A Disaster for the Automated Race

Guest Fiction

Carousel guest fiction by

Red Lamb

ROBOT RIGHTS ‘R’ HUMAN RIGHTS!

Beige cardboard. Black scrawl. Dirty mouths, wide open, repetitive screams of the slogan, surrounded by dozens of variants forming common cause through wicked indignation.

John Preen stares into the whites of their eyes from behind a crystal-clear, high-definition monitor occupying the far wall of the boardroom.

“The statement is categorically untrue.”

“Deeply false equivalency.”

“I think I know what the ‘R’ stands for, heh.”

A chorus of snide laughter from members of the executive suite. The quarter-hour bell chimes and those present drain their glasses of pH-balanced water in unison.

“John, be a dear and fetch us those refills.”

A voice, fit for radio, cuts through the commotion, sharing pitch and frequency with no other man. John remembers all the commercials from his schoolboy days.

At Squishy’s, we take pride in the home-cooked quality of our burgers. Just like Grandma Brown used to make. I’m Robert Brown, and I honor her memory through our family business. Good food, done right. That’s Squishy’s.

The CEO-King, seen onscreen holding a framed photo of his beloved matriarch.

John smiles fondly as he serves fresh water on a silver tray to the army of suits seated around the conference table, attention glued to the escalating protest outside the corporate tower.

“Zoom out and pan left through the crowd.”

Additional signage appears across the frame, producing a few spit takes from the collared class.

“Machine Lives Matter? Those opportunistic sons of grifters!”

John thinks this critique is a hair too harsh, though the national MLM movement does always seem to show their balaclava-covered faces whenever civil strife hits the fan like unprocessed feces, charging exorbitant speaker’s fees for thought leadership at anarchist conventions then licensing the use of their logo and fine-tuned ad copy to disparate cells throughout the land.

At the head of the table, Mr. Brown folds his wrinkled hands. “Perhaps there’s more than a passing reason their organization shares initials with the multi-level marketing schemes of old.”

His inner circle of associates and support staff pound their fists on the thick burgundy ten-top in proud agreement, spilling their refreshments. John sneaks in to wipe up the mess, seen but not heard. He feels lucky to be privy to such high-end crosstalk, how the sausage patties are made—worth more than all his collegiate experience combined.

The streetview camera scans past another outlandish outcry from the perpetually disaffected, this one scrolling right to left as electronic text.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES HAVE BEEN A DISASTER FOR THE AUTOMATED RACE.

The particularly outspoken CFO, Sven Zelko, huffs and puffs with ruddy rage.

“The sole race we need to worry about is the arms race to see which superpower will be ready to blow those bolt-buckets to a cold Christian hell before their barbaric hordes reach our gates!”

His withering wordcraft and immense girth contribute to a behind-the-back moniker coined by underlings at the office: The Potato Laureate of These United Plates. More dinner than tectonic, and a far cry from Pangea; anyway . . .

John braves a question. “Why is optimization such a dirty slur ‘round here?”

The whole room averts their gaze from the monitor to linger on the new kid, then back to the boss in anticipation of response, tax bracket ping pong.

“Son, I built this company on a promise, and I intend to hold true to my word as a man. People want burgers flipped by people. Generative meals are a soulless fad. The eternal maximization of our profit margins is a madman’s gambit, akin to the progressive advocacy trumpeted by those below.” He gestures with dramatic emphasis towards the screen. “When will it end?”

John presses further. “That word: soulless. Does sentient thought not a soul make?”

Sven snickers. “Word soup does sense make good?”

A few department heads chuckle. Mr. Brown commandeers the discourse once more.

“Life is a gift from God above. Complex algorithms that simulate the same are mere falsehoods, hollow imitations no matter how convincing the mimicry. Squishy’s is a decades-in-the-making institution of significant prestige, and now, apparently, a moral bulwark against the rising tides of computational degeneracy. What’s next? Human beings living with the automated, loving the automated, fornicating with the automated? Soon before long, society will grow sterile, and those who make cause to mate with machines shall inherit a scorched and barren Earth. The line in the sand between heaven and hell is here, at Squishy’s headquarters.”

The board applauds Mr. Brown’s rousing call-to-arms as John listens in awe to his superior. Again the bell chimes; again the water drains; again John swaps out fresh glasses.

Insulated from economic turbulence, his elephant-sized feet as ballast in the wind tunnel, Sven can’t abstain from behaving like a negger, even in the direction of his hyperlocal God-Emperor.

“Mr. Brown, if you’ll excuse my insolent tongue, perhaps this doe-eyed ward would benefit from a pinch of backstory.” The room itself nearly dutch-tilts as all heads cock askew to stare at the outspoken Lord of Financials. “Why place a half-century of labor in the crossfire to wage a crusade against the day?” He smirks. “You must have a highly-personal reason for doing so.”

Robert Brown rises gracefully and steps to the other side of the room, gazing through the crisp, transparent glass at the Squishy’s assembly lines arranged across the factory floors below.

He reaches for a handmade wooden box that sits atop a Greco-Roman alabaster pedestal, steady hands emerging after the rummage with a faded computer printout. He clears his throat.

“Rob, I understand the irony of dispatching this message via email. Hopefully you won’t label me a hypocrite, our favorite insult as precocious lads. The inbound war games will be entirely technological. To participate in any sociocultural exercises will require a buy-in, and the price is too steep for my conscience to afford. I must fight this battle from the shade, and what better source than underground. If seeking escape from our collective embarrassment makes me a coward, then so be it. Please don’t look for me. I’m sorry about Anabel. God gives success. Love, Donnie.”

Expect tears from a man of his stature and you’ll be disappointed. Robert folds up the missive and returns it to the enshrined container, eyes dry like fabric in the sun.

Sven slices through the silence. “His only brother chose oblivion over obscurity, accelerating his demise instead of allowing the flesh to fade away into irrelevance, a weakling’s wager—”

“He’s not dead. We’ve communicated more recently, since this letter, but he demanded that I destroy every trace of the trail, each lick of evidence,” Robert interrupts.

“And what did he have to say for himself? Which grand justification did dear Donald invoke to excuse the abandonment of his post, the ejection from his battle station?”

Robert smiles warmly, presses together thumb and index finger, and draws a line invisible across his thin, pursed lips, sealing off the possibility of self-incrimination with a versatile little zipper.

“But tell us—who is Anabel?” Sven says with poisoned tongue.

“I was supposed to protect her!” Robert screams towards the empyrean realm.

Glass shatters and the lines of divination across his palm run red with blood, tributaries spanning the nine circles. John snaps into action, fetching a replacement cup, rat race autopilot; Robert politely waves him off and strides from the conference room to regain his composure.

Sven smiles through illuminating eyes and a quarter-inch curvature of the mouth, snake-like architect of his fellow man’s emotional turmoil. “Donald’s dispatch from the edge of capitulation was penned in response to this behavior.”

With a flourish of his remote hand, the boardroom lights dim, and surveillance footage swaps to a dated news bulletin on the far wall’s screen. A blonde bombshell whispers the words to some tragedy ‘til Sven cranks the volume.

“—her tale is unfortunately a familiar one, and her name might ring a bell—”

The hydration alarm sounds in flawless unison; John ignores, for once, attention glued to the slick talking head.

“—Anabel Brown, heiress to the beef-tallow throne of the Squishy’s corporation.”

Archival photographs replace the reporter’s visage, displaying a sweet doll of a teenage girl shyly grinning for the camera.

“Like many women of her generation, Anabel was exposed to nearly-sentient machines from a young age. Facing social pressure as she approached adulthood, Anabel became an early adopter of experimental new technologies, choosing to shack up with an unbranded prototype designed to offer creature comforts and old school lovin’ for the lonely . . .”

Paparazzi pictures, somehow both darkened by stray shadows and overexposed, show Anabel cuddling with an uncanny automated approximation of a human male.

“. . . much to the chagrin of her increasingly-reactionary father, Squishy’s CEO Robert Brown.”

An image of the man himself, dignified within a print advertisement sharing the good tidings of fresh food products.

“According to our inside sources, each additional patch to the computer’s programming sent their less-than-virtual romance careening towards volatility ‘til Anabel sunk into the throes of addiction, nothing but a stereotypical information junkie hooked on the flow of code across the digitized airwaves. Perhaps the elder Brown was right—”

The television signal fades as the aging scion returns to his company’s affairs, barking orders in clipped tones.

“We must prepare an official response to these ridiculous rioters, complainers by any other name. We need a gesture of goodwill for the community to deflect the forthcoming negative press; perhaps a week of free burgers sent to every children’s hospital in the state.”

The war room buzzes to life as John takes initiative and switches the monitor back to the view of protestors outside their stronghold. Robert’s momentum grinds to a halt when he sees the screen: a down ‘n’ out gal with a bad pink pixie cut holding provocative signage.

I LET ROBOTS FUCK ME RAW!

His jaw drops in abject horror.

“Oh my God . . . that’s my daughter.”