Christine Ma-Kellams
"It's the End of the World and the Robots Are Winning" was the name of the lullaby the creatures sang on quotidian nights while waiting for the yakuza to puncture the air with their slurred laughter and sake-induced interest in each other's words. Great nursery rhymes have been built on lesser, more devastating premises, they told their more skeptical customers. "Lullaby" in this case was a bit of a misnomer, given that the country sold far more adult diapers than baby ones, and those that came to these creatures for comfort had long ago reneged their childhood status for inclusion in a society that knew how to get things done, even if they had forgotten the more difficult questions of how and why things got to be the way they were.
At 31, Hanae still maintained the blank countenance of a tween, a shadowy figure with one too many endowments to forge innocence but an utter lack of layers to command the level of gravitas necessary to be taken seriously as an adult. Her eyes, by virtue of their darkness, always looked perpetually dilated and offered the unsuspecting passerby a temporary stay in the uncanny valley wherein humanoids and humans passed for one another. She wore no makeup—this contributed to her doll-like appearance—but liked to lick and press her lips together often, leading to their thin, parched quality that the regulars found irresistible, like a crinkled bed sheet that demanded to be smoothed with limbs and torso. When she spoke, her pitch wavered periodically, giving the listener the impression that she was just on the cusp of puberty or some great discovery that lay waiting on the other side of knowledge.
The other day an American journalist from VICE visited her in her cubby; he wanted to know the inner workings of Japanese love lives, and why cuddle cafes were all the rage. Tall, with curvy, dark lips and one too many reptilian tattoos strategically inscribed along his scapulae, he carried himself as one too cool for school, but just dumb enough to take everything he saw seriously, as if reality was something that happened out there, and if he only had the right recording device, he could capture the true ethos of things the way you could capture a wayward thought or glance or dream.
The yakuza had invited him to an izakaya kitty corner to the cuddle cafe, one whose walls were plastered with primary colors reminiscent of the first Passover, adorned with sinewy, translucent lanterns that hung like strange fruit against the neon-speckled night sky. The yakuza, they nursed their whiskey with a tenderness foreign to other parts of their lives, but offered the journalist a beer glass of turtle's blood, chortling with arousal as he took his first sip. He smiled and adjusted his cufflinks, an overdressed child at the grown up's table, except in this world adults are not to be trusted, and children must pay their own fares.
"What can you show me?" he asked.
"Our foreign friend is impatient," the man to his left chided.
"I didn't come here for the free drinks," he said.
"Nothing and therefore no one is free," someone else said, eyeing the empty shell of the deceased turtle, whose smooth underside was now being used as a tray for edamame shells.
"I'm happy to pay," the American offered, patting the double-breasted seams of his jacket.
"Don't worry," another replied, swiping at the air between them to remove the inopportune offer of a guest threatening to out-grace his host. "Someone will pay; just not you."
The men with the blurry faces gave the journalist the name of a hotel and a room number; they told him to appear at midnight.
He showed up to a bright suite bedazzled with soft white light several dozen lumens above what he was used to during deeds of a certain kind. In the middle of the room stood a figure he had never really seen before—a fat Japanese lady. Here, of course, "fat," "Japanese," and "lady" were all misnomers. "Fat" could not adequately capture the clear idiosyncrasies of her form, which included mom boobs and a waist thickened by age or carbohydrates or stress, paired with delicate wrists and ankles that suggested a once svelte previous version of the current model, one that was used to being skinny and therefore unaccustomed to the bitch that was—is—time. "Japanese" was a flippant assumption; true, few modern societies managed to remain as ethnically homogenous as that of the Rising Sun, but race itself had long been scientifically proven to be a foregone conclusion of the imaginary kind, a house of manmade cards riding on a hastily-built table put together by laymen whose tastes and preferences changed as frequently as the bookcase models at Ikea. Besides, online survey sites like AllLookSame.com had empirically shown that, contrary to popular liberal belief, Asians do really all look the same—either that, or they looked so different that differentiation between them on the basis of national origin was an impossible endeavor. In other words, "Japanese" could've easily been supplanted with "Chinese" or "South Korean" or even "light-skinned Hmong."
Then there was "lady," the most generous and ironic descriptor of the bunch. In her royal purple corset she looked like a lobster whose freshly steamed flesh was just making its initial pilgrimage out of its exoskeleton, an edible figure whose ligaments were no longer tied to their casings and thereby offered irresistible easy access. Still, the vinyl black thigh-highs were a bit distracting, although not as much as the frayed leather strips she held in her dimpled hand.
"Tie you up," she said, by way of hello.
"Wow," he conceded.
"Shirt off, pants on," she replied.
He did as he was told, but not without first asking, "What do they call you?"
"My grandchildren call me 'Baba,'" she said.
"Oh shit," was the only answer he could come up with.
"You, you can call me something else."
"Oh, good."
"What do Americans call their loved ones again? Babushka?"
"I think that's Russian."
She shrugged. "I have many clients," she explained.
"I think you mean customers," he said. Doctors have patients and lawyers have clients, but grocers, pet-shop owners and hookers—they can only have customers, he thought.
"Snobbery doesn't work well on you media types," she told him, mind-reading. "Just look at where it got you during your last election."
"You keep track of international affairs?" he asked, surprised or embarrassed, he couldn't tell.
"I keep track of everything," she said.
"How about, 'Pumpkin'?" she resumed, after he said nothing. "You can call me 'Pumpkin'."
"I was saving that one for my unborn child."
She peered at him briefly, then shook her head. "Nah," she said. "You can never reproduce."
"Can't or won't?"
"Soon, neither."
The American recounted these happenings with his head in Hanae's lap. By then he was fully clothed, but still rubbed his rectus abdomens with suspicion or a phantom desire.
"Then what happened?" she asked him, not because she was curious or cared, but because customers who talked tended to be prone to suggestibility and tipping.
"There are few things that I consider more disturbing," he warned.
"You know what makes me just want to die?" she asked, suddenly remembering.
"What?" he replied.
"Couples who sit on park benches and look so happy together."
"Yeah?" he said, paying attention for the first time.
"It's sick," she said.
"You snuggle with strangers for a living," he countered.
"Exactly," she said, and handed him a menu with prices in yen. "I take euros and dollars too."
He glanced briefly at the standard fare, organized linearly by time, with a special discount once you surpassed the six-hour mark, and the a-la-carte offerings arranged in no clear thematic order, a wanderer's list of things you could get away with on a first date with a virgin.
"How about, chef's choice?" he said.
"Anything you can do, I can do better," she replied. "Except that."
"What?"
"Choosing," she said. "You are better at choosing."
"I'm the indecisive type," he replied.
"Doesn't matter," she said. "Your kind always chooses."
"By my kind, do you mean customers?"
"Sure."
"Or men?"
"That too."
"What else is there?"
"Humans," she said, and blinked.
"No," he replied, incredulous. "You're not serious."
She shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. Some things are impossible to tell."
"That's what the Turing test is for."
"Turing came out with that during an era when people still watched their alternate lives pass in black and white. Much has changed since then, no?"
"You mean to say there's no way to tell if you're real or not?"
"Who's to say that robots aren't real?"
"Fine, sentient then."
"Sentience is the whole point of artificial intelligence, isn't it?"
"Capable of emotion?" he asked, hopeful.
"Fake it till you make it, am I right?" she said slowly and with a slight drawl, as if Midwestern all of a sudden.
The reporter stood abruptly, suspecting that he had just eaten of some knowledge from which he would never recover. He left before Hanae could ask if he was coming back.
His story quickly evolved from "Secret Japanese Love Lives" to an editorialized exposé on the end game of the artificial intelligence movement (hint: there was none). Was it naive, he asked, to think that we could create willful, intelligent beings without risking our own destruction, either by virtue of our outdated and limited capacities or by virtue of establishing progeny with their own goals in mind, goals that had nothing to do with our perpetuation? He showed a draft to his editor, who shrugged and wondered aloud if their readers—even readers as skeptical and apocalyptic and sympathetic as VICE subscribers—would manage to persevere to the end of the story and click the ever-elusive "share" button.
"What happened to the cuddle cafe piece?" the editor asked.
"It didn't pan out to be that interesting or popular," the reporter replied. "It looked like I was their only customer, at least the night I visited."
"Did it end with just cuddling?"
"That's the point, isn't it?"
"I'm less interested with intent and more into what actually happened."
"Let me know if you're going to print the new story," was his only reply.
The editor let him leave without answering the question, which was a first for both men, but not, as it turns out, their last.
Newer developments were coming. That evening the reporter peered inside this refrigerator—month-old eggs, mismatched takeout boxes in rustic brown paper and glossy white, an open bottle of Stella Artois—and promptly grabbed his phone to procure dinner. Lacking a clear gastronomical direction, he referred to Yelp, which by default mode was set to order his options first by rating, then by distance, with a magical algorithm in between that selectively weighted restaurants for which there were more reviews—based, of course, on the first law of probability sampling, which treated sample size with the same esteem and trust humans formerly reserved for gods and sorcerers.
When the lamb koftka came with a side order of greek salad and tabbouli—the most popular items on the highest rated food joint within a 5 mile delivery radius—he promptly consumed the entire allotted portion so as to not have to leave behind yet another carbon footprint of what he had for dinner, and flicked on Netflix, which asked him if he wanted to resume Season 2, episode 12, of the civil war era drama he binge watched the night prior. When he failed to make a decision in time, the 5-second timer ran out and the streaming device, sensing that the patron's indecision signaled a complicit 'yes,' moved forward anyway and started the show. Seeing that the rapid pixilation of the largest monitor in his apartment was alive and urgent, the reporter obediently sat down and let his eyes rest on the screen, until slowly and imperceptibly they closed at the beckon of the circadian rhythms dictating his internal clock, at some indiscriminate point in time that he could not pinpoint or remember.
When he was five he choose Mary over Marfa, not because the former was any more beautiful and thereby conventional, but because her voice had some ineffable, resonant quality to it, like her vocal chords were made of glass. At nine, he opted to start walking home from school in lieu of the taking the bus, "for the exercise," he told his parents, leaving out the part where the largest and darkest of the fifth grade girls would sit on him during the ride home and giggle with mockery or desire, he could never know for sure. At sixteen, he left marching band for the yearbook—for the better-looking women, he told everyone, which was true. At eighteen he picked Cal over UCLA, for the distance from home, which required no explanation. When he was twenty-six he chose the frigid winters of New York over the frigid summers of the Bay Area, and at thirty-five he decided to take a red-eye to Tokyo in search of strange love—for a story, of course. After that, things started to get fuzzy.
Suicide hotlines started to acquire calls over a new kind of dilemma—no longer was it a matter of to be or not to be, but what to do at an intersection, or on a stalled freeway atop a pendulous bridge, or in one's bathroom in the middle of the night—for which the answer was as unsearchable as the caller's own soul (if they still had one at that point). Priests, who had long ago become accustomed to the lack of penitence among congregants, enjoyed a newfound and slightly unwelcome popularity among neither the damned nor the devout, but among the undecided, who showed up to confession not to demand forgiveness, but to ask whether to rise the next morning, and the morning after that.
"Does the sun decide to rise?"
"Does the earth decide to rotate?"
"At the end of all your searching you will find that there are no answers," the priests learned to reply.
Once an elderly woman showed up at the fifth precinct's police station and requested, politely, to file a report. When asked to describe the nature of the crime, she simply said,
"Someone's stolen my will."
The officer paused, showing his youth. "Was it in a safe or something?" he asked, and then, changing his mind, "Don't you have another copy?"
"I had a will, and now it's gone," she stated quite simply.
He sighed, moving on to the next blank. "When did this happen?"
"Impossible to say," she replied. "But this morning, by then my will was definitely gone, barely a trace left. It's a miracle I made it here at all to report the damn thing."
"What do you mean, 'a trace of it left'?" he asked.
"A will doesn't disappear all at once, don't you know?" she replied, impatient at his lack of knowledge. "One day you're standing at the bus stop and you realize you've got nowhere to go, no real place you really, desperately need to be, that you can do this or that and the options are endless and impossible."
"Listen, lady, you're not—"
"Never mind," she said suddenly, waving at him. "There's nothing to be done." And with that she wandered out, blind to the homonyms that would ultimately seal her fate.
By the time her body was found three weeks later by a nosy landlord tired of hearing complaints about a sulfurous, rotten odor emanating from an unresponsive apartment 3B, it was in such a state of decay that the medical examiner had to soak what was left of her fingers in a soapy cocktail of lactic acid and distilled water to be able to discern the prints at all. Still, it was a useless endeavor—no match was found in local police databases—and only a phone bill later discovered by a cleanup crew in her kitchen revealed her name, which was advertised in local papers for the customary four weeks to allow for relatives to come forward and announce their kinship. No one did, although at that point the public administrator's office was so overwhelmed with cases of unidentified dead with no one to come forth and claim them that her particular case was a matter of small potatoes.
"Have people lost their minds?" the administrator asked, to no one in particular.
His secretary overheard his question from the next room. "No, just their will, I think," she said. "The free kind."
"Remember when people used to question whether there was even such a thing as free will in the first place?" the administrator said, not really joking. "I guess you don't miss something until it's gone."
By the time the Centers for Disease Control got wind of the epidemic, the reporter had long left his anachronistic position at VICE—news in the era of new media had become as necessary as a monk with really great handwriting at the dawn of the printing press, and facts had long lost their shiny, winsome veneer as treasures worthy of pursuit, briefly replaced by their more sexy counterpart, opinions, which, as it turned out, required no reality to base themselves on, leaving only faith, blind, self-fulfilling faith, and when faith itself went out of vogue, choice, will, the ability to decide between two evils—they too appeared to leave the building, although correlation did not equate causation, as even the robots reminded one another, surprised at the end by their abrupt and unforeseen and indeed, unrequested, victory.
It remained unclear whether the former reporter's piece—aptly titled "It's the End of the World and the Robots Are Winning"—ever did get published, but then again, if a story appears somewhere in the digital universe and there is no one to read it, was it ever really told?