Robots: The Recent A.I. by Bear Elizabeth & Doctorow Cory & Kowal Mary Robinette & McDonald Ian & Reed Robert & Swirksy Rachel & Valente Catherynne M. & Valentine Genevieve

Author:Bear, Elizabeth & Doctorow, Cory & Kowal, Mary Robinette & McDonald, Ian & Reed, Robert & Swirksy, Rachel & Valente, Catherynne M. & Valentine, Genevieve [Bear, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: science fiction, robots, anthology
ISBN: 9781607013426
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2012-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

ALGORITHMS FOR LOVE

KEN LIU

So long as the nurse is in the room to keep an eye on me, I am allowed to dress myself and get ready for Brad. I slip on an old pair of jeans and a scarlet turtleneck sweater. I’ve lost so much weight that the jeans hang loosely from the bony points of my hips.

“Let’s go spend the weekend in Salem,” Brad says to me as he walks me out of the hospital, an arm protectively wrapped around my waist, “just the two of us.”

I wait in the car while Dr. West speaks with Brad just outside the hospital doors. I can’t hear them but I know what she’s telling him. “Make sure she takes her Oxetine every four hours. Don’t leave her alone for any length of time.”

Brad drives with a light touch on the pedals, the same way he used to when I was pregnant with Aimée. The traffic is smooth and light, and the foliage along the highway is postcard-perfect. The Oxetine relaxes the muscles around my mouth, and in the vanity mirror I see that I have a beatific smile on my face.

“I love you.” He says this quietly, the way he has always done, as if it were the sound of breathing and heartbeat.

I wait a few seconds. I picture myself opening the door and throwing my body onto the highway but of course I don’t do anything. I can’t even surprise myself.

“I love you too.” I look at him when I say this, the way I have always done, as if it were the answer to some question. He looks at me, smiles, and turns his eyes back to the road.

To him this means that the routines are back in place, that he is talking to the same woman he has known all these years, that things are back to normal. We are just another tourist couple from Boston on a mini-break for the weekend: stay at a bed-and-breakfast, visit the museums, recycle old jokes.

It’s an algorithm for love.

I want to scream.

The first doll I designed was called Laura. Clever Laura™.

Laura had brown hair and blue eyes, fully articulated joints, twenty motors, a speech synthesizer in her throat, two video cameras disguised by the buttons on her blouse, temperature and touch sensors, and a microphone behind her nose. None of it was cutting-edge technology, and the software techniques I used were at least two decades old. But I was still proud of my work. She retailed for fifty dollars.

Not Your Average Toy could not keep up with the orders that were rolling in, even three months before Christmas. Brad, the CEO, went on CNN and MSNBC and TTV and the rest of the alphabet soup until the very air was saturated with Laura.

I tagged along on the interviews to give the demos because, as the VP of Marketing explained to me, I looked like a mother (even though I wasn’t one) and (he didn’t say this, but I could listen between the lines) I was blonde and pretty.