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That British guy who wrote about some tragic young clones (Now a movie with Kiera Knightly and Carey Mulligan, called Never Let Me Go) has a new book out, worth the hardcover price, called Klara and the Sun. Klara is an Artificial Friend.
It was not his book that inspired my old Free Fall Friday piece, but rather, the Japanese anime about robots surviving after humans are few, called Yokahama Shopping Log or Cafe Alpha. It was shown with beautiful shots of silence and long grass. Japanese don’t need to fill silence. (I cringed when the Americans, unlike the British, added extra talking to their dubbing of the anime movie Secret World of Arrietty.)
If “men without women lose their purpose,” (Sixth Column) so do people without people, and robots without people.
One way to be sadly “without people” is to be an immigrant woman stuck at home. Well. A local woman has just won an award for 25 years of supporting fresh immigrants to happily get out of the house and mingle by doing volunteer work. …If you can’t volunteer, find a robot like Klara. She is built of neither heavy steel nor hard plastic, but light fabric.
prompt- to Marie (inspired by a young writer of that name who left Free Fall Fridays to go four time zones east)
To Marie:
That’s how I start this text, how old fashioned eh? Since you can see your name at the top. But hey, you’re an old fashioned robot.
I surely can’t say “Dear Marie,” for it is a strong social custom not to put “dear” with a robot. But why not? Don’t people put dear with the names of their dogs and cats? I swear society seems to put robot love in the shadows, along with prostitutes and drugs. But why? Because you can’t tax them all? Not if you buy your robots second hand, as I did.
I saw you at the velvet underground, that day, and as soon as I saw your eyes glowing indigo I knew you were the one for me.
If Josie lies around with her drugs, and I lie around with you, then how does that hurt society? Whose business is it but ours? Don’t I have the right to be happy, in my own way? Is the government that eager to increase the population that I have to give you up? Don’t my taxes already pay to subsidize other people’s babies, and those silly government meet-up affairs?
To you, Marie, I can only say that you have to stay away for a while. Stay in your cubbyhole and get a good recharging. Watch the soaps on the vids, see the “laugh out loud cats” on the web, hear all the amateur musicians on Ear-tube. We can’t be together just yet because I have frightful neighbours. Two days ago they stormed into Jack’s patio and dragged out his robot and smashed it in the street. People swarmed their drones around it, firing lasers at it. Then they lit the lubrication fluid on fire and danced around the flames.
I was too sick to watch. I just ran back into my house and booted up old frames of you and I at the beach that time you pretended to be my attendant and we sat together on a bench. Remember?
I am saving my money for a spa where they allow dogs and cats and robots and nobody judges. It is warmed by an active volcano. I am thinking we can end it all together, since you have obey circuits and I don’t care anymore.
…
…
Prompt- “with our compliments”
That’s what it said, on the watch they gave me. Inscribed in silver, on the back.
So I’m finished there, and on to a new adventure. And isn’t the world new?
In my day a watch was expensive, you didn’t give one frivolously, and you would pay for the needed man-hours to have it fixed. Now they don’t go tick, they have batteries and crystals and keep excruciatingly correct time—but people are as apt to throw them away as to fix them. How much character can there be in a beast of printed circuits and plastic? How much sentimentality? And how do you inscribe on plastic, anyways?
It said “with our compliments.” I was a volunteer in my free time. Work was no longer long hard hours. As a boy I worked until noon Saturday, but everybody else had two day weekends, even then. The work weeks would have got shorter still, but the barrier was human nature: people didn’t know what to do with themselves. (So they got a second job) Even though the work was so easy that the government was going to raise the age of retirement.
So I volunteer and get complimented.
…
…
Sean Crawford
Officially “middle aged,” because
“Not retired yet,”
in a harsh land,
August 2021
Footnote:
~It’s Japan that has government funded meet-ups, because, with postwar affluence, the birth rate is now below replacement numbers. (Meaning fewer toys for us tourists)
Japanese Elementary schools, which keep closing, were built to be converted into seniors centres. I guess the Japanese are already living in our future.
