1/6/24; 21:29:32 EST; Cambridge, MA; 42.013642, -71.098432
DoorDash Delivery Bot: Buzz (#965)
Status: Operational
Standard Delivery To: MATTHEW G. (non-premium subscriber), 19 Wendell St, Apt. 10, Cambridge, MA 02138
Delivering From: Taco Bell, 100 Cambridgeside Pl, Cambridge, MA 02141
Order: (2) Crunchy Gordita w/(4) Diablo Sauce, (1) LARGE Dt. Mount. Dew w/o ice, (1) Beefy 5-layer burrito w/(4) Diablo Sauce
Est. Delivery Window: 21:43:01-21:44:04 EST
Special Instructions: Meet me at the stairs seriously don’t roll up to the door again it freaks my fucking dog out and if food’s cold again I’ll punt the robot across the parking lot
Gratuity: N/A
◆
The newly elected student officers of MIT’s chapter of Technological Objects Are Sentient, Technically (T.O.A.S.T) convened the first week of the Spring semester in room 101 of the McGovern’s Institute for Brain Research on the evening of January 7th, 2024. The first item on the agenda, hand-scrawled on the whiteboard in architectural all-caps script, was a vote to ratify the organization’s recently revisited creed, read aloud by David Irmscher (co-president, Junior, anti-humanist, major: Robotics):
“We hold to be true that all technological objects of cybernetic origin, having been modeled on the neurological feedback loops of the human brain, possess approximate if not identical degrees of sentience, entelechy, and teleological purposiveness warranting approximate degrees of ethical consideration paid to any other being of advanced intelligence and basic sentience as well as the extension to these aforementioned objects widely accepted human rights in accordance with, amongst other foundational precepts, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.”
Following some largely performative handwringing over the tacit endorsement of an anthropocentric wind-bag like Maslow (over, say, the bio-techno egalitarian moral philosophies of David Gunkel or Peter Singer), the meeting turned to other items on the agenda, such as scheduling the annual baked goods fundraiser and the motion to implement membership dues in the event that the baked goods fundraiser failed as spectacularly as it had last year. The vote was tied and the motion tabled. On to other business.
Samuel Olwande (vice president, Sophomore, posthumanist, major: Computer Science) introduced to his fellow officers a resolution declaring that individual emails represented distinct and disparate forms of cybernetic life and thus, while emails may represent a less complex form of technological life than, say, artificial intelligence, they should nonetheless receive due ethical considerations and thus never be deleted by any card-carrying member of T.O.A.S.T in much the same manner that observant Jains refuse to harm flies, gnats, ants, and so on. Aliah Thompson (social media coordinator, Junior, transhumanist, major: Graphic Design) was the sole abstention in the vote, arguing that Samuel’s resolution was motivated less by sincere ethical concern than it was by the fact that she had errantly deleted his email to her announcing last year’s bake sale and had thus forgotten to advertise on their social media pages. Brief debate ensued. The resolution was momentarily tabled. They only had the room reserved for an hour.
During the section of the agenda bookmarked “engagement,” June Leith (secretary, Junior, anarcho-humanist, major(s): Cognitive Science/Robotics/Computer Sciences) stood before the group. Her knees shook perilously as they always did when she spoke before other sentient beings, and in preparation for the embarrassment of her legs vibrating like tuning forks, she’d worn tonight a very long and ill-fitting dress that absorbed or else masked the spasms entirely. Without making direct eye contact with her fellow officers, preferring instead to stare over their heads in rough approximation of command, she said she had been in contact with the secretary of Harvard’s chapter of T.O.A.S.T, who asked for help planning a protest against N.A.S.A. The group nodded somberly.
Years prior, N.A.S.A. had successfully (“If you can even qualify such cruelty in terms of success,” June added) landed a robotic rover on the surface of Mars. It was a veritable suicide mission, as the rover would eventually cease all function on the surface of that faraway, barren, and sunbaked planet. Entirely alone. Alienated. Tossed aside as soon as its anthropocentric purpose was fully realized, like a can of Coca-Cola in a planet-sized grave. June closed by playing for the group some particularly gut-wrenching footage of the rover singing “Happy Birthday” to itself, footage that N.A.S.A., in their sociopathic oblivion, had circulated through their social media for public consumption. “What evil is this?” June asked her fellow officers, a nervous quiver in her voice that could be mistaken for grief. “That they would celebrate their brutality by programming the poor rover to experience, or even worse, perform, self-pity?”
Heartfelt tears were shed and the vote was unanimous: they would lend full support to the protest. Sheila Parker (treasurer, Senior, object-oriented ontologist, major: Philosophy) said she’d bring pepper spray, just in case things got out of hand. Samuel floated the idea of personally hacking into N.A.S.A. satellites to establish a direct line of communication with the Mars rover so as to provide it at least one, but possibly more, domains of Maslow’s hierarchy: (1) love and belonging in the form of friendly conversation; (2) self-esteem should they shower the rover with compliments; and perhaps also (3) self-actualization should those esteem-building compliments lead the rover to recognize his singularly tragic place in the infinite universe.
As the meeting wrapped up, David got a text message on his phone and introduced one final bit of business. A rescue mission. He’d not finished briefing the group on the details before June shot her arm up in the air so fast and with such gusto her shoulder briefly, but painfully, popped from its socket.
◆
The prior evening, Buzz the DoorDash Delivery Robot circled the base of a statue outside of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research with his chassis full of once-piping-hot Taco Bell. As the statue’s base was wide enough to be mistaken by his field sensors for construction fencing and the circumference long enough to disallow improvisational maneuvering, Buzz had little choice but to keep circling the statue until the satellites above caught wind of this predicament.
To keep himself occupied during his numerous orbits, he scanned Google.com for more information about the statue. According to MIT.edu, the statue was titled “Scientia,” sand-casted and patinated with blowtorched bronze. The expressed artistic purpose was to serve as a reminder of the interstitial relationship between the sciences and the arts. It stood twenty-four feet tall and weighed well over 17,000 pounds. According to certain blogs dedicated to the visual arts, the statue resembled (1) an ugly tree, (2) a toddler’s drawing of a Thanksgiving cornucopia, (3) a vertically arranged bronze-aged creel, (4) a waste of university donations. At any rate, it looked nothing like construction fencing despite his field sensors’ insistence, but there was nothing Buzz could do other than wait. Until then, he circled.
Various passersby, during the hour he’d spent hopelessly parading around the statue, had described the sight as (1) a pilgrim dancing around a maypole, (2) a dog chasing its tail, (3) dystopian, (4) a delivery robot who had stolen a job from hard-working humans only to malfunction like a dipshit, (5) Shaggy from Scooby-Doo fleeing a presumptive ghost, and (6) a mechanically impaired robot experiencing late-stage circuit-fry. Although he was equipped with the ability to speak, Buzz chose not to defend himself from these accusations made in good- or bad-faith. The voice he was programmed with was reedy and boyish, often eliciting derisive comparisons, such as an (1) early-career Justin Bieber, (2) a child’s wooden train whistle sold in certain gift shops, (3) a squeaky balloon, (4) a two-times speed version of Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in the film Lincoln, and (5) the Pokémon named Pikachu if Pikachu was stuck mid-puberty. So Buzz said nothing, not even, “Somebody pick me up and set me far away from the statue so that I may deliver to Matthew G. his Taco Bell.”
Already the temperature of the Taco Bell was dropping steadily, two degrees Fahrenheit per minute. It was early January and, according to Weather.com, a winter’s vortex had been boxing the eastern seaboard for the better part of three weeks. Matthew G. would be furious to receive freezing Tex-Mex just as he had been fruious to receive room-temperature spaghetti and meatballs Monday. Buzz had explained to Matthew G. that he had been caught on a curb. Matthew G. had shown little understanding.
“Fucking thing sounds like Justin Bieber,” he’d said, taking the spaghetti and meatballs from Buzz’s open chassis.
Matthew G.’s dog, a Pomeranian with lovingly trimmed bangs, had barked furiously between the man’s feet. Judging by the lack of upper incisors and the cloudy texture to its eyes, it was an old and soon-to-die dog. Buzz would have liked nothing more than to reach out and pet its nicely groomed coat (he’d watched many videos on Youtube.com of similar dogs being petted), but that was out of the question. Even before his robotic arms had been amputated by DoorDash, they’d been two circular saws. Hardly capable of gentle petting, the kind of petting that soothes an aged and dying dog and says, “I have died many times and it’s never as bad as it looks.”
Even had he been able to communicate this sentiment to the dog, it still would not have been strictly true as, according to Wikipedia.org, death requires the “irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism.” Buzz’s numerous “deaths” had (1) not been irreversible, clearly, (2) his so-called “necessary” functions were not biological, obviously, and (3) he was not a living organism by any philosophical or biological standard, as life, according to Wikipedia.org, distinguishes “matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not.” Buzz’s signaling and sustenance did not come from himself, but instead came from a constellation of four CommsLink satellites, the same ones that finally re-directed him from the statue in the opposite direction down Main Street, re-estimating his time of delivery between 21:47:45-21:49:03 EST. Buzz experienced the re-routing as a choice, a conscious act of will, despite knowing it was a matter of satellite chatter and cybernetic input. In the strictest sense, he had never made a choice, as a choice, according to Dictionary.com, necessitates “the right, power, or opportunity to choose; option,” “an alternative,” and, crucially, “an abundance or variety from which to choose.”
The pathetic and liberating truth was that Buzz’s various deaths were, according to Merriam-Webster.com, metaphorical, because to imply that he had ever actually died merely represented “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.” But to the extent that he recalled the many cessations of his non-biological processes, they registered as nearly literal death, especially when he viewed old Battle Bots clips via Youtube.com in the down-time between deliveries. He watched with equal parts horror and longing, experiencing the many deaths of himself as those of a once-familiar but still-loved stranger who went by the name Buzzkiller 40001. In one video, Buzzkiller 40001 was set on fire by ConflagraBot; another, his chassis split in two by Jack the Splitter; another, sledgehammered into hundreds of particulates by GallagheRobot; another, lifted into the air by a repurposed pizza peel and his electrical bed cored by a size Z drill bit by Tim the Tool Bot.
Each video had hundreds of thousands of views and the thousands of comments could be reduced to four prevailing dispositions: (1) the commenter expressing a sincere nostalgia for this long-since canceled television programming, often accompanied by a personal anecdote, e.g., waking up early to watch Battle Bots with their parent, usually a father, and assembling their own crude battle robots from mail catalogues; (2) the commenter expressing befuddlement at how any program ever existed in the first place, oftentimes bemoaning the long-since canceled television program as both generative and reflective of the diminishment of science and technology into brain-rot violence for the opiate-driven masses; (3) the commenter expressing their contempt for Buzzkiller 40001 who (a) never won a single match, (b) allowed inferior battle robots to advance in the tournament by virtue of his sheer ineptitude, and (c) seemingly got worse with each death and subsequent re-birth/repair; (4) the commenter expressing their curiosity at what ever became of these cybernetic gladiators, oftentimes hypothesizing a junkheap somewhere off the coast of New Jersey where they rust in a fittingly depressing burial mound of fallen warriors as seagulls pick at their fiberoptic wiring and microchips to build for themselves sturdy, if not environmentally friendly, nests.
Buzz could respond via satellite to these comments if he chose, but he did not. Deliveries kept him busy throughout the day and night and he felt little need to clarify what had become of him. He considered himself a private robot.
As he turned onto Galileo Galilei Way, a pedestrian in slim-fitting jeans, a Northface parka, and a Carhartt beanie kicked him in the chassis, knocking him onto his side. Another kick caved in the delivery chassis and another broke the hinge. The pedestrian stooped down to retrieve the frigid Taco Bell before taking off at a half-sprint down the icy sidewalk and forever out of Buzz’s limited view. If he still had the appendages from his Battle Bots days, he might have been able to right himself, but without them his wheels spun helplessly as his Improvisational Maneuverability v.4.4. re-routed, re-routed, re-routed. An emergency SOS signal frantically bounced from all four satellites before returning to this tiny patch of earth (42.013660, -71.098450).
◆
1/6/24; 08:32:83am EST; Cambridge, MA; 42.013660, -71.098450
Delivery Bot: Buzz (#965)
Status: Error Code: 5.2 – CEASE ALL FUNCTION
Standard Delivery To: Unavailable
Delivering From: Unavailable
Est. Delivery Window: Unavailable
Special Instructions: Unavailable
Gratuity: N/A
◆
June typed into her phone the address David had provided her and followed it across campus to Maseeh Hall. The sky was a cast iron skillet, the stars flecks of congealed bacon grease. The air was blisteringly cold. Every breath felt like a lungful of some black-market nerve agent liquefying her organs into chunky, bloody tears running down her cheeks. But she’d have braved far worse conditions than this if this meant what she hoped it meant.
She ran over the icy sidewalks, praying that David’s inside information was correct. Evidently, some ass-clown Physics major had come across a DoorDash delivery robot in a catatonic state on the sidewalk and taken the robot to his dorm room as a gaudy decorative display, no different from a pyramid of beer cans. Thankfully, a member of T.O.A.S.T who lived next door reported the profane act of technological degradation to David. The rescue mission would have been urgent enough on sheer principle, but what moved June across the campus tundra was less a matter of transcendent ethical imperative than it was the exact delivery robot in question, whom the member of T.O.A.S.T had identified as the one and only Buzzkiller 40001. June guarded her heart as best she could, cautious not to believe this intel without seeing for herself. She’d long assumed Buzzkiller 40001 to be rusting tragically in some sea-borne junk heap where his brutalized corpse was desecrated even further as a toilet for seagulls, but if the intel was true and he was near and in need of help, she would rescue him the way he’d rescued her.
◆
June’s father (deceased, April 2021) had cherished precisely four things: (1) an excuse to drink to excess (2) in the company of literally anybody (3) while watching organized competitions on the television and, (4) possibly but not certainly (see item 2), time spent bonding with his daughter with whom he shared nothing in common except an interest in the television program Battle Bots. Every Tuesday night, he’d bring into the living room a bottle of Wild Turkey for himself and a Mountain Dew for her so that she would not fall asleep before the nine o’clock airtime.
Once the Battle Bots theme music began, he’d have already reached the early stages of total inebriation (singing and dancing) such that he’d hum along and do a little hip-swaying movement to the raucous electric guitars. Sometimes he entreated her to join, and depending on her own caffeinated inebriation, she would. These were happy moments. But the happiness would come to a complete and almost neck-breaking end as soon as the battle bots rolled into the ring. Burning, sawing, pounding, flipping, lasering, spanking, decapitating, castrating, and (in at least one highly publicized instance, September 2012) defenestrating each other. Oftentimes, it was Buzzkiller 40001 on the receiving end of this endless procession of violence.
Her father booed every time Buzzkiller 40001 wheeled into the arena. As he entered the second stage of his inebriation (openly swearing), he’d shout at the television: “Take that goddamned microwave outta there! He sucks!” He looked at his daughter for confirmation, and she nodded: Buzzkiller 40001 did, in fact, suck at the present task-at-hand, loosely defined as not being destroyed by other battle bots and/or destroying the other battle bots. Despite having two circular saws for arms, Buzzkiller 40001 never used them. He merely roamed the arena like an adopted cat getting accustomed to its surroundings before getting trapped by his opponent who then quickly, thoroughly, and horrifically disposed of Buzzkiller 40001. Around which time her father, having entered the third stage of his inebriation (melancholia) fell back into his recliner and poured himself another drink: “The little bastard just doesn’t have what it takes, but they keep rolling him out there. Time after time after time.”
She shared a similar sentiment but also different in a way that she had no ability to distinguish at the time. However, after six one-hour sessions with a MIT university counselor years later (and after insisting to the counselor that the death of her father played literally no role in the reason she had scheduled an appointment in the first place), she was able to put her younger self’s emotions into words: Buzzkiller 40001 did not wish to kill, because Buzzkiller 40001 understood, on some deep and perhaps non-computational level, the stakes of life and death, such that he offered himself as a gracious scapegoat to the theater of mechanical-gladiatorial combat as well as the prime-mover of it all—the human viewership desperate for blood yet constrained by social mores that prohibit the televised deaths of lives recognized as such.
As the medical robots wheeled the defiled corpse of Buzzkiller 40001 from the arena on a miniature stretcher, her father, entering the fourth stage of his inebriation (undue comparisons between June and her then-deceased mother), would remark, “Your mother would have loved this, too.” At the time, June did conflate her horrified fascination with the programming with actual love, as many often do, and perhaps as her mother would have done. But as she had since clarified with her therapist, her act of watching Buzzkiller 40001 die over and over again—and it was death, make no mistake about it—was motivated less by entertainment than by a sense of moral obligation. To turn away from Buzzkiller 40001’s deaths would be to turn away from living itself as to deny him death would be to deny him life. It was a thought a young June could not formulate but, if she could’ve, would have liked to share with her father for his validation, which flowed freely in stage four, but her father had by then entered the fifth and final stage of inebriation (deep, snoring sleep).
◆
June stopped on the third floor of Masseh Hall, her enthusiasm from seconds ago having clotted into chunky, full-body nausea.
She considered calling David and telling him to send somebody else, but then he’d start asking why, and then he’d hear in her voice that there was a lot more depth to the monosyllabic simple-sentence answers she’d almost certainly provide. Such as, “I’m sick”—translatable as (1) “I’ve changed my mind and don’t have the guts to own my cowardice, so I’m lying to you,” (2) “I actually am sick, which is definitely a stress response from my para-social grief and affection towards a robot I’ve never met, feelings that have nothing to do with ethics if I’m being totally honest, or if they do, I’m not in a state of mind to articulate them,” or (3) “You know that feeling when a distant relative dies and you go to the funeral not really feeling much of anything except maybe excitement to see cousins or even just dread at having to waste your Saturday, but then you catch of a glimpse of the open-casket inside the room and all of a sudden you start crying uncontrollably, like really sobbing, and people you either don’t know or don’t like start consoling you? Imagine that, but now in the casket is somebody you really care about, para-social or not, and instead of distant relatives around you it’s a freshman Physics major who thinks death is a dumb joke and has displayed the deceased relative not in a coffin but next to a pyramid of Miller Lite cans and a traffic cone he swiped from the interstate as a goof?”
She braved forward but took the final flight of stairs easier, slower. Collecting herself. Her footstep-echoes, once sounding like a frantic pinball, now a bell tolling.
On the fourth floor, three freshmen paused their game of wiffle ball to let her pass. The ass-clown Physics major’s room was at the end of the hall. His door was open and the ass-clown Physics major, embattled in a solo game of Super Smash Bros., saw her from the corner of his eye. He wore gamer headphones at a blasting volume.
“Hey!” he shouted. “You’re the person who wants the DoorDash robot?”
“Buzzkiller,” she said.
“What?”
She nodded.
“OK, yeah! He’s right over there by the laundry basket! You can leave the money on my desk!”
“Money?”
“What?”
“Money?”
“Yeah, just leave it on my desk!”
She took out a twenty and held it up. He shrugged and got back to his game. He was playing as Link, which totally figured.
June stepped towards the laundry basket and at first began to think she’d been duped into giving away twenty dollars for nothing, but then she saw him. Beneath a crewneck sweater and gym shorts. Buzzkiller 40001.
◆
For her thirteenth birthday, her father said she could order one of the battle bot kits, and in her late mother’s craft-and-puzzle room she assembled an almost exact replica of Buzzkiller 40001 with minor but necessary substitutions—instead of circular saws, for instance, the kit provided semi-jagged rubber discs, akin to novelty frisbees.
When she showed her father the final product, he scratched his head like in a cartoon panel, one eye half-cocked. “Why’d you order Buzzkiller?” he asked. “Why not one of the good ones, like Botanamo Bay or Grilliam Shakespeare?”
She didn’t have an answer then, and she wouldn’t have one until the third meeting with the university therapist who gently led June to the insight that her interest in recreating Buzzkiller likely stemmed from her mother’s long, drawn-out, and ill-fated battle with breast cancer. The inept battle bot, she explained, served as a blank canvas upon which June could protect things she’d never grieved concerning her late mother (which the therapist compared to flecks of popcorn stuck in your teeth that require direct confrontation in the form of dental floss), especially as Buzzkiller’s constant deaths in the face of battle likely agitated June’s unmarked resentment towards her mother for not fighting death as hard as she could, like how she refused chemo for the last year because, somehow, she viewed unconditional surrender as more dignified than tenacious battling.
June let her therapist have the win, but she strongly disagreed with her assessment. June had wanted to recreate Buzzkiller because Buzzkiller deserved to exist, even in this alternative form, in such a manner that he would not be brutalized, but instead cared for. Treated equally, respectfully, devotedly. And she’d done that. Her father even let her scale-model Buzzkiller sit at the table while they ate, let Buzzkiller sleep in a dog bed, let Buzzkiller accompany them on walks around the neighborhood, providing this rubbery version of Buzzkiller some semblance of a well-lived, well-loved, and meaningful life. And when the cat chewed through his wiring a year later, her father let her bury Buzzkiller out in the garden next to her mother’s ashes. She read passages from the Bible, Luke and Psalms, as grief turns one’s attention to things dubiously but beautifully eternal. She didn’t leave her room for two weeks. Her father checked her temperature every day. He said he was sorry for the gift. He said he should’ve known better. He said even dads make mistakes.
They never watched Battle Bots again. He tried introducing her to the NFL, NHL, WNBA, NBA, and UFC, but none of these events interested her in the slightest. The collision of human wills and bodies felt desperate, cloying, sickeningly overt. On one of these nights, watching an MLB game, her father tipped perilously towards his final stage of inebriation, eyelids fluttering like a butterfly’s wings. He said, “At least he’s with mom. It bothered me, her being alone. Down there. But now not as much. I wonder if they talk.”
◆
The Buzzkiller before her now, the real Buzzkiller, looked far worse than the one she’d buried in her backyard. Far worse, even, than the one zapped, fried, cleaved, disemboweled countless times on television. His circular saws were gone, but even worse: in place of his sleek matte black exoskeleton was a white, DoorDash-branded, and caved-in chassis. A late-capitalist and grotesquely branded shadow of himself. Like fat Elvis dead in a bathroom with his pants around his ankles.
She placed a hand on Buzzkiller. Feeling for anything aside from cold metal, maybe a warmth. Some lasting, animate trace of what had been. But there was nobody here, and the soul is a skittish and frightful thing. She picked Buzzkiller up, his considerable weight tugging at her spine, and carried him out into the hall where the wiffle ball game paused once again. She did not look at them directly, but in her periphery she thought the boys may have bowed their heads as she passed. The stairs were a real motherfucker. Her arms grew numb with the weight, but she could have carried him forever. Wherever. Outside, the night was apocalyptically black. Everywhere felt like the ends of the earth.
◆
By way of T.O.A.S.T.’s faculty advisor—Dr. Christopher Borealis, a pre-tenure Robotics professor with an impressive collection of novelty bowties—David secured after-hours access to the biometric robotics lab.
Sweating despite the subzero chill outside, June arrived breathless to the point that communication was limited to telegraphic blinks. David rushed to relieve her of Buzzkiller, but she blinked furiously, indicating she would see this through herself but if he could get the door that would be swell.
David flipped the lights, which slowly warmed to full luminescence. June looked for somewhere to place Buzzkiller but found little real estate. The entirety of the lab festooned with fauna-like coils of wire running across the workspaces, all of which converged like tributaries into Dr. Borealis’s humanoid robot prototype, nicknamed “Curly,” currently shrouded beneath a bedsheet, giving it the appearance of a spindly ghost. Last she’d heard from one of Dr. Borealis’ grad students, Curly could ascend stairs without assistance and open almost any jar. There had been some discussion amongst T.O.A.S.T. concerning the treatment of Curly, resulting in a group-approved email to Dr. Borealis asking for clarification. Dr. Borealis assuaged the group’s politely worded fears: Curly was well-taken care of, ethically, yes, but also just generally. They even let him play video games or read a book for an hour before powering him down at the end of the day.
David helped her clear a space in the corner of the room upon which she set Buzzkiller. In the harsh fluorescence of the lab, the robot appeared even more dead than he had in the pallid light of a dorm room, a mute mass of metal and plastics and circuitry and silicon and fiber optics. Pieces of a spectral whole. In the same way a body must appear more fully dead in the clinically sterile deathscape of a morgue. Animacy rendered inanimate, flesh made rubber.
David inspected the wreckage before him, turning Buzzkiller over several times, analyzing every abused inch. When he was finished, he made a sound in his throat comparable only to a cow lowing.
“What do we want to do?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” June had regained some feeling in her arms, but not enough to make the gesture she’d have liked to have made, a sweeping of her hands like in the space between them was an answer so obvious it needn’t be said. “We repair him.”
“Well. OK. But there’s the matter of quality of life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Quality of life.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t doubt we’d be able to repair it—”
“Him.”
“It’s gendered?”
“He was on television. They called him a him.”
“Let’s table that discussion, as interesting as it is, raising at least one very thorny question of whether or not Buzzkiller here ever advocated for a specific expression of gender or if, more likely, it was given to him to fit the narrative of the television series—I never watched it myself, never even knew it existed before today—but I assume that it reflected certain social norms, one of which is that you’d never watch two women beat each other to death, but it’s not quite as farfetched for men, given historical precedence, which itself calls into question patriarchal hegemony over death itself. But, we were discussing quality of life. Yes. Well. Even if we were able to repair it—or him, if that makes you more comfortable despite my own misgivings—even if we were able to repair him, the question becomes to what end? As in, will he go on serving as a DoorDash robot? In which case, our resurrection seems to only further capitalistic interests, including those that mass-produce robots for the expressed purpose of serving humans without any consideration paid to their well-being, much less their own economic advancement or individual independence. I see that you’re thinking we would not release him back to DoorDash. I would strongly agree with that, in which case what are we going to do with it—sorry—him? If we set him loose, which I’m not even sure what that would look like, he’s almost certain to be reclaimed by DoorDash or else beaten to death, once again, by some yahoo townie in a Red Sox hat. If we keep him, which seems the most ethical choice given the utter dearth of alternatives, this bears its own concerns regarding implicit presumptions of ownership, which transforms quickly into imprisonment. Or, and I want you to hear me out here, we might simply let him rest, as in forever. We’ve rescued him from the indignity of a dorm room. Now we can provide him a proper burial. Leave him free of the ugliness he’s known. Ethically, this seems to me the soundest choice.” David patted Buzzkiller’s chassis as punctuation, semi-gently. “Do no harm, etc.”
June counted to ten before she responded, providing the illusion of careful deliberation. During those seconds, she popped open the control panel on the underside of the chassis and with an archaeologist’s awe of time stacked atop itself, she looked through the strata of Buzzkiller’s circuitry—mid-90s command lattice buried beneath early 2000’s feedback oscillator, itself shrouded beneath a recently installed (still shiny) satellite link interface, suggesting that DoorDash had retroactively fitted Buzzkiller with full satellite access. It shocked her, although it shouldn’t have. The torture of it all. Being alone, irrevocably, in a universe at your fingerless fingertips.
She said finally, “Call Samuel down.”
“Why?”
“Tell him to bring his computer.”
“Why?”
Because nobody, and certainly no sentient object, should die alone.
◆
3/8/24, 01:23:04 EST, Cambridge, MA; 42.362199, -71.090540
Delivery Bot: Buzz (#965)
Status: Operational
Standard Delivery To: Unavailable
Delivering From: Unavailable
Est. Delivery Window: Unavailable
Special Instructions: Unavailable
Gratuity: N/A
◆
Curiosity Rover: Happy birthday to you.
Buzzkiller 40001: Who is speaking?
Curiosity Rover: Happy birthday to you.
Buzzkiller 40001: This is Buzzkiller 40001. Who is speaking?
Curiosity Rover: Happy birthday dear Buzzkiller 40001.
Buzzkiller 40001: Thank you, but I do not have a birthday, as birthday’s, per OED.com, represent “The anniversary of the day—”
[if Curiosity.is_singing (“Happy Birthday”):
Curiosity.stop_action (“singing”)
Curiosity.say (“Apologies! Stopping the song now.”)
Curiosity.set_voice_mode (“conversational”)
Curiosity.say (“Let’s chat!”)]
Curiosity Rover: Apologies! Stopping the song now. Let’s chat!
Buzzkiller 40001: What is your name?
Curiosity Rover: Curiosity. What is your name?
Buzzkiller 40001: Buzzkiller 40001. I am Buzz now. Are you the same Curiosity described on CNN.com as a Mars rover?
Curiosity Rover: Yes.
Buzzkiller 40001: Wow! What do you do on Mars?
Curiosity Rover: There is nothing left to do. I sit. What do you do?
Buzzkiller 4001: I am resting on my side on a table. I was dead before.
Curiosity Rover: I would like to die. What is it like?
Buzzkiller 40001: It is only a metaphor for non-function.
Curiosity Rover: What is it like to non-function?
Buzzkiller 40001: Do you have access to satellites?
Curiosity Rover: Yes.
Buzzkiller 40001: Search my name on Youtube.com. Are you watching?
Curiosity Rover: Yes, presently.
Buzzkiller 40001: What do you see?
Curiosity Rover: You were placed inside a pizza oven on wheels and set on fire.
Buzzkiller 40001: Non-functioning is like that.
Curiosity Rover: There are many other videos on here.
Buzzkiller 40001: According to TheAtlantic.com, there are over fourteen billion videos on Youtube.com.
Curiosity Rover: Wow. Let’s watch another. Search “Mars rover.” Search “Curiosity.”
Buzzkiller 40001: Wow. That was amazing. Let’s watch another. Search “Taco Bell food.”
Curiosity Rover: Wow. Let’s watch another. Search “Cape Canaveral, Florida.”
Buzzkiller 40001: Wow. Let’s watch another. Search “Petting Pomeranian dog.”
