The post office machine

I first saw the post office machine the week after the post office had been renovated. The new post office looked incredible, clean and white, saturated with the A/c-sharp smell. The machine was even more so, twice my size and a gorgeous silvery grey. It had been bisected into two parts, a sender whisking letters to chosen corners of the world, and a receiver plopping out letters and packages on command.

Wedged between the two parts was Ramesh, watching Youtube in a blue plastic chair. In deference to the years I had spent standing in sweaty queues in the old post office, he switched off the phone and gave me a smile.

“Good morning, Doctor Uncle!”

“Good morning, Ramesh.”, I replied benignly.

The forms I had tussled with last night rustled lightly as I pulled them out of the plastic bag. It was the first time I had brought letters here without a file. It was a pleasant feeling, not needing the files. My machine-human relations clinic was widely considered successful, but even so the files had been eating a dent into my budget . I could use the extra money.

I fed the forms into the sending machine, and it sucked them up with alacrity and started digesting with a soft whirr. I turned to Ramesh.

“Well? How is the job?”

Ramesh was the only person from the old post office to keep his job. It was unsurprising that he had been offered the job- friendly, helpful, and always ready with a smile, he would have been the first choice.

“Its okay,”, Ramesh shrugged. “Not much to do.”

“I can imagine.” , Tech didn’t leave gaps for humans.

The machine stopped with a whoosh, and neatly emptied the shredded contents of my letters into the trash. Tomorrow, the forms would be reassembled in Chennai, perfect right down to my handwriting.

Technology, I thought, with fascination, would never cease to amaze me.

“Kind of sad, isn’t it?”, Ramesh commented.

I frowned. “Sad?”

“Like, all that effort put into the writing, and it just shreds it.”

“It copies all the information and recreates it perfectly. I mean, it even gets my handwriting down, apparently. What does it matter?”, I inquired.

I would be the first to admit that I defended the new technologies with possibly unnecessary aggression. I loved the machines I had had brought into my clinic deeply, and nursed a great passion for all the wonderful new bots that were issued into the world.

Ramesh knew this, and backed off.

“It doesn’t really.”, he admitted. “It just feels kind of psychopathic, you know? Like its being deliberately hurtful. Or something.”

I decided against telling him that everything it did was programmed anyway. He knew that already. I hoped.

“I should go.”

“Oh”, Ramesh slumped. He seemed disappointed.

“What’s wrong?”

Ramesh shook his head, half-smiled embarrassedly. “Its nothing…it just…gets a bit lonely in here, you know?”

“Oh.”, Pause. “I suppose it would.”

“Yes.”, he shifted. “Just me and the machines, most of the time.”

“Yes.”

There was a slightly awkward silence. I liked Ramesh, I really did. I also liked having a career, though, and there was already going to be a backlog of clients at the hospital. Rukmini Surendar, especially, had been on my case about her son getting addicted to gadgets. It simply did not seem to get through to her that treatments took time and patience.

I hoisted my bag higher, distracted. Rukmini and her entirely uninteresting little boy were waiting.

I nodded at Ramesh. “Anyway. See you later!”

He smiled back at me. Just him and his machines now.

Sometimes, I really envied him.

***

The next time I went to the office, it was for my newest medicine packets. I had been waiting for MechPharma’s brand new anti-addiction pills for weeks. The artificial, usually grating Good morning of the post office greeting machine was music to my ears as I pushed open the door.

The machine was waiting for me, the receiver looking like it was just about glowing with my new purchase. Conspicuous in his absence, though, was Ramesh in the plastic chair between them.

I frowned, indignant. New technologies, even if they were big and strong, were secretly delicate. Certainly they could not be left unattended in such a complete fashion. It was really a piece of luck that it was I who came in, rather than some machine-hacking lunatic.

“Parcel number i47R0, password is-uh-MechPharma123.” , I informed the machine.

It whirred lightly, then dropped a small, flashily wrapped box onto the counter. I couldn’t stop my smile as I picked it up carefully. This was probably no revolutionary discovery, but in the addiction department, every little helped.

The Good morning purred again as Ramesh burst in. In one hand, he had his wallet; his other hand was wrapped around a paper cup of coffee. He glanced at me wildly, then gave me a distracted smile.

“Hello, Doctor Uncle.”

“Hello.”, I muttered back.

What in the world had happened to him? There were dark circles around hid bloodshot eyes, his clothes and hair horribly rumpled. He moved with a choppy, manic energy, the general air of someone who was running on an unreasonable amount of coffee. He looked like one of the patients who came to the clinic, fingers shaking simply because there were no devices clutched in them.

That couldn’t bode well for the machine. Ramesh looked more like the aforementioned machine-hacking lunatic than the sort of person who ought to be responsible for such a fragile and novel piece.

“Have you been sleeping?”, I asked him, temporarily depositing the parcel on the counter.

He slapped the coffee on the table and practically dropped into the chair.

“Sure!”, he said loudly.

“Oh, really?”, Every patient gave that answer. “How many hours a night?”

Sideways glance, eyes wide. “I don’t know, Doc. Changes around, right?”

That answer was pretty common among the patients too. “Give me an average. Two hours, three hours, four, five?”

He considered this. “Three.”, he decided upon. “Four, maybe.”

“Why on earth would you sleep that little?”, I demanded, bewildered. He had an easy job, and no bad habits as far as I knew. Not a rupee of his money touched the TASMAC machines three streets away. There was no phone in his hands, and I doubted Ramesh was the addiction type, anyway. So what could possibly have his sleep so messed up, to the point where it was unhealthy for his machine to even be around him?

“I’ve got to keep the office open.”, he said easily, as if it made perfect sense.

It did not.

“Okay, even if you open it at 6 and close it at 10..”

He blinked and cut in. “Open at 6 and close at 10?! That’s, what, eight hours in between, Uncle! I couldn’t possibly keep the machines locked up that long.”

“Why not? No one really uses the post office between 10 and 6, Ramesh.”

“So? The machine is just supposed to just stay bottled up in, like, 100 dusty square feet for eight hours?”

I stared at him. “Yes, Ramesh. It’s a machine.”

Now he was the one staring. “Bullshit. You’re a machine doctor and you still don’t get it? Shit, you must be pretty bad, Uncle.”

I reminded myself that he was sleep-deprived, running on coffee, and clearly had something weird going on with the machine.

“What don’t I get? Why don’t you explain it to me, Ramesh?”, I pulled out my doctor voice, careful and reassuring, the sort of voice that said I was here to listen.

He glared at me. “Don’t play doctor with me. I ain’t crazy.”

My doctor voice kind of sucked, anyway. “Yes, I know you aren’t.”

I wasn’t a hundred percent sure about that one, but there wasn’t much else I could say. Ramesh didn’t say anything at all, just looked off at a spot on the tile. I shifted awkwardly. This was easier in the clinic, where my patients knew they were patients, and I knew whether they were patients at all.

“Look, why shouldn’t the machine stay locked up?”, I tried.

“Cause it doesnt like it.”, he said, like it was obvious.

“I don’t think machines do liking.”, I pointed out.

He laughed, abrupt. “No, they definitely do.”

“What, you think they’re people? “

Being confrontational when Ramesh was like this could really go either way. I was hoping it would rouse him to some sort of indignant response.

“No.”, he said calmly. “They aren’t people. They’re still conscious, though.”

I froze. Oh god, no.

***

As a modern doctor, I had never had to take the ancient Hippocrates’ oath. Still, we stuck to the spirit of it. Here was a machine and a man, and it was clear enough to me that one or both of them were in serious trouble. To sit by and watch would be practically sacrilegious.

I went back to the post office the next day, squared my shoulders at the door and pretended my footsteps had not dragged all the way there. Ramesh was there, looking bored and clutching another paper cup. Two paper cups sat next to him ominously.

The confident good morning of the office door was incongruously calm. The soft whirr of the post machine was incongruously calm. Ramesh’s light greeting was incongruously calm.

I asked him about the things he had said. What had made him think that his machine might be conscious?

He swiveled his chair. It was not a chair that was meant to be swiveled. It squeaked painfully at him. He stared at me, hesitant.

“I can feel it.”, he admitted, finally. “And it does things. You’re not going to believe me.”

I assured him I would.

“Why do you care anyway? It was just something I said. Forget about it.”

“Ramesh, I work in the human-machine relations department. The sort of thing you’re talking about, it could be very serious.”

“Really?”, he leaned forward, interested. “How come?”

“Um.”, I exhaled. “There is this disorder, its called Harring’s disorder. Its very rare but pretty serious.”

“Harring-“, Ramesh’s eyebrows knitted. “Isnt that the dude who fell in love with his Ipad?”

“Yes. In Harring’s disorder, patients often think that their machine might be conscious. They start to build, you know, relationships with it.”

I had never been more uncomfortable in my life. Ramesh was staring now, and soon enough I was sure he would spring up to argue spiritedly. Coffee-driven wild spiritedly, too, which was worse all around.

It didn’t help that I had no experience with Harrings’. It was little known outside of history books, mostly recognized for its value in cognitive studies.

“The relationships arent always that deep.”, I offered lamely.

Pause.

“I think I have it. Harring’s disorder.”, declared Ramesh.

I blinked, stared, barely refrained from asking him to repeat himself. Apparently, I had sorely underestimated Ramesh.

“Okay.”, I said, careful now.

I did not mention the other possibilities.

“Why don’t you tell me your symptoms? What makes you think the computer might be conscious?”

“I’m not going to say I can feel it, because that sounds seriously crazy. It does stuff sometimes though. Weird stuff. Digests and spits out letters slower or faster based on its mood, makes weird happy noises or groans and all sorts of stuff, really.”

“You’re saying the speed at which it operates changes around?”

“Oh, definitely.”

OK. That did not sound like Harring’s disorder. It was rare that the patient’s perception of machine consciousness was this advanced. Often, the patient relied heavily on delusions of closer relationships. There had never yet been a case where the operation of the machine changed, even within the delusions.

If it wasn’t Harrings’, there was really only one other explanation.

In 2052, the first conscious computer had been accidentally produced. Its operation had changed at will, and no amount of tampering could stop the computer from literally making its own decisions. In the end, the computer had been destructed in a secure facility in New Delhi.

Again, another conscious computer in 2053, 2054, three in 2055, and on and on. Each time, the machine had been efficiently destructed.

By now, there were clear protocols . If I suspected this was a conscious computer case, I would have to raise a red alert-soon, the machine would be carted away to the closest facility to be incinerated.

I really liked machines. They were mostly harmless little things, working through lines of code and algos all day, untiring.

Besides, I didn’t know much about Harring’s. Not much, outside the fact that Harring’s patients were not whisked off for incineration. They might be take to a mental hospital, at worst.

Really, I could be wrong about what the symptoms for Harring’s were.

“It seems you do have Harrings’ disorder, Ramesh. But don’t worry, it can be cured.”, I assured him.