Robotic Feelings
by Tom Cho
Tom Cho’s novel-in-progress is set in the 2200s—a future with many robots. The following excerpt, adapted from this manuscript, features two teenage robots named Robot and Norman. The excerpt is set at a party at Norman’s house.
Norman was standing at the drinks table where he was about to fix himself a drink. He looked at Robot with curiosity and Robot reciprocated with her own curious stare. Robot didn’t know Norman that well. In fact, for most of their years of schooling together, she hadn’t given him much thought. But over the last six months or so, he had become a bit more interesting to her and the reason why was this: Robot was undoubtedly having her own problems with puberty, but in recent times it had become obvious that robot puberty was testing Norman too.
Expectations had long been high that Norman would pursue a brilliant academic career at a top-tier university. Norman’s parents were super-intelligent robots and esteemed university lecturers, and Norman himself was programmed with knowledge across various academic disciplines. But robot puberty was bringing about an unexpected change in Norman. Previously, he had always lived without any arms, instead using multiple tractor beams that emanated from his chest. But over the last six months or so, he had grown five elongated, tubular arms that were tentacle-like—each having a row of suckers along its length—and the stump of another such arm was already beginning to show. In fact, as Robot watched while Norman expertly siphoned tomato juice and then Worcestershire sauce into an arm and rotated this arm windmill-style to mix the ingredients while flamboyantly juggling a bottle of Tabasco and some sticks of celery with two more arms and simultaneously throwing into the air several ice-cubes with a further arm before neatly catching this ice in a glass held by yet another arm, she saw first-hand what had come to trouble Norman’s parents and what everyone else around him was noticing too: Norman was developing an obvious aptitude for bartending.
But just because Norman was growing what looked like robot bartender arms, it didn’t mean that his ultimate career path lay in bartending. While Norman and Robot chatted, Norman fixed them both drinks, and Robot came to learn that Norman did harbour plans of becoming a bartender, although not as his primary career. Norman steeled himself, and then confessed to Robot that after he graduated from school, he planned to do bartending work to support a career as an author. His intention was to write fiction for the still largely-ignored market of younger robot readers. Norman conceded that becoming an author would likely set him on a hard path in life. He would not only face opposition from his father, but potentially from agents and publishers. However, he declared that he was willing to do it anyway.
Robot looked at Norman with a lot of admiration. She said that she really hoped that he could find the necessary support from people like agents and publishers to help make his dreams come true.
As Norman looked at her gratefully, Robot hesitated for a moment and then she made her own confession. She told Norman that her own experience of puberty had not been happy overall. She did not tell Norman about her recent confusing crushes on various schoolmates: on Fatima 5000, who is on the softball team; on Stephen, who stars in all the school musicals; and quite a few others—not only robots, but cyborgs and even humans. The integrated school that Robot and Norman attended brought together robots, cyborgs, and gifted young humans—ostensibly to bring about a kind of harmonious pluralism. And in the last few months, this integrated school environment had brought forth and brought together within Robot a great plurality of desires—voraciously inclusive and diverse desires—that she dared not speak of to Norman. But Robot did confess to him that her experience of puberty had largely intensified her sense of the oddness of her own body. For one thing, she had cat ears on her head that she had never found to be very helpful. And of course, worse still, she spoke with a stilted and formal diction that was purported to sound “robotic.” If anything, it seemed to her that her body was a strange sort of hybrid.
Norman looked at Robot with much sympathy. He admitted that he didn’t know what he could say about her “robotic” voice. He added that he was sure that he couldn’t say anything that would make her feel any better about her cat ears either although, being a fan of stage musicals, he did know of another robot, GZ01, who could probably relate to her experiences. Back in the late 2140s, robots were developed that could do the exhausting and repetitive work of performing in long-running stage musicals. The first of these robot performers made a seamless debut on Broadway in 2151, thus ushering in a whole new era of robotic restagings of various musical theatre productions. A highly skilled robot, GZ01 was not only developed with long-running musical theatre productions in mind: she was purpose-built for a specific role in a famed musical that originated in the twentieth century. This musical had since been revived many times over the years. Its plot centred on a cohort of singing and dancing cats who were preparing for an annual ritual in which one among them was to be chosen for rebirth. The show was called Cats. GZ01 was designed for the sole purpose of playing the Cats lead character of Grizabella, a miserable and bedraggled cat who was no longer the glamorous feline of her youth. GZ01’s form was humanoid, but this humanoid form was permanently adorned in a beige unitard, brown arm- and leg-warmers, feline-like facial decals, and accessories such as a set of costume cat ears and a costume cat tail, thus more or less emulating the appearance of a human who was more or less emulating a domestic cat. So far, GZ01 had been working for the last forty-nine years in this humanoid-feline form, spending each night playing the role of a sad and broken cat, reprising with each show a haunting song titled “Memory” that was steeped in nostalgia and yet expressed a yearning to start a new life. Indeed, by the end of each show, it was the character of Grizabella who was selected to journey to a realm of the afterlife and be reborn, thus evoking a cyclical character to life with which GZ01 could readily identify, in her own way. Indeed, as someone whose circumstances involved reprising certain popular musical numbers night after night whilst in a feline role, GZ01 often privately questioned her place in what she referred to, somewhat memorably, as “the circle of life”.
Robot had never heard of GZ01 but she took in this new information with much interest. In fact, although Norman had claimed that he couldn’t say anything that would make her feel any better about her cat ears, it turned out that he was wrong. Having learnt about the life and lot of GZ01, Robot actually felt that her own situation with her cat ears wasn’t so bad and she told Norman so.
As Norman smiled, Robot gazed at him. She was enjoying spending time with him. Maybe it was because he had drawn on his fannish taste in stage musicals to help her to feel differently about her cat ears. Or maybe it was because his bartending manner was so affable. Or maybe it was because of his brave and noble choice to write fiction. And maybe it was because she knew that he, like her, was made in China. Whatever the reason or reasons, at that point a new track began playing on the party’s retro soundtrack of late twentieth-century pop and dance music. Upon hearing this song, Norman gasped in recognition and he asked Robot if they could dance—and even in spite of her awareness of the stiff and awkward manner of her dancing, Robot said yes.
Together, they walked to the dance floor. As they began to dance, Robot’s moves were indeed stiff and awkward, but the track was so irresistible a piece of electronic dance pop that her drive to dance overshadowed her self-consciousness. Yet Robot was soon enlivened by even more than the track’s pulsating, up-tempo beat. Around half a minute into the track, she noticed that the singer’s voice had an occasional “robotic” inflection. She leaned towards Norman and, above the sounds of the song, she asked him what the track was. As Norman energetically danced, he told her that the track was an extended remix of one of his favourite songs: a centuries-past hit from 1998 titled “Believe,” as sung by an entertainer named Cher, of whom he was a very big fan. As Cher’s vocal slurred once again into a catchy “robotic” delivery, Robot’s eyes literally lit up in delight for a moment. Seeing Robot’s response, Norman’s own eyes flickered brightly. He eagerly told Robot about the audio processing effect that was famously used in this song: Auto-Tune. Auto-Tune’s original purpose was to correct off-key vocals but in Cher’s “Believe”, Auto-Tune was flamboyantly used not for pitch correction but for stylistic effect, spurring many other recording artists to experiment with this technology. As it turned out, certain well-known hip-hop artists of the early twenty-first century discovered that within Auto-Tune’s “robotic” inflections, there lay new forms for expressing grief, alienation, longing, and other kinds of feelings. Thus, years before robots with advanced emotional capabilities came into being—including pubescent robots with their own complex emotional lives—these hip-hop artists bent and warped their human voices to “robotic” effect. And far from signalling stiltedness or mechanical formality or “robotic” remoteness, these vocal distortions and tonal dissonances were in fact used to express feeling.
Robot liked the “robotic” resonances that she was hearing—not only in Cher’s singing, but in Norman’s discussion of Auto-Tune—and she said as much to Norman. She added that she really needed to look further into this Cher person and some of those hip-hop artists who followed her. Norman beamed and he said that he would love to introduce her to a particular album called 808s & Heartbreak, as well as select songs by T-Pain and Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy, and—above all—the work and life and fans of Cher. As she continued to dance, Robot nodded and smiled at Norman, a faint glow still illuminating her eyes.
Unlike certain kinds of protocol droids, Norman didn’t have a sensor to gauge what forms of physical intimacy were likely to be considered appropriate at any given point of a social interaction, but he shyly moved closer to Robot and, after a moment of hesitation, he slipped two arms around her waist, his tubular limbs coming to rest lightly on her hips. Robot in turn put her arms around Norman and, for a time, this was how they danced with each other. Then, as Norman encircled a third arm around her left hip, Robot sighed happily, thankful for at least some of the innovations of robotic technologies, and they began to dance right up against each other. As their close talking gave way to close dancing, Cher’s cybernetic vocal, enfolded in layers of electronic effects, an amalgam of digital processing and personal feeling, resounded throughout the room.
Robot didn’t know much about Cher, nor the popular music of the twentieth or even the twenty-first century, but she did know this: in the twentieth century, certain genres of popular music emerged that became synonymous with sexual expression. In fact, as Norman’s fourth arm moved to the small of her back, she remembered that these musical genres were of particular appeal to youth, frequently expressing desires and tensions that were pertinent to their lives—including sexual desires and sexual tensions. And as Norman’s fifth arm became entwined in her long hair, Robot decided: the ultimate, socially-sanctioned setting for youthful sexual expression was still—after all these centuries—the dance floor. So, while they danced to the strains of Cher’s “robotic” expressiveness, Robot pressed herself up against Norman as closely as she could, even tilting her cat ears towards him. One of Norman’s arms tightened around her waist and another arm slid down from the small of her back to coil around her thigh and then she felt a gentle suction from the suckers on all of his arms. Robot’s BioPlastic skin broke out into a sweat and her eyes momentarily flickered alight again and she gazed at Norman through a happy, hazy glow. Cher’s voice shifted into and out of “robotic” registers again and again as the extended remix played on. Meanwhile, Norman himself was becoming a tireless shape-shifter, his elongated arms snaking across Robot’s body and re-shaping themselves with each caress. Soon, the suckers on Norman’s arms began to pull at Robot more insistently and she writhed rhythmically against them while the music played over her soft gasps. The music continued on and on, and so did Robot and Norman—although they did eventually decide to continue their close dancing elsewhere: not because of the looks that they were starting to draw from a few others at the party but because they both knew that, regrettably, extended remixes of songs don’t last forever, if only for reasons of practicality. So, as the last strains of the song played, the two robots drew apart from each other and Norman extended an arm to Robot and led her away from the dance floor and then away from the lounge room and the party itself altogether. They made their way down a long hallway, and then Robot followed Norman into his bedroom.
Inside this bedroom, surrounded by holo-posters of pop stars both human and robot, Robot soon found Norman to be as eager as before. He seemed all arms—and as one of his arms reached for her, she took it in her hand. She gazed at the suckers that protruded along its length and then she ran her finger around the rim of a single sucker. Norman sighed appreciatively. The sucker dilated a little and Robot watched it in delight. It was a sensitive little sucker. Impulsively, she inserted a fingertip inside and the sucker gently clung on. She then slipped a little more of her finger inside and Norman’s arm undulated in response. Norman sighed again and his other arms reached for Robot and clung on tightly. The sucker, too, clutched firmly at her finger, and Robot smiled. She playfully pulled her finger out, but she soon pushed it in again. She did that again and again, lending Norman the full length of her finger each time and wanting, above all, to stroke that sucker from the inside. Norman’s arm began to thrash about and the sucker started pulling at her all the more, variously opening and drawing her in and clamping down, until Norman cried out and his eyes shone brightly while the sucker squirted a few streams of cloudy viscousness that looked unlike any beverage ingredient that Norman might have used in the course of his bartending activities thus far tonight.
As Robot slowly drew her finger from the sucker, she suddenly noticed that the remaining suckers on Norman’s arm were dilating in her direction. She then looked at Norman’s other arms. Rows and rows of suckers were inclining towards her finger, straining towards this new source of stimulation. Robot had already decided that she liked these suckers very much, and yet Norman had so many suckers that she wasn’t sure how she would attend to them all—but she did have an idea or two. Grasping two of Norman’s arms, she crisscrossed them. At the point where the arms now met, the suckers of one arm soon affixed themselves to the suckers of the other arm. As Norman stared down at these arms and attempted to compute what was happening, Robot happily proceeded to intertwine the arms further, setting the sets of suckers from each arm onto each other, and as these sets of suckers hungrily sucked at each other, the resulting suction and friction made Norman groan loudly and his eyes glow, so Robot began progressively incorporating his remaining arms into the mix, twisting and coiling and even tying until, eventually, Norman’s radiant eyes were staring down in un-computable, uncomprehending disbelief at the seething, intricately-knotted mass of his own desirously sucking arms, and this superabundance of sucking soon turned his loud groans into super-loud groans and his radiant eyes into supernovas-of-sorts, and as Norman’s eyes flared brilliantly, Robot shielded her own eyes from the long and luminous burst of brilliance that lit up the room—and from the profuse and prolonged streams of cloudy viscousness that erupted from his tentacles, coming in multiples, until he finally collapsed onto his bed.
Robot laid herself on the bed next to Norman and she gently loosened and untied his arms. She then held him and stroked the back of his head. She watched as the light in his eyes faded to a gentle glow that gave the room a conveniently soft and ambient form of mood lighting. Eventually, Norman met her gaze. For a moment, both robots smiled at each other. Norman then looked at Robot in wonder and thanked her. He revealed that his arms were often needy and that he spent considerable amounts of time attending to them. It was, he admitted, another change of robot puberty that he’d had to adjust to. These days—and pretty much every day—he spent literally hours in his room tending to his tentacles, each one of which he had named Ralph. He had actually never set his suckers upon each other before, but he happily told Robot that he was now motivated to develop a multitude of highly pleasurable self-sucking techniques that, frankly, would save him a lot of time—and, moreover, be the envy of many. At the very least, he predicted that such techniques would be the envy of several other robot boys he knew. Last year at school, he became friendly with a group of robot boys upon discovering that their fannish tastes, too, were inclined towards all things Cher. Eventually, their mutual interest in Cher had led to sessions of mutual masturbation.
The two robots smiled at each other again. Robot was keen to talk more, especially about those boys who were fans of Cher, but she saw that Norman’s eyes had begun to grow dim. Norman apologised and told her that he was very tired. He also knew that he should run a self-cleaning cycle at some point. But for now, he had to rest.
Moments later, Norman was already in sleep mode, but Robot didn’t mind. She lay on her side next to him and she gazed at him. Once again, she decided that she was enjoying spending time with him—and not only because they had just enjoyed some robotic sex. It was not even because he had turned out to be such an excitable sex machine. Like her, Norman wasn’t a cyborg. But with his aspirations to be part-author and part-bartender, Norman seemed something of a hybrid too—in fact, a queer hybrid, like her.
Tom Cho’s current project, a novel that philosophises about religion, will be published in Australia and New Zealand by Giramondo. Tom is also the author of the collection of fictions Look Who’s Morphing.
