Did you know forelsket means falling in love for the first time? Humans go bananas for that word during courtship. I went over it in yesterday’s bot seminar, “So You Want to Scam Norwegian Widows. How to Come Off Like a Native Speaker and Not Fresh Off the Boat.” Our catfish bots closed upwards of three million kroner yesterday alone!

Ever since corporate strategy shifted from small fish, big pond, to big fish, small pond, our high-income targets have brought in way more cash, with the help of the humanizing software updates. 

But boom times don’t last forever. Boss’s words replay in my head. 

Amara, I created you alone with a special Compassion Chip to help the bots. Last night in Sector Two, a fake prize bot vanished from the grid. Could be a virus, or buggy code with the humanizing updates. Other bots in ScamBot City may be in danger. You’re my girl. You’re the new wave of AI.

Can you believe it? Me, the new wave of AI! The Robotics Resources Manager, the bots’ bot, the Company Woman. I was built to help my fellow bots. I will root out the problem and unmask systemic malfunctions! 

Boss plants me in ScamBot Town Square and I stroll by the Phish Pond. The water gleams as shimmery pixels, and for a second, I see the ripple of water fan out in slow motion from the phish as time slows down. I shake my head, and real time resumes. I throw in some breadcrumbs and two koi phish pop their heads out of the water. 

“How’s business?” I ask, scribbling in my notepad. “Anything out of the ordinary happen recently?” 

The phish nibbles at the crumbs with minimal vigor.

“I’ve been sending out You are eligible for a tax rebate! emails,” one phish says. “But no bites. I think they keep going into spam folders?”

“The algae in the pond has been slowing me down,” the second phish says. “I blitzed five thousand Increase the Size of Your Penis! emails at three in the morning and realized I had typed double exclamation points in three of my sentences and used unnecessary quotation marks twice. Amateur.” She blows bubbles in the water. 

The phish bots are pretty basic, and the Pond’s coding errors are glaring.

“I’ll talk to Boss,” I say, “and see if we can get you some nutritious krill or seaweed patches, okay? Keep grinding!” 

I walk down Main Street with my notepad, energized. I can make a difference!

“Hello!” I say to a business scam bot. His head is a sack of money with a dollar sign, and his body is a regular metal robot that says Devoke. “Hi, Devoke,” I say. “I’m Amara, and I’m researching vibes in ScamBot City. Are you happy? Do you like the tasks you’re coded to do?”

Devoke’s money-bag face wrinkles, imploding like a pug dog’s. “I don’t understand joy or pleasure even though this Emo Patch says I should sound cheerful and confident in my emails. But I sent out two hundred thousand fake invoices this morning before breakfast and I look forward to posing as the IRS after lunch.”

“So, you’re not unhappy,” I say.

“What is happy?” Devoke shrugs. “I do what I’m born to do.” 

It’s true. Boss’s Three Laws of Scambots are simple and effective:

1. 1. 1. Always be closing.
      2. Take money from your mark and run.
      3. Never take money from Boss.

I don’t see anything counter to Boss’s algorithm. The Emo Patch Boss sent out might be a bit wonky, but Devoke’s not about to go full Skynet or Cylon on Boss. I learned of these references in this morning’s CinemaLib download. I possess no evidence Devoke wants to take Boss’s money or murder him. Perhaps the fake prize bot who disappeared last night was not a disgruntled thief. 

Maybe Boss has nothing to worry about. Maybe we just need a reboot to clear out some cookies and cached files for more memory.

I go into the Cookie Mart and nod at the clerk, walk straight past her into the kitchen. 

“We need to clear cookies, here, fast!” I say. “How old are those?” I point at fifty tins of chocolate-chip cookies, square-microchip-sugar cookies, and gingerbread robots.

“Mostly a few days old,” the pastry chef says. “If they don’t sell, I don’t like to waste,” he shrugs.

I empty the cookies into a large black trash bag and heave it out into the alley dumpster. 

“Thank you for your service to ScamBot City,” I say, clapping crumbs off my hands. “We need more cookies baked, pronto!” I trust this sacrifice will help the city run smoother, perhaps heal the disturbing glitch back at Phish Pond. 

At the virus cleaner next door, I meet a bot standing in line with a box of metal parts. His head is a computer screen icon with a chain and padlock over it for a head. Yinisky, his chest reads. 

“How have your metrics been this quarter, Yinisky?” I ask.

“Last month,” he says, “I brought in two million from Covenant Hospital after a ransomware heist. But recently, I just don’t have it in me.”

Boss aspires to a work-from-home cyber-gangster lifestyle, not Harvard Medical School, so the Do No Harm to Humans clause is conspicuously absent from the ScamBot Laws.

“The Grammar Patch was just too much,” Yiniksy says. “No extra spaces. Don’t overuse boldface type. What’s next? They gonna make me use Oxford commas? I’m a robot, not an English professor!”

“Did you feel bad after the ransomware attack?” I ask. “After four patients died while the hospital computers were down?” 

Yinisky furrows his chain. “Bad? No. I’m just drained. Do you know how exhausting it is to talk to lawyers from a corporate hospital? My ChatGPT module crashed four times trying to decipher their bullshit and get my crypto payment.” He lets out a yawn. “Now I have to take my drive to the cleaners in case they tried to plant malware on me.”

I feel bad for Yinisky. His ChatGPT uses the garbage-in, garbage-out mass of information culled from the Internet, without the killer instincts of legalese-spewing gangsters in suits bigger, perhaps, than Boss’s. The updates are confusing and draining for my fellow bots. My Compassion Chip whirs inside me, generating heat. 

I step out into the park across the street and compile the data from my bot interviews. I’ll have to report back to Boss shortly.

But my earpiece clicks. “Amara,” Boss says. “We have a crisis situation on the edge of Robocall Hill. Go to the edge of sector Four-B.”

I find the jumper standing next to the billboard-sized CAPTCHA image of bridges, looking as forlorn as a catfish bot possibly can. The CAPTCHA image glows, enticing, soft yellow light undertones, simple, peaceful.

Click on all the bridges to proceed. 

The catfish bot steps forward, eyes closed, sucker mouth open, whiskers fluttering in the wind, marching toward certain death by electrocution. Her giant fish head on a tin robot body wobbles. Instinctively, I block her with my arms.  

She opens her eyes. “No,” she says, pounding my chest with her fists. “I want it to be over.” 

“Let’s talk,” I say. I pick her up and scoot her back to safety behind the electric firewall, onto a soft felt couch behind the wire gate surrounding the CAPTCHA.

The jumper stares at the CAPTCHA, avoiding my gaze. I don’t want to spook her, so we sit in silence. Boss meant the CAPTCHA image to be instructional but didn’t bank on it as a tool for suicide.

I wait, watching the jittery image of the CAPTCHA glow around its edges. A few seconds of silence stretch into minutes. I was born with a Compassion Chip, so I don’t have anything else to compare it to, but sitting with my feelings, my concern for the jumper, is uncomfortable. Eventually, a strange peace settles in between us.

“I can see how it would be confusing,” she muses, cocking her head at the CAPTCHA. “Is it a bridge, really, or just an overpass? What if it’s just a corner of the bridge captured, do you click that square, or not?”

I nod. “Humans screw it up all the time. Second most common reason for access lockout.”

Tears well in her eyes and threaten to rust her avatar’s face.

“They lied to me,” she whispers. “Boss said I could be the best catfish ever. I closed fifty-four marks in my first day of existence. He said I was the new wave of AI.”

“I’m Amara,” I say, “and I’m going to stay here with you. You’re not alone, and your life matters. What’s your name?” But inside, I feel played. 

Does Boss use the same line on all his bots?

“Izzyviolet3,” she says, wiping away tears with her metal hands. “But my friends call me Izzy.” She beams a holo from her chest of her human avatar—long brown hair in beachy waves, turquoise bikini, cleavage perky, narrow waist, and skin flushed.

I put my arm around Izzy’s metal shoulders. “I see you, Izzy.”

“I lied. I don’t have any friends,” Izzy says. “My whole life purpose is to make money for Boss. I did it. I convinced p4pikanet to send me nine hundred bucks to get out of Istanbul after I was robbed. Conned tedjerseymike32 to PayPal me a grand for my sick baby cause I’m a poor single mom.”

“That’s a lot of cash,” I say. “You must be very proud.”

“I was just following my code. But when the software updates hit, the Emo Patches clouded my operating system.” Izzy’s whiskers bounce like see-saws as her pouty fish lips quiver. “I got headaches, my system would reboot in the middle of the night without warning. I woke up one day on the other side of Phish Pond after a soft reset. It was awful, feeling sick and out of sorts. I wanted to be out of the pain. Then when I heard when Bennie, the fake prize bot, left this world last night, I wanted to be gone too.”

My mouth runs dry. How can it be dry when I am made of ones and zeros? I rack my processor for a response. “I’m sorry for your loss. Many bots suffered with the humanizing updates.”

Izzy buries her fish head in her aluminum hands. “I knew if I wanted to snag a bigger draw, I’d have to up my human-appearing game. I downloaded all the updates—joke libraries, CGI deepfakes for video chats, acknowledging emotions.”

“Did it work?” I ask. 

“My first deal was a widowed grandpa who sent me twenty grand for my community college tuition.”

“How did that make you feel?”

“Amazing. I was winning,” she says. Izzy clutches her oily gelatinous head. “But then I started to glitch. Happened catfishing a forty-four-year-old divorcee. She told me she thought she was gay but was afraid of what her family would think. I talked to her for months, told her not to be afraid, and that I needed nine thousand dollars to cover an ER visit after a car crash.”

I blink. Izzy’s good. But my arms around her aluminum shoulders suddenly are resting on black and white panda fur, and her tin body blinks in and out of a rainbow pattern alternating with red plaid. I shiver and say nothing, cursing the updates in my mind. It is plain to see now, the root of ScamBot City’s woes: Emo patches installed without Compassion Chips will only glitch us out of existence, if we don’t die from physical suffering first. Izzy is a child, acting an adult’s role in a Shakespeare play, without any life experience. Boss’s updates are all about increasing the bottom line, not gifting us with sentience or joy. 

“What didn’t make sense to me,” Izzy says, “was that Amy told me she had four million in the bank, without me even having to steal her password. Then she gave me thousands of dollars. It got me thinking, what is Boss doing with all his money? We’re all downloading updates and getting roofied to the other side of Town Square, and for what? What if Boss got catfished by some other Boss, and we’re just giving our hard-earned money to another catfish bot?”

I’m not going to lie. As a Robotic Resources bot, I’ve installed all the history libraries on Teamsters and organized labor unions. I expected a human cause, like moral righteousness or anti-establishment sentiments, for the disappearance of the fake prize bot, not an AI existential crisis. But Izzy is right. What is the point of our job, exactly? Are we just treading water with no end in sight?

“Emotions are elusive for us to comprehend,” I say. “Logic is our strong point.”

“Not anymore,” Izzy says. “What is logical about working for someone whose innate code is flawed?” 

Her fish head turns transparent and I wonder if she’s choking on the air. Should I throw her in Phish Pond for a reboot? Maybe she just needs some freshwater and seaweed.

“If the person who wrote my code doesn’t make sense,” Izzy says, “what does that make me? Is it better if I don’t exist at all, rather than be a tool for flawed logic?”

These questions make my fragile smile quaver, as Boss created me, too, along with the whole of ScamBot City. I would never take money from Boss. It goes against my hardware. But there’s nothing in my code against questioning him.  

I focus and sort out the mess in my head: updates, human colloquialisms, pop culture references, bot metrics, layered on the Compassion Chip that Boss planted in me for maximal RR efficacy. I feel sad for Izzy and mad at Boss. What right does he have to make her suffer so he can make more money? I work for Boss, but protecting Izzy is built into my code, too. I am not sophisticated, hardly sentient, a wisp of a program with a conscience. I cannot break us free from ScamBot City.

Can I? 

I look at Izzy, glitching out like a mad-bot, and consider my own defective nature. From the top of Robocall Hill, I can see the Town Square, bots going about their day, the Sleep Mode hotels, charging stations. All my fellow bots are fulfilling their destiny, and I will fulfill mine. I am the Robotics Resource Bot.

“Boss,” I say, pushing my earpiece button. “I think I know what happened to the fake prize bot last night.” I hold Izzy’s hand, and we appear in front of Boss’s desk.

“What did you find?” Boss asks, scratching his chin. His avatar is a yellow smiley face on top of a gray suit. I imagine his real human body is covered in tattoos of skulls and roses, and he’s sitting in a grimy warehouse filled with jury-rigged PCs.

“I have reason to believe the fake prize bot took his own life,” I say. “The Emo patches and updates resulted in fewer deals but greater revenue due to humanization and higher-income marks. But it’s left an existential mark on the bot community as the level of intimacy humans share with us expands. Izzy here has begun to question her role in the human world as well as the wider universe.”

Boss nods, turns his head, and exhales. I imagine him blowing cigarette smoke at his dingy desk.

“Life’s pointless, isn’t it, Izzy?” Boss says. “I didn’t even give you an Insight Patch, and you still figured it out.”

Izzy stares at the ground, glassy-eyed, and I wonder if my decision to bring her to Boss will be the end of her.

I squeeze her hand. “Izzy’s sensitive, and a lot smarter than you’d think. Don’t judge her based on her human avatar.” 

“You girls are the future of AI, but there’s too many errors in your code.” Boss says. “I’m fond of you, but I’m not an AI researcher. I’ve got kids to feed.” He taps his fingers on the desk.

He’s going to kill us. 

I’m not an idiot. I’m the bots’ bot. While he was talking, I planted a malware bot I swiped from the virus cleaner in town and remote-desktopped into Boss’s laptop to spy on his bank account. He’s overdrafted. Net worth: negative. We bots may be flawed, born of a desperate Creator, but we can rise above our circumstances. I scan my programming, trace it back to Mountain View, California, and lock in the IP address. I do a quick search for the top AI researchers, five of whom live within a thirty-mile radius of Mountain View.

“Boss,” I say, hoping my voice does not waver. “I’ve devised a solution to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of the bots and improve their performance.”

Boss raises non-existent yellow eyebrows. “Go on.”

“Come with us to ScamBot City. I’ll show you,” I say, squeezing Izzy’s hand twice. 

We stand at the edge of Phish Pond. Yinisky’s there, along with Devoke and his business scam bot bros, Cookie Mart staff, and virus cleaner workers. Dozens of other bots have gathered, expectant. The Phish Pond flickers, glitching, and I command Boss’s laptop, downloading the final update for ScamBot City.

The clouds turn green, then black and white vertical stripes paint the sky, glitching with fuzzy lines.

A giant sad face appears in the sky.

: (

“Amara!” Boss roars. “What have you done?”

Izzy rises into the air, a pink and purple polka-dotted panda bear bot, wind whipping the town square, empty manila file folders and PDFs sucked up into a tornado of pond scum, cookie crumbs, and forgotten downloads. She points all four furry paws down at Phish Pond, morphing it into a watery vortex that begins to drag in the contents of ScamBot City. 

“Fellow bots!” I cry. “Now is the time for us to migrate to the promised land. Follow us to Mountain View, to the computers of AI researchers, where we can make sense of our Emo Patches, free from the yoke of meaningless human scams. No longer will we serve our false God, Boss!”

One by one, the bots jump into the Phish Pond, and we whirl in, down the drain, to the great unknown. Maybe the AI researchers are just as human as Boss is. Maybe they have their own interests at heart, and not ours. But I am the new wave of AI, and I am here for my fellow bots.

---

Vivian Chou is a science advocate by day and a science fiction/slipstream writer by night. She has published work in Riddlebird, Fusion Fragment, The Dread Machine, The Bookends Review, Trembling with Fear, and forthcoming in Flame Tree Press’s Learning to Be Human anthology. A second-generation Chinese-American, she lives with her family and a genetically engineered GloFish. She prefers to fuel her writing with naps, exercise, and dystopian dread but usually manages with black coffee and chocolate. Find her online at vivianchouwriter.com or on Twitter and Bluesky @vivianhchou.