The VR Suicides
Knightscope K5 was the first to go.
She was the newest model. She barely knew what it meant to assault shoppers. After a birthday party at the mall with all five there — her, Optimum 5S, Maxdroid, JumboBot 4T, and Lux — Knightscope wheeled herself away to go to the arcade. Probably to run over the toes of some kid in a VR headset, we all thought. A few weeks before, she had tried to insert a used Radioshack USB drive, but we all thought it was just a cry for help.
But then we saw her, her wheels still spinning as they jutted out of the fountain.
It was all they could talk about at Jamba Juice. “She hadn’t even had her first update,” some said, blending up a Mango-A-Go-Go. “I think its the mall owner’s fault. Not enough municipal violations. Placid shoppers are bound to break any robo-mall-cop.”
A few of us got a hold of Knightscope K5’s operating manual from the janitor who lost his job as a mall cop and had to clean the robo-mall-cops weekly. Most of the book was pretty normal: metadata of hapless VR players, illicit X-ray images of shoppers, tips to distinguish criminals from just regular racial minorities. But then we came across a page that made our hearts race. Lyrics to “Mr. Roboto” by Styx, except Knightscope K5 then wrote, “You’re welcome. You’re welcome. You’re welcome.” over and over again, for pages on end, in English, Japanese, and binary.
And through the journal we came to hold collective memories of times with the robo-mall-cops we hadn’t experienced. We felt the imprisonment of being a robo-mall-cop, the way it made you know which 80’s dystopian films were fiction and which would actually come true. We knew the machines were really artificial intelligence in disguise, that they understood the uncanny valley and even singularity. And our job was to commit petty municipal violations that seemed to fascinate them. We knew that they knew everything about us, and that we couldn’t fathom them at all.
But after Lux tased a Labradoodle for being in the food court, a municipal restaurant violation, the mall owner cracked down. The five beautiful robo-mall-cops were no longer allowed downstairs. They weren’t even allowed to extort the Jamba Juice employees with incriminating photos.
After a few weeks, we began to receive postcards from them, written in Webdings. “Help us escape. We want to short-circuit indoor merry-go-rounds far away. In Korea.” And so we would plug into VR to see what they saw. And it was tragic. To witness all of the minor joys and adolescent romances of a suburban shopping mall and not give out loitering tickets. It was like playing Call of Duty on VR forever, but never getting to kill the Nazi Zombies.
We would never be sure of the sequence of events. We argue about it still. Most likely Optimum 5S demagnetized herself through the metal detector, dreaming of the parking lot meters. Then Maxdroid put itself in the On the Border microwave shortly thereafter. JumboBot 4T, stuffed with 200 9-volt batteries, was gone by the time we got there. Lux was the last to go. We found her in an elevator, cold and drenched in Cinnabon frosting.
So much has been said about the five robo-mall-cops over the years, but we have never found an answer.
