The Robot and the One You Love

The Robot and the One You Love
by Tom Maddox
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This story originally appeared in OmniMagazine, March 1988.
Black polycarbon tentacles hissing across concrete, the diener robot continued along M Street, warmed by the July sun. Its shell was made of porcelain the color of a blue sky, the color of dreams. Sitting in the controller egg at home, Jerome squirmed, feeling as if someone were scraping his skin from the inside. The clear path along the sidewalk turned into cratered moonscape, street sounds to electric charivari. The fragile interlink between him and the diener robot was breaking up in a burst of neurological static. "You pulling anything interesting?" Jerome asked, fighting to stay oriented. His perceptions shifted from room to street and back again, like a TV monitor flashing aimlessly from camera to camera.
"No," the diener robot said, its voice coming from Jerome's back teeth through conduction speakers vibrating behind his ears. The diener carried unobtrusive optical and acoustical recorders for the passing scene, electronics to capture data from surveillance cameras and filch transmissions from police, private security firms, corporate spies, Peeping Toms.
"I need to quit," Jerome said. "I'm getting crazy."
"I am sorry you are troubled," the diener said. "I will return."
That night Jerome sat next to the controller, viewing CROME disk records of the day's take. Around him freeform shapes in pale rose flowed from ceiling to wall and floor. They changed, and dark mauve outlines shifted with them, as the decorating program displayed its abstractions. Between the viewing console and the controller--a dark padded chair with a chrome sphere forming its upper half--the diener robot stood motionless.
"This was not a good day," the diener said in a voice that over the past two years had acquired some of Jerome's characteristic inflections.
'A horseshit day," Jerome said. "But I've gotta look."
Jerome was a freelance information broker. He moved lightly across the web of information that the city generated, stopping from time to time to pull at a few among the millions of threads. He had sold to congressional aides, lobbyists, policemen, and pimps. Sifting through the city's chaos, he looked for a treasure trove...whispered word of a deal going down, evidence of felonies old and new, rumors of sicknesses, love affairs, changes of allegiance. Even the smallest of indiscretions could be worth something in a city where information was practically an autonomous currency. On a whim he would trail people selected at random for a week, a month, or more--would create dossiers more complete than the National Data Bank's or the FBI's. Jerome was obsessed by characteristic details...a man's liking for eating hot dogs from Sabra street vendors while sitting in the sun next to the Dupont Circle fountain, then drinking small cups of Turkish coffee at a sidewalk cafe before entering a hotel room where he would lie nude--prone and helpless, weeping and fulfilled--beneath black clad legs and spike heels.
Compared with Jerome, voyeurs were casual, uninterested. Compared with his needs, theirs were direct and uncomplicated. What he was trying to learn even he did not know, but he kept at it, capturing what most people never looked for and so didn't see... In a shadowed alley near P Street, an old man in a long green coat blackened with dirt pissed steadily against sooty brick and then collapsed into the puddle. A cat with grease-smeared yellow fur stopped to sniff the puddle, then the man, looked around as though aware it was being watched, moved on.
At the corner of Wisconsin and M stood a man and woman in their early twenties. They were almost identical--hair dyed black, flowing yellow silk scarves, soft blue leather boots. Locked together in a moment of pain--carefully groomed faces, red and tear streaked--they were oblivious to dense crowds surging around them. At this point the diener lost interest.
Jerome froze the frame, ran a sound isolation program on the couple, wanting to understand the passion that isolated and transformed them, but they stood there speechless and so beyond his ability to probe. At the edge of the picture a woman was caught in mid-stride, holding a cold bag of crumpled white foam. Near the cream plastic U of the handle, black numerals against a silver ground read thirty degrees F.
He closed in on her face.
In profile she had a strong nose, an overbite, a hint of a coming double chin. Her eyes were brown, liquid. Her clothes--black blouse, tan straight skirt with dark, blotchy stains--seemed thrown on her, not worn. She looked like nothing special, but... He scanned her image from pale streaked hair to black spike shoes. If you spend most of your life watching and listening, perhaps it's inevitable--this helpless, feckless thing--that you'll find the key to the code written so deep that it might be in your genes; in the tattered phrase, you'll find