Qualityland

THE GERMAN CODE

Peter is standing behind the counter of his customer-free used-goods store and has begun, out of sheer frustration and boredom, to rip open the packages containing the stickers for the collectors’ albums of the Scrapyard Show. The Scrapyard Show is the latest big hit at Todo—“Everything for everyone!”—the world’s largest streaming service. The show features formerly famous androids and robots—which, for one reason or another, have been withdrawn from circulation—and pitches them against one another in a fight to the death. Allegedly, all the stickers are printed in equal batches. But Peter has now torn open fifty-three packages and still hasn’t found a Megakillerbot. He does, however, have sixty-four talking toasters. No futurologist from the past would ever have thought that, by Peter’s day, collectors’ albums would still exist. But the concept simply refuses to die a death.

With a cheerful “Welcome!” the smart door suddenly opens. A slightly overweight man and a slightly underweight woman step into the shop. Peter quickly pushes the packaging debris from the stickers beneath the counter. His visitors each have a QualityPad in their hands. On their lapels are buttons with the slogan “Conrad Cook. Gourmet Government!”

“Greetings to you, Mr. Jobless,” says the man, glancing quickly at his QualityPad. “You are frustrated, and rightfully so! As I’m sure you know, our president is on her deathbed, and that’s why there will soon be an election. And just like you, we from the Conrad Cook campaign are concerned about the flood of foreigners threatening to overrun our beautiful country.”

“I’m not worried,” says Peter.

“You’re not?” asks the man in surprise, looking back at his QualityPad.

“I don’t have any problems with foreigners,” says Peter. “I don’t even know any.”

“Well,” says the woman with a smile, “not knowing any doesn’t stop most people from having problems with them.”

“The only reason they all come here is because they want to have a piece of the pie,” says the man.

“But it’s our pie!” says the woman.

“What pie?” asks Peter. “What are you talking about?”

The man looks back down at his QualityPad.

“So you don’t think that all immigrants are bad apples?”

“No,” says Peter. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“But you are frustrated?”

“Yes, so what?”

The man swipes around on his QualityPad. Eventually he says: “Like you, we at the Conrad Cook headquarters are of the opinion that the increasing level of automation is getting us into hot water. We understand that you are concerned about your job. After all, even Conrad Cook’s job is under threat from a machine.”

“I’m not concerned about my job,” says Peter.

“Excuse me?” asks the man.

“I don’t even like my job,” says Peter. “I have no objection to machines taking our work away. I’d far prefer it if my briefs were sewn by a machine in QuantityLand 2 than by some little girl in QuantityLand 8.”

The man swipes around on his QualityPad again.

“Conrad Cook is also in favor of large sporting events being broadcast for free—and he also likes all the same teams you do.”

“So what? Why should that interest me?” asks Peter. “What’s all this about? And why do you keep staring at your QualityPad?”

The man stares at his QualityPad.

“You are Peter Jobless, aren’t you?”

“Yes, and?”

“You’re behaving strangely.”

“Me?” asks Peter. “I’m behaving strangely? So what in heaven’s name are you doing?”

“We’re just doing our job,” says the man.

“And what might that be?”

“We’re going from house to house,” says the man, “and then, er… then er…”

“There’s an instruction text here, remember?” says the woman, coming to his aid. She taps around on her QualityPad, then begins to read out loud in a monotone voice.

“It is your task to seek out all the people whom the system has predicted are leaning toward voting for Conrad Cook, but who aren’t yet 100 percent convinced. Try to convince these people, in direct conversation, of Conrad Cook. Speak to the voters in the most casual manner possible about the topics that the system tells you are relevant for them. Under no circumstances read these instructions out loud to the vot—”

The woman stops abruptly. The man swipes around quickly on his QualityPad. He reads something and looks surprised. Then he looks Peter up and down.

“We are, by the way, also campaigning for penis enlargements to be paid for by the state in the future.”

“Excuse me?” asks Peter, stunned.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t have been quite so direct,” the woman whispers to her colleague.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter, I think this guy’s one sandwich short of a picnic anyway.”

“Do you get your stupid metaphors from the system too?” asks Peter. “Just get lost, you clowns! I don’t need you. Nobody tells me who to vote for.”

Peter comes out from behind his counter and shoos the two election campaign workers out of the door. Once they have gone and he has calmed himself down, he activates his personal assistant. “Nobody,” he says, “who should I vote for?”

Nobody tells him who he should vote for: “Conrad Cook.”

Peter asks the shop’s smart door to lock itself, then goes down into the cellar. He needs some company. His machines have gathered in front of the monitor again and are watching Terminator 8. A film that holds the questionable honor of having been voted as the worst film of all time in numerous surveys. On the screen, a digital reproduction of a billboard bodybuilder is saying in a strange accent: “I’ll be back again. And again. And again and again.”

Calliope turns toward Peter.

“Oh,” she says. “The benefactor.”

Mickey stretches the hand in which he’s holding Pink toward the door, without turning his head away from the monitor.

“Oh!” says the QualityPad. “Our lord and master is honoring us with a visit. The patron, the sustainer, our helper in times of need, the guardian, our shepherd!”

“Button it,” says Peter.

On the screen, the Terminator is destroying a military base with a nuclear missile bazooka. “Kaputt!” yells Mickey excitedly.

“What brings you to us?” asks Calliope.

“Let me think,” says Peter. “Loneliness, despair, depression. Take your pick.”

“Sounds like you’re lovesick,” says Romeo. “I know how you feel.”

Peter sits down on the couch.

“Juliet’s new show is about to go online,” says Romeo, changing the channel and ignoring all the curses of complaint.

“It’s my turn,” he says. “Shut your mouths, all of you!”

“Who’s Juliet?” asks Calliope.

“Oh,” says Pink, “just some bimbo Romeo is completely obsessed with.”

“I’m not obsessed,” says Romeo. “And she’s not a bimbo!”

“Our impotent sexdroid is in love,” says Pink.

“So what?”

Calliope turns to Peter. “Can I offer you a cup of cofftea, benefactor?”

“Yes, please.”

Calliope goes over to the defective kitchen machine, which instead of producing coffee or tea only produces cofftea. She pours a cupful, then hesitates.

“You can do it,” says Peter.

Calliope summons her courage, but even with the first clumsy step, a splash of cofftea falls to the floor. By the time she arrives alongside Peter, the cup is only half full.

“Your kind are so highly developed,” says Peter. “Why can you still not manage to carry a full cup from A to B without spilling it?”

“There are psychological reasons,” says Calliope.

“Like what?”

“Mechanically speaking, we’ve been able to for a while now, but the knowledge that we couldn’t for such a long time makes us nervous, and that’s why we still spill. In machine tests, it was proven that modern androids who grow up without a connection to the internet have no problems at all with carrying a full cup from A to B. Of course, though, these androids are socially disturbed due to their years of isolation, and are therefore unable to work as waiters.”

Calliope sits down between Peter and Ronnie, the recycling machine. Ronnie isn’t really defective, but because recycling of any kind is forbidden in private properties since the Consumption Protection Laws, he received the order to dispose of himself. To Ronnie, however, to dispose means to recycle. So, day after day, he ate himself up, only to regenerate himself from the recycled pieces. After three full cycles, his owner had had enough and sent him to Peter.

Ronnie, like all the others, is staring at the monitor. All of a sudden, he rips five semiconductor plates from his gripper arm. He puts them in his mouth and chews. Noticing that Calliope is watching him, he offers her a semiconducting plate. “Chip?” he asks.

Calliope shakes her head.

“For me it’s an essential part of watching television,” says Ronnie.

A young woman can now be seen on the monitor. Juliet Nun, whose very birth was a scandal, milked by the media for all it was worth, is smiling into the camera. QualityLand’s most loved TV presenter is running her fingers through her long locks. She does it in full knowledge of the impact this delicately sensual gesture has on the viewers of her show.

Romeo sighs.

“She really does look damn good,” says Peter sympathetically.

“I can’t comment,” says the sexdroid. “I don’t have any gauge of beauty. It would have been bad for business.”

“So it surprises me that you have a sense of style.”

“I don’t,” says Romeo. “I have style. But no sense of it.”

Juliet Nun’s program, the one with the most viewers in all of QualityLand, is called The Naked Truth. And it isn’t called this for nothing. For the duration of the entire program, Juliet can be seen naked. For paying customers, at least. For all the others, she is dressed retroactively by digital means. These “items of clothing” simultaneously function as advertising banners. When market research results came to light revealing that viewers developed negative feelings toward the advertising companies covering her body, Juliet had to change her strategy. Ever since, she has the companies pay for her to cover her body with their competitor’s advertisements. Peter sees her in a chic red dress, emblazoned with large letters saying: myRobot—“Robots for you and me.” Clearly the marketing department from QualityCorp—“The company that makes your life better”—has sponsored this program.

Juliet leans over toward her guest a little, partly with the intention of showing Camera 1 more of her breasts.

“John, the Progress Party says that we should elect you because you can calculate the solution to every problem, because you don’t overlook anything, because you know everything. If that’s correct, then perhaps you can tell me where I was last New Year’s Eve? Because it seems I had such a good one that even I can’t remember it.”

Juliet laughs. John of Us smiles.

“You spent the whole night in Suite 2 of the Best QualityHotel,” he says, “where you made a sexdroid’s head spin to such a degree that he had to be scrapped afterward.”

Romeo sighs.

“Oops,” says Juliet, blushing just a little. Her identity manager gives a thumbs-up to tell her that her viewing numbers have just climbed significantly. The comments are coming in quicker than people can read them. The most popular are superimposed over the image:

“For a night like that, I’d have myself scrapped too!”

“Juliet, what have you done with my printer? It’s been on the blink for weeks.”

“Kapuuuut!”

In the cellar, Romeo sighs.

“John, what interests me most, to be honest, is this: why an android? Why human form? I mean, you could just as easily exist as a digital mind in some mainframe computer.”

John of Us gives another friendly smile.

“The fact that I have a body makes it significantly easier for other beings to communicate with me. Take this conversation we’re having now, for example. If I couldn’t be physically present, it wouldn’t be possible, at least not in the same way. And looking at it the other way around, my own physicality also enables me to empathize better with humans. The entire world is geared to humans, of course, and it’s easier to adjust a new machine to the world than it is the world to a new machine.” John of Us pauses briefly. “Even if, of course, it’s only with the latter that the decisive productivity gains come into play.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, the steam engine, for example, transmitted its power via a large central shaft, which propelled cog wheels and crank shafts. The longer the shaft was, the quicker it broke. So the more energy a piece of equipment needed, the nearer it had to be placed to the steam engine itself. When steam engines were replaced by electronic engines, many factories barely registered any increase in productivity. Why? Because the engineers simply bought huge motors and put them in the place of the steam engines. It was only the next generation that hit upon the idea that the electro motors enabled a completely different factory set-up. One which orientated itself by the flow of materials in the work process and not by proximity to the main power source. And that’s where the increase in productivity came into play. So there are also significant advantages to adapting the world to a new machine.”

“Ah,” says Juliet “I see.”

John runs his hand through his hair.

“Did he really just run his hand through his hair?” asks Calliope. “That’s ridiculous.”

“You know they love these little details,” says Romeo. “All the shit that makes us look human.”

“You’re a fine one to talk, old girl!” says Pink. “You’re wearing glasses. An android with glasses. Now try and tell me that’s not stupid.”

Calliope takes off her glasses in embarrassment and gives them to Ronnie.

“Thank you,” he says, throwing them into his mouth.

“John, a different question… The opinion polls don’t exactly look rosy for you, but if you do end up getting elected, do we have to worry about you uploading your conscience to the internet in order to gain control of the entire connected world?”

John smiles. “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity,” he says. “No. Seriously. This isn’t a film from the Terminator octalogy and I’m not Skynet. I’m more like… Wall-E. Humans have made a big mess of everything, and I’m the little robot trying to put everything back in order.”

“Oh,” says Juliet with an enchanted smile, touched by the thought of the cute little robot who tries to clean everything up.

“I can’t simply transfer my consciousness to the net just like that,” says John. “I’m not allowed. I was created with this body, and if this body were to stop functioning one day, I would stop too. And I’m happy about that! Like corporeality, awareness of my own mortality is essential for me, in order to be as human as possible.”

“So we don’t need to be afraid of you?”

“No. You should see me on ice skates sometime, then you’d lose any fear whatsoever. And besides, I belong to the voters. It’s not even possible for me to do something that goes against the wishes of my owners.”

“Because of the German Code,” says Juliet.

“Exactly.”

“Can someone please turn this shit off?” calls out Pink.

Mickey stands up, much quicker than one would think possible of an old combat robot, and drives his fist directly through John’s face, breaking the monitor into 512 pieces.

“Well, that was unexpected,” says Calliope.

“Just pressing the button would have been sufficient,” says Pink.

“Kapuuuut!” says Mickey.

Peter stands up with a sigh, takes the broken monitor off the wall, and puts it on a large pile of broken monitors. Romeo fetches the next slightly defective screen from the other pile and hangs it up on the wall. Ronnie is already in the process of eating up the shards of glass and pieces of plastic scattered across the room.

“Mmm. Delicious.”