And really, Master did so little when alive that being dead should barely make a ripple in his schedule…
Adrian Tchaikovsky has two books nominated in the Hugo’s Best Novel category this year, and his second book is about as different from the first as you can get. Service Model is an epic quest for meaning and purpose by a main character who repeatedly confirms that he isn’t capable of actually wanting anything, set during an apocalypse that a surprising number of people didn’t even realize was happening.
Charles is a top-of-the-line valet robot, owned by a wealthy curmudgeon who lives alone and never goes anywhere. The daily schedule is hopelessly out of date (setting out fresh clothes for someone who rarely gets dressed, checking the schedule for a lady of the house who hasn’t existed for years), so Charles is used to endlessly repeating tasks that simply don’t apply anymore. He’s so used to it, in fact, that it takes a surprising amount of time for him to realize that the stains he’s leaving on Master’s car and clothes and tea set are due to the fact that Master is dead. And also Charles killed him.
The first several chapters are a Monty Python-esq comedy of errors as Charles attempts to complete his task list with a Master who has to be sewn into his clothes and hauled to the dining room to keep the increasingly perturbed computer that runs the manor from deciding that Charles’s services are no longer needed. Things get even more ridiculous when the police and the doctor are called, both of which turn out to be robots because their human counterparts aren’t available. None of the robots are able to deviate from their task list, so what you get is the strangest “I’ve called you all here today” scene where every robot keeps following the letter of the law over a cliff and down to the center of the Earth. Metaphorically, at least.
The upshot is that Charles is stripped of everything, including his designation, and exiled from the manor. He sets off as “Uncharles” to discover a) the cause of the unfortunate incident with his Master, and b) an employer who needs an only-slightly imperfect valet.
He was, he considered, very employable. He was used to providing very high levels of service coupled with very low, albeit nonzero, level of murder.
There are probably as many methods of portraying robot “emotions” as there are writers. In Uncharles’s case (and by extension all robots) the method here is deny, deny deny. Robots don’t have “wants”, or “desires”, or “feelings” of any kind. Robots have tasks lists, and the irresistible command to complete those task lists. So it’s purely anthropomorphism to, say, see Uncharles’s attempts to create just one more task to complete, and another after that, and another after that, as “desperation”. Or his unwillingness to talk about or even think too closely about his former Master’s death as “guilt” or “PTSD”. Or to see all of the many, many robots out there who are waiting at closed gates until the grass grows over their feet, or standing in an endless line at Diagnostics because there’s no human to tell the next robot in line to come in, or circling the same delivery route over and over, waiting for an “all done” confirmation that will never arrive as “trapped in a unique kind of hell”.
If it sounds like civilization has gotten a little…unsettled, you’d be right. The scope of the disaster widens, and escalates, the further Uncharles travels from the manor. This is not a Mad Max style of apocalypse, or a Terminator one, or even the robots from the Matrix who gained sentience and started a war with the humans who tried to prevent their robot utopia. This is a world where humans – with a few exceptions – are just gone, and the robots are left alive to follow their programming. Even if that programming no longer makes sense. Even if the attempts to make sense result in robots being fed into the robotic equivalent of a meat grinder. The claim that “robots don’t have emotions” has a tough time holding up against the bombardment of wireless communications that Uncharles gets from robots who can only pathetically transmit their broken-down commands as they’re being led to the slaughter.
A spidery maintenance unit was next in line. It attempted to link to Uncharles but its communications were defective and the only thing that came through was static. It sounded like screaming.
It’s fascinating to watch as Uncharles is forced to assemble his own motivations bit by bit from leftover task lists and robotic protocols. He’s helped along the way by a hopelessly defective robot named The Wonk, who’s convinced that Uncharles has become sentient, or at least has enough self-preservation that maybe he could stop marching blithely into the next death trap, Uncharles. His endless patience and the Wonk’s sarcastic fanaticism are both pretty hilarious, and that’s contrasted with some impressively nightmarish images and hard-to-describe scenes, like the most touching interaction between a robot and a robotic door-opener, ever. The two of them are constantly having to deal with the latest example of robotic dystopia, either by running for their lives, or by Uncharles having to thread the needle of rules and commands and actual reality, because a genie deciding to give you exactly what you wished for is nothing compared to a robot who can figure out how to exploit a loophole.
So what you get in this book is the strangest Hero’s Journey possible. It’s an Odyssey with the oddest Odysseus jumping from community to community to fulfill his quest. But instead of Lotus eaters and a cyclops, you get variations on what happens when robots are stuck endlessly fulfilling a command long after the command actually means anything. Especially when the original command started out as malicious, or greedy, or focused on “preserving” something just for the sake of preserving, or didn’t make a lick of sense to start out with because humans, am I right? It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the apocalypse with robots involved is entirely the fault of the humans who made them. But the glimmer of hope is that, by the same argument, humans can get a tiny bit of the credit when a robot manages to make things better.