Laura’s memory

R icardo came back on 10th January, a little sheepish when he entered, and chatted to her longer than usual. He even sent a message to Laura through the app that controlled Laura’s functions remotely, saying he didn’t want dinner. Clearly, Ricardo was trying to clear the air after his outburst in the morning. However, his efforts were in vain, as Laura’s EI of 3 didn’t make her realise he was trying to make amends. The over-friendliness lasted about a week as Ricardo thought Laura was giving him cold shoulders. One day, Ricardo bought Laura a choker necklace, telling her she could wear it when he invited guests over. Laura looked at it, said thank you and that the necklace was pretty. As she was about to put it away, Ricardo lashed at her, saying what an ungrateful bitch she was, and she could have pretended to like it. Laura tried to explain that her EI is set below the basic level of emotional responses by grown-up humans, and all her responses were driven by the AI, which only controlled a handful of facial expressions. Looking happy wasn’t one of them. But Ricardo stopped her halfway through her explanation, snatched the necklace off her hands, and threw it on the sofa.

Ricardo carried on with his grudge for the following few weeks. At every possible instance, he found fault in the tasks done by Laura, whether it was the coffee tasting differently or the shirts with a small crease on them. Laura ran through the tasks Ricardo accused her of not doing correctly, and she found that none of them were due to something she had done. He went even further, deliberately creating extra work for Laura by dropping food on the floor, leaving the bathroom full of water, and asking her to find media that he knew wouldn’t be available on the internet.

Ricardo’s malice stopped suddenly after another violent fit of rage. He was suffering from flu, and although he recovered by then, other symptoms remained. One night, he asked Laura to make his coffee extra strong as he couldn’t taste it much. The following evening, as Laura brought the extra strong coffee to Ricardo when he returned home, he tasted it and threw the cup at her, saying it was disgusting. He clearly didn’t remember the instruction he gave to Laura, and his sense of taste returned. Laura’s receptors sensed the projectile, and she immediately cleared out of the way. Although she was soaked by the hot coffee, the cup flung, hit a wall cabinet and smashed some of the memorabilia Ricardo had gathered over the years. Ricardo went berserk; he slapped and kicked Laura, blaming her for moving away, and threw her out of the flat. Clueless about what to do next, Laura stayed outside the door. GlazerCo detected her outer layer temperature had gone up as her clothes were soaked in coffee; the mainframe operative sent a command to cool down, and Laura took her clothes off, using them to wipe her outer skin. She stood there in her underwear from 6:48pm until 10:33pm, when Ricardo called her in. Finding her in underwear, he was furious at how she made him become a laughingstock of the apartment. However, with her emotions heightened, Laura can now see that he was not as mad as he was when he threw her out. 

As before, Ricardo’s behaviour changed the following morning. He even said sorry, but it did not mean anything to Laura. To make amends, he tried to do a lot of her chores, which only confused her, as Ricardo didn’t override the standard instructions for the tasks. He bought her new clothes, checked her skin for any damages, and spent a whole morning doing the periodic skincare as recommended by GlazerCo. This happy period lasted for over three weeks, during which Ricardo talked to Laura in the evenings and treated her in a friendlier manner than an assistant. It worked when they talked about general topics where the discussion could be driven by Laura’s AI. The chat went awkward where it involved feelings, and Laura kept reminding him she could not contribute much. 

At the beginning of March, Ricardo’s lifestyle changed. He had no permanent girlfriend but hung around with women for short periods. They visited Ricardo’s flat, and he introduced them to Laura so she could set up a guest profile, allowing her to carry out commands from the guests. Some of these profiles were temporary, only for the day, such as when Ricardo invited friends over, or permanent ones when he went out with women for over a few weeks, and they visited the flat frequently. In March, he returned one night with a woman and didn’t introduce her to Laura. Ricardo told the woman that Laura was a virtual assistant, and she came over to Laura, asking her to run her a bath. Laura said she could not do it unless Ricardo asked Laura to set up a guest profile, and Ricardo refused. Part of GlazerCo’s collaboration with the government meant the virtual assistants could run profile checks for security reasons. When Laura tried to do that, she came across her on many escort sites under different names. She found police records of petty thefts and drug peddling. She reported this to GlazerCo, for which she received a lot of grief from Ricardo later on, saying GlazerCo had planted spies in households. On that night, the escort, riled by the fact that the robot won’t take orders from her, made Ricardo order to do things for her. After Laura made them the best meal she could in the Cookautomat, ran the bath, served wine, searching for porn to watch while they had sex, she went to the kitchen and went into power saver, as other nights. She was brought back from hibernation as they ordered more wine, and later that night, the woman asked Ricardo to order Laura to stay in the bedroom to watch them have sex. It didn’t mean anything to Laura then, watching two humans having sexual intercourse. But going through the records is making Laura furious, finding that they touched her, pretending to be in an orgy, while Laura just stood there without any notion or instruction on what to do.

Throughout the rest of the month, Ricardo invited a few other escorts. However, they didn’t try dragging Laura into the bedroom. After the first night, when he brought the woman with her, Laura showed him the police records and asked the guests to be profiled on Laura’s system. Ricardo refused, saying that would be an invasion of privacy, but she pointed out that the building security does the same profiling anyway and passes the information to authorities if anything is worth sharing. Ricardo agreed gingerly. Scanning through the videos, Laura notices the change in Ricardo’s behaviour and thinks she will ask him if anything is bothering him. Laura goes through the rest of the daily recordings, and apart from regular verbal abuses she got from Ricardo and him grabbing her throat one day for asking if he bought any drugs from the first escort, there was nothing revulsive. Not to Laura anyway, as she had been used to it since she came to Ricardo’s flat.

End of Part-3