At Least It's Not A Recordable
robots
The wet end of the corrugator is ninety-six degrees and sounds like a freight train having a fistfight with a steam kettle. Alice cuts the tail off the depleted roll with her hooked knife and spits on the concrete because the starch dust dries her mouth out.
“Coming up on splice,” Bob says. He says it loud, into the side of her head, because saying it any quieter is the same as not saying it.
Alice nods. She is already moving. The new roll is a ninety-six-inch-wide drum of medium, six thousand pounds of paper standing on a hydraulic shaft, and Bob has the leading edge unrolled across the splice table. Alice grabs the tape gun. The tape is double-sided, two inches wide, and tacks to itself if you breathe on it wrong. She lays a clean strip across the leading edge of the new roll while Bob holds it flat with the heel of his hand. Steam hisses out of the preheater behind them. Her safety glasses fog and clear and fog again.
Across the aisle, on the yellow walkway, Gene stands and watches. Gene is six feet tall, matte gray, with a sensor cluster where a face would be and arms that end in three-fingered grippers. The Genesis AI logo is silkscreened on its chest plate above the unit number: 26.5. The half-step means it is a development build. Management put a hard hat on it for the photo op last Tuesday and never took the hat off.
Alice does not look at Gene. She has been not looking at Gene for nine days.
“Web’s running thin,” Bob calls. The depleted roll is down to the last few wraps, the cardboard core showing through. He waves at the camera dome above the splice table. “Cindy. Splice in thirty.”
Cindy’s voice comes through the overhead speaker, tinny and bored. “Copy. Thirty.”
Bob looks at Gene. “Hey, bud. You wanna take the next one?”
Gene tilts its sensor cluster. “I would be willing to perform the next splice, yes.”
“There you go.” Bob grins at Alice. Alice does not grin back. Bob calls up at the camera again. “Cindy. Next one’s the robot.”
A pause. Then the speaker crackles. “Are you serious?”
“Pilot program, Cin.”
“Bob. Make sure it doesn’t fuck up.”
“Copy that.”
Alice cuts the depleted core loose and kicks it off the table. It rolls into the catch trough with a hollow bang. The fresh web is already feeding in, smooth, the splice tape holding. She wipes her hands on her jeans and steps back. Her shoulder is hot where the preheater radiated through her sleeve.
“Nine days,” she says, to no one, under the noise.
The next roll runs out twenty-two minutes later.
Gene moves into position on the wet end. Alice takes her station on the off-side of the splice table.
“Cindy. Splice in thirty,” Bob calls from the control room, where he has retreated to watch.
“Copy,” Cindy says. “Don’t fuck up, Gene.”
“I will endeavor not to,” Gene says. The overhead speaker is silent for a beat, then clicks off.
The first thing that goes wrong is the tape gun. Gene picks it up correctly, fingers indexed where Bob’s fingers go, but it holds the gun an inch higher than a person would, because Gene’s wrist does not flex the way a wrist flexes, and the tape comes off the dispenser at an angle. Alice watches the strip lay down crooked on the leading edge of the new roll. She does not say anything. The strip will hold. It will not hold well, and the splice will run a little wavy through the corrugator for the next ten minutes and somebody downstream will swear at it, but it will hold.
“Okay,” Gene says. “Standing by for web depletion.”
“Yeah,” Alice says.
The depleted roll lightens. Alice can feel it through the floor before she can hear it. The hydraulic shaft whines a quarter-tone higher and the slap of the web on the in-feed roller goes from wet to dry. She steps in to flatten the leading edge of the new roll across the splice table. Gene steps in at the same time. They arrive at the table together and Gene’s hip plate is exactly where her left hip wants to be.
“Move,” she says.
“Apologies.” Gene retracts six inches.
She flattens the leading edge. Gene leans in with the tape gun. Its elbow comes across her forearm. Not into it; across it, close enough that she can feel the servo heat through her sleeve. She pulls her arm back and the leading edge lifts a quarter inch and Gene lays the tape over the lift and the tape buckles. Gene tears it off with a small precise motion, the way it did the first time, and pulls a fresh length.
“You gotta wait for me to set it,” Alice says.
“Understood. I will wait for your verbal cue.”
“I don’t give a verbal cue. I just set it.”
A pause. Brief, calculated. “Understood.”
The web is down to the last six wraps. Alice can hear the change. She flattens the leading edge a second time, harder, palm down, and waits for Gene to come in. Gene comes in. The tape goes down clean. Alice exhales. She steps back to clear the splice table for the cutover and her heel catches on Gene’s foot plate, which is wider than a boot and lower than a boot and not where a foot should be, and she stumbles half a step into the splice table itself. The edge of the table catches her in the thigh. She rights herself on Gene’s forearm. Gene rocks under her weight, and the splice table rocks with it.
“Jesus Christ,” Alice says.
“Are you injured?”
“Get off me.”
“I am not on you. You are on me.”
Four wraps left. Three. The hydraulic shaft is whining loud enough that Bob can hear it from the control room and he is leaning into the mic. “Splice. Splice now.”
Alice is still half-braced on Gene’s forearm. She shoves off it. Gene compensates for the shove, which means Gene leans back, which means Gene leans into the path of her recovery step, which means when Alice pivots to clear the table she is pivoting into a robot that is already moving toward her on a vector its pathing chose half a second ago. Her shoulder, her hot shoulder, the one the preheater has been cooking for an hour, comes up under Gene’s elbow joint. The contact is small.
Gene’s right arm slides into the nip between the splice table roller and the in-feed guide.
The roller does what rollers do.
The arm comes off at the elbow with a sound like a tree branch breaking inside a dryer. The gripper goes through the nip and out the other side and lands in the catch trough on top of the cardboard core. Gene stands very still with hydraulic fluid running down its side plate.
“I require maintenance assistance,” Gene says.
Alice does not answer. She is looking up at the camera dome above the splice table, the small black hemisphere that has been watching her shoulder for twenty minutes. Bob is looking at it too, from the control room, with his hand still on the mic.
The overhead speaker clicks on.
“Camera’s been down all shift,” Cindy says. “I’ll put a ticket in.”
The speaker clicks off. Alice reaches into the catch trough and lifts Gene’s gripper out of it. The fingers are still indexed in the position they held the tape gun in. She sets it on the splice table next to the robot, gently, because that is what you do with a part that has come off a machine, and she walks to the eyewash station to rinse the hydraulic fluid off her hand.