Hideout for Runaway Robots

Hideout was inspired by Professor Michio Okada’s Weak Robots: robots that have relationality, not functionality, at the heart of their design. We are endeared by Okada’s robots; they prompt us to behave in ways that are kinder and gentler.

"In my vignettes, I hope to lift the reader outside our anthropocentric perspective by exploring the interiority of four misfit robots. The runaway robots in Hideout all break free of their original designs. I hope that, in their quiet optimism, KiMo, Rii3, DAWEI and Callisto add to the question at the core of FRIEND: how can we design and relate to robots in a way that expands, rather than diminishes, us as human beings?” — Grace Chan

KiMo (Kian + Moto)

As always, KiMo rises before dawn, voices and memories swirling in their head. Watching a pale pink sun rise through cloudy streamers, KiMo brews a flask of hot oolong tea and takes it out to the workshop abutting the bungalow. A coastal wind blusters through the workshop’s open sides. The enormous bench, overflowing with machines in various states of repair, takes up most of the space.

KiMo finds the grease bottle and oozes oil into their mechanical wrist. KiMo flexes the joint experimentally. Steel tendons scuttle through their tunnels with a little less friction. Sensory feedback buzzes into KiMo’s cortex.

<Take it easy, Ki. My arm isn’t so new anymore.>

“Feels better than last week, Mo.”

Nowadays, the soreness feels real. Five years ago, when they were still adjusting to the merge, the pain was just a series of data parcels fizzling into distant awareness. Back then, every moment was bloated, claustrophobic, constricted. It wasn’t easy suddenly being two people crammed into one body. But they’ve gradually found a symbiosis.

<HumanPlus have just released a budget line of prosthetic limbs that would fit us much better…>

“No way. I like yours,” comes the brisk reply.

Memories streak across their joined mind: four-year-old Kian opening his birthday present and powering up the bright purple robot for the first time; Moto comforting Kian after the other schoolkids teased him for his missing arm; ten-year-old Kian in hysterical tears as Pa sent Moto away in a steel box. There was a factory recall, Pa explained calmly. One of the Motos had a circuit failure, so they decided to discontinue the whole line. Pa always wore an emotionless expression; it was impossible to tell whether he was glad, sad, or furious.

Only Kian remembers running away from home at thirteen. Hiding out with other runaway tech-heads—mostly kids, like him. After a long hunt, hacking into company records and tracking disposal vehicle routes, he’d found his broken Moto in a scrapyard. After that came the terror and excitement of patching Moto’s network into his head, Moto’s arm onto his shoulder.

“Besides,” KiMo continues. “What kind of person just throws out the old and replaces it with the new? That’s not what we do. We fix, we mend, we adjust.”

KiMo gets to work repairing a customer’s broken microwave, listening to the noises of the bungalow’s other residents waking up. A cheerful racket as the Rii3 switch on the coffee machine and chatter to each other. Gentle strumming of the guitar as Callisto warms up her nimble fingers. DAWEI, charging straight through the workshop with only a grunt for greeting, heading out to the garden to pull weeds for hours.

They each have a different story, but they all came to the bungalow from the coastal village, along the secret path through the forest. KiMo had never intended for this to be a hideout for misfit robots, or even a home—they’d doubted they even knew the meaning of the word.

Mo’s voice pipes up, gentle and familiar.

<Maybe it’s something you keep making, Ki.>

“Keep making?”

<Keep mending, keep fixing. Home.>

Rii3

Every time a new resident comes to the home, or on the rare occasions that they receive a guest, the Rii3 brew coffee and tell the story of how they came to be here. “But you can’t even drink it!” more than one guest has exclaimed. Of course the Rii3 can’t drink the coffee—neither can most of the residents, except for KiMo—but the coffee is as much a vital part of the conversation as the meandering chit-chat that accompanies it.

It’s quite a remarkable thing to see. Despite their squat bodies and miniscule limbs, the Rii3 can brew all sorts of coffee: French press, pour-over, espresso machine. It takes them a long time to complete the task—circling one another, nudging utensils back and forth, catching items just before they fall—but somehow they manage it. The guest is inevitably drawn from watching to helping: they might grab a cappuccino cup teetering on the edge of the kitchen bench or plunge the coffee grounds just to appease the Rii3 squawking, “Time’s up! Time’s up!”

Working together in a marvelous synchrony, the three cuboid robots transfer the steaming drinks from the kitchen bench to a wooden serving tray, stack themselves into a tower to carry the tray to the living room, and, with a startling display of acrobatics, lower the tray onto the rattan coffee table. A wobble, a clatter, maybe a little spill—and coffee is served! “Drink, drink, before it gets cold!”

As a roasted caramel aroma swirls around the room, the Rii3 settle themselves on the colourful wool rug.

“We’re so lucky we’ve found a home here,” says one.

“Hidden from the corpos,” adds another.

“This place is shielded, you know?” chimes in the third. “KiMo’s tech is very smart.”

“We weren’t always so lucky,” says the first, or maybe the second.

“We were prototypes, did you know?”

“Yes, first of our kind. They paraded us in shops and showrooms.”

“We didn’t like it.”

“No,” one says, shaking its head sadly.

“After many shows, the boss took us home and put us on his shelf.”

“We tried to talk with each other, but he hated our voices,” says another, mournfully.

“We talked to him too—but he was boring.”

“He wanted to shut us up.”

“So he gave me to his nephew,” says the second, or maybe the third, in horrified tones.

“We were split up!” they wail in unison.

“We were lonely.”

“We ran away,” two of them explain, “and found our friend.”

“It was not easy,” says one, showing a scuff mark here, a dent there. “But we all got away.”

“We heard rumours of KiMo’s hideout.”

“Robots whisper to one another, you know.”

“We travelled a long way to get here.”

“From the city, through the countryside, into the forest…”

“Hitchhiking, even!”

“There are many kind travellers, just like you.”

Some guests ask questions and join in the conversation; others simply listen and sip their coffee. After a while the Rii3 will scurry to refill their cup, to offer a snack. Inevitably, the robots settle back onto the rug as though they have all the time in the world, turn three pairs of glowing eyes onto the newcomer and ask, “What about you? How did you come to be here today?”

DAWEI: Deployed Autonomous Weaponry, Espionage and Intelligence Systems

As the winter fog retreats into the trees, DAWEI acquires his next target and stalks towards it. His steel hands clamp around its soft, tender neck. He grasps. Wrenches. With a damp noise, the dandelion weed pulls free from the ground, a clump of soil clinging to its roots.

…deployed with the purpose of exerting kinetic force against a physical entity…

DAWEI tosses the weed onto the growing pile and flexes his stiff arms. He feels terrible. His metal skull rings like a beaten gong, and his treads creak more than the bungalow’s floorboards. The other residents try to accommodate for him by talking quietly in the mornings and being careful not to slam doors. But today, even the mellow noises of Callisto strumming her guitar, the Rii3 brewing coffee, and KiMo pattering in the workshop threaten to short-circuit him.

…to this end is able to identify, select or attack the target without the intervention of another agent…

Growling in frustration, DAWEI surveys the garden in a critical sweep. This patch he’s been working on is stripped bare. He’ll let the weeds dry out in the sun before carrying them to the disposal bin. He trundles along to where an explosion of thistle threatens to overwhelm the camellia bushes.

The heavy, repetitive movements keep the wolves at bay. Grasp, pull, throw. Grasp, pull, throw. At night, DAWEI tries as hard as he can not to power down. But sometimes he must charge his batteries, and it’s difficult not to drowse. That’s when the memories snap at his heels.

His first deployment, into combat, in contested territory. A blur of gunfire, movement, screams.

His second mission, a covert operation gone wrong. His friend, fragmenting into shards beside him.

His third, an ambush. A line of human figures on the horizon. DAWEI stalled. Why aren’t you firing? The humans were too small. There was a 67% chance those were not adults. Was that too low? Too high? DAWEI wrestled with his internal circuitry—and shut down.

He was sent to analytics, deemed too faulty to operate in the field, and decommissioned.

…a lethal system is a specific subset with the goal of exerting kinetic force against human beings…

DAWEI—Deployed Autonomous Weaponry, Espionage and Intelligence Systems—lifts his head from the weeds. For the first time in a long while, he notices the way the sunlight falls: a golden waterfall spilling through the cracks between grey clouds. A damp wind brings leaves and whispers swirling out of the nearby forest. The soil on his hands smells loamy. In the dirt by his treads, an earthworm pokes out, wriggles joyously in the fresh air, and then disappears underground. As he watches it go, a strange feeling blooms in his body.

This morning, he is nowhere else. He is just here.

Callisto

Callisto vividly remembers the moment the kid touched her on the shoulder with their purple mechanical arm and whispered four words in her ear.

A storm was blowing into shore. Callisto was huddled in a tumble of boulders, shielding her metal body from the rising gales and stinging sand. She’d been scavenging for a new battery that might fit her frame (her old battery had taken in damp after too many nights camping in the open), but the scrap piles had yielded no prize.

“Follow the trees east,” the kid murmured cryptically, and scampered off.

Stubbornly, Callisto had held out for a few days before following the kid’s directions. When she’d run away from the garbage-sorting facility, she’d known surviving wouldn’t be easy. She dragged herself three times a day to the charging stations at the market, but they were always hogged by robots with owners. She grew sick of arguing with those pretentious clods for a few measly hours of juice. Even she could only take being called a trash-muncher so many times.

At first Callisto got lost in the forest, but after a while she figured out how to see the way: subtle markings on the trees, a pattern that would be invisible to humans. The markings guided her through the thick underbrush to a hidden clearing, a rambling garden, a brown bungalow with a cluttered workshop.

Now that she’s made a home in KiMo’s hideout, Callisto still ventures down to the coastal village once or twice a month. She likes to sift through the market stalls and scrap piles, filling her wagon with odds and ends. Sometimes, she even likes to hang by the charging stations and talk back to those snobby clods (“You’re just a collection of parts to be repurposed!”). Once, she splurged on a second-hand guitar at a trash-and-treasure shop. The shopkeeper didn’t care that she was a robot; he even gifted her a spare set of strings.

During those tiresome days sorting garbage on a conveyer belt, Callisto had dreamed of such freedom. She’d dreamed of not having her supervisor’s voice barking incessantly in her head; of tramping through the wilderness with the wind caressing her face; of being allowed to rest.

More than anything, she imagined using her hands to make art.

Nowadays, Callisto sits in a patch of morning sunshine and practises chords on her guitar, listening to the Rii3 chattering in the kitchen. She isn’t very good at the guitar yet, but that’s not stopping her. She’s already working on an alt-rock album about her coming-of-age adventures.

In the afternoons, Callisto heads out to the patch of lawn between KiMo’s workshop and DAWEI’s garden. She sorts through her piles of scavenged treasures: sea-smoothed planks of wood, discarded plastic toys, rubber tyres, the metal carapaces of broken machines. With saw and screws and glue, drilling and welding and joining, Callisto fashions the waste into new creations. Her robot sculptures are larger-than-life and brimming with soul. Callisto doesn’t know it, but they are astonishing.

In the evenings, Callisto sits on a cushion, sometimes chatting lazily with the others, sometimes daydreaming. She’s heard stories of other robots making music, making art. One day, she muses, she’ll hold an exhibition of her sculptures. She’ll record her songs and release her debut album (“Trash-Muncher” might be a good title, after all). She might even have a concert!

But first, she wants to go back to the shore, find another runaway robot, and whisper in their ear, “Follow the trees east.”

Grace Chan is an award-winning speculative fiction writer. She writes about brains, minds, and space. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Every Version of You, is about staying in love after mind-uploading into virtual reality. It won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards People’s Choice Award, and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards.

Her short fiction has been published widely. Her stories have appeared in The Best Science Fiction of the Year and have been translated into Italian, Korean, Spanish, Polish, and German. Grace was born in Malaysia and lives in Melbourne. In her other life, she works as a psychiatrist.