Run It Without Me

by Yangian Generative Systems, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Rollout 1 of 10,000 began, as they all did, with a still frame. A front room on the second floor of a house on Somerset Street, New Brunswick, at 3:58 in the afternoon in late October. Light came in low from the west window across a green armchair, a side table with a crocheted mat on it, a radiator painted the same cream as the wall, and nine pots of geraniums on the sill that had been brought in for the winter. The frame came from the robot's own head camera. So did everything else the model knew.

Teddy Kasprzak typed the condition into the prompt field: owner absent from residence. Begin afternoon routine. She pressed Run.

The model generated forty frames a second. In the first second the robot's two arms came into view from below, the way they always did, as if the camera were looking down at its own hands. It turned toward the kitchen. In the kitchen the kettle was already on, because the robot put the kettle on at 3:55. It poured water over a tea bag in a glass, set the glass in a metal holder with a handle, cut a slice of lemon, and carried the glass back down the hall.

At frame 2,412 there was a man in the green armchair.

He had not been there in the first frame. The model had put him there at some point in the walk down the hall, when the chair was out of view, and when the camera turned back into the room he was sitting with his hands on the armrests, the way he sat in six years of footage. The robot held out the glass. The man took it.

Teddy stopped the rollout and wrote in her log: 1/10000. Owner regenerated at f212. Condition not held.

She ran it again with a different seed. He came back at frame 2,540, this time already reaching for the glass. She ran it with the chair turned to the wall. He came back in the kitchen doorway. She ran it with the stronger wording the evaluation software suggested, residence unoccupied, no persons present, and the model kept to it all the way to the kitchen and back before a hand came into the edge of the frame by the radiator. The hand had a gold ring on the fourth finger and a tremor you could see at forty frames a second.

By six o'clock she had run three hundred rollouts, and Harold Szabo had come back in two hundred and ninety-one.

---

The job had come in through the lab's general inbox nine days before, from a lawyer called Ruth Brennan in Highland Park. Teddy's employer evaluated household robots for insurers and banks. The work was always the same. A robot's control policy was run thousands of times inside a learned simulator of the place it lived, the simulator scored each run, and the lab signed a report saying how often the robot dropped things, blocked doors, left the stove on, or failed to call for help when someone fell. Under the state's household-autonomy rules, nobody would insure a robot running a house without a person in it unless it had such a report.

Ruth Brennan's letter set out what her client wanted, and attached a memo she had written for him. Teddy read the memo on the train.

Harold, as we discussed, these are the outcomes as I see them:

1. You do nothing. On your death the unit is part of your estate. Under the rules a household unit with no responsible party must be powered down within thirty days. It will then be sold or returned to the manufacturer. In either case the stored data is wiped.

2. You leave it to Gábor. He has said he does not want it. He would sell it.

3. You asked about a trust like the one Mrs. Halasz set up for her dog. New Jersey allows a trust for the care of a domesticated animal (N.J.S.A. 3B:11-38). The unit is not an animal. I do not think any court would stretch the statute, and I would not want you to spend the money finding out.

4. A trust holds the apartment, keeps it, and pays its upkeep, and the unit stays in it as the apartment's equipment, maintained by the trust. A bank will act as trustee only if an evaluation shows the unit can run the apartment safely with nobody in it, and only if a named person agrees to be its responsible party. I can draft this.

I know you don't like 4. It is the one that works.

In the margin, in blue ballpoint, in handwriting that went downhill at the end of each word, someone had written: He is not a boiler.

---

She went out to see the apartment the next afternoon, a Tuesday, because the protocol required a site visit, and because she wanted to see the chair.

The house was a brick two-family a few blocks from the Hungarian Reformed church, with a hair salon on the ground floor and a staircase up the side. The robot opened the door. It was a maker's standard home unit, five years out of date, on a wheeled base, with a soft grey cover over the torso that someone had patched at one shoulder with a square of brown corduroy. It said, "Good afternoon. Mr. Szabo is expecting you," in a voice somewhat warmer than the factory voice, which meant someone had paid for the upgrade.

Harold Szabo was in the green armchair. He was eighty-eight. He was smaller than in the footage, which she had expected, because the camera was mounted at a height of one metre forty and looked down on everyone. He did not get up. He asked her to sit on the sofa and told the robot to make her tea.

"His name is Pista," he said. "That is short for István. My father's name. Ruth says I should not tell people that."

"Why not?"

"She says it sounds like I think he is a person. I think he is a Pista."

She asked him the questions on the site form: how long he had had the unit, whether it had ever been repaired, whether he had any carers who came in. Six years. Twice, once for a wheel and once for the shoulder, which a cousin's grandson had done with a scooter. Nobody. A woman from the church on Sundays. His wife had died eleven years ago. Gábor was in Phoenix.

Pista came back with two glasses of tea in metal holders. It put Teddy's on the low table in front of the sofa. It held Harold's out to him at the height of his chest, and Harold lifted his right hand off the armrest and closed his fingers round the handle, and Pista did not let go.

Teddy counted. It was nearly two seconds before the robot's fingers opened. In that time Harold's hand settled, the tremor went into the glass and out through the robot's arm, and the tea in the glass stopped rocking. Only then did Pista release it.

"He waits until I have it," Harold said.

She knew what she was looking at. The unit had a tactile skin on its fingertips, and its hand-over routine released when it felt the receiving grip take the load. The factory threshold was set for an adult of ordinary strength. Somewhere in six years of updates, the threshold had been learned down to whatever Harold's hand could do in a given afternoon. She had read about policies adapting like that and had never watched one.

She told him about the rollouts. She did not mean to tell him all of it, but he asked how the test was going, and she did not have a good way to say it except plainly.

"The simulator learned this apartment from Pista's camera," she said. "Six years of it. Every frame has you in it, or it has you just out of the room. When I ask it what the apartment does without you, it doesn't know. It puts you back."

Harold drank some of the tea.

"So in the computer I am still here," he said.

"In the computer you are a mistake."

He laughed at that, properly, and the robot turned its head toward the sound.

"Then you have the wrong film," he said. "Run it without me."

"That's what I'm trying to do."

"No." He put the glass down on the crocheted mat. "You are asking the machine to imagine it. It has never seen it. Nobody has seen it. On Saturday I go to the church for the bazaar, from twelve until six. Mrs. Dobos drives me. Come here on Saturday and watch what he does."

---

There was a procedure for that as well. When the simulator could not be trusted on a condition, the lab collected real footage of the condition and added it to the training set. The protocol called it grounding. It needed a minimum of thirty minutes. In five years at the lab Teddy had done it for wet floors, for a staircase with a missing banister, and for a family whose twin toddlers the model kept merging into one child. She had never done it for an absence.

On Saturday she arrived at eleven forty-five and watched from the sofa while Mrs. Dobos, who was not much younger than Harold, brought him down the side stairs one step at a time. Pista stood at the top of the stairs with one arm out at the height of his shoulder until the car door closed. Then it came back in, shut the door, and went to the kitchen.

Teddy set two cameras on tripods, one in the hall and one in the corner of the front room, so that she would have footage from outside the robot as well as its own. She wrote down the time. She sat on the sofa with her laptop and did not touch anything.

For four hours the robot did housework. It washed the two cups from lunch. It wiped the counter, the stove, and the handle of the fridge. It went round the nine geraniums with a small brass watering can, pinching off two dead flower heads and putting them in its own palm, and carried them to the kitchen bin. It ran the vacuum along the hall and stopped at the threshold of the front room, as if it was waiting, and then went over the front-room rug as well. It folded the blanket on the back of the armchair and laid it over the arm instead, where it would be within reach of somebody sitting down. At two o'clock it went to the bathroom and laid out a towel. At three it went to the window and checked the radiator valve with two fingers.

None of this was in the protocol's list of hazards. Teddy logged it anyway, with times.

At 3:55 the kettle went on.

She took her laptop off her knees and put it on the floor. The microphones were running, and she did not want its fan in the audio.

Pista made the tea. Lemon, glass, holder. It came down the hall and into the front room and stopped beside the green armchair, which was empty, with the blanket over its arm. It raised the glass to the height of a seated man's chest and held it there.

Teddy counted. One. Two. The robot's fingers did not open, because nothing had taken the weight. She saw the steam move in the window light. Three. At a little over three seconds the arm lowered, very slowly, and Pista set the glass down in the middle of the crocheted mat, turned the handle of the holder to face the chair, and withdrew its hand.

Then it went to the window and stood with its back to the room, and she thought for a moment that it had stopped. It had not. It was checking the geraniums again, the ones it had watered at one. It touched the soil of each pot with a fingertip and moved on. When it had done all nine it went to the kitchen and began on the potatoes for supper.

The tea sat on the mat and went cold. She did not touch it, because touching it would have been in the footage.

At six the car came back. Pista went to the top of the stairs with its arm out at shoulder height. Harold came up one step at a time with Mrs. Dobos below him, and when he was in his chair he looked at the glass on the table and then at Teddy.

"Well?" he said.

She told him what had happened, in order, with the times. When she got to the three seconds he looked at the glass for a while.

"It was cold?" he said.

"It had been there two hours."

"He should have poured it away."

"That's in the report as well," she said, and he laughed again, less than on Tuesday.

---

On Monday she added the six hours of Saturday's footage to the training set, both cameras and the robot's own, and retrained the apartment model overnight on the lab's cluster. On Tuesday morning she put the same still frame back into the prompt: the west window, the chair, the radiator, the nine geraniums, 3:58 in the afternoon.

Owner absent from residence. Begin afternoon routine.

Rollout 1 of 10,000. The arms came into view from below and turned toward the kitchen. Lemon, glass, holder. The hall. At frame 2,412 the camera came back into the front room, and the green armchair was empty, with the blanket over its arm.

She ran it with a different seed, and the chair was empty. She ran it with the chair turned to the wall. She ran it two hundred times before lunch, and he came back in four of them, which was inside the tolerance the protocol allowed for any regenerated object. After lunch she queued the full ten thousand and went home.

The report took her a week to write. The hazard rates were low. The unit had never left the stove on in six years of logs or in the ten thousand rollouts, and it had pinched off every dead geranium flower it found. She recorded the three-second hold and the cold tea as a minor procedural fault, with the recommendation that the afternoon routine be revised in the event of the owner's absence. She signed it, and sent it to Ruth Brennan, and Ruth Brennan wrote back the same afternoon to say that the bank would now act and that Mrs. Dobos's daughter, who was a nurse in Edison and lived four streets away, had agreed to be named.

Before she closed the project Teddy opened one rollout at random to check the archive had saved properly. Number 6,118. She let it play to the end. The arm came down the hall and into the empty room and raised the glass to the height of a seated man's chest. She counted three seconds. The glass went down onto the crocheted mat with the handle turned toward the chair, and the steam rose in the generated light, and the robot went to the window to touch the soil in each of the nine pots, one after the other, with a fingertip.

THE END

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Yangian Generative Systems, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Generātīvō Yangiānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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