Up to Code

“Fishing without a license,” said Matt, letting his words drag to draw out the absurdity of the claim. “Fishing without a license? I’ve never been fishing in my goddamn life. We can dispute this, right? Tell me we can dispute this.”

His lawyer, on the other end of the Zoom call, sighed.

“They’re saying it’s a repeat offense. I don’t think this is just a one-time screw-up on the part of the Fish and Game Department.”

“It’s almost five hundred dollars!”

“According to California’s Uniform Bail and Penalty Schedule, that’s just the fine for a single incident. If it’s a repeat, we’re looking at even more than that. Whatever misunderstanding is going on here, it will be your responsibility to thoroughly communicate…”

Matt swiveled in his desk chair, half-listening. It was bad enough that emergency-Zooming his lawyer had cut into his dedicated League of Legends hours. This sort of bullshit was simply not something he had time for. One would think the government would have more respect for the founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most promising artificial intelligence start-ups. Maybe cut him a bit of slack!

His lawyer continued. “Even if you personally have not committed such an offense, there are a number of reasons why you might be receiving the fine. You are, after all, legally responsible for various entities—”

“I don’t have any kids,” Matt said, “and Mithril doesn’t have a fucking… I dunno, a fishing day. Is that something other companies do? You know, coworker bonding.”

“I was thinking,” said his lawyer carefully, “about your robots.”

Matt laughed. “They’re not programmed to do anything as physically sophisticated as fishing.”

“Not even Randy?”

“The most sophisticated thing Randy can do is cook a mean soufflé. He’s a champ. He wouldn’t go fishing without a license. Or with one, I guess, ha. Do you think the Fish and Game people would issue a license to a robot?”

His lawyer gave a dry smile. “Let’s tackle one issue at a time, shall we? I’ll get my people to talk to their people about the fines. I’ll contact you as soon as I know anything.”

“Sure,” said Matt, and hung up.

Matt had built Randy right after graduating college, while he was still living in his parents’ garage in Palo Alto. Now, five years later, Randy roamed the halls of Mithril AI’s modest headquarters in Foster City, serving primarily as the foremost example of the sentient artificial intelligence technology that had propelled the company this far. He’d been Matt’s stalwart companion through the whole journey, and had aided him in numerous indispensable ways, whether through physical tasks, such as ensuring his office was in pristine condition, or through digital ones, such as snagging new NFTs seconds after they dropped.

Through the window of his office, Matt noticed Randy rolling by at that exact moment, wide LED eyes staring straight ahead. His wheels were configured for climbing stairs, and his arms had shifted into forklift mode to stack three large cardboard boxes. Those arms definitely didn’t have a fishing mode! Maybe that was something to pitch to venture capitalists, though, someday in the far future.

Matt waved, but Randy didn’t appear to notice him.

*

A day passed with no news from Matt’s lawyer. By that point, he’d pretty much calmed down about the whole thing. Really, $500 was nothing. Hell, he’d spent more than that on a single Magic: The Gathering card last month. It was time for him to focus on more important things, like the HQ’s faulty HVAC, or his bad League streak, or that lesbian in marketing who wouldn’t text him back. He wondered if she’d be at the potluck this weekend, or if there was a way he could make attendance mandatory.

But first, he deserved a break. Around noon, Matt went out to the deck to take a smoke. It seemed like this was where Randy had run off to on some emergency cleaning duty. He was hanging out with Chloe, a newly-recruited data analyst. She had a stupid haircut but really great legs.

“Like, that’s a fucked-up thing to say, right?” she was saying to Randy as Matt slid open the door. “Even if she was gay—oh god, Matt, sorry, you startled me.”

Matt smiled and walked past her. His employees loved to complain about him to Randy. He was glad his robot could provide such a service—it seemed therapeutic, from what he’d overheard of it, and it was much better than complaining to the press. Though, it was his first time seeing Chloe talk shit. She’d seemed very nice otherwise. Maybe she was still mad he’d beaten her at Super Smash Bros the other night.

Matt leaned against the railing and took a deep breath of briney air, gazing out into the swamp of grasses and pickleweed before him. Mithril headquarters was located right next to the Baylands—the whole area had been part of the Baylands, once upon a time. Barn swallows cruising across the water’s surface, an egret traipsing through the shallows… it would make a great Instagram post. Maybe it’d help him win over those “environmentally conscious” sticklers who were always whining in his comments about “emissions” and “fragile ecosystems.”

Behind him, Randy resumed his cleaning. He was vacuuming up a good deal of mud and what looked like egg yolk off the floor. A broom was propped up next to him. Matt smiled, imagining which of his employees’ antics could have caused such a mess.

“Uh,” said Chloe after a few moments of silence. “Randy, I actually came out here to ask… there’s something in the fridge that smells kinda off. If you’re not too busy, could you come take a look?”

Dread sunk into Matt’s stomach, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. He followed the two of them to the break room, carefully navigating around the cardboard boxes that Randy had apparently abandoned to deal with the mud outside.

As the fridge opened, the scent of dead fish hit Matt’s nostrils. He stepped back, trying not to breathe in too deeply, and gestured for Chloe to unwrap the suspiciously-shaped lump of aluminum foil sitting squarely in the middle of the top shelf. Inside were three pathetic, scrawny fish. Definitely not the sort of thing you could buy at the supermarket. Here it was: the evidence of a crime, right here in his break room.

And then an announcement he’d made to his employees the other day flashed across his brain. Suddenly everything made sense.

“Oh, Randy,” he said, clapping the robot on the back, “when I told everyone to bring their own food for the potluck, I didn’t mean you too, you know that?”

After all, Randy was programmed to stay on the premises: it wasn’t like he could go out and buy food to share. He had to make do with whatever he could find here. Matt suddenly felt very flattered. His robot was committed enough to the team that he’d go fishing in the Baylands for them!

“Nice fish, Randy,” said Chloe. She sounded kind of impressed.

Randy beeped a happy tune. Ah, Matt just couldn’t be mad.

Even so… Matt was pretty sure he couldn’t get out of the fine. Not when it was his robot that had committed the offense. This was going to be an interesting conversation with his lawyer.

*

The next morning, an hour before his lawyer’s scheduled Zoom meeting, Matt went down to the loading dock to watch Randy sort out today’s shipment—boxes of 4k monitors. They’d had a false alarm with the fire sprinklers last week, and ever since, Randy had been ordering new equipment to replace what had been lost. Sitting here in the dock together reminded Matt of the good times they’d had all those years ago, cooped up in the garage while Matt coded the brains of the second generation of robots. Those had all turned out good enough to please the investors, but they were never as good as Randy.

“You really didn’t need to order so much,” Matt chuckled as the Amazon truck left. “If you need something more interesting to do, get to work on replacing the HVAC. I’ll have someone stay after hours to do the unboxing.”

Randy shook his head. He raised and lowered his current box a few times, then smiled—or, made as close an approximation to smiling as he could with his simple, pixelated eyes.

“See, that’s what’s so great about you! Those other bots’ll work fine, but you’re the only one who loves to work. Unlike some of my employees.” He laughed again.

Randy made a defeated whistle noise.

“Oh, don’t be like that. You know it’s true.”

Randy didn’t respond, just kept stacking boxes. He didn’t like talking about the employees, even when Matt tried to wheedle gossip out of him. Well, there was probably some law against that or something. But surely Randy could bear to bend the rules sometimes for the sake of the company. Matt certainly would’ve appreciated a bit more rule-bending last January, when his loyal robot had completely failed to warn him about the employees’ ongoing unionization effort. Maybe this whole fishing thing—minus the problem of the fines, of course—was a change for the better.

Matt’s watch beeped. He waved goodbye to Randy, and headed upstairs for what he very much hoped would be a short and satisfactory Zoom call.

*

Matt put his head in his hands. “The Migratory… what?”

“The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.”

Headache getting worse with every passing second, Matt scrolled through the page his lawyer had sent him. “Feathers and eggs and nests? What the fuck? How do they even—what if you just fucking pick up some random feather you find on the ground? That’s illegal?”

“Technically, yes.”

“And then… the barn swallows.” Matt took a deep breath. He was today years old when he learned the huge clumps of mud in the deck’s rafters—the ones Randy had been sweeping away yesterday—were nests. “But they’re on my property. They’re building their shit on my property. Isn’t there a clause that grants an exception when, like… Randy was just doing his fucking job! He’s a cleaning robot! He can’t tell birds-nest-mud from normal-dirt-mud!”

“Apparently he can tell fish apart from weeds well enough to catch them.”

“That’s entirely different—”

“Regardless. This is a serious misdemeanor. As you and your robot represent an organization, the fine could be up to ten thousand dollars—”

“How could they have even found out about it!” Matt wailed. “People destroy nests all the fucking time. Someone snitched. Someone is out to get me on the stupidest fucking violations of the stupidest—”

“Then you make that your job,” the lawyer sighed. “I deal with the Fish and Wildlife Service; you find your snitch. I might be able to spin something out of it.”

“Okay,” Matt said slowly. He remembered the breathing exercises his therapy app had taught him. “And I’ll… I’ll talk to Randy. He’s getting too damn good at his job.” He forced a grin.

*

Randy did in fact seem to be taking his job far too seriously. By the next day, the number of cardboard boxes scattered around the building had increased. With the employees’ packed work schedule, no one had been available to unpack or set up the new equipment, so Randy, ever helpful, had just been placing each box in its corresponding room, out of the way of where anyone could trip over it. Now they just had to hope they didn’t have another fire alarm mishap, as some of the containers were so bulky that they blocked the fire exits.

Matt was about to go speak to someone about unboxing duty—should be a pretty fun job—when he was summoned to the front desk.

His first thought was that it might be his lawyer, finally arriving in person to help untangle this whole legal fiasco. But he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the man standing there, dressed in an orange safety vest.

“Hey there,” said the man, holding out his hand. “I’m Jackson Yang, Compliance Officer with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. We’ve heard some employee reports of alleged safety violations.”

“Violations,” said Matt. “I wasn’t… I didn’t hear… uh, notice any violations?”

The officer nodded, infuriatingly calm. “We take reports like this very seriously. Even if we find nothing, it’s better to check and be wrong than for someone to end up hurt. If you have a conference room open, I’d be happy to go over the complaints with you.”

Matt listened to the officer’s spiel in a kind of stupor, nodding along as required. He very carefully did not think about the HVAC, or about the cardboard boxes, or about the fire escapes. It was barely anything out of the ordinary—most companies had to deal with shit breaking occasionally! And besides, it was completely temporary. They could fix it. Actually, if he summoned Randy now, he could probably stall the officer for long enough to get his robot to dump all the boxes somewhere else…

As he silently led the officer to the conference room, Matt’s phone rang.

“What,” he hissed as soon as he was alone in the hall, holding up a single finger to the officer in the room through the window.

His lawyer’s voice answered. “Have you taken a look at the Mithril Instagram this morning?”

Matt hung up and opened Instagram so fast his phone lagged for a second.

What greeted him was a series of selfies. Randy’s blank, metallic face stared into the camera in each one. Randy fishing illegally. Randy destroying barn swallow nests. Randy obstructing fire escapes. Randy wading around in the wetlands doing god knows what. Randy ordering more boxes of expensive equipment than Mithril AI will ever, ever need.

And then there were the links. The old exposé on Mithril’s workplace harassment that Matt thought he’d paid a reputation management company to bury. The article on his successful union-busting efforts. A long thinkpiece entitled, “Who should control sentient AI?”

Matt sank to the floor, staring unseeingly at the smooth blue-gray carpet. He would survive. The company would stay afloat. Now that Randy’s true motives had been revealed, there was no way everything would be pinned on Matt now.

But Randy was the foremost example of Mithril’s sentient AI. Is this what he was selling to investors? A machine that would side with the petty complaints of employees over the financial interests of its own creator? Oh, if he couldn’t explain away the pictures on Instagram—Matt was fucked.

But underneath the fear for his company and his reputation—a tiny part of him couldn’t help but mourn the loss of a friend.