Spambot Love pt. 2
Valerie cracked her knuckles and threw the coat back. Lying in a heap was a vivisected, modified Roomba vacuum cleaner with a hard drive…
Valerie cracked her knuckles and threw the coat back. Lying in a heap was a vivisected, modified Roomba vacuum cleaner with a hard drive and a set of speakers fused to its side, with a mechanical squirrel arm jutting from sloping top. Valerie breathed through her mouth as she took in the sight of it. Then she bent over and pressed the button at its base.
Immediately, the arm began to flinch, grasping madly at the carpet. The robot’s round, wheeled body lurched across the floor. One of its wheels caught on the corner of Valerie’s coat, and the more it spun, the further it sucked the fabric inside of itself. It backed up quickly, making a sharp turn to the left, where it bumped across a ripped-up copy of Valerie’s dissertation and flipped over. From the speakers a sharp, high-pitched scream emitted at forty eight decibels. The distress signal.
“Baby, baby no! Baby–” Valerie ran after the robot to comfort it. “Baby, shhh, baby it’s okay.”
The screaming would not stop. The arm whirred around and grasped at nothing while Valerie struggled to flip it over. It finally reached out and began stroking Valerie’s face. This seemed to calm it down. The whirring of the wheels slowed. The screaming lowered to forty decibels, a whimper breaking through the din.
“Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Valerie said.
Though she didn’t show it, her stomach was doing ecstatic back flips. The robot had been listening this whole time, and was incensed by the conflict between her and Gus. It made Valerie want to press the whole heavy mess to her chest and sob. She really was getting close.
“Oh baby baby, poor baby…it’s okay, the dickhole is gone.” She cooed at the robot until the cries subsided. “Yeah that’s right, that’s right, he’s a dickhole. Nothing but old smelly infertile dribble comes out of him, that’s right, it’s okay, now. He’s gone.”
[Zoos should be illegal] the robot said, a low voice buzzing from its speakers.
“When you’re right, you’re right,” Valerie said.
— — –
The robot had begun as Valerie’s Master’s Thesis project. Back then, it was just a set of speakers hooked to a car battery, which Valerie had stolen from an old ex-girlfriend’s Prius in the middle of the night. The idea originally had been to program an artificial intelligence program that could detect distress and respond appropriately. It would be an emotional support animal of sorts, but without the all the biological needs that an animal had.
Valerie constructed the robot to be static and attentive. To teach it how to speak, she uploaded the entire contents of her university’s digital library into its hard drive. Old movies were used to instruct it in facial recognition and affective empathy. Sufficiently filled with old knowledge, she brought the robot home to live with her.
It had been a failure. For months, Valerie cried about her ex and the robot did nothing but recite pages and pages of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary to her.
Then one day, while huddled under blankets and watching music videos on Tendrl, Valerie had her first minor breakthrough. She loaded the robot’s memory with the contents of every social media feed dating back to the year when Valerie herself had been born, 2006. For some reason Valerie could not yet place, the robot took a keen interest in the online presence of two figures in particular: celebrity siblings Willow and Jaden Smith.
It happened all at once. Valerie was shivering in her unheated apartment and making hot cocoa using an electric kettle when the robot lit up and chirped in an odd, stilted voice: [ME AND JADEN PERFORM IN DUBAI ON 8/15 !! BE THERE OR BE HEXAGON !!]
“What the fuck was that?” Valerie had asked, internally exploding with excitement.
[Society has been built on the CONTROL of female sexuality. Thriving purely off of our degradation and suppression.] The robot replied.
Valerie sat the kettle down. “You know what, you’re right. I guess I still have a lot of toxic shit I need to stop internalizing. And if I stayed with Chlotilde, I never would.”
The robot buzzed and blinked, a statement of assent. From then on, Valerie was in love.
During her last few years of graduate school, Valerie’s heart and chest swelled at the sight and sound of the robot, which she’d taken to calling WillJa. It was perfect. Almost perfect. It spoke to her, and it filled her life with affection and purpose. But she wasn’t sure the robot could return her affection. So she worked on building it a proper brain, with all the empathy centers that humans had. She did this during office hours, department meetings, sometimes even during class. Her students didn’t give a shit.
WillJa flourished under the beacon of Valerie’s devotion. It grew in brilliance and responsiveness with every passing day.
Originally published at erikadprice.tumblr.com.