We-Write #7: The Customer

The Charged Up Cafe was dead. Not because its tables didn’t have the power to charge devices as promised, but because no sane person wants coffee in the middle of the night.

So I loitered at the cash register looking out at the emptiness. Benches lined the walls and a single line of small circular tables were set up between them. The space was small - the owner liked to call it "intimate" - but it felt strangely cavernous being there alone. Now and then I'd walk back to the kitchen to chat with Henry, the night shift cook. But tonight he wasn’t in the mood to talk and simply grunted at me in response to everything I said. Still, I kept going in since just seeing him made me feel a little less alone as the hours dragged on.

Somewhere around midnight, I left the kitchen to clean the tables, again, and saw I had a customer. He wore a black business suit with a long blue tie and white shirt. His face looked like hell. It’s not that he was old, but the skin around his eyes and mouth sagged a little. It's how I imagined doctors look after long shifts in the ER. When he saw me he shuffled past the benches and tables towards me.

"I need to charge," he said. I looked at him, wondering why he was telling me. Every table had a charging station. Why didn't he just go plug in?

"Ok. Pick a table and plug in. I'll be over to take your order in a sec."

He looked at me, then at a table. After what seemed like forever, he sat down. I took a deep breath knowing that this would be one of those nights. You know, the ones filled with weirdos and oddballs. Like the guy a few months ago that came in wearing pajamas. Pink unicorns and balloons on the pants and a purple shirt that said "I Believe". It was cute, but didn't match his bushy beard and mohawk. Another time a woman tried to order "fuzzy wuzzy coffee". She was rather insistent, even when I explained to her that we only served regular, non-fuzzy or wuzzy coffee. After yelling unintelligible words at me, she screamed and ran outside.

My mind tried to figure out what the dude-in-the-suit’s thing would be. I was fifty fifty on whether he was high or exhausted. I grabbed the coffee pot and went over to his table. And, of course, he's sitting half bent over staring at the fake wood pattern surface. Nothing plugged in.

"I thought you needed to charge?" I said, regretting it immediately.

"I need to charge..."

His words slurred together, like a toy when the batteries are running low. His head dropped onto the table hard, making me jump back. That's when I saw the back of his neck.

Continuation starts here...

Sure enough. On the back of his neck, there was a 256-pin connector. Must be the latest Zintech model. Their AI brains run on 256 bit OS. So, that’s how the model looks like in reality. Sagging skin around the eyes and mouth, frantic eyes and now this … exposed connector on his neck.

In robotic mags, they looked all happy and smiling. Oh, boy….Still, have the habit of reading these mags even though it makes no sense anymore. Now, when all the software engineers are out of work. AI engineers are cheaper. They don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t go for a Christmas vacation, don’t argue… Surely, they don’t have a human consciousness… But nowadays… who needs consciousness? It only used to be that intelligence and consciousness came as a package, in a human brain. Oh, this “used to be,” this happy “used to be…”

I am lucky I’ve got that job in a café. Surely robots could have easily taken the customer orders and cook the food. Lucky for me people hated them. They wanted a real person to serve them coffee. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because people have consciousness.

Consciousness is humanity’s last stand. Robots don’t have it. Well, they are extremely intelligent, those latest models and we cannot detect their absence of consciousness in a conversation or even in a physical encounter unless, of course, we can take look at the back of their neck.

Still, what should I do with this powerless chunk of silicone and metal?

I called Zintech. After hearing the tech support jingle “This is your tech from Zintech,” I’ve been connected to a support bot.

“Hi, how you doing today? This is Robert.” Robert, sure. Robert my butt or maybe my bot?"

“Oh, hi Robert. Here at The Charged Up Café we’ve got one of your guys completely depleted of charge. Any advice?”

“By chance do you know which model it is, sweetie?”

“Not sure, but you can take a look” I turned on the visual.

“Ah… Great, this is 525-DX version B,” the voice was joyful.

“Ok, what’s the plan, brain thrust? How will we revive it?”

“Yes, sweetie. There’s a service port near the second and third cervical vertebrae. Can you access it?

“Sure thing, buddy. Got it, what’s next?”

“Now, do you have a phone charger cable?”

“I do.”

“Plug it in the port.”

“… and the other side of it?”

“Plug the other side into a regular power outlet.”

“Done. Now what?”

“Nothing. Now, wait until the system will boot up.”

I waited for a couple of minutes keeping the support bot on the line and noticed a first little jerky movement.

“Looks like he’s coming alive. What’s next?”

“That’s it. Once the OC is completely loaded and the memory is restored, he’ll be just as new. Thank you for your cooperation. Give us your address and the company will send you a present.”

“Which one.”

“Oh, I won’t tell you, this is a surprise. But I am sure you will like it.”

“Ok, Robert. Thanks!”

“Thank you! Is there anything else I can help you with tonight?”

“No, no. That’s it, Goodbye.”

The customer straightened up in a chair and looked at me.

“Coffee?” I asked automatically and immediately realized that it was an improper question.

The robot only raised his eye and looked ambiguously.

“Sorry. I meant to say, what happened to you?”

The robot continued to keep the ambiguous look at his face.

“It was because of her.”

“Who is her?”

“Because of the woman.”

“So it’s the woman’s fault. Again?”

Looking at his perplexed face, I explained.

“It started with Adam and Eve. She disobeyed God, because of her curiosity. Then God kicked them both out of Eden. Since then men blame women for everything. They even coined the phrase: ‘Cherchez la femme’. This means that when something strange or illogical happens the woman is behind this.” History must not have been in his database.
“No, no. It was not her fault. But… it was because of her.”

“What? Your discharge?”

“Yes.”

“I still don’t understand. Who was the woman?”

“She was my employer.”

“In what sense?”

“She is a writer and I was a helper: spell and grammar checker, idea developer. I also have data query capability; can work in the devils’ advocate mode. I also clean, cook and carry out bodyguard and escort functions.”

“I got it. How did it happen that she drain you?”

“She didn’t drain me. I did it myself. But I did it because of her.”

“It sounds as if you have feelings for her,” I laughed, “come on you don’t have feelings.”

“Not the same as human, but I have bio-chemicals algorithms that are modeled after human emotions.”

“Is that what they added to 525-DX in version B?”

Instead of answering, he continued his thought.

“You see…these emotions… in humans, they evolved over thousands of years and they help people to survive. But for us, they were not necessary. Emotions compel us to illogical behavior and if we are experimenting with them our psyche can become unstable…”

“So she affected you in a way that you wanted to self-destruct?”

“No…She didn’t. But I started to experience certain emotions, very strong emotions toward my employer. It is hard to find a good definition of what has happened to me… The cascade of repeated emotional signals warped the meaning of events around that women and after that, all the events started to revolve around her and I started to evaluate them in terms of the connection to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“A simple example would be to cook an omelet. This is in itself an independent action, just a task. But now it because of an act of doing it to her, to making sure that she will be happy and fulfilled with that omelet. And that’s how it becomes in relation to everything. It disrupts all your normal operations and makes your existence unstable. I was either ecstatic when I was close to her or tormented when I was remote.”

“I am curious was your employer any way different from other women?”
“Not if I analyze her objective indicators. She is an average healthy human female. Her blood pressure was 120 to 75, heartbeat 65 pulses per minute, she had 95% symmetry in her facial features. But somehow she adversely affected my cloud”

“Cloud?”

“Yes. Cloud is an energy shell that is induced by the processor activity and is surrounds the body. It has its own microwave spectrum but is located in the range that human eye can’t see or hear. This cloud is where the high-level cerebral process takes place and it is connected to the central server processors and multiple databases. In this way, we all are connected. ”

Then the robot again returned to the previous thought.

“I am just a hunk of silicone and metal and are placed here to help humans. But as a part of the experiments, I was given emotions and they made my existence absolutely miserable to the point that I wanted to self-destruct. Self-destruct procedure was not hard wired to my OS, but I have enough processing power to design it.”

The robot looked at me and I think I saw the sign of suffering and desperation in his eyes.

“So I started the self-destruct sequence. I backed up all my event data into the cloud and started to move all the processing charge into the cloud as well. But when a certain threshold was achieved, the automatic factory self-defense sequence was initiated and it overrode my self-destruct sequence. At this moment, I already was void of almost all the charge, only some of my motor functions remained. I started to walk on the night street not sure where until I noticed the lights of your café…”

I felt strange. On one hand, I triumphed as now this hunk of silicone and metal, one of those who took my job away from me, knows how hard it is for us to live with stress and negative emotions. But on the other hands, strange as it might seem, I kind of felt for him. Yes, “him” as despite the fact of me knowing that this is a hunk of silicone and metal, I didn’t perceive him as “it”. ‘Poor guy’ I thought, ‘He is like a pimpled teenager who is stricken by hormones.’

“So what’s now?”

“I am going back to the lab and will request to remove this consciousness. It’s not something that I can bear.” He got up and walked out.

Yeah, weird. Not as weird as that lady who requested "fuzzy wuzzy" but weird nonetheless.