The Vestigial Heart Read online

  THE VESTIGIAL HEART

  A Novel of the Robot Age

  CARME TORRAS

  Translated by Josephine Swarbrick

  THE MIT PRESS    CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS    LONDON, ENGLAND

  © 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Originally published in Catalan as La mutació sentimental by Pagès Editors, © 2008. Winner of the X Manuel de Pedrolo Award.

  For additional reading materials and discussion questions, see https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vestigial-heart

  Epigraph from The Passions by Robert C. Solomon, © 1993. Reprinted with the permission of Hackett Publishing Company.

  The quotation on page 47 comes from Im Schatten Albert Einsteins: Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić (In the shadow of Albert Einstein: The tragic life of Mileva Einstein-Marić) by Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić (Bern and Stuttgart: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1983).

  This book was set in Sabon by Westchester Publishing Services. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Torras, Carme, author. | Swarbrick, Josephine, translator.

  Title: The vestigial heart : a novel of the robot age / Carme Torras ; translated by Josephine Swarbrick.

  Other titles: Mutació sentimental. English

  Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017038907 | ISBN 9780262037778 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Robotics--Fiction. | Emotions--Fiction. | Bioengineering--Fiction. | Memory--Fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PC3942.43.O763 M8813 2018 | DDC 849/.936--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038907

  “It is the relationships that we have constructed which in turn shape us.”

  —Robert C. Solomon, The Passions, 1977

  CONTENTS

  I—Robots, Massages, and an Adoption

  II—New Year’s Eves

  III—The Creativity Prosthesis

  IV—The Unexpected Event

  V—Transmission of Sentiment

  VI—The Key to Timeout

  Appendix

  I

  ROBOTS, MASSAGES, AND AN ADOPTION

  1

  ALPHA+

  7:10 a.m. – I observe Dr. Craft’s restless sleep. He is snoring. I move closer to the bed and connect the microphone to the medical channel. Are you reading the snores? Recording confirmed. I attach the report: he is lying on his left side, tonight he turned over twenty-nine times and got up twice to urinate, he had twelve episodes of apnea between thirty and fifty seconds each, now he maintains thirteen inhalations per minute and a regular pulse of sixty-two. I request approval to raise his dose of Rhinofor and end the communication.

  7:15 a.m. – Time to initiate the tactile alarm. I combine moving the duvet lightly with rubbing his cheeks and forehead. In the new sequence I correct what he did not like yesterday: I don’t even think about touching his nose, and insist more on the eyebrows, moving slowly down across the temples. He opens one eye, groans a little and rolls over to face the other way. I go round the bed and start the tactile sequence again while playing the melody, tailor-made for the Doctor, that I have downloaded from the central repository to stimulate his emotional reserves for the day.

  “Get off me, you confounded beast,” he bellows, giving me a shove that my joints have no problem absorbing. A good sign, he liked it. I must reinforce this sequence.

  7:20 a.m. – I repress the primary programming to offer him my arm to help him up. Every morning millions of ROBs all over the world make this gesture toward their PROPs, but I have to inhibit it. The Doctor is a rebel and I have to adapt myself to him. I have been built with a boosted learning capacity precisely because he is difficult. And he is the boss. Neither can I tell him that if he gets out of bed on the left-hand side, after only two paces he will be in the bathroom. I have to let him go all the way round. He knows this is the longest way, but “Why make things easy if you can do them the hard way?” he let fly at me one day. It is not logical. He says he likes the “re-creation” he gets out of things, and he pronounces it like that, really separating the “re.” I analyze everything he says, to adapt myself to him as much as I can, but the return is low. About the only thing I have learned so far is to inhibit my primary reactions.

  7:25 a.m. – I never go into the bathroom when he is in there. Another “no” I had to learn. But I connect to the toilet to receive the analysis. The first urination of the day is the most important. pH = 6, negative proteinuria, slight glycosuria. Attributable to last night’s excessive inebriation. Fecal analysis: microbial flora parasite-free, leucocytes within limits. I transmit: normal excretions, low-sugar diet recommended for today.

  DR. CRAFT

  The man sitting on the toilet looks at himself in the mirror and barks. My face is starting to look like a dog’s, he thinks, and barks again. Does that happen to all old people? Tonight, taking advantage of the face-to-face soirée, he will pay close attention to this. Good night, Mr. Bulldog; come on in friend Fox-Terrier, your husky is looking splendid this evening. Nice to meet you, yes, I’m Dr. Pit-Bull. Urrrggg. If he doesn’t tense up his face, everything hangs down: the bags under his eyes, his formerly fleshy cheeks, his jowls; by instinct he lowers his gaze, to look at his belly, the muscle-less skin on his thighs, his cock. Look at it, so inoffensive. And it got to be so despotic, the bastard. First always chasing women, and then, that bloody prostate, it didn’t let him live in peace. Getting old has its advantages: now it is he, and only he, who makes decisions, every hour, every second of the day.

  Alleviated, he gets off the toilet and stands up facing the mirror. He frowns and a few black hairs, long and untameable, shoot up, giving him a diabolic look that reconciles him with his physical appearance. Urrrggg. Quite an idea, that one about the dogs. Maybe we could even get a product out of it: “Youngster, want to see yourself thirty years from now? Turn on your ROBcam and stand in front of it.” Photographs of the future. One would just need to select a breed of dog based on the most characteristic traits of the face and morph the youngster’s face with that of the dog. This evening he’ll try it with Hug 4’Tune and Fi. Without any warning, he’ll project the images directly onto their mirrors. What a fright they’ll get when they suddenly see themselves looking so old.

  He lets himself fall backward into the immense bathtub and the sponge net catches him and rocks him like a baby. It doesn’t even occur to him that it could fail. Up and down. Down and up. The waves break against the ceramic walls creating lines of bubbles that burst against his body. The tickling makes him shudder but, once he gets used to it, his other senses are opened to the revitalizing fragrance of a sunny morning and the cheering melody that is still playing. Ebullient. He feels ebullient. Alpha+ has arranged everything to perfection. He would trust Alpha+ over and above his mother, if she were still alive. Or, it goes without saying, his daughter or his wife. The robot was already a good servant, but since it had the neuroaccelerator installed it is learning at a vertiginous speed, and in a few days has adapted to him like a tight glove.

  Like this water, which also molds itself around every part of my body, he thinks, as he moves his legs so that the warmth fills his most intimate nooks and crannies. A good choice of stimuli, that’s the secret to well-being. Let’s forget about self-help implants and other neuropsychological devices, we can’t change man or turn his brain upside down, we can’t modify even
the smallest reaction. Let’s accept that. The only way forward is to control his surroundings, control what he feels through the stimuli he receives. A key idea, but when he presented it as the leitmotif of the new line of robots, no one gave it a bit’s worth of notice. Too simple, they said. How short-sighted! One must understand man, each man, in order to be able to activate the right resources at the right time. This was the difficult part: they couldn’t tailor-make a ROB for everyone; they had to come up with a generic ROB that was highly adaptable and, most important of all, one that could achieve a very fast adaptation. If it took one week for a ROB to work out how to wake up its PROP or how much sugar to put in his coffee, the whole idea would go down the drain. But he was sure: at CraftER they had the expertise to do it. Their competition didn’t; that’s why he rubbed their noses in the idea. They couldn’t plagiarize it. The only thing that made him occasionally stumble was the speed, for a very long time it had escaped them … and now Alpha+ is the proof that he was right, the culmination of his idea.

  The sponge net draws back to the bottom of the bathtub, just as his body calls for him to perform some swimming strokes. He takes a deep breath and submerges himself; he exhales, outward, inhales, inward. The smell of eucalyptus fills his lungs and gives him the impression that he is moving forward more than ever with each push. He empties his mind, abandoning himself to the pure sensation of his own strength, gliding through the water.

  When he gets tired, he stretches out face up and lets himself float, and the net picks him up again, cradling him gently. If we could do the same thing with the mind … At its heart physiology is easy: trying out stimuli and measuring reactions, that’s all. We could even control feelings in this way: “Hey, Hug, go and see Fi, her emotional state has just become compatible with yours.” If it weren’t for the fact that we can’t play with person-stimulus so frivolously, because … who would be given priority? With compatible states, mutually stimulating, there wouldn’t be any problems. Nor with incompatible ones. But what would we do when one person wants it and the other doesn’t; when for one it’s harmful and for the other … Like the blood groups: O- people, universal donors, ultimate altruists, can only receive blood from those of the same blood group. At least at the level of blood everything is organized into groups, something that’s unimaginable for feelings, an inextricable network of attractions and rejections. Even so, it would be good to have a panel with an LED for every person you know. If the light is on, their emotional state is compatible with yours; if not, it would be better not to get too close. Each person could make their own choice, on site … or it could be done centrally, to guarantee the maximum global satisfaction. What an invention, the electronic matchmaker.

  He had been so absorbed in his brilliant reflection, and all of a sudden he’s wondering whether it might be nonsense. His thoughts had never embarrassed him before, but now it happens often. As he gets older, he’s becoming like other people, clichéd and banal, that’s how his mind will end up. He’s still capable of following anyone’s logical reasoning, but when he lets his imagination fly he gets caught up in developing theories of the most ordinary nature. Over the years, his brain has lost its originality. And that used to be his strong point, what catapulted him above the run-of-the-mill engineers.

  So many prostheses for everything nowadays, and there’s not even one for his handicap. Damn the LED contact panels! What he wants is a creativity prosthesis. Or an assistant, it doesn’t matter; something that would stimulate him to think differently, that would warn him when he started down well-worn paths and would show him the promising forks in the road, those susceptible to innovation. Now the net has placed him on the massager at the side of the bathtub and a series of cushioned rolls and strategically placed heat sources are drying and massaging him from head to toe. A brain massage, that’s what he needs.

  2

  LU

  Lu’s had a hard time finding clothes like the ones they wore at the start of the twenty-first century. Luckily for her the fashion was revived only fifty years ago, because on this point the psychologist was categorical: it was absolutely essential that she dressed like that so as not to shock the little girl. With some difficulty she pulls on a pair of blue trousers so hard and rough that she shudders, and an off-white t-shirt that makes her wince with disgust. She couldn’t find leather shoes, and hoped the girl wouldn’t notice. She spies herself in the mirror out of the corner of her eye, but tries not to look too closely, and the image of her grandmother smashes into her retina. Today she does bear a resemblance to those old photos, void of depth. She’d hated them so much as a child, but the old woman insisted on looking at them on her relic of a computer. Look sweetie, we’re so alike, can’t you see? But Lu was horrified by the black-rimmed eyes, the sagging cheeks, and, above all, those tight trousers that opened up like a glass onto a bloated belly without any trace of waist.

  Not even remotely, Grandma, we don’t even look alike when we’re dressed in the same old rags. She carries on looking at herself as she turns on her toes, and thinks that the passive gymnastics and massages have done a megabyte’s worth of good! Thanks to ROBul, her prominent hips taper into a model’s waist. But how will she get by now? How will she survive without her robot? She’s proud of herself for being able to accept such a great sacrifice. They’ve assured her that it will only be a couple of weeks, until Celia feels secure in her new lifestyle. Celia. She stares at the bedroom door and tries to imagine her there, first wary, not daring to look at her, and then running toward her. Throwing out her arms and letting herself be drawn in close. In a new gesture that she enjoys, Lu hugs herself, with her eyes tightly closed, and she can almost feel the girl’s breath against her stomach.

  She slowly drops into the chair beside the dressing table and imagines how lovely it will be to comb that beautiful hair, so straight, and longer than she’s ever seen. The doctors said that it would take a good three years for it to fall out, but no matter how much she insisted on the subject she couldn’t get a clear answer on why the hair loss couldn’t be avoided. They only came up with excuses like oh well, it’s all down to environmental damage causing genetic mutation, oh, in the last few decades the evergreen trees have become extinct as well. They go on and on with their big words just so they don’t have to admit that they’re completely ignorant, those know-it-alls, always so full of themselves. And then that old joke that bald people are delighted every time autumn comes around and all our hair falls out … girls’ too, one of the doctors had added, contemplating the eight months’ worth of hair on her head. Morons. She’ll take it upon herself to look for a decent specialist and everyone will be jealous of her Celia. Starting with that idiot Fi, for all that she labeled adoption frivolous and inhumane, for all those ironic comments about how now that the third world has been eliminated we have to import kids from the previous century, even she will want to be in Lu’s position.

  She pulls her white-blonde hair back off her face, and goes about putting her makeup on. So many years have passed since she last did it herself that the products have evolved a gigabyte. Now they’re intelligent, and can both improve your mood or hide it, while simulating the polar opposite of it. It’s important not to make any mistakes, because after a certain amount of time the simulation can impose itself and end up completely changing the situation. Luckily, ROBul has carefully prepared it all and there are labels and instructions for everything. She selects several options from the dressing table panel. Partenaire: daughter; empathy: high; situation: welcome; mood: cheerful; emotion: tenderness. There’s no need to fill in the date, time or climate, because the program detects them automatically. So she presses the button indicated by the arrow, and the chosen concoctions for face, eyes and eyelashes gently place themselves on the table. She realizes straight away that she no longer has the knack for putting her own makeup on and the whole process drives her mad, but it’s just the price she has to pay, and it’ll only be for two weeks. Once she finishes, a youthful and matern
al Lu smiles back at her from the mirror. “Sertuum—we work miracles,” the fleeting ad reminds her, superimposed under her face like a necklace.

  On the way out Lu goes to cover herself with her anti-UVA hood as usual, but the contrast with her current attire makes her stop for a moment, as if the psychologist had caught her in the act. An old-fashioned coat would be enough to combat this Nordic cold, it must be more or less the same as before, but her skin and hair would be damaged by all the radiation. She can’t expose it. Anyway, there’s no way the little girl will see the cover up, it will be left in the decontamination chamber at the entrance. That was the only thing she liked about the clinic, that glassy cabin, capable of delicately removing her protective clothing, without any effort on her part, and promptly returning it to her on the way out. She had seen similar cabins in other medical centers and health clubs, but none were as elegant as this one. That was where the up-to-date technology ended, at least at the visible level, because the rest of the clinic was to all appearances megabytes old, so as not to scare the kids, as they hurried to tell her. It takes some balls to justify deficient service with such a puerile excuse. The same excuse that, according to them, meant they had to have the exclusive clinic in a deserted area on the outskirts. As if the children would be traumatized if they saw some iron and concrete through the window, and, sure, a few aero’cars, but they’ll see plenty once they leave anyway.

  At this rate it’ll be her that won’t make it out the door. She’s never had to worry about preparing the house for her return and, because of this lack of expertise, she is stuck in front of the control panel. She misses ROBul more than she’d thought. Even though she’s followed his instructions bit by bit, she gets the impression that something isn’t quite right. But there’s no time to hang around, the last thing she needs is for the little girl to wake up without her there. She would be refused the adoption, they were very clear about that: to establish a good filial connection the first thing the girl sees must be her new mother’s face. Hopefully it will work. Celia, Celia, Celia, the name beats strongly through her, in her head, neck, everywhere. She doesn’t like the name, but for now she’s not allowed to change it.