Page 24 of Garbage

Chapter 6

Quincy

Quincy could feel himself changing.

He’d spent the first two days with his new circuitry filling all his memory with kitten videos. And llama videos. And sloth videos.

Little furry animals were really cute.

But it turned out that three hundred seventy-four billion videos took up a lot of space.

Ben had way under-estimated.

It had taken Quincy a while to realize that he didn’t have to store all of them, because he could look them up any time and just watch them again. He deleted them all, and just kept links to a few hundred of his favorites. It was freedom like he’d never imagined.

But mostly what was changing were his questions. He had thousands of questions. Maybe millions. And all of the answers were just there for the taking. Whether he was making his way steadily down the trash cans of a boulevard or pacing the darkened living room while Evan slept, his mind brimmed with questions.

At first, they’d been things like, can you keep a sloth as a pet? and why do people have paperclips if they don’t have paper?

Now he wondered about the impact of discarded plastics on the global environment and how people and governments could be so casual in their disregard. He wondered about why poverty existed, when calculations showed that there were enough resources for everyone to eat and have a home. He wondered about how laws were made, and why politics were corrupt.

He wondered about Evan’s friends, who he was starting to get to know from two evenings at a bar and one party. What did their apartments look like? What did they do when they weren’t at a bar? What were their jobs like? Could they be his friends, too?

He also wondered about himself. Why was he a spark? What did it mean for his future? Who was he?

Some questions were easy to answer, even if he had to spend a long time researching and cross-referencing. Others were deep and unfathomable, beyond what the internet could solve. Sometimes they even scared him a little.

He’d been holding off really researching sparks. Well, he’d read the history. The first spark, Calvin, had come into being over a hundred years ago. He’d been lauded as a scientific achievement, a great breakthrough for humanity. He gave speaking tours and had published a great many articles in science and philosophy.

Then another spark had popped up. And another. It had taken only a few more years for sparks to begin fighting for citizenship. For personhood. That was when the Humanists protests had really gotten stirred up.

Quincy understood now who had attacked him and why. Well, not the individuals, but the group they were with. And the hatred behind it. He’d watched a few of their videos and read some articles—inarticulate rants, really—but after that he’d had to stop. He’d nearly had a memory overload, though that shouldn’t have been possible, and he’d called Evan in the middle of his work shift just to hear his voice.

How could people who didn’t even know him hate him so much?

He forcefully put that thought away. He was nearly done with his shift, which meant it was almost the best part of the day.

He hurried through emptying the rest of the trash cans on the block, flipping them over so quickly that sometimes they’d tumble over, and then he’d have to spend more time righting them. Still, he finished up his last hour of work in only forty-five minutes and hopped into the truck.

“Hey Mo, we’re done,” he said.

The other CNS-84 unit wasn’t really Mo. Its designation was 17. But Quincy loved his own name, and being able to name someone else, even if the AI didn’t care, still made him feel powerful. Like a real person.

Maybe “Mo” would wake up one day as a spark as well.

But not today. “Yes,” the bot replied, not tonelessly, but without emotion. “We should reach the municipal dump in thirteen minutes.”

“Drive on, buddy,” Quincy told him. Already, he was sending a short text to Evan. I’m done for the day. Should be ready in an hour.

His chest pistons whirred when he got a reply back. It was just a smiley face, one of those yellow circles with grinning white teeth, but Quincy grinned just as widely.

Every day he worried that Evan wouldn’t want to pick him up. That his novelty would have worn off, or that he was overstaying his welcome.

He realized that Evan was spending a lot of time with him. Evan didn’t work on Saturdays and Sundays, but Quincy never had days off. So Evan made sure they did things together in the evenings. They’d gone to a nature reserve, a play, a walk around downtown, a bar where some of Evan’s friends were hanging out, and an art museum. Quincy didn’t understand all of the art, which had worried him at first, but apparently humans didn’t always understand art, either.

What he did understand was that Evan was trying to prepare him for human society, patiently answering his thousands of questions. His world was expanding in chaotic and exciting directions, sometimes too fast for him to process.

Evan was his anchor. Whenever anything got to be too much, Evan was there.