1989 words
12
A CRAPPED-UP SOCIETY
Elijah, on one of his ‘holidays’, which grew increasingly longer every time, would often do some detectiving work, both onboard and planetside. The things people wanted detectiving! Some were so typical they were risible! The customary jealous/suspicious spouse of course, par for the whatever. Gang leaders were another: always wanting to check that their members weren't grassing or absconding (bunch of failed asshole hettys!). These were shockers at trying not to pay him and so, when nicely mentioning became asking and then looked in danger of having to degrade into an out-and-out demand, along would go Daneel (calling himself ‘Daneelia’ for the duration) and Giskard to play heavy: a spot of arm-twisting (literally) or swinging by the ankles over the side of a railway or motorway bridge usually did the trick. One or two had actually peed or puked with terror and, most humiliatingly, often in front of their gang members too.
And ‘Daneelia’ seemed fairly terrifying too (weird how these hettys are often flummoxed by a masterful female!). Physical won over mind manipulation too: trying to ‘persuade’ such entrenched, menacing and thoroughly negative minds into anything remotely positive was tricky and would require too much delicate concentration. Gang barons don’t give one an opportunity for delicate. Heavy is all they understand. But just ‘bashing’at such minds could irreparably damage them so this was not an easy option for the robots (Elijah savagely thought, more’s the pity!). However Giskard and Daneel were pretty skilled at the physical stuff with implicated threat – without actually inflicting damage – or any lasting damage (More’s the pity again!). And once your average gang baron’s worked out that he’s up against something far faster and stronger and more enduring than he could ever be, some of the stuffing can fall out a bit (literally!). There were a few, however, on whom Daneel and Giskard had been forced, as a last resort, to inflict quite a bit of discomfort-going-on-painful, to becoming – well, painful! They were highly sophisticated enough to reason themselves into being able to ‘do what was necessary when necessary’. For if they didn’t, then Elijah wouldn’t get paid and Elijah’s earning a living was (as was Elijah himself) a higher priority than the wellbeing of a brutish gang baron.
One shouted at Giskard and Daneel “I order you to go away and leave us alone!” and Daneel and Giskard looked amicably back at him and didn’t move. In the face of anyone’s suspicion Daneel neither denied nor confirmed that he was a robot – as with gender just let ‘em guess. Another who had, shouted, “As a robot you should turn the other cheek – not be roughing us up!” which only made Daneel look even more amicable than ever, though in a steely kind of way. If anyone tried to hit Daneel he merely flicked out an arm and knocked their fist aside before it was even halfway there and if it hurt them then Daneel could reason that he certainly wasn’t to blame: they had chosen to let fly, it wasn’t like Daneel had asked them to, nor had he broken any law by setting out to hurt them.
Some people were often shouting orders at Giskard, the obvious robot, and he too, with those advanced lightening-fast computations, prioritized these out as to which it made sense to obey and which were just plain daft (aka unreasonably illogical, made in the name of malice). As a metallo robot Giskard often got a lot of daft orders thrown at him just for the hell of it to see if he would get tied up in knots and go into shut-down as a simpler robot would. All that would happen was that Giskard, eyes glowing, would just stand there and wait until they got tired of it which they did long before he did. And then he’d flash his eyes and floor them with some sardonic comment like, “And now may I carry on with what I was doing before you interrupted me with your silly order which, let’s face it, was only to have a bit of sport at my expense”.
“Oh de-ar.You thought he was just another stupid metallo didn’t you”, Daneel would grin. “Who would take things literally and wouldn’t understand malice, hmm?” Oh Giskard and Daneel were ace at dealing with contrary humans; if they didn’t understand something or reckoned their contrapotentials would start building up, they coped by just standing there, and would hold up their hands and laugh, saying things like, “Hey we’re only stupid robots”, and, “we’re not supposed to understand jokes”, and, “didn’t you know there’s another robotic law that doesn’t allow us to understand jokes”, but this rarely happened nowadays, not after five hundred years of hard living, working and playing amongst humanity.
Oh Daneel and Giskard had developed a fine wit by now to get themselves out of sticky situations from imminent attack to just not understanding a joke, or just to avoid having a bit of sport made at their expense or simply being made fun of as robots tended to be. They learned to be past masters at the art of self-parody and this could flummox quite a few might-be detractors with ill-intent. Trying to set up false situations to fool these robots didn’t work either as their cerebroanalysers would simply detect the antagonist’s frame of mind in which negative anger was as writ large and clear, and so deduce that this constituted the most unreasonable illogicality (or illogical unreasonableness) and therefore to be given a low priority.
Invaluable to an intelligent robot to aquire the art of prioritization as well. Else there would be waste, and, to an intelligent robot, waste is unreasonable and therefore illogical because it’s destructive and so equates negative. And it harms humans too in the end so all the more reason to not have it. And so the art of prioritization is all the more essential. So reasoned robots like Daneel and Giskard, and after reasoning this out, just got on with their mission of trying to, if not exactly saving, than at least making things more sensible for these most un-sensible beings called humans.
Some of their missions were now showing results. Bikes were allowed at all times on trains now and trains were now being designed or refurbished with the old guard’s van incorporated once more, so one could just walk on and park one’s bike like a bike should be parked. Public transport was improving in both frequency and reliability and was free in many towns now. Trams were being reintroduced too. There was far less extraneous packaging on products so less waste – and less hassle in opening things too! Small shops were beginning to flourish once more and what’s more were being paid to stay open later so now they could well compete with the all-enstrangling supermarkets who had killed off the local high street and had turned these into nightly no-go areas where only yobs went.
Schools were harder to crack. Trying to ‘coerce’ school governors, let alone the local education authority, or nobs in the Min of Ed, into seeing that it was well worthwhile in spending money to improve the schools and teaching standards so that there was a hope that they’d then turn out better-educated young who might then decide to not go onto a criminal career. “Lazy greedy lot of buggers!” Daneel and Giskard groused in a very human fashion. “Sit on their meaty arses in their fucking gold-plated marble and ivory towers and line their pockets with more gold credits - and choose not to see whilst the rest of humanity can go hang”.
It was amazing how Giskard and Daneel had worked out that it was laziness and greed and not just obduracy that made those in power tick. Ah well, that was five hundred years of having lived, worked and played with humanity.
One Min of Ed nob had actually said, “But that costs money!” and so great was the obstruction in their mind that Daneel and Giskard had had to pick away oh so carefully which meant they didn’t get anywhere very much that time.
“But just think,” Daneel said, looking the man straight in the eye, “you might then have a chance of turning out slightly less criminally-inclined young who are tomorrow's adults. I’m sure you yourself had a good education which is how you are where you are today and not a criminal who lived in a slum” – (And I know you had you great smug meatbag! Your little mind tells all) – “Besides”, Daneel went on, “criminals are costing you money too.”
Sometimes Daneel would go twice, once as female, once as male. Between them he and Giskard managed to ‘make’ the person ‘forget’ that they’d seen them before. Some hettys, whilst slavishly appreciating the female form etc, did not like to do business with women and so at those times Daneel reckoned he’d got more results going as male. Which meant appearing as a more conservatively clad male because one thing hettys, from government ministers to crime lords, cannot abide is what they see as a poufter. Even the women who had attained these higher echelons were in some cases more man than the men. So to look even more Iron than these Iron Ladies Daneel went as a sternly-dressed male with shorter, darker side-parted hair.
“Fucking hell!” said he when he looked in the mirror that evening. “Just look at that crapface!” before tearing off the scalp-wig and flinging it aside. Such movements were rare in the graceful economically-gestured Daneel so that rather went to show the depth of his humanized revulsion. And with unusual vigor he replaced it with his own rich glossy bronzy-red mane and, with huge satifaction, watched it swish and tumble as in a shampoo ad. Likewise he stripped off the awful dark male suit and high-necked shirt and flung these after the scalp-wig. “Urrrrh!”
Then, when Daneel had got over the initial jubilation of divesting himself thus he later picked these up, dusted them down and hung these up. They would surely be needed again, he knew. Saving humanity wasn’t going to be done in a few score years.
The two robots were always ‘tired’ after these excursions. Such intense concentration and need for agility was quite a drain really on their positronics. They liked nothing better than to now fall back into sofas and watch trashy films and listen simultaneously to soothing Irish ceilidh music or Greek bazoukis or even Cornish sea songs – and suck metallo snacks. If Elijah was there Daneel, programmed to ‘enjoy’ many good foods and drink, would eat with him. Later, when the robots had recharged their mentalics and come to, they told Elijah all that had happened.
“I think”, Elijah said, “that humanity has not progressed in all the thousand or so years that it should've progressed”.
“No”, Giskard agreed. “Look at all those terrible resurrected twen-cen urban sprawls. And the culture this brings forth. That’s if one could call it culture. I’d call it just ‘a’’itude’”. He did a pretty good rendering of a medieval anglo-estuarine accent.
“Yeah”, Daneel grimaced. “Those housing estates. Those shopping malls. Those substandard schools. Those old-style cars they still persist in using! Furgh! Perfect breeding ground for yobs”.
“And”, Elijah sighed. “if it’s not resurrected twen-cen urbs complete with housing estates, shopping malls, crap schools and sulpher-emitting slam-door cars, it’s still the old caves of steel with medieval soviet-style government and foul air – which, yes I know is supposed to be hygienically filtered from nasty Outside air”.
“But, in reality, is full of nasty little sticky biomolecules”, Daneel grinned. “Does wonders for my poor olefactorics!”
“Oh Daneel. You are so-o poetic”, Giskard said in a deadpan robotic way. “How that I could be likewise”.
“’How that I could be likewise’! That”, Daneel returned, “is a-mazing, coming from such a yob-bot as yourself.”
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