The Less Interesting TimesWhat if Tomorrow Exists?

2008/11/09 The Modern Ronin: Perverse

Every human being comes, at one time or another, to a point where he says: “That there is it. That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. If I live until forever runs out, I’ll never catch a glimpse of something more gut-wrenching than this.” Most of those people will turn back and be right in their assumption but some push on and find that point again, and again and again. They’ll find that there is no end to human perversity.
I mean, if you go to all the wrong places you can find anything from people fucking horses or the other way around to little girls forced to give it to their daddies in the rear. If you can think about it, someone probably already digitized and uploaded it. If you’re unlucky, you might also find a RealSense recording some really sick bastard made.
When I saw her, in the back of that warehouse, riding that chained up man like he was her sweet 16 birthday pony and she was a jack hammer on full auto, I knew I’ve reached one of my points. I probably had to be front row and center in a necro-pedophiliac convention to top that scar on the visual cortex.
It wasn’t that out of the ordinary to see a man and a woman enjoying some rough sex. But the added info behind the job really turned that nausea dial all the way up to 12. She wasn’t really a woman but a remote controlled robot, he wasn’t consenting and those weren’t screams of pleasure.

The droid was not a new invention. They were used for dangerous materials handling and hot zone clean ups for years. But only recently they have been made much more life like and adapted for other uses such as highly dangerous movie stunts and other dirty deals. This is the first one I saw in private hands. Must have cost a fortune.
When Iris said she was ready, I moved. I ceased to be a shadow, a fly on the wall, and turned into the harbinger of doom, the bringer of the end.
“Don’t move,” I said and pressed my gun to the side of her head. The jerkiness stopped. The man was trying to catch his breath and utter thank yous at the same time.
“You know this won’t kill me,” She said in a tried and tested voice that sounded smooth as silk.
“If,” I stressed, dragging that pause, “You could log out.”
She looked at me with a startled look and then jerked slightly but nothing else happened.
“What did you do?” She asked, angrier now.
That second or two of preoccupation was all Iris needed to close a feedback loop in the system and nullify that emergency exit function. The control mechanism was now locked at the other end and the eject button was under Iris’ finger. Of course, critical trauma would circumvent every other safety and quit the session, anything and everything to prevent brain trauma. But I wasn’t going there. Not yet.
“Wasn’t me,” I said, smiling. And before she could think of anything else, I pulled the knife from my sleeve and jammed it in the back of her neck at angle to cut the neuro pathways but not kill power conductivity. She crumpled to the floor, her face looking up at him in horror. Iris said this should be just below the system’s tolerance level. It seemed to have worked.
“Now, that was a nice trick, wouldn’t you say?” I said, holstering my weapon. “Now, let’s go and meet your maker. Or something like that.” I took her hand and dragged her out of the warehouse, the man still yelling after me to release him.

I couldn’t bring her home on my bike so Iris let me drive her van. Up until now I’ve only ridden the Ghost but the controls were basically the same. Um, well… no, they weren’t. But it seemed to be one of those things again, one of those things I knew but didn’t know I knew until I actually did it. That’s the tricky part with having a swiss-cheesed memory.
The bot made no fuss on the way over to the manor. She couldn’t do much other than talk and yell and accuse and I took care of that with a rag I found in one corner. It didn’t look too dirty but I suppose it would make no difference.
When I arrived at the estate, Iris was already working the software. She avoided plugging in on this one. I suppose it would be too creepy to contemplate. Jacking into this kind of system, it just felt wrong. Even describing it sounded weird.
The room we were in was some kind of old library. Or maybe it just used to be one. The place was well taken care of but the shelves on half the wall have been taken down and replaced with the equipment needed to remote control the high-tech gizmo I brought with me. The top half was the communications array. Since these things only came in one-size-fits-all-ranges style, it was supposed to be able to radio out to the outmost spaces and be able to sustain a stand-alone satellite uplink. The bottom half was the signals processor and the control mechanism. The signal processor being a computer of vast proportion that translated human nerve signals to machine readable code, and the other way around, and regulated the transfer for outbursts; and the control mechanism being the containment capsule into which the operator inserted himself to interact with the human-adapted controls.
I dragged the body in and laid it on the floor near the machine. Iris stood over the outside interface, looking at a screen and hacking away at the console. The stool was right next to her but she seemed to ignore it, shifting her gaze from the console to her own tablet book. She took a sort of key from her coat pocket and slid it into a slot on the machine, then she turned around.
“Info’s downloading. Is this it?” nodding her head towards the prone robot on the floor.
“This is it,” I said and stuffed my hands in my pockets.
Iris insisted on saying ‘it’ ever since we accepted the job. The robot wasn’t really suited for gender definitions and the person controlling it didn’t suit Iris’ definition of a human-being. We both looked over to the capsule housing the one behind the whole affair. That was what made the whole thing so bizarre.
He was a middle-aged man with a tidy haircut and a well trimmed mustache. He was wearing the interface suit with all the jacks and sensors and his bath robe was hanging on the side of the chamber. His eyes were closed. We both looked at the robot. She would pass for human in almost every respect, dressed in the finest hooker-wear. She looked up at them with wide eyes and trepidation.
Iris’ tablet beeped and she turned around, scooping it off the console and taking her little memory key out of the slot. Then we both just walked out the front door.

At the planning stage, she already told me what would happen next. Her interruption couldn’t override the basic emergency protocols even if she wanted too. When the machine will detect its operator has severely depleted sugar levels or his brain waves starting to stumble, it’ll disconnect him.
The virus she planted in the system will slowly eat out its insides with a ferocity that can only be outmatched by actually scorching the circuits themselves and then the control program will activate a different emergency ejection protocol to prevent data corruption from shutting down the operator’s physiological functions.
The machine will be a two ton paperweight, the robot will be a nice display window model and the operator will be alive but still a pervert.

Posted in From the Writing Desk by Eran with 12 comments.