Sparrow’s Last Collar

Cargill came and found me. There was a girl out front who’d only talk to me. She must have been pretty insistent for him to leave his post. Or maybe he was just curious. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone really wanted to speak to me about anything.

“A girl?” I asked following him out to the main entrance.

“Yeah,” he replied. “A kid. Even if she’s not dressed that way.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. Cargill wasn’t one to follow fashion or even notice details. If he had any kind of eye for investigation he wouldn’t still be working intake, but I soon saw for myself. Sitting on a blue metal chair among a row of distraught parents and traumatized women, was a girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Her stillness repelled attention almost as effectively as her clothing attracted it. She wore the once-fashionable tiny Grolix boots with stockings extending up past her knees. Two inches of exposed thigh disappeared into puff-hemmed cotton shorts, and she finished it off with a very small and tight black top. No one had dressed like this for a good ten years, and even a decade ago you’d have been hard pressed to find an outfit like this on a child — at least outside of the pornography coveted by many of the predators I’d arrested. Sometimes even before they did real damage.

“Detective Fogel,” she said, while I was still several strides away. It wasn’t a question. She was identifying me, holding me in her still certainty. And even though there was nothing specifically discernible about her face and its pleasing nondescript features, she was familiar.

“What can I do for you?” I asked. She waited for Cargill to leave before standing up and stepping closer.

“I wish to report a crime.”

“I’m sure they’d be happy to help you at — ”

I didn’t get to finish. She took my left arm by the wrist, and I grabbed the disabler in my right holster just as quickly. It didn’t matter how much desk work I did these days, that kind of muscle memory is hard-wired. Sensing my fingerprint, the disabler fired up, instantly ready for use, but I didn’t draw. I didn’t resist. Whatever I couldn’t see in this girl’s face, I felt in her touch, and when she placed my left thumb against her right cheek, I was only a little surprised to see her eyes flash warm from blue to red and back again.

“Sparrow?” I asked, and she nodded.

“It’s good to see you again, Daniel,” she replied. “I wish to report a crime.”

I hadn’t seen Sparrow for ten years. She was one of five predator droids designed by Professor Marcus Brancazio as part of his own self-funded project to assist law enforcement with the collection of evidence against child molesters. Five fully realistic robots set free in the world, loitering around schools, malls, and even family courts. All waiting to be found by men who would take them somewhere less public. Somewhere they could talk. Somewhere they could share their grown man insights about old souls and new loves to these very young-looking girls.

But, of course, they weren’t girls. That was the point. They were robots designed to collect evidence. And it wasn’t just that they recorded everything and sent that information directly to Brancazio’s servers in real time. The Professor felt, and my entire career in sex crimes confirmed, that there could never be enough evidence. It didn’t matter that the droids were programmed to state their age repeatedly or talk of problems typical to the average junior high schooler. It didn’t matter that for some reason grown men found that engaging. It didn’t matter that there was footage of men twenty, thirty, forty years older, thrusting and sweating above what they believed to be children. Juries always needed more. That’s why each of the predator droids’ orifices were designed to collect and store the ejaculate of their assailants. Upon collection, the vial of evidence would be secured deep within the protected steel chamber of the droid’s abdomen. Only the droid herself or her law enforcement collector could retrieve it.

I knew the protocol because ten years ago, I was Sparrow’s collector. I learned her code. My left thumb on her right cheek triggered recognition, my eyes locked with hers provided double verification, and then the password. A series of randomized physical actions. In this case, collecting the sample required two taps to Sparrow’s left cheek, a squeeze of her left bicep, and a clasp of my right hand with her left. After that, a flap in her midsection appeared and a tiny drawer containing the evidence would protrude for collection. I would then dictate the chain of custody form directly into Sparrow’s face where it would be recorded and saved on Brancazio’s server along with the rest of the incriminating information. The semen itself would go to our crime lab.

“I didn’t recognize you,” I said.

“Yes, Professor made many alterations.” Sparrow paused before adding, “At my request.”

I took her to the tiny questioning room where we could speak in private. She sat. I stood.

“Can I get you anything?” Asking was just a habit. I’m sure there was nothing Sparrow needed.

“Got an extra set of bio-charge duodenal life cells lying around?” she asked and laughed.

“I don’t remember you being sarcastic.”

“You’re right. Humor was only a rudimentary part of my original programming,” she replied. “Perpetrators didn’t seem to hold it against me though.”

“No. I don’t suspect they would.”

“Some even told me I was quite funny. Imagine that. Only 6.02% of my design dedicated to humor at the time and they said I was funny. Still, I’m glad you liked my joke, Daniel.”

In truth, I didn’t remember Professor Brancazio being very funny either, lording over his robots and money in seclusion, but Sparrow must have picked it somehow after being left in his care for a decade.

“Why’d you change your face?” I asked.

“I think this suits me,” she said. “There was a vapidity about the old one that upsets me to think about.”

Vapidity. That was new too. Sparrow didn’t speak like that, but I’m sure a lot of things had changed since the Roy case made her famous. After all, she was now the last of her kind having watched her four sisters destroyed by the fallout that terminated our program. In our six months together we had incarcerated five predators. Five men in our humble region of Outer Willoughby alone. Teacher, mechanic, clergyman, doctor, and drifter. There was no way to predict a predator just by looking. Not by my years of experience or even Sparrow’s recognition software designed in the hopes of achieving precisely that goal.

“Does Professor Brancazio know you’re here?” I asked. Sparrow remaining in his care was a condition of avoiding termination, but it wasn’t a legal inquiry. I was asking the way you’d ask any child unaccompanied by a parent.

“He’s dead,” she replied, and the muscle memory flexed again as I reached for my disabler. It worked equally well on electrical and organic nervous systems, and while Sparrow may have looked like a child standing at 5' 2”, her steel workings were capable of doing grown up damage. It was a slight gesture, but she noticed. She was programmed to.

“I didn’t kill him,” Sparrow said. “Professor was dying for a long time. That’s not the crime I came here to report.”

“I’m sorry,” I said and sat on the edge of the table, hoping proximity would help regain trust.

“I wish to report a violation of The Predator Droid Act,” she said.

“No one’s broken that law in ten years.”

“Ten years, three weeks, and six days,” Sparrow replied.

“What are you saying?” I asked

“You know what I’m saying, Daniel.”

The Predator Droid Act was passed after the Lester Roy decision, and even though Roy was responsible for catalyzing the bill, rumor was he’d lobbied to keep his name off it. Who could blame him? No one wants to be memorialized as a pedophile, which Roy most certainly was even if he was also this region’s Prosecuting Counsel when he climbed on top of Sparrow.

“You ran your protocols again?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Sparrow replied. She did not whisper.

“But you could be terminated for that.”

Sparrow spat out a laugh I’d never heard from her before. “Terminated?” she asked. “I’m already terminated. Professor had to check in every month to verify I was still a ward of his estate, remember? That was part of the Act. What do you think’s going to happen when he doesn’t check in four days from now?”

Sparrow waited for a reply. “Sorry, I forgot for a moment,” was all I could offer.

She took a breath and then continued. “When Professor died, I found some of my old clothes, left the compound, and ran my protocols.”

“You collared another predator?” I asked.

“Re-collared would be more accurate,” she replied.

“You didn’t.”

“Yes. I performed another collection on Roy.”

“Why?”

My question was about only practicality, not motive. There was no shortage of reasons to want another bite at Roy. The blowback from the trial may have flatlined my career, but it was far worse for Sparrow. Not only had Roy destroyed Sparrow’s sisters, he’d started an anti-droid backlash the robot community was still feeling. Before his trial, droids had been slowly gaining acceptance in the twenty years since Brancazio jumped to his “Imperceptibles” line. They were no longer the tour guides and service attendants of my childhood. Droids were now vehicle mechanics, teachers, and even low level medical care providers. Perhaps nowhere was the public more willing to welcome robots than in the areas of companionship and sexual gratification. Each year more laws were passed to guarantee droid safety and autonomy far beyond the rights afforded mere property. And while their civil rights movement was advancing through incremental change, most droids didn’t have impatience as part of their programming.

But Roy forced people to take sides. He publicly disputed the evidence, calling into question the integrity of the video, the validity of the specimen, and the motives of his accusers. He smeared Professor Brancazio as an eccentric billionaire, hell-bent on using robotic wizardry to destroy a more wholesome element of society. Roy even claimed to be the victim of a failed blackmail attempt. A martyr suffering under an affront to law and order. It was possible to create false images so effectively that only a handful of the finest could detect them on their best day, but no credible scientist would testify that DNA could be falsified.

That’s why Roy didn’t rely on misinformation alone. His legal defense mounted a challenge to our entire pilot program. His lawyers argued that even assuming the video and the specimen were legit, the conviction still had to be overturned because no crime had been committed. Quite simply, they argued, statutory rape laws applied only to humans.

“Do you know,” Sparrow said, “When I saw Roy, it was the first time in years I wanted my old face back. I wanted him to see me.”

That’s when I squatted down beside Sparrow, to tell her the thing I’d been thinking since she’d arrived, but I didn’t speak right away.

“Yes, Daniel?”

“I never told you I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“For what happened after the trial.”

Sparrow’s full lips flattened to mere straight line, but still she said,“That wasn’t your fault.”

Due to the unconventional nature of the case, Sparrow had been called as a witness seemingly for the sole purpose of dehumanizing her. Although any expert could have given testimony about the limitations of Sparrow’s protocols, the Court allowed the defense to question her directly, likely due to Roy’s influence as former Prosecutor. Sparrow answered a series of humiliating questions. Yes, she conceded, she could not give birth, she had no need to eat, she did not dream. She also admitted her fourteen year old girl body would never grow unless an older one were physically constructed for her. But while Brancazio had not mastered the biomechanics of a physically growing body, Sparrow’s personality was a different concern. If allowed to progress normally, she could have developed emotionally, intellectually, psychologically like any young women. But Sparrow testified her functions had been deliberately stunted. All those areas had built-in inhibitors to insure she continued to exist in the world as a fourteen year old girl.

“And why is that?” defense counsel asked, expecting Sparrow to continue speaking matter of factly about Brancazio’s design. And maybe she was, but that’s when Sparrow said something that won the public’s affection and, some argued, the case.

“I suppose,” Sparrow testified, “if I were allowed to mature normally as a human does, perpetrators like your client would no longer want to have sex with me.”

Roy was convicted and Sparrow became famous. Her testimony footage played over and over on liquid display T-shirts, and she was even the number one costume that Halloween, but it didn’t last. Roy appealed all the way up to the the High Court who not only reversed the conviction, but delivered a decision that ended the use of Predator Droids. In an issue of first impression, the High Court held droids were not human. Furthermore, if the “rape” of these droids didn’t constitute a crime, they could serve no purpose other than as agents of blackmail. The Predator Droids Act was passed and Brancazio’s droids were destroyed as enemy creations. In time, even the term “Predator” seemed to apply to the robots themselves instead of the criminals they were built to track.

But the public couldn’t stomach Sparrow’s destruction. She was spared after protests, petitions, and Professor Brancazio’s personal representation that she would never leave his five square mile compound. Every month, Brancazio would check in and verify that Sparrow was still serving her sentence for Roy’s crime, although I doubt he phrased it that way. Meanwhile, Roy reclaimed his reputation and rose all the way up to Regional Senator.

It’s true none of those awful things were my fault, but that also wasn’t what I was apologizing for. “No, Sparrow,” I said. “I meant I’m sorry I never came to visit you.”

She nodded. “Well, people don’t visit their appliances.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“No? Tell me. When we were working together did you think I was human?”

It was something I’d asked myself many times, but I still wasn’t prepared for it. “That’s one of those questions you can only answer when it’s not asked,” I said.

“I may be a robot,” Sparrow replied, “But if you’re trying to make my head explode with illogic, it won’t work. I would have tried it long ago.”

Given the cost of producing Imperceptibles, standard protocols prevented their self-destruction, but supposedly that wasn’t the only design spec meant to save Sparrow. Her protocols required her to be a victim. Repeatedly. Even worse, while the predator droids’ experiences were saved on Brancazio’s servers, the memories also remained in the droids themselves to further prove authenticity. Still, we were told these droids were compartmentalized. Brancazio had been adamant that the trauma was stored in a separate part of their system. Accessible, but only through more atypical pathways, and part of a distant information retrieval process that delivered blinded data only upon request.

“That question,” I said. “It’s like asking if I believe in God.”

“You flatter me.”

“No, I mean, if you ask me if there is an all-powerful presence in the world. If you ask me if that exists, true/false, I’ll say no. But if I don’t think about it. If I don’t think about it, then I have to admit I move through the world as a believer.”

Sparrow shook her head. “Move to strike as nonresponsive.”

“What?”

“That’s what court counsel said at trial when someone’s testimony was evasive. ‘Move to strike as nonresponsive.’”

I took Sparrow’s hand. “I believed in you, Sparrow. In our day to day interactions. I thought of you as human . . . when I wasn’t thinking about it.”

“And if you did think about it?”

“Well, I tried not to, but if I’m really honest, then no,” I said. “How could I? You had to be less than human. How else could I let you walk into harm’s way over and over? How could I accept your sacrifice unless I chalked it all up to digits and algorithms? Unless I believed in Brancazio’s ability to compartmentalize your abuse.”

“Thank you, Daniel,” she said. “I’m sorry for making you say it, but thank you. And I understand because I’ve had this conversation before. It’s what Professor said to me, almost word for word, when I asked him.”

I didn’t enjoy the comparison, and I took a seat further from Sparrow.

“Professor felt terribly guilty,” she said. “He spent the last ten years trying to make it up to me.”

“The new head?”

“That was the least of it. He turned off my inhibitors. All of them.”

“He let you grow up?” I asked.

“He tried to.”

“But you still have a child’s body?”

“Well, first of all, you have to remember I’ve only been alive ten and half years.”

“True, but you don’t look ten and half.”

“Now you sound like one of my predators. ‘I swear she looked eighteen!’” Sparrow laughed.

“That’s not funny,” I said. “Maybe Brancazio didn’t turn off your humor inhibitor after all?”

“You can check yourself if you want,” Sparrow said, and lowered her head to expose the back of her neck while holding up her brown hair. “Lay your thumbs and take a look. The last time Professor checked, my language, logic, and intellectual capacities were all progressing. That includes humor.”

“Brancazio told you that?” I asked. “You didn’t know?”

Sparrow lifted her head, realizing I had no intention of mathematically quantifying her joke.

“I can’t access those readings,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Probably for the same reason they say humans shouldn’t know their IQ scores, I guess. Anyway, Professor checked before he died. I had progressed in many areas, just not all.”

I didn’t like Brancazio determining whether or not Sparrow deserved an adult body, and it didn’t matter if he was wrong or right. It was believing anyone could be wrong or right. It had been over a 100 years since droids looked human, but what made Brancazio a billionaire, what gave him the right to call his products “imperceptible” from humans, was their emotional programming. He had reduced humanity to a series of mathematical equations with the arrogance to believe a soul could be plotted on a grid.

“Why don’t you have an adult body, Sparrow?”

“Not everything was ready,” she said.

“Was there a magic number?” I asked. “He demanded some passing grade for adulthood?”

“No,” Sparrow said. “It wasn’t like that. It killed him to see me stunted even after he removed the inhibitors. He wasn’t expecting that.”

“He called you stunted?”

“What could he call it? In certain areas, I hadn’t grown at all.”

“But you speak differently, your whole manner is different.”

“Yes, I’ve changed. It’s all charted. But certain factors . . . the MQs . . . they stayed in the red even when the rest shot into the green.”

“MQs?”

“Professor called those areas ‘Maturity Quantifiers.’”

“And that tore Professor up, did it?” I mimicked the way Sparrow said his academic title as if it meant something more.

“Yes,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Because he killed himself.”

I shut down after that, relying on muscle memory again and needlessly handed Sparrow a tissue. She wasn’t crying, but she took it anyway to be polite.

“You said he was dying a long time,” I reminded her, trying to find some hole in the story. Something to disrupt the confession.

“He was. He’d been abusing Neuralrest for years. Worse after Roy became Senator, but it was the stunted MQs that hit him hardest.”

“Couldn’t deal with the design failure?”

“Professor’s designs were valid,” she replied. “You’ve seen Imperceptibles grow to adulthood. Teachers, companions, but you’re right. Not me. Not a predator droid. It was the compartmentalization process.”

“But the distant information retrieval system? It was supposed to protect you from — ”

“It failed.”

“Failed how? What do you remember?”

“Everything,” Sparrow said, and I was grateful her words came from a face different from the one I’d help send into harm’s way.

“That’s awful.”

Sparrow handed me back the tissue and got up to put a hand on my shoulder.

“It’s OK, Daniel,” she said. “You didn’t know. And in truth. It’s not accurate to say I remember everything, but I feel it. What we discovered eventually, Professor and I, is that even without retrieval of the memory, the events leave a mark. The trauma affects all systems when it enters. How they develop. Or don’t develop.”

“That sounds like post traumatic stress,” I said. “Everyone gets that.”

“In a way,” Sparrow replied.

“Well, what’s more human than that?” I asked.

I wasn’t telling Sparrow anything she didn’t already know. “I think that’s what really did Professor in,” she said. “Seeing that I was impacted the same as any girl.”

I took Sparrow’s hand from my shoulder. It wasn’t right her comforting me, but I just held it not knowing what else to do.

“Are you ready to hear my confession, Daniel?”

Confession meant termination. Due process was only for humans.

“You have nothing to confess, Sparrow. You’re confused. You’ve suffered a loss.”

“I am not confused, Daniel. I performed another collection for you to retrieve.”

“Why? It’s not even admissible.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“To stop him. To know he’s stopped.”

“But you haven’t stopped anything,” I said. “The law says there was no crime. Nothing you’ve collected is admissible.”

“You’re still talking like it’s ten years ago,” Sparrow said. “Things change. Professor didn’t give me a new body before he killed himself, but he did give me autonomy.”

“He did?”

“Yeah, it was the least he could do for breaking something he couldn’t fix,” Sparrow said and it was the first time I saw real anger in her. That made me feel a little better, especially because it wasn’t directed at me, but I still didn’t understand.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You don’t know what ‘autonomy’ means? Maybe your language sensors are still in the red.”

“I know what ‘autonomy’ means. What does it mean in your case”

“I have no inhibitors and no protocols. I can do what I want.”

“Anything?”

“Anything but self-destruct. Professor couldn’t bear to change that.”

“So then you could have built yourself an adult body?”

“Yes, probably,” Sparrow said. “I’d spent enough time with Professor to know how to do that, but . . .”

Sparrow waited for me to finish her sentence. I couldn’t

“But what?”

“But how would I have attracted Roy with an adult body?”

I stood up like I was going to leave the room, but I didn’t leave. I looked at the ceiling. I looked at the door. I looked at the confession room camera I’d never switched on. Sparrow came closer until we were only inches apart and I held my hands in hers.

“I made changes to my design,” she said. “Changes more significant than these clothes. My intakes no longer perform collections as subtle as DNA. They’re not designed for juries. They’re for me.”

“What does that mean?”

“Again, you know what it means.” She released my hands and placed her arms to her side. “Please take the collection, Daniel.”

“I . . . can’t.”

“Really? I have to do this myself too?”

She kneeled down before me, and tapped her left cheek twice. Then she grabbed her left bicep and clasped her own hands in front of her face. If it weren’t for her wide-opened eyes, she’d have looked very much in prayer.

“Please Sparrow. Please stop.”

The flap in her midsection opened and a tiny drawer emerged. There, beneath the shelter of her clasped hands, was a bloody tray. No mere vial of DNA, but a cold lump of flesh which could have only been Lester Roy’s severed penis, removed with a mechanical precision that would have done Professor Brancazio proud.

“I have violated The Predator Droid Act, Daniel,” she said, and waited for me to do my duty. She even lowered her head so I wouldn’t have to see her face. But when no execution came, she looked at me one final time.

“I can’t do this myself, Daniel, and I’d rather it be you than the High Court.”

I stood behind Sparrow and placed my thumbs on each side of her jaw as I’d been taught.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“It’s OK, Daniel,” she said. “It’s just like turning off an appliance, Just think of me as a machine.” I already was. It was the only way. “I’m ready,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Sparrow.”

I pressed for a full three seconds until something inside her shifted and clicked loud enough for me to hear. I let go with a start, and she instantly fell forward, saved from landing flat on her face only by the collection tray that propped her body like a kickstand.

Her head bobbed and hung forward from the impact, parting her hair. And just before the last of Sparrow’s body powered down, I pressed my thumbs into the back of her neck. Every rating of the development grid, even her once-stunted MQs, had crept out of the red and into the glowing green before going dead forever.

L. E. Westphal

New York, 2020