to pay off the debt of some corporate entity whose name John would never know.

He was definitely going to convince Med to watch Ouran High School Host Club when she got back from the lab. Bots never slept, so she was pretty much always up for binge watching on their apartment projection wall.

After he kicked the lights on, John saved the videos to their home server with a tossing motion and collapsed on the springy sofa that dominated the room. He couldn’t decide whether to activate the Yummy Pan or spark some 420 or run around screaming. That guy in the library had really pissed him off—not so much as an individual, but as the representative of an entire genre of dickbags who had never once been asked to produce an origin story for someone else’s amusement. It reminded him uncomfortably of Michael’s questions the other day. Obviously Michael had asked out of friendly curiosity, but the sentiment was the same. Where you come from is who you are.

The chime of the door interrupted his increasingly tight rage spiral. Med flopped on the sofa next to him and sighed. “That was a very long day of department meetings.”

Med had been begging the administration for money to cover an update to the lab’s protein library. John sat up to face her. “Did you get that funding you needed?”

“Ugh. No. They don’t understand why we need new protein data when we already have a library from five years ago. Plus some bullshit from the dean about how I should make the students discover new folds themselves, and not just copy from a database like a bot would.” Med rolled her eyes but John knew she was genuinely upset. The dean never missed a chance to make insulting comments about bots around Med. She was the only bot professor at the university, and the dean liked to remind her where she came from. Or maybe where she didn’t.

“Well, I have some good distraction for you.” John flicked the air and the wall opposite them displayed a menu of recent downloads. “It’s this crazy anime from the 2000s about an indentured student who has to earn her way out of contract by pretending to be a hot boy at a café for high school girls. You have to watch it. It’s so incredibly weird.”

“You’re lucky that the media library gets more useful the more out-of-date it gets.”

“That’s not exactly true. But yeah, I know what you mean.” He decided not to tell her about the librarian sign. “Want to watch the first episode?”

Fifteen minutes in, and he could tell Med was feeling better. He watched her watch the screen, smiling faintly, her hand resting on the charger in the sofa arm. He wondered whether she was smiling for his benefit or if she really thought it was funny. Then he started obsessing about whether the subtitles really did justice to what was happening. Were they missing something? Maybe Med could help.

“Could you learn Japanese if you wanted to? Like just download it or something? Then we’d know if these subs were good.”

“It’s not like I would instantly know Japanese. I could get all the rules and vocabulary—enough to do a really basic translation. But I’d still have to learn how to use it. And some things just can’t be translated with words at all.” She gestured at the wall and the action froze on an image of light bulbs turning on. “Look at that. What does that mean? You only know from context that those light bulbs represent members of the host club, and each time one of them turns on it’s the guy figuring out that Haruhi is a girl. I couldn’t ever figure that out from a translation program.”

John thought about that as the action started again and Haruhi tried on the fancy school uniform that made her look like a beautiful boy. There was a lot of confused swooning.

August 5, 2145

After three more episodes, John paused the action for a bathroom break. When he got back, Med was flipping through movies on the server idly. An urgent message blinked at the corner of the projection: “Streaming to unknown device.” That meant Med was streaming previews straight to her mind. The humans who made the streamer hadn’t thought about how robots might use their machines, so Med remained an “unknown device” on the network.

“How’s job going?” Med divided her attention between John and whatever she was previewing.

“Pretty good. I keep hooking up with Michael, but he’s starting to annoy me.”

“I can’t even keep track of your hookups. Which one is Michael, again?”

“Dinosaur hair guy.”

“Oh yeah!” Med stopped streaming and took her hand off the charging pad. “He sounded nice?”

“He’s nice but he’s just… I dunno. He asks too many boring questions.”

“Like what?”

John tried to come up with a good way to explain it. “He asked about my brand. Which—why would you ask somebody about that after fucking them? So rude.”

Med didn’t pick up on his sarcasm, or she chose to ignore it. “I can see why he might be curious. Why do you keep it if you don’t want to talk about it?”

“Why do you tell people that you’re a bot if you don’t want them to make snotty comments about it?” His voice rose in anger he hadn’t intended to express.