The next day, Wendell rolls into my office and starts working right away. He’s found commercials of children playing games called Lite Brite and Shoots and Ladders and Hi Ho Cherry-O. The children in these commercials are very white and dimpled and mostly wear stripes, and they shout a lot. They are very, very happy children. My research involves childhood in the twentieth century which, even though it wasn’t that long ago, is difficult because so much was deleted or destroyed in fires and floods. I’ve done some interviews at old folks’ homes. I’ve done some memory scans. What’s confusing is that most of what Wendell is finding doesn’t necessarily collaborate with the memory scans.
It’s a story about a woman and her neurotic robot. I never thought about it before, but now I realize that Wendell is the perfect name for a neurotic robot.
Wendell is supposed to be helping our narrator with research for her dissertation, but he keeps refusing to work unless she performs certain acts on him first. No, silly, not those kinds of acts. Things like cutting him and leaving a mark. Tying him up and leaving him in a closet for an hour. Squeezing his throat hard. Sealing a plastic bag over his head.
It isn’t like our student doesn’t have other problems. Her husband works with those in the Home for the Disembodied (nobody dies, they just get uploaded), and has a virtual wife with whom he has virtual triplets, but as he told his real-life wife, he hardly ever has sex with his virtual wife any more. She then told him she doesn’t want to hear any more about his virtual family.
And in the meantime she’s trying to figure out how to reconcile all the happy children pictured on game boxes and in ads for toys with the information from old people who remember, and those who don’t but have had memory scans. Like fights over what happens when you land on Free Parking, whatever that is. And what is this Battleship game? This may be why her dissertation advisor tried to discourage her from researching toys and games. That, and because “who wants to be reminded of what you can’t get back?”
Hagenston could have just told us that our student is living in Crazytown and the future doesn’t make sense, but instead, she shows us, just like they tell you in Creative Writing 101. But she underlines it just a little to make us laugh a little more at the absurdity of it all.
This morning, Wendell isn’t in his corner. He’s not in the closet or the bathroom or behind the laundry room door, or in my office, so that means there’s only one place left to look, and sure enough there he is in the bedroom. He’s standing about a foot from my husband, who is sitting at his workstation, the top half of his body swallowed by the VR unit. He’s lost in his disembodied world, counseling newbies, leading discussions, giving tennis lessons, coaching the triplets, and hardly ever having sex with his actress wife.
“I found some information about battleship, “ Wendell says. He still has the bag on his head. I feel like everyone is underwater but me.
Margaret Atwood said a lot about the yin-yang relationship between utopia and dystopia: “within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it existed before the bad guys took over.” I doubt anyone in this story would describe their life as utopia, but the husband, the dissertation advisor, the staff at the University Service Robot center, all seem perky and chipper. Sort of like those kids in the ads and boxes. And meantime, we’ve got our student, and Wendell, and the old folks with all their memories of what it was really like to play Monopoly. Yin and Yang. Somebody’s happy, somebody’s unhappy. Too bad it’s the images and disembodied who are the happy ones.
Addendum: Jake Weber took this story apart and reassembled it – and came up with a very interesting take.
A Just Recompense 