The Perfect Page 2

  Grabbing his firm shoulders, I attempted to pull and push him off balance, but he adjusted quickly.

  I gave him a light punch in the stomach. That was a mistake. I rubbed my hand discreetly.

  Arriving at his belt, I hesitated.

  “What do you want to know?” Josh asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I can tell you have a question.”

  “All right. This is a little weird, but... how can I put this? Are you... androgynous?”

  Josh pulled off his pants and folded them neatly. He wore boxers. “Shall I remove them?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I’m a machine,” Josh said. “Take a look if you’re curious. I don’t care.”

  I had to remind myself that this was a robot standing in front of me, but I felt uncomfortable when I reached out, grabbed his boxers by the band, and stretched the undergarment forward. I peered in.

  Then I pulled them out further and peered closer.

  “You sick bastards. What in God’s name does it have this for?”

  Barry shrugged. “His naked body looked strange without one.”

  “Does it – do anything?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Not really? What does that mean?”

  Josh answered. “TJ, although it doesn’t serve much purpose, I can make it erect.”

  I looked at Barry. “Why on earth…?”

  “The engineers’ goal was to make a robot that is completely indistinguishable from a human. You can hit the Perfectus, you can poke it, strip it, beat it, whip it, and it will look and act like a human.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think this has something to do with our Nightware defense project.”

  “NeoMechi just sees the perfect human as inevitable and wants to be the first to get there,” Barry said. “The business model will solve itself. This is bigger than the moon landing.”

  I glared at Josh. “Well, don’t walk around with your pants off. That thing doesn’t do anything else, right? It doesn’t fake pee or anything?”

  Josh said, “Actually, it is better than yours in one way.”

  I raised my eyebrows and looked sideways at Barry.

  Josh said, “It vibrates.”

  “It...?” I tried to catch Barry’s averted eyes. “It vibrates?”

  A gentle reverberation began, quietly at first. Then, more aggressive.

  Barry still wouldn’t look at me. “Just engineers having fun.”

  I furrowed my brow.

  Barry gave a few final instructions. “Don’t let him out of your sight. Stick to him. And don’t bother coming in to work this week. Cancel everything. Say you are sick. Ignore your messages. Spend time doing normal things with Josh and learn all you can about him. Watch him interact. See how he interprets the world. Watch how the world interprets him. Most of all, have fun, and watch the future unfold before your eyes.”

  With that, Barry nodded and left. He didn’t shake my hand. He’d become a germophobe ever since he’d installed Biome analyzers in our company bathrooms.

  We sat still and regarded each other. Josh was strikingly handsome, his face symmetrical. I felt I could marvel at the quality for hours. He was perfect, right down to the eyebrows. Each hair emerged from silky skin and joined the others in a clean and well-trimmed brow. His mouth curved up in a subtle arc, a cocky smile. His blue eyes hinted at dark depths.

  A small mole on the left side of his face caught my eye. The discoloration didn’t detract at all from his striking appearance. If anything, the dark brown splash of color underscored his perfection as a human replica. Nice touch, I thought. As I looked closer, I saw that it wasn’t a single mole after all, but rather two identical tiny moles, side by side, barely touching.

  Well, guess it was time to start interacting.

  “Josh, can you get me a glass from the cupboard?”

  “No problem,” he said. He rose from his chair and went to the kitchen. He returned with the glass in his hand.

  He slid the glass across the table with a slight flourish.

  I turned it in my hands, then handed it back. “Now, go to the refrigerator and get me some orange juice. Fill it half way.”

  “No problem,” he said again, with a slant of his eyes and what I sensed was a trace of robot sarcasm.

  “Is something the matter?”

  Without answering, he silently walked to the kitchen. I felt a prickling of hairs along the back of my neck.

  Josh poured the juice, joined me back at the table and placed the glass in front of him. “Sorry if I sounded a bit annoyed,” he said. “That wasn’t called for and I apologize. Let’s not get off on the wrong foot. However, I need to be clear: I am not your servant.”

  “You are a machine. A tool. We built you. I thought you were here to make our lives easier? My god, why am I explaining myself to you? You’ll do as I say. Understood?”

  “Relax,” he said. “I am here to make your life better, but treat me with respect. Treat me like a person. Think of me as a friend. Someone you can spend time with.”

  I felt a moment of regret and a tinge of warmth.

  His voice took parental overtones. “Think of me as a guide. A teacher.” He smiled. “Let’s not get our roles mixed up, okay?”

  He snapped up the glass without spilling the juice. “Exactly half full, to a tenth of a millimeter.” He plunked it on the table, paused, and slid it across with more flourish than before.

  Zach wouldn’t be home for another hour, according to his KidTracker status update, so Josh and I killed time by playing a few old-school board games. We played beat TJ at chess, beat TJ at Scrabble, beat TJ at Go, and beat TJ at Trivial Pursuit, Sports Edition. The only thing left in the closet at that point was Chinese checkers, and after looking at the box a second, I tossed it back on the shelf.

  “It’s not a whole lot of fun playing board games with you,” I said.

  “We should play something more dependent on chance, like Yahtzee or Backgammon,” he suggested. “Randomness will level the playing field.”

  I deferred. I liked strategy and thinking games. Not dumb chance games.

  Fortunately, Josh had no problem sitting and doing nothing while I booted up to check my work messages. I also started a quick journal to record the week’s events. Capturing the details of my experiences with the robot would help me generate my pitch. Besides, if this product was as game-changing as it seemed, these interactions might have historical value. I jotted down my initial impressions.

  A short time later I heard Zach at the door. I intercepted him before he disappeared into his gaming room. He hadn’t noticed Josh sitting quietly on the sofa. “Before you start gaming,” I said, “let’s cover a few things. First, how much homework do you have left this weekend?” Zach’s brief answer: about 30 minutes’ worth. “Second, when were you planning to go out and practice soccer? You have a big game tomorrow.” Answer: after he did some gaming; he needed to chill first. “Third, I have a colleague from work visiting. He’s from out of state and I offered to let him stay with us for a week.” At this, Zach – who was halfway into his game room – stopped and said, “What?”

  “We have a visitor. Let me introduce you, then you can game for a while.”

  Zach pulled himself away from the entrance to the dark womb, his state-of-the-art gamespace, and shuffled behind me to the living room.

  Josh smiled and shook Zach’s hand. “I’m Josh. Nice to meet you.”

  My son mumbled a hello.

  “Josh, Zach and I are going to kick the soccer ball around in a bit. Want to join us?”

  “Sure,” Josh answered. “Zach, maybe you could give me a lesson.”

  Zach politely agreed and retreated to his games.

  “You’ve given me an idea,” I said to Josh. “Can you pull up a soccer rulebook and coach’s guide in your little brain there?”

  Josh nodded. “Done.”

  “Learn how to play the game. We play the Frackers t
omorrow and they are undefeated. We are in a Champions league and heading toward a regional tournament. Zach has his sights on a college scholarship and we could use the win. I’m an assistant coach, so maybe you can dig up something useful about them instead of just sitting around doing nothing.”

  “I wasn’t doing nothing. I was reviewing world events. I also entered a few hundred poorly protected accounts on NeoMechi’s servers and reviewed information on your work history, past and current projects, and employees. I checked out your home network, too. Accessing your medical monitor account was a piece of cake. I reviewed your blood glucose – speaking of which, we have to talk. And I sent the Department of Defense anonymous suggestions for handling a few code vulnerabilities I stumbled across on their network. As for the Frackers, they were undefeated last year, too. That information was public.”

  “You hacked into my medical monitor?”

  “Your password was easy to guess. Zach35. His birth year. Clever. Did you know the Frackers’ coach goes out and recruits kids from neighboring clubs to be on their team? He pays them.”

  “He pays ninth graders? Is that allowed?”

  “There are loopholes,” Josh said. “The bylaws are kind of sloppy in that regard.”

  “Hmm. Interesting. By the way, stay out of my personal business. Stay out of my personal accounts, my work accounts, my medical monitor, my home security – stay out of all of them.”

  “Got it.” Josh’s blank stare gave no indication that he was going to comply.

  We went out to the storage room. I grabbed a soccer ball and carried it to the backyard. “Watch and learn,” I said. He stood with arms folded, still in his fancy suit. I juggled the ball back and forth a few times in the air, foot to foot, until it bounced away from me. “You get the point. Give it a try.”

  “Okay,” Josh said. “Once I have it figured out, I’ll send the data to the engineers at NeoMechi. Then every Perfectus will be able to do it.”

  “How many of you are there?” I asked.

  “I’m the first.”

  After a moment’s reflection, I said, “That didn’t answer my question.”

  “Good catch. The components are built by a few isolated teams in China and India. They haven’t seen the entire compiled product. They are making heads and arms as we speak.”

  Josh pressed the toe of his shoe under the ball and flipped it up. The ball bounced off in the grass. I watched him try a second time with similar results. Knowing that would keep him busy awhile, I went back in the house.

  From the kitchen, I watched him through the window while I poured myself a glass of water. NeoMechi was making heads and arms and eyes and feet. I imagined the engineers packing the parts in bubble-wrap and stuffing them into boxes. Somewhere, the pieces were being collected and assembled by hand. I guessed that was done in Changsha, China, where we had a senior strategy team that directed software and hardware integration. Those folks were Barry’s go-to favorites; they always got the top-secret stuff. Next year, it seemed, our factories would be ramping up for production.

  Those thoughts were interrupted when I remembered my date Wednesday night. I’d met Indira about a month ago and we had plans for dinner. She was the first woman I’d had a serious interest in since my divorce two years earlier.

  I couldn’t bring Josh along on the date. No way. That was a bad idea on multiple levels. She was cool, but it was way too early in our relationship to be casual about our dinner plans. This was a date, not a night out with the robots.

  Yet I couldn’t leave Josh alone, either. I had agreed not to let him out of my sight. I wasn’t sure what was so risky about leaving him at home. Maybe NeoMechi thought he would request an ElloCar, head off by himself into the Big City, and get into mischief.

  I’d have to cancel the date.

  This was frustrating. My life was crazy busy. I had no time to babysit a snoopy, know-it-all robot.

  I knocked on the gaming room door. No answer. Opening the door a crack, I peered into the darkness. When my eyes adjusted, I navigated around a few boulders from the room’s Instant Terrain. Zach was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his eyes covered with a strip of black fabric. I heard a faint buzzing, which meant the room was bombarding him with high-frequency pulses to simulate sensations like warmth and touch on the skin. As I approached, light from the hallway reflected dimly off his cheeks and forehead, but the fabric over his eyes blended with the dark, creating the eerie appearance of a gap of nothingness in his head. His mouth hung open.

  “Zach,” I said. He couldn’t hear me. I yanked out an ear bud to speak to him, and he jumped. He was flustered.

  “What were you looking at?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said sullenly.

  “Get up, it’s time to practice.”

  I collected another ball from the equipment bag in the storage room and returned to the back yard while Zach changed his clothes. Josh was practicing kicking the ball into the net. The shots were going in, but he was only five feet from the goal, so he had nothing to brag about. Our machines had done that 30 years ago. I watched him run, connect with the ball, and create a straight path to the target. Typical stuff. After he had done that a few times I took his ball away and tossed it off to the side.

  “Go over there and stay out of the way. Zach and I are doing a little one-on-one. Practice your juggling.”

  Zach trudged out in his socks, rubbing his eyes, and tossed his shoes on the ground. “Get your butt in gear,” I said. He silently tapped the snap-lace button on his shoes.

  Starting with the ball between us, we sparred for a few minutes, keeping the ball from each other, losing it, stealing it back, taking shots at the net. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Josh juggling. Expertly. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He was kicking the ball up each time as precisely as if he were stamping out 14,000 widgets on an assembly line.

  “Wow, you’re good,” Zach said.

  Josh shrugged. “Once you learn a skill, you can do it forever.”

  “I wish,” my son said. He invited Josh to come over and play with us.

  Josh had laid his suit jacket carefully across a patio chair. He wore black leather dress shoes.

  “He isn’t dressed for soccer,” I said.

  Josh waved my concerns aside and said it was fine. He had lots of shoes. “Let’s ruin a pair,” he said.

  “Fine,” I stated flatly. “Try your hand at goalkeeper.”

  Josh positioned himself in front of the net, stretching out his arms, judging the distance to each post. He said to Zach, “I’m not as good at goalie as I am at juggling.”

  I shook my head and tossed the ball onto the grass. I maneuvered it around Zach and took a shot. The ball blasted past Josh, who missed it by at least six inches.

  Damn that felt good. He might kill me at strategy games, but I could kick his hollow ass at soccer.

  Josh scooped it up and tossed it back to us. “Nice shot.”

  Zach and I fought for the ball. After a minute I took another shot, aiming for the far right corner. Josh dove and nearly reached it, his fingers kissing the ball as it sailed into the net.

  “Good try,” Zach said.

  Josh tossed the ball and I snatched it out of the air.

  Zach dribbled back toward the house to plan his attack. He went into a run and tried to move past me, but I took possession and drove toward the goal. I glanced at the far left corner. Moments before my foot connected with the ball, I had an eerie feeling that Josh was already moving into position. My shot was fast and dead on, but Josh dropped into its path and knocked it away as he landed on his side.

  He stood up and brushed himself off, and our eyes locked. He said nothing.

  “That’s enough practice for today,” I said. “Josh you’re going to ruin that shirt.”

  “C’mon, Dad,” Zach complained.

  I was done. I knew what I had seen. Josh had mastered a complex physical skill exponentially faster than any of our previous
autonomous systems. His mechanical accuracy, fluidity of movement, sensory processing, and real-time learning were shocking.

  We went back inside. I was in a bad mood and wanted to watch something on the network.

  “Don’t go anywhere yet,” Zach said. “I need help with my homework.”

  Homework: the last thing I wanted to do. Zach didn’t want to do it any more than I did, so I couldn’t complain. He pulled up his Slatey and tapped it a few times.

  Math problems popped up. He was flirting with a failing grade. Unfortunately, numbers were not my strong suit either.

  “We have finals soon, so it’s review time,” Zach said. “I don’t get imaginary numbers. Can you explain them to me?”

  Imaginary numbers? What the heck were those?

  I bent over his screen and pulled it toward me so I could look at the problems. I wiped stinging sweat from my eyes and read the first problem. “Let’s see, imaginary numbers... I think that is when – those are negative numbers, right?’"

  Standing behind Zach, Josh shook his head.

  Who was I kidding? I had graduated from high school over two decades ago, and had put math behind me the moment the diploma hit my hands. “Do you have any class notes I can look at?”

  Zach looked up at Josh. “Can you help?”

  Josh scratched his chin. After a moment of fake reflection, he said, “Let’s start with what you understand. When you multiply a number by itself, you always get a positive number. So how can you have a negative number in a square root?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Zach said.

  “In one sense, you can’t,” Josh answered. “You already figured that out. On the other hand, you can ask the question. In math, it’s not a good idea to ignore a question.”

  Zach seemed somewhat enlightened by this point. I was still trying to remember square roots.

  Josh continued. “Any math question demands a math answer. That doesn’t mean the answer has obvious practical value or relates to the real world. We only need a way to express the answer. We’ll use the letter ‘i’ to mean imaginary. If the problem asks you to solve the square root of -9, just solve for 9 and add an ‘i.’ The answer is 3i.”