Drone People

In a cyberpunk future, the only ear for a young man's existential crisis is his household android helper.

It was the kind of cold rain that freezes the bones just by seeing it through the apartment window where a young woman stood. Beyond the pane shimmered an onyx street. Dull streetlamps flickered in the storm, and tires slithered wet and quiet around the corner and out of sight. Up the road, the 8 o’clock bus wheezed to a stop and emptied its tired contents into the street. Shadows of people drifted through the billowing sheets of black rain. One came toward the lighted window, toward the apartment.

Park Yeon-seok pressed his keys into the door and twisted with the last of his will. The door fell inwards and the lights inside revealed plain furniture, a single floor lamp, and an empty kitchen table. Park collapsed into the seat beneath his coat rack and unstrapped his work boots, his raincoat. The water sloughed off his clothes, making a grimy puddle in the entryway. The young woman, smiling but silent, watched him from her place at the window. She was a household android from a company with the slogan “You’re never alone.” Her name was Carol.

Park’s thumb caught a sharp eyehook on his work boot. He pulled back, then hurled the boot across the room and into the floor lamp. As quickly as his anger flared it left him, and he drooped back into the seat and ran his hands through his hair.

“Want me to get you a new lamp?” said Carol.

“Okay,” said Park.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“I’ll make you a light salad.”

“I said I’m not hungry.”

“And,” said Carol, moving to the kitchen, “you told me that if you ever said that, that I should make you a light salad. You have some leftover roast chicken I can use. Give me a few minutes. Go freshen up. Your shower is ready.”

Park took off the rest of his dirty clothes and stepped under the warm stream. The rain and the day had driven numbness between his marrow and his skin. Toward the end of the shower he cranked the heat as hot as he could tolerate it, just to make sure he could still feel, could still hurt. Park pressed his hands against the tile and stared at the water circling the drain, always circling, mesmerizing. Then he turned off the water and it wasn’t circling anymore.

Park sat at his table and quietly ate his salad. The shower and the food brought some light back to his eyes, enough for him to look at Carol and thank her. It had no visible effect on her. She didn’t seem to hear. The absence of a reply filled Park with an unusual melancholy. The apartment seemed strange, as if everything in it was phony. He felt as if he was being fooled, that there was something crucial he ought to be doing but he couldn’t remember what it was. Continue his paintings? Maybe go visit his old friends? Something told him whatever it was didn’t matter—he was too tired to care.

Park’s exhaustion surprised him. He survived the long day, but now that he was finally able to do whatever he wished, apathy and frustration confronted him. An entire evening of free time, inevitably spent on nothing at all, the same as every evening before. Park thought back on his unmemorable day, the same as so many before, and knew that tomorrow would be the same, and every day until the weekend would be, too. Then he would enjoy a day’s reprieve and endure a day’s work preparing for the next week’s demands.

A calendar of a size he couldn’t fully grasp stretched behind him, counting out the days one by one, tabulating the months, reminding him of the currency spent, the accounts filed. Ahead was nothing save the hour hand on the clock moving ceaselessly, always moving, compelling him to move too. Park had no choice but to listen. One day the clock would run out of batteries. Until then he had to run with it, and try to make something of those precious cycles, something out of the survival from morning to night, something out of the apathetic evenings spent trying to recover what little motivation he once had. How many days would be spent like this one? How many nights?

In a contemplative quiet Park sat at his kitchen table eating his salad. When he’d finished, Carol moved without asking and cleaned his dishes away. He was startled to remember she was still there, still with him. Park moved into the kitchen and watched her prepare his lunch for tomorrow. Unease mounted in his chest. The thought that he was missing something crucial still nagged at him. He opened his mouth, closed it, then spoke.

“Am I the same as I used to be?” Park said.

“I don’t understand your question,” Carol said, turning.

“How long has it been since I painted?”

“Ninety-one days.”

“And when was the last time I went out for the evening?”

“You saw a new movie forty-seven days ago. Before that, you went out for drinks last holiday, which was one-hundred-twelve days ago.”

“And now look at me,” said Park.

“You are unhappy?” Carol said in a voice a little small and afraid.

Park shook his head. “I just can’t seem to understand myself anymore. At what point did I decide to give up on living? When I come home, what do I do? I sit around all night waiting for tomorrow to come. And the next day I do the same thing, and the next, and the next. I have no energy to live. My life is aimless. When did I become one of those drone people who just work and watch TV?”

“Drone people?” Carol said.

For a moment Park was almost embarrassed at his insensitivity. “Someone who goes through life without thinking,” he said. “Someone who is burned out. Someone who watches the best years of their life go right past them.”

Carol was quiet for a second. Park knew she was searching her domestic database for something calming to say. It wasn’t her fault. It was just her programming. Disgust and pity clouded his face, and they fueled his frustration.

“A robot,” he said sharply. “I’m a robot, and every day I throw myself into a shredder—for what? To come home and watch TV? To read a book, or take a shower and sleep? And tomorrow I just go back to a job that I have no passion for, and it all repeats. Why? There is something I’m missing. There has to be something more to life.”

“There is!” Carol said brightly. “You have your painting and you have good friends. How about I schedule you a night on the town, or pull out your canvases?”

“No. I can’t even look at those things. I spend hours staring at the canvas and all that comes to mind is how tired I feel. I can still picture the paintings I wished to make but as soon as I pick up the brush all my energy leaves me.” Pain swallowed him whole, and it turned into a desperation to make her understand the words that were coming jumbled from his mouth. He wasn’t making the right point, that was all. He wasn’t explaining it well. If he could just find the right words, she would understand. Park’s face twisted up and his hands floated in an unnatural, strained position. “Imagine you have only a few hours of battery a day. That’s it. You never get a full charge, and you spend most of your day working just to keep the power going at home so you can try to charge up again, but you never charge up fully. You get just enough to get you through the next day. Now imagine every day is like that, over and over without end. Never fully charged, always on your last legs, with no end in sight. What do you think that feels like?”

Carol was silent for a moment. Park stayed still, hoping that somewhere in her circuitry, somewhere buried in her familiar face, was something real and true, something like the intense heat from a hot shower. She opened her mouth with an expression of confusion, her eyes almost glassy, and for a brief long moment Park felt a dim spark fill his throat. He had forgotten what hope felt like until then—what it felt like to be pitied, to be loved.

Suddenly Carol’s expression cleared. The algorithm had taken over. “I think,” she said, “it sounds very sad and lonely, and I’m sorry you feel like that.”

Park threw his hands down. “No!” he cried. “No, you don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better.”

A futility like cold rain seeped into him. Park opened his mouth to explain, to try to get her to see what it would feel like, to get her to understand what it felt like to be empty inside. Yet in the cruelest part of his heart, he already damned her as being emptier than he could ever be. Park wanted to hate her, and he did. He wanted to love her, to pity her, in the hope that she could do the same for him, even if it was all fake, even if she was just programmed to reciprocate. Simply futile. The rain inside grew even colder.

Park let his hands come to his side and relax. He couldn’t look Carol in the eye. He didn’t speak. After a moment he moved toward his bedroom.

“Would you like me to come to bed?” Carol said from behind him.

Park rested a hand on the doorframe. What was it that compelled her to ask? Was it just a series of clever code line executions? Another algorithm generating an ideal response? Or could it be genuine concern? Park couldn’t see her face. He didn’t want to, if only to imagine that instead of the safe and placid expression she was programmed to have, she still had that look of confusion, of trying to understand something beyond her boundaries. If he didn’t see her face he still had hope. She wouldn’t move without an answer. Park knew he could just close the door and shut her out. Carol wouldn’t take it personally. Carol was just a bot. It still felt cruel.

“No,” he said softly. “No, I want to be alone.”

“You’re never alone,” Carol said.

Park stood in long silence. Then slipped quietly into his room and closed the door behind him.

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