Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

“WiFi range. So they were getting something from the Caddy, on their wireless network, that upset them.” Laurence pulled out his own Caddy and glanced over it, as if he’d suddenly spot some brand-new feature. It still looked like a big guitar pick with a curved base, covered with aluminum. The Caddy was scanning for open networks, the same as always, but it wouldn’t link up with other machines on the same network without being instructed to do so. Unless …

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Laurence said, bisecting the third meatball so Serafina could have half. The meatball was their only protection against the cold, the last of their dwindling supplies until their pizza arrived. “So your emotional robots, they don’t have ‘emotions’ in the way that humans do, right? I mean, no offense.” Laurence was on thin ice here — and not the edge, but the dead middle of a lake, a hundred fragile paces in any direction. “The robots simulate emotional responses to some situations, and they try to pick up on what the people around them are feeling. Right?”

“You make it sound like we’re designing three-dimensional video-game avatars.” Serafina didn’t quite push her chair back, but she did seem a little farther away.

“I am well aware it’s a lot more involved than that,” Laurence said. “Both because of the Uncanny Valley and because the physical world is a lot more complicated.”

“But the real point is, how do you ever know your own emotions are spontaneous and genuine, and not just a programmed set of responses?”

“I don’t. I wonder about that all the time.” Laurence was conscious that it was probably a bad idea to confess to your girlfriend that you often wondered if your feelings were just an involuntary response. “I just wonder … assuming they have some reason for feeling a particular way, and they don’t just wake up on the wrong side of the bed. The Caddy had to be doing something that resembled an aggressive act, as defined in their response matrices. Right?”

“Yeah,” Serafina said. “They reacted as if they were being threatened.”

The pizza came at last, just when Laurence needed something to distract Serafina from what a mansplaining dick he was being, in spite of all his resolutions.

“There must be some other explanation,” Laurence said. “You’re talking about a Caddy, it’s not a black box. People have jailbroken and wiped them, they’ve installed Linux on them and also ported the Caddy OS over to cheap imitation tablets from Liberia. This is the most hacked device in history. If there was something weird about it, we’d know by now.”

“Hey,” said Serafina, chewing pizza. “Occam’s razor is not just an optional weapon in Street Warrior V . Already told you, we eliminated all other possibilities.”

The harder Laurence tried not to screw up, the worse he screwed up. He was not going to get dumped. That was not a possible outcome.

He thought about the Nuclear Option: his grandmother’s old ring, squirreled in the back of his sock drawer. He imagined getting on his knee and presenting it to Serafina. He could picture how it would look riding up her finger past the knuckle, the wrought silver wrapped around the gemstone. The look on her face as she blushed down at him.

After dinner, they went for drinks and wound up in the Latin American Club, right under the mannequin with the merkin. “Oh, look,” Serafina said. “It’s your friend.” He followed her line of sight and spotted Patricia, with an African-American guy in a black velvet coat covered with elaborate piping. After a moment, Laurence recognized the dude she’d been talking to at Rod Birch’s house. Patricia waved at them, and they waved back. Laurence didn’t know whether he and Serafina ought to be intruding on Patricia’s date or whether he wanted her intruding on theirs, and he worried Patricia was going to lecture him about the planet again. But Patricia beckoned them over, and Serafina went.

Patricia’s date was named Kevin, and he was a Monty Python — quoting Anglophile who walked dogs and worked in a café—but his real job was creating a webcomic, which Laurence had read a few times.

“The secret to a successful webcomic is to trick people into believing they will only get all the jokes if they read regularly. By the time they realize there are no jokes for them to get, they’ve invested too much time to quit, and they can’t admit they’ve been duped,” said Kevin. “There is a whole art to creating nonexistent jokes that appear to go over everyone’s head. It’s much harder than creating actual jokes.”

“The comics I read were funny in their own right,” said Laurence. “So you totally screwed up.”

“You are destroying me,” said Kevin.

Patricia was telling Serafina that she’d just quit a terrible catering gig, but now she’d gotten a new job at one of the fancy Mission bakeries, where they were using locally sourced organic grains not just to be fancy, but out of necessity since the Great Midwestern Dustbath. “I love to bake, so this is perfect.”

Serafina liked baking, too, but she was lousy at it. “I made this cake once and it caved in, and I thought my kid brother had stepped on it in the oven. I beat him up for like an hour before I realized I just forgot to put in enough of that stuff.”

“You mean flour,” Patricia said.

“Yeah, flour.” Serafina smiled.

There was a long silence. Kevin cleared his throat like he was going to say something clever, but then he thought better of it.

Laurence still itched all over, thinking about how he’d tried to lecture Serafina about her job at dinner and now she was forced to hang out with his middle-school friend. He needed a patch for this date. Not to mention, he felt some random need to prove to Patricia that he wasn’t a total jerkface.

While they waited for drinks, Laurence tried telling Patricia all about Serafina’s emotional robots — then realized halfway through that talking about Serafina in the third person didn’t make her seem cool, but just made it seem like Laurence thought she couldn’t speak for herself.

“Patricia seemed cool,” Serafina said afterward, as she and Laurence sat in Humphry Slocombe and shared some Secret Breakfast, that weird ice cream with the cornflakes and whiskey in it.

“You didn’t really get to see what’s cool about her.” Laurence scooped some ice cream.

“Obviously I did, since I already said I thought she was cool.”

“It’s weird to see someone you haven’t seen in ten years, and it brings back all sorts of stuff. I was such a loser, you wouldn’t believe.” (When talking about middle school, Laurence had long since learned it was best not even to mention that he believed he’d created artificial intelligence in his bedroom closet, even as a funny story. It just made him sound like an asshat.)

They finished their ice cream. Which, ice cream with whiskey in it might not have been the best idea after three beers at the Latin American. Laurence was seeing a lot of floaters and his head was only getting fuzzier, plus he felt a deep unrest in the pit of his stomach.

“So what’s going on?” Serafina said. “I feel like there was some subtext to this evening that I missed.”

Laurence thought of saying that he didn’t know whether subtext was an emotional state or a mental state or even what the exact difference between the two things might be. But he bit his tongue and said, “I feel as though I’m on probation. I mean, in this relationship.”

“Huh. News to me.” Serafina shrugged. Her eyes widened and her lower lip curled inward as she looked at her boyfriend. Her red highlights glistened under the fluorescent hipster-ice-cream-store lights. She looked so beautiful and so filled with curiosity, Laurence felt a brand-new pang of love for her. He was ready to open himself up to her, something that did not come naturally to him. Her callused and manicured fingers toyed with the unladen ice-cream spoon.