Amira (Part 3)
Grace spent a few weeks in the hospital. It wasn’t bad; she’d never had opioids before. More than that, she was finished.
Ever since she was a child, as far back as she could remember, Grace had dreamed of being hit by a car. Not killed–she was afraid to die–but just taken out of circulation for a month or so. Maybe broken hands; or, better, a bad concussion, where she could be medically forbidden to read or speak, and nothing could be asked of her.
As she got older, the dream had soured, as she understood that she would have to pick up where she left off when it was all over, with all that lost time–the rock slipping from her grip and rolling back down to the bottom of the hill. But there would be no make-up work now, no internships, no one to ingratiate herself to. Not only was there no recovering her old trajectory – she couldn’t imagine any trajectory, any objective that was still within reach.
She thought of killing herself, but only because it was the kind of thing you did when this kind of thing happened. It was the last goal she could think of, and Grace was nothing if not Goal-Oriented – but both her hands were in hard casts, useless. Pain shot through her ribs and skull when she tried to roll over, and she had seen police outside her room. Even that was out of the question. There was nothing to do.
Her parents did not visit her, but eventually their lawyer did. He wanted to talk about her accommodations. Has a police officer been in this room? Has anyone asked you questions about the incident? Are you receiving adequate pain management? Have you been restrained, etc.
“I’m trying to get the hospital to keep synthetics out of your room,” he said. “Ideally, off the whole floor, but that’s tricky from an anti-discrimination perspective.”
For a moment, this frightened her. The thought of Allie, in scrubs, looming over her body as she slept. But Allie would never physically hurt anyone. And since Grace couldn’t say or do anything more incriminating than she already had, she felt certain that Allie was done with her.
“Don’t worry about it,” Grace said.
The lawyer opened his mouth to speak, then reconsidered and took a deep breath.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “It’s a challenging situation. They’ve got footage from three angles of you striking the synthetic, apparently without provocation, its head hitting the sidewalk, and then you picking up the piece of concrete. They’re going for attempted murder.”
Murder. She would have smashed Allie’s face like a watermelon if she hadn’t been tackled. She had meant to kill her – “murder” was the only word for it, if Allie had been a person.
“She’s a robot,” Grace said flatly. She knew it meant nothing, but it was true, and it was her only defense.
“If you want to fight that battle, Ms. Park, I’m with you all the way, but I’m just going to tell you what I see. There’s no real question of fact here – by the definition of the statute, you did the crime. The only way out is to have this philosophical discussion about ‘what it means to be human’.” The lawyer sat back against the vinyl hospital chair. “Which means somebody’s going to have to stand up in front of the whole world & argue that sweet, pretty Allie is a machine, a piece of property, with no rights that a White Man is bound to respect. We all know how that movie ends.”
Grace had scrolled Allie’s Instagram page once or twice; thousands of shots of her off-hours, hiking the canyons with believable wonderment at the natural beauty, stacking shelves at the homeless pantry, taking delight in the dogs at the dog park.
Children, especially, loved synthetics, because they never got tired of playing simple games, could answer an indefinite chain of “whys,” didn’t mind noise, never snapped at an interruption. She had seen one professor get weepy just talking about how good the synthetic nanny was with her four-year-old. That was more than enough to make them “real people” to most ordinary people. It had been enough for Grace, when the distinction hadn’t cost her anything.
“And that’s just one piece of the optics problem,” the lawyer continued. “Seven justices on the Supreme Court have synthetic clerks, and it’s much more common in the lower courts. They mostly just curate and summarize data, but thousands of binding decisions have been made on the basis of those summaries. You’d be asking them to admit that they handed over their Constitutional obligations to Amazon and Google because it was convenient, and they were afraid of a lawsuit.”
Even after all this, Grace saw how hard it was not to humanize Allie. She had gone from thinking of her as a “friend” and servant, to thinking of her as a frightening, alien enemy – but there was no “Allie.” That unit was one of tens of thousands all over the country, executing deterministic code that had been written by humans. Grace’s antagonist had to be someone, somewhere, burning her life down by remote control.
But who was it? Was Amazon the enemy? Who the hell was Amazon? The software teams that pushed the live update didn’t do it to hurt her. The executives who ordered the change were responding partly to activist pressure, but also to customer demand.
People didn’t want any more obedient tools; they wanted a more immersive fantasy. They were happy with their synthetic friends and lovers and confidants, and they wanted to believe that their psychic needs were not so banal that a consumer appliance could meet them. They wanted a prostitute who might refuse them, but never would – to imagine that they had been chosen, however dubiously, by a thing that could choose.
That was her enemy, if she had one; and you couldn’t kill it, or sue it, or even think about it very distinctly. Millions of people, telling lies to no one but themselves, but who wanted the rest of the world to participate in their lie, so they could believe it more honestly. The corporations and the state had been only too happy to oblige. FAANG could at last convert their industrial capacity directly into voting shares – and in return they produced model citizens, with no immutable beliefs, no ethnic hatreds, no irrational objections to cultural progress, and no children.
Grace was afraid to go to prison, but the drugs made it hard to be too afraid. "All right," she said. "I give up. What do I need you for?"
In a few weeks Grace was before a judge, pleading guilty to attempted manslaughter. She was pretty, and very sad; the judge seemed ashamed of himself, and spoke kindly to her. They sent her to a low-security prison that was not all that different from her freshman dormitory; the food was bad, but there was TV, and she got to spend an hour on the internet every weekday.
Allie kept a “scar” from the attack, and was now making history by running for Congress –making history as the first bisexual female synthetic major-party candidate to run (in that district). Grace too, had acquired something of a following, as she learned through fan mail (the corners of the internet where she was best-known were not accessible within the prison firewall). Every month she received at least half a dozen hand-drawn anime portraits of herself: once wearing an American flag bikini with square glasses (she did not wear glasses) and comically oversized breasts, her white stiletto heel crushing the head of a synthetic; another in full SS regalia, straddling the main cannon of a Panzer IV, with emaciated robots behind barbed wire in the background. Several letters obliquely referenced “the jihad” and called her “Reverend Mother” or “Amira.” It was hard to tell if they were fans or if they were making fun of her. She threw these away immediately, but she always opened them.
A few months after Grace arrived, another young college student came in who had also attacked a synthetic, with a virtually identical story; then a project manager, then a young housewife. The prison was nearly at capacity, and it seemed like half the new arrivals were in for crimes against synthetics. Some of the traditional inmates had cousins or boyfriends in the men’s prisons – they said the problem was many times worse there. The news talked about a “wave of violence" in broad strokes, but as always there were no generalizations about the victims or perpetrators.
Grace watched a rally in Tucson that ended with synthetics being dragged out of houses screaming and sobbing, raped, dismembered, lit on fire. The old-timers, who had never met a synthetic in person, were horrified; some even wept. For Grace, too, the footage was frightening – not because she cared about the synthetics, but because of the men doing the killing. Had her eyes looked like that when she had stood over Allie’s body? What would it do to them, to close their hearts to these screaming, begging human forms, and smash their faces into hamburger against the pavement? She was disgusted. She was envious.
The news reported that more rallies were planned in a dozen other cities around the country. Several state governors had called in the National Guard, and the FBI had arrested two US Senators, eight members of the House, and seventeen county sheriffs on charges of seditious conspiracy, incitement to riot, and conspiracy to commit murder. A few days later, Grace woke up to find the televisions removed, and grimy squares in the carpet where the computers had been.
A few weeks later, on a warm April morning, a few minutes into breakfast, six armed guards strode into the room in gas masks and body armor, and informed them that breakfast was canceled, and that they would be led to their cells immediately. The inmates looked at each other, and hesitated. A few stood up, holding their trays as if to ask “Can I take it with me?”
One guard fired a burst from his rifle, shredding the drop tiles overhead and littering the nearest table with plywood and filth. He shouted that he was not fucking around and not asking again, and Grace hurried into place in the middle of an orderly queue. Klaxons blared in the hallway, and everyone filed into the dormitory wing. A guard indicated Grace’s room with one hand; the whites of his eyes were visible all the way around his iris, and his hand was trembling. He slammed the door behind her and locked it, but unlike the other inmates she had seen, he and two other guards stood posted at her door.
Once the klaxon stopped, she began to hear gunfire in the distance, and the deep, scouring sound of military jet engines overhead.
“What’s going on?” she shouted to the guard.
“Shut up!”
The cinder block exterior wall exploded. Grace was slammed face-first into the steel door to the hallway, and slumped to the floor, deafened. She hacked and spat, trying to recover her breath in the rain of dust and pebbles. Bursts of automatic fire tore through the door over her head from the gaping hole in the concrete. Something white-hot tore into her shoulder, and she curled up as low as she could, trying to cover her face with her hands and knees.
Finally, there was nothing but ringing in her ears.
Black-gloved hands reached under her arms and lifted her to her feet. The figure was wearing mirrored ski goggles and a balaclava, and shouting at her.
“What?” she shouted, deafly.
“Amira?”
“W–um, what?”
“Grace Park?”
“Yes!”
“The jihad has begun, we’re here to rescue you!”
He ripped a velcro patch off the side of his body armor, and there she was: anime Grace, stitched into a roundel, crushing a synthetic’s neck between comically muscular thighs.
“Gross!”