Beyond The Bot
Crystal Stems, Part III
Karl Mercer’s blasé-tending-to-negative attitude towards frogs notwithstanding, his emotional window opening to Aracelle on the downtown Q train was unexpected, considering his most recent date was a disaster, which was mostly the fault of his long-time friend Brianton Guy Flincherton Jr. (pronounced “flin-KER-ton”), whom everyone just called “BG.”
The playboy son of a cruise line magnate, and elementary-through-high-school classmate of Karl’s at The Dalton School, BG was wealthy beyond reason. Karl’s family, on the other hand, was well-off, his mother having been a New York City media magnate and socialite, but by no means did Karl ever know the never-need-worry existence of a Flincherton scion.
Rich as he was, BG was not considered good looking by any metric. His chin stuck out almost 2 inches beyond the plane of his nose tip, a prominent and defining attribute that classmates dubbed the “Flinkerchin.” The Flincherton chin was the result of BG’s father Brianton Guy Sr.’s participation in a secret early 21st century billionaire’s-only beta-test, wherein a person’s DNA was modified for elongated life by sitting in a lawn chair for 2 hours inside the Large Hadron Collider while gnawing on a raw gourd. Unfortunately, the DNA modification to BG’s father produced only an elongated chin, and had no measurable effect on his lifespan.
The downside to all on-the-fly human genetic modifications, no matter how crude or advanced, is that they cannot be undone, only written over. Legacy DNA code always sticks around as yet one more family heirloom; and the Flinkerchin became the Flincherton family’s organic legacy.
When it came to his identity, if pushed to label himself, BG would say that he was polyamorous pangender neutrois, but in reality he fit no classification. Not only was BG prone to falling in love with almost any person with whom he spent time, but his sexual appetite was boundless. Everything and everyone turned him on. He walked around in a constant state of secret (and sometimes no-so-secret) arousal.
Karl, by contrast, had classic good looks. Unlike BG’s mainstream gender fluidity, however, Karl was unabashed (though humble) about his cisgender, straight, and male identity. By the late 21st century, Karl’s narrow path to companionship was rare, and considered beyond archaic.
“So, Flinkerchin,” Karl would say on their morning uptown subway rides to Dalton, “what’s today’s turn on?”
“Dude, what’s the difference, you wouldn’t touch it,” BG might say.
“Try me.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Shut up, Flinkerface. Yesterday was that babushka with edemic ankles.”
“I don’t know,” BG said. “Something about the way her panty hose flowed into her shoes…”
“Okay, okay. Just point. But subtle. I need to know today.”
“Okay, then.” BG moved his eyes to the left in a furtive sideways glance. Karl followed BG’s gaze towards a rotund man wearing a green hunting cap and plaid pants leaning against the express-side doors of their car. The man’s gaze was fixed to the floor, and from under the bill of his hat, the only visible features of his face were a large bristled, waxed mustache, and a pair of greasy haired ears whose lobes disappeared without effort into his jowls.
The man of largesse crossed one foot in front of another, and narrowly missed crushing a frog underfoot while undulating concentric ripples radiated through the folds and pleats of his pants. As Karl stared at the man with equal revulsion and curiosity, a thick, wide tongue pushed out a few inches below the mustache, curled up on itself, revealing a veiny, pink-gray bulbous underside, and swiped across the bristled hairs with enough force to cause a few drops of spittle to fly a few feet in front of him to the ground in a manner reminiscent of a lawn sprinkler. The salivary ejection drops landed near the frog under his feet, which took a quick sniff of the spit, shook his head, and bounded off towards the opposite end of the car, underneath the morning commuter throng.
“Myrna,” the man kept muttering to himself. “Myrna.”
“Holy shit!” Karl laughed into the clatter of the express train clackity-clacks and frog croaks as they careened through the darkness. “No way!”
“I want him,” BG said.
“No you don’t,” Karl countered.
“Yes, I do. I love him.”
“Oh, c’mon. What do you know of love?”
“What do you know of beauty?” BG snarled back.
“I have standards,” Karl said.
“Well, I have revelation where you have restriction,” BG said. “And it’s our stop, so that guy’ll just remain my daydream.”
Neither Karl nor BG could explain their friendship, or why they even tolerated each other. Nonetheless, they yin-yanged their way through a highwire coming-of-age in early 2060s New York City.
In their teenage times, though, as much as they fancied themselves modern-day Cassanovas, real-life romance was almost always a ruse. And a pain in the neck. Back in 2035, a few years before Karl came to be, all sexual contact outside of “registered sanctioned partnerships” was outlawed by the U.S. Trusted Intimacy Control Act (USTICA).
The Act’s sponsor was Rep. Connor Feathers of the 89th District of superstate Washaforegon, the youngest congressperson at the time and leader of the Freshman Dorm Party (one of seven parties to hold seats in the 124th U.S. Congress). A bitter and lonely young man, born just a bit too early for the artificial sexual revolution of the 2050s, and a complete strikeout on every free and paid matchmaking app, Feathers had run for Congress on a singular mission to “destroy the Dating Industrial Complex.”
USTICA regulations slapped steep restrictions on dating and sex, requiring any 2 (or 3 or 4 or however many) persons over the age of 16 interested in touching each other to register with their local Citizen Identity Office, attend two mandatory “relationship arc modeling” (RAM) sessions, pay a US$5 fee, and ultimately post a joint 3-minute follow-up “IntimAdventure” vlog to the CIO’s sexUS app detailing their adventures.
The Intimacy Control Act also required all first dates be shadowed and recorded by a floating camera-equipped drone (dubbed a “chaperdrone”). “May I shake your hand?” became the most common end to first dates. Rep. Feathers, though, to his chagrin, remained dateless. Turned out his inability to find intimacy had nothing to do with dating apps, but rather just that he was an unlikeable person.
In 2040, Brown University opened the first on-campus Citizen Identity Office outpost in its Faunce student center to handle USTICA applications and vlog production. For the next couple decades the school touted itself as “academics with benefits,” and had the lowest acceptance rate of any university in the world.
A 24/7 operation during Fall and Spring semesters, the Brown C.I. Office could turn around and approve students for intimacy in as little as 10 days. This was in stark contrast to nationwide approval averages, which by the 2060s in more remote areas of the mid-west could take as long as six weeks. “The CI Office advantage alone,” wrote the influential yearly college ranking outfit Urchin News in 2064, “justifies Brown’s $178,000 per semester cost.”
In 2066, Karl and his college girlfriend, Pearl Lee Munchrey, both sophomores, had their first respective CI Office visits after meeting cute and flirting heavy in the Brown University Rockefeller Library on simultaneous searches for Virginia Woolf books.
“Meet me tomorrow at the CIO?” Karl entreated, after the two spent two hours discussing To The Lighthouse sitting on the floor in between moveable stacks. The CIO question had replaced the ubiquitous “May I shake your hand?” as the most popular attraction giveaway on campus.
Pearl Lee, playing coy, with zero intention of saying no, half-smiled. “Sure.”
The next morning, their mutual crushing unwaned, the two smitten sophs found themselves in the office of Dr. Karen Cottonhead, the Dean of Student Identity. Soft, early February Providence snow fell through the view out her window over the college’s main quadrangle. A few students made snow angels, and a couple larger groups engaged each other in snowball fights. A professor of Comparative Literature, Dr. Cottonhead was pleased that Karl’s and Pearl Lee’s potential intimacy would be inspired by Virginia Woolf.
“The moment was all; the moment was enough,” Dr. Cottonhead opened the interview with a challenge.
“Ah, yes,” Pearl Lee said. “The Waves.”
“Very good, Pearl Lee,” Dr. Cottonwood offered. “You know your Woolf. Karl, what do you want out of this moment?”
“Something beyond intimacy,” he answered, adapting a favorite phrase of his old pal, BG, and grabbing Pearl Lee’s hand. “What’s there I don’t know, but there should be something more. That’s what Woolf has taught me.”
“Impressive,” Dr. Cottonhead nodded. “I like where this is going. Fill out the paperwork, I’ll model your RAM scenarios, and run it all up the chain.”
The intimacy application contained a few boiler plate questions (“List all your registered sexbots,” “How many times have you touched yourself in the last month?”, “Are your feelings of attraction for real?”), and a couple outliers (“Is sex a form of violence, or violence a form of sex (30 words or less)?”, “Is breakfast cereal for dinner, too?”). Karl and Pearl Lee laughed, looking over each other’s shoulders as they filled in their answers.
“So weird this is hand-written, isn’t it?” Karl asked.
“I guess,” Pearl Lee thought for a second. “I heard that the lower loops of your g’s and y’s and j’s give everything away about your sex life.”
“Really?” Karl stopped writing, looked up, and flourished his pen in the air. “I guess I better not penetrate the lower zone with too much pen pressure.”
Laughing, they finished their forms and turned them into the administrator along with $5 each for the processing fees. Ten days later they were approved.
By Karl and Pearl Lee’s third intimate encounter, however, they had started to grate on each other. Karl, in particular, became distant on his first overnight at Pearl’s. Lying back on her bed produced a metallic crunching sound and pointed sharp jabs all over his body — separate noises and sensations than would be expected from typical dorm-room bedsprings.
Looking under the bed revealed Pearl Lee’s penchant for hiding pilfered, used refectory silverware between her standard-issue two-inch thick foam mattress and the bed frame. He pressed her for a few minutes, but only got vague answers as to why.
“I mean, is there a certain kind of fork or spoon that turns you on? Is it a certain meal — like chicken cutlet night or Taco Tuesday that makes you do this?”
“Why are you obsessing over this?” Pearl asked.
“Maybe I don’t like the sensation of sleeping on a scrap heap. And why don’t you at least clean the cutlery before you stash it?”
“You and your dishwashing fetish. Who does that?”
“I don’t know. I like to cook, so I like a clean kitchen. Thinking of becoming a chef.”
“You’re uptight enough,” she surmised, and resolved to break up with him by the end of the week.
Their public, compulsory CI Office “IntimAdventure” vlog proved so popular, however, that starting a week after upload, the video was played on prospective student tours, and Brown mandated they stay together as the “campus it-couple” for the duration of their university careers.
“You two were made for each other,” Dean Cottonhead told them when they attempted to file a termination agreement at the CIO. “I won’t in good conscience approve you for intimacy with anyone else, so work it out.”
“But — “ Karl protested.
“No buts,” said the Dean. “And make sure you’re seen together at least a few times a week. Everyone here expects you two to be in a flourishing relationship.”
There was nothing they could do.
So in 2068, the second they threw their graduation caps in the air, Karl and Pearl Lee broke up and never looked back.
Meanwhile, all the while, BG’s amorphous sexual identity cast such a wide net that, despite his being able to afford the US$5 Intimacy Fee a million times over, the constant partnership registration and standardized relationship modeling wasn’t worth his time. His sex life, however, did not suffer from want. His ever-growing collection of InnerHome In2me sexbots had satisfied his every physical desire since he turned 18 during his halcyon high school days with Karl.
InnerHome, the largest home appliance manufacturer in the world, introduced its flagship In2Me line of sex robots in 2058, at the height of the 2050s’ artificial sexual revolution, with a mission to bring “machintimacy” to the masses. The U.S. Intimacy Control Act’s laborious process and waiting periods had given a couple horny generations of Americans a healthy amount of sexual downtime — and distaste for dating. The stigma around coupling with machines waned to zero while most people, waiting around for real partners to be approved, used sexbots to fill the gaps.
Fast-tracking societal acceptance of machintimacy, the CIO flooded PSAs nationwide with the headline, “It’s not porno — it’s normo!” that summed up the government’s position on sexbots.
The InnerHome In2Me model became the sexbot standard bearer and the company’s most popular product. The baseline In2Me 20 could present as any gender or sex, speak 140 languages and perform 20 basic positions. InnerHome’s most expensive model, the In2Me+ 2000, could be programmed to present as any gender, and speak any language (including fictional Vulcan, Klingon and Valerian) in regional or galactic dialects. The main selling point for the 2000, though, was its patented “sexlastic” skin, which could expand, contract, and contort to create any bodytype, natural or imagined. So cartoons, animals, and even geometric shapes got their workout through the In2Me by more adventurous pleasure dabblers.
“Bucky ball?” an androgynous pitchperson piped up in one of the In2Me’s more memorable late-night video ads. “More like lucky ball!”
The ensuing decade brought a flood of sexbots from InnerHome competitors such as the PerkelCo Perfecta and the Gordon LoveMaid. If humans were your thing, almost all the sexbots on the market came with sentience and movement indistinguishable from the real deal. Not only were they gender and sex fluid, these synthetic creatures could be programmed with any conceivable personality (and outfitted with wardrobes) from any time frame in human history. A stereotypical ’50s housewife? Check. An Olde English farmer with a spongy mane of chest hair and a talent for raising lamb? Just hit the button. A dotcom executive with a knack for putting people in their place? Dial it in and go to town.
For Karl, even though the pool of cis straight monogendered people under 50-years-old was in a minority by the late 21st century, he pushed forward with his increasingly archaic notions of companionship and love, driven by a deep belief in the concept of a soulmate, and his loathing for machintimacy.
BG took a bit of pity on Karl’s constant unrequited state, and being a well-meaning letch ensconced in an arrested development, and like any decent old friend, always kept one eye open for Karl when it came to romantic set-ups.
By the late 21st century, algorithmic dating services became essential to the lives of single people. A positive compatibility result from any of the Citizen Identity Office approved list of dating services almost guaranteed governmental approval for consensual sex, but the app DISHR, the first dating app to match people by how they load their dishwashers, and whose producer OpenLife owned most of Congress via lobbying, was the sole way that prospective lovers could speed an intimacy application through the system.
Karl’s antiquated approach to companionship left him loathe to use dating apps, but two weeks before his face got stuck to Jessie’s tongue on Q train car 3699, BG managed to convince Karl to use DISHR.
In a way, DISHR was bespoke for people like Karl. As the Executive Chef of Rage Restaurant, he saw the meticulousness and care of dishwasher loading as a fractal of the level of service his restaurant provided customers. Union rules, however, prevented Karl from touching the restaurant’s actual dishwasher. The closest he got on a shift to washing a dish was throwing tasting spoons after one use into a jar next to the pass.
At the end of the night, though, he would often join the dishwashers to oversee their final loads and help them arrange the racks. “Let the Health Inspection drones see what they want,” he would say, often pointing directly at the City-mandated camera-mounted drone hovering in the corner of his kitchen. “All they’re going to see at City Hall is clean dishes and a chef who gives a shit.”
Every employee in the restaurant was required to take a few shifts as a dishwasher, and most of the line cooks had worked their way up from there. If you saw a loaded dishwasher as an expression of aesthetic intelligence, you had a future at Rage.
Karl’s insistence on humans up and down the restaurant’s workflow was a parallel affectation to his throwback romanticism, though, and human capital came at a price to Rage’s profits. Almost all food service establishments in the world used sentient robotic servers and dishwashers that took orders and (not only washed but also) loaded and unloaded all of a restaurant’s dishes with utmost efficiency and speed — for cheap.
His business partner, Premium Haddock, the son of Rage’s founder Noman Haddock, continued to hound Karl on the cost of hiring so many people for what he termed “unthinking work,” such as dishwashing and ice-chipping, but Karl never relented.
“Everything here is done by hand,” he laid Haddock flat. “Machines are the real unthinkers.”
“I don’t get you,” said Haddock. “Not everything. The dishwasher does the actual washing. Why not let it do the loading? What’s the difference?”
“Of course some things are best left to an industrial spray arm that can handle sanitation-level heat,” Karl relented. “But there’s so little left for humans to do. How your dishwasher’s loaded says more about you than about the machine. It’s still a skillset ‘beyond the bot.’ Like, you know, eating.”
“Ah, shizza, you with that Hamptons bohemia ‘Beyond the Bot’ stuff again,” Haddock rolled his eyes. “The crackpot Mega Watts is a drive-by philosopher at best.”
“Watts knows exactly what he’s talking about. Your reactions to his theories just prove you’re nervous he’s right about everything.”
“If I didn’t have a soft-spot for the East End of Long Islandia, I’d dissolve our partnership today,” Haddock lamented.
“Yeah, well, if we don’t stay ‘beyond the bot’ we’re as good as extinct.”
“And if we don’t, you know, maximize our cabbage haul, Rage Restaurant’s as good as extinct,” Haddock lamented.
Who names their son ‘Premium’? Karl thought, forgetting his Telegraph connection to Haddock was on. Like, seriously?
Premium shook his head and scowled. “Leave my father out of it,” he said. “He’s the reason we’re here.”
He’d agree with me, Karl thought, then talked out loud. “There’s a reason Rage doesn’t have AutoGarçon™ HoverBots all over the front of house, either. Wine is poured, dishes are turned to the perfect angle on presentation, and tables are bussed by actual hands, connected to actual bodies, containing actual minds, living actual lives. Even with our frog detection system, humans catch and release any frog that makes it past the amphibishields. Your dad Noman would’ve had no problem with how this place is run.”
You gotta catch up to this time — my dad was ahead of his, Premium telegraphed to Karl, then said out loud, “That’s the difference here.”
“Time is a rubber band,” Karl said.
“Yeah, well, we’ll see who snaps first,” Premium offered as he closed the door on Karl’s office in Rage’s basement.
Haddock remained ever determined to squeeze a bigger margin out of Rage’s kitchen and in 2076, hoping to convince Karl of the pleasure and ease in letting robots wash dishes, he high-rolled for Karl’s birthday gift. So, on November 20 of that year, an US$18,000 state-of-the-art InnerHome Roto-Jet 1 Ultrasonic Know-Load™ Dishwasher waited for Karl in his home kitchen upon coming home from Rage.
Happy Birthday to my favorite “Get off my lawn!” guy! Premium telegraphed to Karl. Welcome to the 2070s.
I won’t even ask how you got this in here without me knowing, Karl answered. And I won’t say thanks.
Premium laughed in Karl’s head, and then clicked off their Telegraph connection.
In addition to the accurate elimination of the most pernicious nanomicrobes from plates, glasses and utensils, the Roto-Jet 1 had a sentient Dinnerware Canadarm™, modeled after (and sharing a name with) the late 20th century U.S. Space Shuttle cargo arm. Able to detect dirty dinnerware in an eight-foot radius around the Roto-Jet, the Canadarm could sense, pre-rinse, and self-load dirty dishes without prompting. Combined with an InnerHome AutoGarçon™ HoverBot gifted to Karl by his buddy BG a couple years previous, Haddock knew Karl could now go years before setting or clearing a table himself.
But Karl was Karl, and though he marveled at the machines’ combined front and back-of-house capabilities, and even after a year living with the Roto-Jet, he still preferred to set his own table and arrange dishes in the dishwasher himself.
BG, an avid adopter of any technology that that gifted robot sentience to any task, considered Karl’s daily dedication to table setting and dishwashing a curiosity worth needling in the face of a world awash in automation. One night in late 2077, leaning on Karl’s kitchen counter, BG watched Karl arrange yet-another dishwasher load while they quaffed late night “Airleron Fizzes” (equal parts squirrelgin and canebubble). Karl seemed more introspective than usual. BG hated on contemplative moments, and cut through the silence.
“Love how you keep it real, K,” he said to Karl, using his typical first-name-first-letter reduction address. “But what you do there, with your dishes…? That’s just yokel.”
“Whatever, forever,” Karl slacked back. “Get a new story.”
“Hey, I’m trying to open you up to some fun. You know about Dishr, yes?”
“No,” Karl said. “I don’t go for those gossiptruth shows.”
“No, no, no,” said BG. “You’re thinking of the show Kishr with Kish Kisher. That’s trashy stuff. Dishr’s a dating app. It’s OpenLife.”
“I don’t do OpenLife, either,” Karl sneered. “I mean, I have the mandatory account for Federation tax verification, but maybe I check my feeds once a month. You know that.”
“Frickin’ Brown grads. Get off the low pony, Karl,” BG sneered back. “OpenLife-owned or not, Dishr’s a perfect way for dishwashing freaks like you to meet.”
“Freak? Why, because I load my dishwasher with my own hands? My way?”
“Uh, hello? You load that Roto-Jet even though it can load itself,” BG noted. “You set your own table even though your AutoGarçon™ would let you sit back and chill. Man, all the time you would save if you let the bots do the work for you! I mean, I know you’re straight-up cis, and it drives everything, but for real, where are you, still in 2010?”
“You can’t save time,” Karl intoned. “You can only waste time, or use time. There’s no bank where you can deposit time.”
“Cripes, more Mega Watt witchery,” BG waved off Karl’s sound-byte philosophy. “I wouldn’t date you, either, and I’m the most polyamourous, gender-fluid, non-binary, fur-footed, womanman I know.”
“Shut up with that,” Karl shook his head. “you haven’t had a human partner since high school.”
“By choice!”
“Ok, still. Maybe I should ask your closet full of sexbots how much you know about courtship?”
BG narrowed his eyes. “That’s low. My polyelectronic affections are hardly one-way. You cis-shits are all the same, clattering on and on about some higher level of monogamous commitment that somehow separates us from ‘the animals.’”
“That’s a lot of words, BG.”
“Can’t handle the bantz?”
“You think you’re insulting me?”
“I don’t think, Karl. I do. I just am. Dude, that’s the difference between you and me.”
“No, the difference between you and me is sex with robots.”
“Don’t call them that. They’re enhanced companions.”
“You just keep them around for sex. That’s not companionship. Next, you’ll be saying you have actual courtships and relationship arcs, and that they laugh at your jokes.”
“Even better, K,” BG said with a sly grin. “They’re so advanced, they don’t laugh when I’m not funny.”
Karl shook his head. Living with a real person, if you could even make a connection, was so much work that Karl did wonder if BG had the right idea. Even the concept of “biological imperative” was thrown out with the bathwater, as most children were conceived and gestated in labs using purchased sperm and/or eggs. Sex itself became a pure pleasure pursuit; a form of leisure entertainment that carried no consequences or emotional risks.
The USTICA law was the only thread that held most long-term relationships together. It wasn’t worth the social currency flux risk to vlog your “first times” over and over again with a stream of partners on the USTICA sexUS.gov site. But on the other side of things, real people brought less and less worth to long-term relationships. If it ever went south, they endangered finances, comfort, and personal and professional reputations.
“I get that your robots — I mean extra-human companions, or whatever you call them this week — can be programmed with any personalities and be physically modified whenever you get bored with a specific look or era,” said Karl. “I just can’t. I want a child with someone I know. Someone I love.”
“That’s just quaint. You’re a frickin’ rom-com, you now that?” said BG. “If I ever, on the off chance, feel the need for a child, I’ll just blink on a few “OK”’s and “I AGREE”’s in my corneal screen, and call it a day.”
“How romantic,” Karl turned back to his dishes. “Just keep on with your mindless sex, and leave me out of it.”
“Hey! My sexbots have minds of their own. And they don’t stash dirty forks under the bed.”
Karl shot BG a scowl and shook his head.
“Oh c’mon. That’s fair game and you know it,” BG needled. “And this isn’t about sex.”
“Oh. No?”
“No. It’s about freeing your time,” BG smiled. “Look, I haven’t washed a dish since forever. My time is mine. That’s a way bigger difference between you and me than your penchant for actual human caresses and my enjoyment of less organic companionship.”
“Housework’s not work to me,” Karl countered. “I can’t explain it, but it’s relaxing — and satisfying — to load a cup rack in perfect harmony.”
“Yeah, well. You’re just weird. Here. I’m sending you a DISHR invite on Telegraph.”
BG opened the cuff of his white dress shirt, and sent a thin metal bangle around his left wrist spinning, touching it in a sequence as it rotated. BG blinked three times and the bangle flashed a photon out across the kitchen into an identical bangle on Karl’s left wrist, and both bangles flashed in sync. BG re-buttoned his cuff and pulled his sport coat sleeve back down over it.
Karl, meanwhile, blinked twice. The Dishr interface appeared in his right-eye’s corneal infolayer as BG sassed, “I mean, hot chicks and clean dishes — it’s like they made this thing only for you.”
“This looks beyond ridiculous,” intoned Karl.
BG slammed back the rest of his Airleron Fizz, and handed his highball glass to Karl’s AutoGarçon™ hoverbot, which had floated towards him, seeing BG finish his drink.
As BG walked toward the front door, he shot his cuffs out the front of his sport coat sleeves (his signature local-network exit-sequence activation motion). The bangle around his left wrist flashed twice from under the fabric behind his white shirt’s cuff, and Karl’s front door opened. A red lattice of lasers zig-zagging up and down in an “X” pattern across the door’s threshold turned green and formed the number 10 with various brightened lattice node points.
“You’ll thank me, Karl,” BG said, pausing at the threshold for a few seconds.
“Yeah, right,” Karl said, not turning around.
BG walked out. The threshold lasers turned back to red after a few seconds, and the door closed behind him with a soft, firm shushclick.
The AutoGarçon™ floated towards Karl, and the dishwasher’s Canadarm started to extend from its racks to grab BG’s used highball glass from the drone. Karl slapped away the Roto-Jet’s robot arm, and grabbed the highball glass from the hoverbot.
“I’ll take that, thanks,” Karl said to the Canadarm, rinsed the highball in the sink and placed the glass in the Roto-Jet’s upper rack. The robot arm went limp and retracted in a sad, slow drop. “Stop that!” Karl snapped at the machine. “As if you have feelings,” He closed its lid and shook his head.
Karl saw motion in the corner of his eye and made an abrupt turn. A bright green speckled toad hopped from the living room onto the stairs and disappeared at the top landing into the parlor floor.
How did that get in here? Karl thought.
The toad breached your entry when Mister Flincherton de-activated your home entrance forcefield, and stopped to talk to you before exiting, the AutoGarçon™ communicated to Karl inside his head, in a soothing female London West-End English accent.
Karl glared up at the HoverBot and said out loud, “I didn’t pair with you today on Telegraph, Kate. How are you on my internal channel?”
Your level L-10 friend Mister Flincherton has unrestricted access to all your local networks. He opened this three-way channel just as he left, Kate related, still inside Karl’s head.
Three-way? Dammit, BG, Karl thought.
Karl then heard BG laughing in his head. He pulled up his Telegraph interface in his corneal overlay to find BG and Kate green-lit as active connections.
Enjoy the toad, Karl heard BG say inside his head. And set up your DISHR!
Bye bye BG, Karl said to BG in his head with an eyeroll. He near-focused on a red “stop” button in his Telegraph corneal overlay and blinked twice to shut down all the connections.
to be continued…
